Alanna the First Adventure A Times 100 Best Fantasy Novel

[devilinthedetails]

Times recently compiled a list of 100 best fantasy novels spanning from the ninth century to the contemporary era, and Tamora Pierce's Alanna: The First Adventure made the list. The list was arranged by date of publication rather than ranked by merit or quality.

I thought the blurb Megan McCluskey wrote explaining the book's inclusion on the list was interesting:

"Without Tamora Pierce’s Alanna of Trebond paving the way, we might never have gotten to read about such beloved young heroines as George R.R. Martin’s Arya Stark or Sarah J. Maas’s Celaena Sardothien. We first meet Alanna in The Song of the Lioness series as she’s preparing to disguise herself as a boy in order to take her twin brother’s place as a knight in training. So begins a four-book saga replete with magic, love and unforgettable adventure that spans decades in the medieval fantasy world of Tortall. In many ways ahead of its time, Pierce’s fantastical young-adult story doesn’t shy away from addressing issues of feminism, diversity, gender and sexuality, and class politics."

The blurb can be read here.

The list itself can be found here.

It was nice to see Tammy recognized among some of the best fantasy authors of the past and present and to see it mentioned how revolutionary the feminism of SOTL would've been when that series was published.

It's a little harder for me to comment on the diversity angle since by the time I read SOTL in the early 2000's, the series did seem a bit dated in its treatment of the Bazhir in particular, but perhaps for the time it was published, it would have seemed progressive for the era as well just for showing a culture not inspired by white Europeans.

[mistrali]

I think ATFA (and SOTL generally) was also ahead of its time in terms of writing an explicitly feminist narrative in fantasy. I think it was of its time with the Bazhir, in terms of showing them as an Other to be saved by white people (which is why I like the headcanon that either the Naxens had some Bazhir in them, or A and J weren’t the Burning Brightly One and the Night One after all).

As much as I can understand people’s issues with WWRLAM, I loved the characterisation of Halef Seif, Ali Mukhtab, Kara, Kourrem and Ishak, and the others we saw (well, except for ibn Nazzir who was OTT).

ETA - accidentally hit post, sorry. Of course, none of this is to excuse Tammy’s usual problems with exoticising the Bazhir - Bazhir magic is treated as foreign/shamanic magic mysteriously connected to the land and fundamentally different to the Gift, when actually, they’re one and the same thing. We see a lot of commonalities in Tempests and Slaughter.
It’s also used to develop Jon’s character, but I really like that the Bazhir magic is instrumental in saving Tortall/a part of the magics that combine to save the kingdom.

[devilinthedetails]

Oct 20, 2020 11:21:22 GMT 10 mistrali said:

I think ATFA and SOTL was also ahead of its time in terms of writing an explicitly feminist narrative in fantasy. I think it was of its time with the Bazhir, in terms of showing them as an Other to be saved by white people (which is why I like the headcanon that either the Naxens had some Bazhir in them, or that A and J weren’t the Burning Brightly One and the Night One after all).

Naxens with some Bazhir blood in them would be cool and I think the Conte line itself might have some through Jessamine in the Beka Cooper books as well as maybe through Jasson’s wife whom the Spy Guide book said he married in Barzun. And the coal black hair could definitely be a Bazhir trait.

I really like the idea of Jon and Alanna not being the Burning Brightly One and the Night One. I’d rather those roles be filled by people born and raised among the Bazhir.

[mistrali]

Same, devil. I’m in the middle of a fic based on that. IIRC the Bazhir being Barzunni is fanon/headcanon, but certainly she might have been a Bazhir.

[devilinthedetails]

mistrali, I forgot to mention but I agree with you that I really like characters like Kara and Halef Seif who do feel well-fleshed out in Woman Who Rides like a Man and Ali Mulhtab will also always have a special place in my heart. So a lot of the Bazhir characters are portrayed as unique individuals with depth and sensitivity.

[Seek]

Oct 20, 2020 11:35:45 GMT 10 devilinthedetails said:

Oct 20, 2020 11:21:22 GMT 10 mistrali said:

Naxens with some Bazhir blood in them would be cool and I think the Conte line itself might have some through Jessamine in the Beka Cooper books as well as maybe through Jasson’s wife whom the Spy Guide book said he married in Barzun. And the coal black hair could definitely be a Bazhir trait.

