The Edassan Tomes

[Seonid he/him]

If you've been wondering if I'll ever stop worldbuilding and get to writing actual plot, I do not have happy news for you today...

But, if all you've ever wanted is to have a long-winded treatise on the way marriage and inheritance works among the Avran commonfolk, then...

Well, first, I'm a little bit concerned for you. But second, today is absolutely your lucky day. 

Most Avrans are worshippers of the Tribunal, and their marriage practices follow the prescribed rituals of that religion. Avran law understands marriage to be permanent, and does not permit divorce except under very rare circumstances. However, before a marriage is legally solemnized, the couple enters a betrothal contract. During this betrothal period, the couple lives together as if they were married and adjusts to life together. This state can persist for several years, to ensure that any incompatibilities will come to light before the couple is permanently joined, but generally ends once a child is born, or once it is obvious that the couple is compatible with each other. Since any gifts or alliances associated with the marriage are not actually legally transferred until the betrothal period is over, both households tend to put pressure on the newlywed couple to finalize their marriage sooner rather than later.

In general, the title to land stays within members of a household - only on exceptional occasions will someone inherit land from a separate household, such as when a holder dies with no hold-members remaining in their household to inherit.

Outside of these outlier cases, the only time land changes hands between households is during marriages. In an Avran marriage, at least one of the parties will be leaving their household to join a new one - if one or both families has enough land available, the couple might start a new household of their own with land given as a marriage gift. More commonly, however, one of the newlyweds will marry into their spouse’s household.

Marrying into a new household removes the spouse from the line of inheritance of the household they are leaving - at least, as long as any living heirs remain in that household to inherit. However, such a spouse often comes into their new household with a marriage gift of their own - money, valuable property, or even some land that passes to the new household in exchange for the marriage. As a result, which household the new couple will be a part of - and what marriage gifts will be given on either side - is a key part of marriage negotiations.
As a general rule, the heirs of a holder almost never leave their household - their spouse marries into the family to become a holder in their own right once their partner inherits. But even marriages between hold-members can still carry significant marriage gifts, even if the gift is just a formal connection with a wealthy and influential household.  These marriage gifts are held in escrow during the betrothal period, and are permanently transferred to the new households once the marriage is legally solemnized.

However, most marriages are not only driven by cold calculations of property and profit. Many families strongly weigh a child's happiness as part of marriage negotiations. Relatively wealthy households that let poor young people - or even trusted hired hands - marry into them are a relatively common fixture - even if the newcomer's household is desperately poor, at a minimum, the household gains a new person who can help work a larger area of fields or take care of larger herds without having to pay a hired hand, while also catering to their child's happiness.

Among serfs, the patterns are different - in part because any marriage to a serf must be approved by the noble who holds the serf’s land. Since no serfs own land, each new couple immediately forms their own new household. Often, the village will band together to build a new house for them, but the new household might also move in with an aging parent or parents to care for them, effectively dissolving the parent's household and replacing it with the child's.

Marriages between serfs and free households are uncommon, since the vast majority of them involve a free peasant giving up their free status to become a serf. Very few lords tend to allow their serfs to leave their service to join a free household - that would involve losing a serf; though wealthy or influential families can offer a sufficient gift to make it worth the exchange. However, wealthy villeins will sometimes marry the children of poorer householders, offering a significant monetary gift to outweigh the concerns of their child giving up their free status.

 

[Seonid he/him]

So, as it turns out, I've been gone for a while. My dad is rapidly going downhill, and I spent a lot of that time just unable to write or even worldbuild. But now that the end is in sight, I'm finding myself drawn back to Edassa. It's a drug I just can't quit. So I guess this is me announcing that I'm (kind of) back? I don't know what kind of worldbuilding information will show up here - possibly whatever I found interesting that day. And if anybody is all like "Ooh - I want to know the nitty gritty details of the marriage rituals for the Tribunal's worshippers," let me know and that will suddenly become the most interesting thing in my day

Also - apparently I'm the absolute last person on the planet to experiment with AI, but I did find myself playing around with it the past few days. As a result of my experiences, I'm going to make the following statement on Seonid's use of AI models in worldbuilding and writing.