I really like the idea of Jon and Alanna not being the Burning Brightly One and the Night One. I’d rather those roles be filled by people born and raised among the Bazhir.

My take as well - I'd prefer the Bazhir fulfill their own prophecies, despite their subsequent adoption. I haven't read T&S but don't mind spoilers - I get the sense magic was vastly different in SotL and I'm mildly okay with the Bazhir magic if we got to see more of Tortallan land/Crown magic, Doi magic, Chitral, elemental magic, Old One magic, demons, and just the idea that magic is a lot more diverse in kind than we really get to see. Where the story cleaves close to Alanna's perspective, I am somewhat okay with the Bazhir being treated as this exotic entity, but I wish the narrative would make it clear it's a perspectival limitation rather than the setting itself.

I like max's Bazhir headcanons a lot, especially her notion that other tribes tend to have women as shamans. I am somewhat okay with the way of the veil was treated, with Alanna not really pushing against it. I know the real-world issues the veil maps onto, I just feel that it goes badly with the white saviour set-up already if it became an issue. But this is one of the places where I think it's very hard to write about or talk about these things. The veil is also a powerful cultural marker and as the Bazhir spill out into Tortall in Jon's reign, and the integration project continues, I expect that the veil itself will also become a declaration.

My sense is that there's some connection between the Bazhir and Barzun but it's unclear what exactly. We know that Barzun and the Bazhir and the Barzunni are mentioned as separate entities in Provost's Dog - implying they're not exactly the same thing. Persopolis is also described in SotL as the only city the Bazhir ever built, which I take it to establish further distance. (This actually generates some interestingly sticky issues about what Ali Muktab is doing as the governor of a city within Meron, and Lord Martin's hostility to the Bazhir if Fief Meron is the whole Great Southern Desert, but let's set that aside for now.) It is possible to reconcile these things by stating that the Barzunni didn't build, and after Jasson did some conquest/assimilation, Tortall embarked on a frenzied building and colonisation spree, but that gives us trouble with where the people of Barzun went. We could postulate that Jasson had them all put to the sword, and I think you've made good suggestions about a Tortallan population recovery in the days of Jon that might work with this notion. Anyway, it seems hard for me to buy that Jasson's forces engaged in full-scale slaughter of the inhabitants of new land, and so the suggestion to me is that the inhabitants of Fief Jesslaw used to be Barzunni.

(I've been working on a massive Bazhir fic since 2010 or something so everytime a discussion about the Bazhir gets underway, I start getting interested ) Which is a rambling aside for - yes, I love SotL, and it was very formative for me as a kid. I also feel that the wholesomeness of SotL is something it's really hard to see these days. Alanna learns to accept herself as a woman and as a warrior. I feel like it'd be really easy for Pierce to fall into the trap of erasing Alanna's womanhood in writing and focus only on Alanna the warrior and I like that Alanna has to reconcile different aspects of her nature and come to terms with it. She's chosen by the Great Mother Goddess, not by Mithros, despite Mithros being the god of war, and I really like it when that distinction comes out.

[mistrali]

Well said, Seek!

Re: T&S, I was driving at the nature of the magic being more elemental-focused, to the point that it reminded me of Emelan (as did the brief mentions of Kara, Ishak and Kourrem’s magic as being based in healing, weather, and fire/future-seeing, respectively).

We get glimpses of this in previous Tortall books, like Kaddar’s magic being mostly attuned to gardening, or even healing magic requiring a talent for healing (see, e.g. Maude’s words to Alanna at the beginning of ATFA). Certainly we know that magical talent does play a role in the Gift, Thom I and Numair being a case in point, but in T&S we see it being used and conceived of in ways that are very reminiscent of Emelan - e.g. (spoiler) Arram discovers ‘lightning snakes’ in bolts of lightning, which is a major plot point, and there’s a gardener whose magic is referred to in very ambient-magic-ish terms.

So I suppose we’re seeing more diverse uses of the Gift. All this to say that I agree with you that “I wish the narrative would make it clear it's a perspectival limitation rather than the setting itself”.

Yes, I tend to agree that it makes much more sense for the Bazhir tribes to traditionally elect female shamans, even perhaps multiple shamans. From checking canon, it seems most of Ibn Nazzir’s objections and K&K’s perplexity come from Alanna being a warrior, as opposed to Gifted. This would support the idea that female warriors are more of an anomaly than female shamans. Particularly considering the apparent influx of Bazhir we see joining the Own - after all, if men are traditionally warriors and women traditionally shamans, it would make sense that in lieu of fighting other tribes for territory, or whatever they did before the Tortallan conquest, they’re now in service to the Crown. It would also make women as powerful as men, politically speaking.

But it sounds as if Tortallan notions of patriarchy have slowly taken root among the Bloody Hawk, given Kourrem’s comment on whether any man would want to marry a woman who was a shaman. Implying, maybe, that shamans were traditionally unmarried and that a Bazhir woman’s status as ‘marriageable’ is more highly valued than it was, say, three hundred years ago (at least within the BH), and certainly a married woman is more valued than an unmarried shaman woman. Predictably, we see a double standard because ibn Nazzir’s predecessor had a wife.

Yet from Ali Mukhtab, scholar, Voice and compiler of thousands of years’ worth of Bazhir history, we have, “To make girls shamans is a new thing. But this tribe has done many things that are new since the coming of the Woman Who Rides Like a Man.” And Coram also seems to support this when he comments that Alanna’s turning centuries’ worth of tradition on its head. Not once does Ali mention traditionally female shamans.

How to reconcile this? Maybe Ali means that the BH has, for whatever reason, traditionally always had male shamans and female shamans are a new thing.
Or maybe he means relatively new, like in the last fifty years: it could be that the BH was wedded more quickly to the Crown, and took on Tortallan thought patterns earlier, than some of their more remote counterparts. This would also make sense given that Persopolis/the BH is physically closer to Corus than the other end of the Great Southern Desert, meaning Jasson would’ve taken it first.

We’re probably supposed to read ibn Nazzir as representing the last bastion of the ‘traditional’ Bazhir mentality, and that mentality as being centuries of misogyny and oppression of women. Basically your classic white saviour narrative. But the text doesn’t support that. We could just as easily frame his vendetta against Alanna in terms of a relatively recent change in attitudes towards women. And a number of other issues, e.g. her warrior status being ‘improper’, his age, his possible mental illness, his personal issues with having power/control wrested from him, and loss of cultural identity/assimilation (doesn’t he also hate Alanna because she’s white, as well as female?).

More re: misogyny: Alanna more or less equates some Tortallan royal priests’ attitudes to her with the BH’s attitudes (WWRLAM, loc 200). Notably, she also seems to feel that the BH women’s view of their men with “loving disrespect” rather than fear is more progressive than Tortallan women’s (at least, noblewomen’s) views of their men. But we don’t have much of a sample size to support this, apart from Liam’s toxic masculinity (and he could well be an outlier), our limited glimpses of the interactions between Delia and Roger, and Jon’s possessive and misogynistic behaviour towards Alanna in any romantic context whatsoever. We see plain toxic people like Joren and Vinson later on in POTS, but we also see Neal, Wyldon and most of Kel’s yearmates, who generally seem to be decent to women.

(Like you, I also love the way Alanna learns from the Bazhir, even though it’s her learning about herself (and broadening her understanding of Tortallan society).

It also says the Bazhir have child brides (age 12) - or at least, younger brides than the rest of Tortallan society, but for all we know, that also started post-conquest. Or it was a holdover from a time when women did get married young, but they also had more political power within their tribe.

It also says Lord Martin is ‘fair’, so maybe he’s one of those ‘civilise the noble savages’ types who hates the Bazhir for being ‘uncivilised, warlike, troublemaking sand lice’ or whatever, but also sees himself as The Great Dispenser of Tortallan Justice or something.

Or he could hate Bazhir in general due to some familial grudge (so-and-so killed such-and-such relative during the conquest), but not let that interfere with his governing of them.

I imagine Ali Mukhtab governing Persopolis was probably part of some sort of negotiation on the Bazhir’s part, so they’d get to preserve that part of their history. Ali says Persopolis was built so they could guard against the Ysandir.

But even if we take the Bazhir!Naxens headcanon and assume the ‘Ysandir burn higher’ rhyme was some long-ago Bazhir chant to call up fire (hey, I dunno, maybe it was translated to Common Eastern later?), an evil that can be defeated by a pair of twelve-year-olds hardly warrants an entire city set to guard it. Maybe it was to the Bloody Hawk’s advantage during talks with Jasson to let the story spread that there were dangerous spirits around Persopolis who would kidnap children — regardless of the truth, or partial truth, of those stories. Maybe the Ysandir only took one child every few centuries, and then something happened and they upped the count by Roald’s time.