1. I have not now and will not ever use AI to generate plot ideas, write prose, or anything even close to it. Ever. That's a red line (not to mention that the methods the AI would use to do that work involve the outright stealing of a great deal of copyrighted work).
2. I will not use AI to generate worldbuilding content. The whole point of Edassa is to have a world of my own to play with, and using AI to create the world for me just cheapens the experience.
3. I will not use AI to generate artwork about my creative work for public consumption. If I want art in a published book, I can darn well find an artist to commission for it.
4. I have used AI to check the linguistic consistency of my place-names and character names, and in the process have adopted some suggestions to retain as much of the original as possible while fixing any jarring "why is there a random dude with an Arabic name in the middle of my Anglo-Saxon kingdom" moments.

This deserves a longer story - I basically started by worrying (as I often do) that the leftovers of my junior-high school worldbuilding no longer tell a consistent story with Edassa as I have built and rebuilt it in the last few years. Since work has been pushing us very hard to use AI for literally anything we can use it for - which is ridiculous in its own right, but that's a different story - I decided to ask AI how a list of my names fit together from a consistency standpoint. Just for fun. (Also, it was late at night, I was tired, and I might very well have been depressed - so no judging).

The stupid AI kept asking follow-up questions (that's how they get you, kids - the follow-up questions), and before I knew it, I'd gotten to telling it about my characters and even the plot arcs of the story. (Also, apparently I might be a teensy-tiny bit lonely. Who knew? I wasn't aware I had time to be lonely with my spouse and 4 kids in the house.) It made all of the appropriate oohs and aahs, and kept trying to predict where the story might be going (in some ways, it was scarily accurate - in others it was laughably wrong). Luckily for me, it never tried to tell me what the story should be. Still, I felt a little bit icky after that session, and I think for good reason. It got too close to using AI to help me write, and I don't like that.

I followed up, however, keeping the next session much more focused on linguistics, character names, place names, and cultural consistency therein. And it was really helpful. It turns out my brain switches to worldbuilding plus-ultra mode when I'm being asked questions about my world that I have to answer - even if it's an AI asking the questions.

I'm not going to go back, I think. Probably. I hope. It's a slippery slope from asking AI "what do you think about this set of names" to "hey, I need ten names for minor characters from culture X - can you get them for me." It helps that I'm genuinely out of city, culture, and character names I was worried about - the high school/junior high leftovers pool has finally run dry - everything has been converted or renamed, one way or another.

And I can legitimately be happy that I have reasons to keep several of my favorite city names. (Not that I needed any reason beyond "I like the sound of that," but 30-something year old me is much more concerned with obnoxious things like "do these names form a coherent cultural picture?").

Anyways - that was my foray into the world of AI. I kind of hate it, even as I love that it was able to give me advice on making names more consistent. Maybe my next post will enumerate the changes I've made as a result of that.

[Seonid he/him]

Alright, let's chat about what's changed in Edassa. The first answer is: not much. I was deliberately trying to restrict the AI (I tried several models, but Claude was the most helpful for me) to talking only about linguistics and not getting into deeper withholding concepts, like cultural or religious practices. I didn't want the AI to help me with worldbuilding new stuff, I just wanted a sanity check on my old stuff to make sure it all fit together correctly.

First off, there were several spelling changes (and one or two outright changes) in the regional noble houses: for the French-inspired houses: House Samane became House Samand, House Feravut became House Feravaux, and House Verekai became House Verecay. For the English-inspired houses: House Calliester became House Chalester, and House Surrestor became House Surrester.

Some more minor changes happened in city/town names: Sirrienbourge went to Sirresbourge (a more French-sounding derivation), while Malach Crossings went to Malke's Crossings, Astreleur went to Astrelier, and Bellflower became Bellham (moving from the generic fantasy "string two words together" and towards a more Anglo-Saxon naming approach). In that same spirit (but without AI assistance this time), I went ahead and proactively changed Sprucevale to Spurdale, Ivyleaf to Ivyton, and Goldcrest to Fenwold.