I‘d also prefer that people born and raised Bazhir were the real Night One and Burning Brightly One. But in terms of trying to sort of retcon what canon tells us, part-Bazhir Jon and even Alanna (via Marinie of Tasride) work well.



Alternatively, Ali Mukhtab could be the nominal ‘governor’, as a sop to the Bazhir, but have no legal power over Persopolis, since it’s part of Meron. Or Persopolis is some kind of independent zone, maybe technically part of the Bloody Hawk somehow, or linked to the status of the Voice, which gives Ali Mukhtab the authority to ‘rule’ it just the same as it gives the Bazhir tribes the right to live on Crown lands. Or, well, Meron lands. Maybe that’s why Lord Martin hates the Bazhir, because he feels they’re undermining his authority by having Ali Mukhtab there. Or he wasn’t happy with having a desert as a fief and being lumped with negotiating with the Bazhir? I dunno.



I wonder what would have happened with the Ysandir and the Black City had the Bazhir tribes living in the desert actually left or been disbanded? Would the Ysandir have broken free and consumed the souls of everyone in Tortall or something? I mean, how does that even work? What are the Ysandir? How were generations of Bazhir able to entrap them (and keep them trapped) but not destroy them, yet when Alanna and Jon come along they all just burst into flames?

[Seek]

mistrali - ah yes, sorry, thought you were referring to the bit about the adoption/Voice magic specifically and the 'power that smells of the desert' that Roger refers to. This clears things up well for me!

Anyway, sounding out to say I love your analysis - it's very thought-provoking, and I always love it when someone engages closely with the text!

But it sounds as if Tortallan notions of patriarchy have slowly taken root among the Bloody Hawk, given Kourrem’s comment on whether any man would want to marry a woman who was a shaman. Implying, maybe, that shamans were traditionally unmarried and that a Bazhir woman’s status as ‘marriageable’ is more highly valued than it was, say, three hundred years ago (at least within the BH), and certainly a married woman is more valued than an unmarried shaman woman. Predictably, we see a double standard because ibn Nazzir’s predecessor had a wife.

I agree with this, but also it's possible for women to have significant access to power but - as you point out, to nonetheless be subject to patriarchy. The Bloody Hawk read to me to be significantly rigid in terms of gender roles ('woman who rides like a man' issue and all) and those tend to have harsh limits on how much power women can have, despite the roles being in theory equal but different. I could see this play out either way: as you point out, if we want to reconcile women shamans (still one of my favourite of max's canons) with the text, then it has to be restricted to the Bloody Hawk, or we could suspect women shamans were still subject to a whole lot of misogynistic double standards. (There's all that stereotypical 'virginity = power' baggage that could come into play, as well as just Kourrem being aware that the issue isn't so much of women shaman not being done as recognition that Bazhir men don't marry their social superiors, or a woman who is more powerful than they are, or that powerful women get pushback.)

I definitely think ibn Nazzir is weird. And I strongly suspect he's an outsider to the Bloody Hawk - he's the only member of the Bloody Hawk I can think of who follows the no patronymic convention. And Hassam ibn Farid, I suppose. Almost every Bazhir of the BH and Ali Mukhtab do the <NAME><FAMILY NAME>. Even Amman Kemail of the Sunset Dragon does. This is in opposition to Zahir ibn Alhaz and Qasim ibn Zirhud and makes me think this could be a marker of very different Bazhir tribe structures - very arbitrarily and with scant textual support, I suspect that 'ibn' becomes more common in the south (just because it's far far away from where the BH are), and the BH convention is normal for their neighbourhood. Which also explains how Gammal can even be in Persopolis to begin with. Anyway, just that I wonder if ibn Nazzir's outsider status also works against him - he might have issues when he sees another outsider Gifted come, just as he did for the last shaman!

I imagine Ali Mukhtab governing Persopolis was probably part of some sort of negotiation on the Bazhir’s part, so they’d get to preserve that part of their history. Ali says Persopolis was built so they could guard against the Ysandir.

Yes - I agree with this. But that's what strikes me as interesting, because again: we know different Bazhir tribes (from WWRLAM) have different relationships with the Crown. No headman can speak for all the Bazhir, and the Voice really seems more like a respected spiritual advisor than a war leader or a chief of chiefs. It's curious whether there really was 'the Bazhir' to bargain with Jasson in the first place - the fact that there are different relationships with the Crown suggests to me that this might be a reach. On the one hand, it's plausible that the Black City (after all, they built Persopolis to keep a watch on it!) was so important all the Bazhir agreed, or Mukhtab talked to all the headmen to forge that agreement, in his role as the Voice of the Tribes. On the other hand, it's also plausible that any agreement that was struck over Persopolis might have involved some tribes but not others, or might have been done unilaterally by the Voice of the time (Mukhtab or whoever came before him.)

I brought up the Lord Martin point largely because we know that Meron land has Bazhir and Barzunni claims involved. I do think there are plenty of reasons Lord Martin might not like the Bazhir, but what's interesting to me is more the question of where Meron manpower comes from. (Again, slightly tangential thoughts about what happened to the people of Barzun - it's clear Meron can't be expected to field Bazhir forces alone if the king calls for a muster!)

I wonder what would have happened with the Ysandir and the Black City had the Bazhir tribes living in the desert actually left or been disbanded? Would the Ysandir have broken free and consumed the souls of everyone in Tortall or something? I mean, how does that even work? What are the Ysandir? How were generations of Bazhir able to entrap them (and keep them trapped) but not destroy them, yet when Alanna and Jon come along they all just burst into flames?

Another fantastic mystery! Maybe the Ysandir were weakened over time? Maybe they were diet-Ysandir? The Bazhir seem uniquely terrorised by the Ysandir, though we don't get much of a Meron perspective, anyway. This is peculiar to me - do the southernmost Bazhir tribes also deal with Ysandir issues? Why are the Bazhir this vulnerable? And as you say - how did the Bazhir trap them and Alanna and Jon burn them?

We know they're related to some Ianto clan that had a fight with the Searflame dragon family, thanks to Pounce, and that they had great music. But that's about it. I think there's mention in ATLA of them being cousins of gods, which seems about right. They seem almost like immortals but not quite immortals.

[devilinthedetails]

Seek , Yeah, I'd like to see people who were born and raised among the Bazhir and who truly seem to identify with the Bazhir fulfill the Bazhir prophecies. The adoptions of Alanna and Jon always seem kind of perfunctory in a way as if they aren't truly identifying as Bazhir and in Alanna and Jon's case are primarily becoming Bazhir to attain a certain status among the Bazhir that they wouldn't be able to enjoy otherwise.

Alanna in particular doesn't seem to think about being a Bazhir much at all after Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Jon at least must do some thinking about the Bazhir since he is the Voice, but I'm still not sure he actually sees himself as a Bazhir--it certainly wouldn't be his primary identity--so much as someone apart and above the Bazhir, ruling over them as Voice and king (which also raises questions about what happens when Tortall is no longer ruled by a Voice and king. Does Roald Jon's son have to become Voice after him and so on down a line of descendants in order to stave off a Bazhir revolt because of that no one can resist the Voice statement or will the next Voice be a Bazhir, and what implications will that have for the Bazhir remaining within Tortall in the future? It really just becomes very tangled the more I think about it, and the more it might be the case that Jon becoming the Voice has only staved off conflict for a bit of time and might even make the conflict worse when it comes. So, Jon becoming Voice and king isn't even a perfect, permanent political solution to the problem even if we leave aside the troubling imperialistic/colonialism implications of it it all.)

But I digress, I suppose I just would have liked for the Bazhir prophecies to be fulfilled by someone who truly seemed to identity as Bazhir and as part of Bazhir culture rather than someone who was adopted but doesn't seem to fully identify as Bazhir.

I do find the takes of on magic to seem to differ between series to series within the Tortall books, and I feel like part of it may be that the Tortallans are learning about other types of magic and interacting with other cultures who use magic in different ways. Generally, I don't think the Tortallans knew that much about magic and were very entrenched within their own cultural view of magic. The monks who teach magic in the City of the Gods might have a broader perspective and know more, but Alanna and thus the reader hardly interact with them in the SOTL books.