But, as helpful as it was with making minor edits to get better linguistic consistency, the most useful parts of the conversation were where it helped me justify some of my favorite old names from my high school worldbuilding era.

Alaner (not a very good German city name) got justified by being named after the river Ahle, and then the local imperial officials Anglicized it. (Maryksberg just went to Mareksberg, but I'm saying that imperial cartographers and their unreasonable love of the letter y made the original the spelling you would see on an imperial map.)

Corento was supposed to be in a Slavic-inspired region, but it is very definitely not Slavic. Slavicizing it gave Korentyn as an original name, with Corentum being the Latinized version of the name in High Avran, and Corento being the Commonspeak or Low Avran version. As an added bonus, the local name of the river now gets to be named Korentka, after the city (although I'm still calling it the Minhara River unless I'm writing from the perspective of someone in or from that city).

Gadre (originally Gadhre in my earliest worldbuilding) was supposed to be a city well into the English/French cultural overlap zone, but it fit neither of those identities. AI helped me associate it with the Celtic inspired region to the west, having it be a remnant of a time when that culture occupied the plains. It actually suggested Gadhre, which was a delightful coincidence - I jumped at the chance to reclaim my original name from all those years ago - and suggested the Anglicization of Gadrey for a modern term, which I graciously accepted. 

Sergaho is one of the river kingdoms -city states who live in a wash of many cultures. It, unfortunately, has a name that came from "15-year old me looked the sound" and doesn't map well onto the existing mix. But the AI tried Welsh Ser-Y to start with, inventing the Welsh-ish word Gafon (the Welsh afon means river, so having a very similar term works). So Ser-y-Gafon meaning something like "stars over the river" becoming Anglicized to Sergaho, and maybe showing up in low Avran as Sergau was a delightful experience.

Several far-off cities with little to no relevance other than being close to my heart got saved - Gastor was from an old Celtic-inspired Gasda, later Latinized as Gasterium and Anglicized as Gastor, while Afert, Forthar and Malage got to be the Celtic inspired Averdun, Forthair and Maelagh, Latinized as Avertum, Fortarum and Malacarum, and then finally the local trade creole language renders them into their final forms. Having multiple layers of etymology helps, apparently! 

Now, we're moving to more substantial improvements. One of the things I kept telling the AI in order to keep certain city name elements in the Gaelet region was "this preserves remnants of an older culture that was conquered by the Avrans." Finally, it called me out on it and asked me what the culture was like so it could judge the remnant city names with the right metric.

I reached back to the ancient world - since this region has been Avran for at least a thousand years - and figured that something like old Gaulish would be an excellent fit. So now I have an old Gaulish culture sitting underneath a layer of Avran domination (which now makes the original inhabitants related to the Celtic inspired hill folk across the river, which is excellent). The AI have a list of old Gaulish place name elements, and I picked (then adjusted to match my sensibilities) Venduri to be their culture name (or at least the Latinized version of it). The name comes from Vindo- (meaning bright or white) and -duro- (meaning waters), so "the people of the bright waters."

Their naming conventions let me keep Menkor [from medio- (meaning middle - reduced to men- with a consonant shift) and a reduced form of -coria (meaning market)] and Caedros [from catu- (meaning battle) and -ros (a suffix generally meaning great)].

And now we get to the big five - 5 names I was very worried about that are very important and I really didn't want to change but had been afraid for a while now that I'd have to: 

Two empire/culture names:

• The Kaloneri Empire (these days, it's meant to be Anglo-Saxon coded, but it wasn't even I named it). The name is now derived from the high Avran demonym that was used to describe their people - the Caeloneria (people of the sky, or sky-worshippers, referring to their practice of generating the constellations). When they formed themselves into an empire, they called themselves the Coelmaer, attempting to turn the foreign term into a self-identity - it's an amalgamation of Latin cael-/coel-, meaning heaven and the Anglo-Saxon -mawr/-maer, meaning great or large. The implied meaning is "the great realm under heaven." How much did the AI help? It helped run through ideas where the term "Kaloneri" could have come from, and offered the Latin-ish Caeloneria as an interesting backwards derivation. It also offered a list of elements from Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic language that could be combined to be something that could be latinized into Caeloneria. Noticing the option for something heaven-associated in that list was all me though.
• The Alcorazimai Empire (no originating culture for influence, I just liked the name - it felt like something all my own). The AI said it sounded vaguely Turkic, so I reached for a Khazar basis for the language. Assuming Arabic-ish speaking neighbors (which actually works - the Rakalli are Arabic inspired), you can get Al- (definite article "the") plus Kharazim as the ethnic endonym. They call themselves Kharazim, their neighbors refer to them as Al-Kharazim, and it gets latinized to Alcorazim. The -im suffix indicates a plural, but an additional pluralization gets added on by further who don't realize that it was already there, so Alcorazimii goes to Alcorazimai by a local vowel shift. A little bit complex, to be sure, but I'm keeping it. 

Finally, 3 personal names:

• Samhain Seonid. I was in my "edgy early-oughts teenager" phase when I named him. So yes, I named him after the Celtic fall festival that happens around Halloween. The fact that Seonid is a Gaelic female name (roughly equivalent to English "Janet") is a happy accident. The AI flagged his name as not being appropriate for the local cultural mix - the Welsh inspired hill country wouldn't give us Gaelic names, and French and English certainly wouldn't. As it turns out, I have a Gaelic inspired culture right next to my Welsh inspired one, and the overlap zone is right next to the kingdom...it's actually terrifyingly serendipitous. Once the AI pointed me in that direction, things feel into place on their own. I already had him as the son of an enslaved woman - so having her be from that region wasn't hard. His mother giving him the name Samhain is also right in line with that. And as for how Seonid becomes his family name? I think it's sweet that, after he gets made into a noble, he names his new noble house after his mother.
• Areska Lasofer: this one was relatively simple. It has a Slavic feel, so I make him originally from the Slavic-coded Svorans, and there we are. Lasofer is less Slavic coded, but can be close enough if we squint. Las- is a Slavic root meaning forest. Oferta is a Polish word meaning offer or price, and connecting the two together gets us somewhere close. Only problem is that the -ska ending is a feminine ending for Slavic family names, roughly meaning "from." But I'm sure I'll figure out something there - we're already light years closer than we were.
• Najar Wyst. Here's the biggest problem. Najar is an actual word...in Arabic. It means carpenter, which is fine, but it's completely wrong for the time and place. Again, this was me naming things willy-nilly in my young, careless days. Now grown up me has to clean up the mess. In fairness, I think it cleans up rather pretty. The AI gave lots of suggestions, but the only one that I even remotely liked was Enjard - an invented French-ish name that keeps a lot of the sound qualities of Najar. I went researching on my own and found an Occitan (southern French) verb enjeura, which means to terrify. And if I decree that his mother was from the much-more-heavily-French southern region, or even the Godlands, then suddenly I have a plausible origin and an almost-close-enough-that-I-don't-hate-it name.

So there we are. That's what I got from AI. In fairness, I don't think I could have found a bunch of that linguistic information on my own - even with the mildly AI powered search tools in modern search engines. My linguistics research-fu just isn't good enough to compete.

On the one hand, the vast majority of these names were names I had created a long time ago, and all I got were justifications to keep them. On the other hand, having these justifications really does deepen my worldbuilding, and the line between what I create and what came from AI gets blurry.

I think it's fair enough to say that I don't want to go back to it, as helpful as it was.

So, we'll call it a learning experience, and keep our wonderful new derivations/linguistics stuff. (Also, since I really don't have any old stuff to fix anymore, I'm lucky enough to not have much temptation anymore. Convenient, that.)

Anyways, there's disclosure. For those of you who want to use AI in your own worldbuilding, here's an example of what it can do when you have your own high quality stuff already there. I'm not going to continue with it, because it makes me feel uncomfortable, and I feel like it cheapens the experience if I'm not doing the work directly.