I do wonder if the Bazhir might wield several different types of magic in different ways. For instance, there seem to be shamanistic type magic for healing, magic for warfare, and then perhaps what Jon seems to describe to Daine in Wild Magic as a type of wild magic that links the Bazhir to the land and the Voice to his people. Perhaps some of the blood type magic such as the adoptive rites and the Voice making ceremony are subsets of this type of wild magic. In a way, the Bazhir at the time of Woman Who Rides Like a Man might actually be versed in a greater variety of magics than the Tortallans, it's just that the Tortallans with typical imperialism attitudes are oblivious to that and convinced of their own superiority. This backs up my general belief that the Tortallans aren't as advanced as they think they are. (I think the Tortallans lag considerably, possibly as much as centuries, behind the Carthaki and the Yamani in most standards measures of civilization, for example. Probably even behind Tyra as well since Tyra seems to be wealthier and farther ahead in trade, akin to the Italian city states of our world perhaps.)

I agree with you that I wish the attitude toward Bazhir magic was written more as a shortcoming of Alanna's perspective than as a truth of the setting we are meant to accept without questioning. I do find the fact that most of the time we are supposed to agree uncritically with the Tortallan heroines plus the fact that the point of view isn't a really "tight" third person limited tends to make it read more like the latter than the former for me, which is part of why the treatment of the Bazhir in the text themselves tends to leave a sour taste in my mouth. Like with just a bit of a tighter third person limited writing style, I'd be more quick to say, "That's what Alanna thinks, but it's not necessarily what the author wants us to think," but with the style of the books as they are written, a lot of times it feels like, "That's what Alanna thinks, and that's what the author wants us to think as well." And it's with the latter thought that things become uncomfortable in a way they wouldn't with the former, but describing how the former is created rather than the latter is a bit difficult to explain. It's just an impression that I get reading the books.

I like the idea that some Bazhir tribes could've had female shamans, and I could definitely see that being the case and something that might have differed from tribe to tribe where some tribes would accept female shamans and others wouldn't.

I actually have a similar head canon regarding veiling where veiling customs vary from tribe to tribe. In some tribes, women might be expected to wear dark veils that cover their faces and reveal only their eyes but in others I picture them wearing veils of different colors (they can choose the colors for themselves) and having their veils only covering their hair. Which really wouldn't be that much different in concept than many medieval style hoods or hairpieces worn by women that I bet have been fashionable in Tortall.There is just such diversity in real world veiling among the Muslim people that seem to have inspired the Bazhir that I'd really like to see that diversity reflected in the attitudes that various Bazhir tribes have toward veiling.

I'm very glad that Alanna wasn't shown to push back against the veiling more than she did in the text because I really feel that it would be very culturally imperialistic and white savior "civilize the unenlightened savages" of her to do that and there are already enough uncomfortable traces of that attitude in Woman Who Rides Like a Man. I really think it is for Bazhir women to decide if they want to wear veils or not and what kind of veils that they want to wear. To me, it is as wrong to tell a woman that she can't or shouldn't veil in the way that she chooses as it is to force her to wear a veil against her will. I don't really know how much coercion with regard to women wearing veils exists in Bazhir society, but this Bazhir society is also being compared to a quasi-medieval one where women don't exactly have what we would consider equal rights by modern standards, so it's a case of, "Well, who are the Tortallans to judge anyway?" That's the thing. Quasi-medieval Tortall is no bastion of progressive enlightenment even under Jon's rule. It is a feudal society rooted in deep inequity and it would cease to function in anything close to its current forum if it made any significant strides toward eliminating its fundamental inequities.

I agree with you that the veil can also function as a mark of Bazhir culture and a focal point of Bazhir pride and that could become especially the case the more that Tortallan society seeks to impose its rule over the Bazhir. Wearing a veil in that context could become a sort of declaration of independence or defiance especially for a Bazhir woman in the north, a badge of her cultural heritage and pride.

I think that there is some link between the Bazhir and Barzun but I don't believe it is as simple as everyone in Barzun is a Bazhir. I think the Bazhir tribes are a subset of the people living in Bazhir, and that Barzun must have been a multi-ethnic country though it wouldn't surprise me if there was mingling in terms of blood and ancestry between those different people. Some of the people of Barzun might have been culturally closer to Tortallans living in castles and such, and then others would have been the Bazhir tribespeople in the desert. I'd be fascinated to learn more about the Bazhir and their relationship to Barzun and about Barzun in general. And I'd like to learn more about the royal family of Barzun since Jessamine in the Provost's Dog series is described as being a princess of Barzun. Did the Bazhir acknowledge the royal family in Barzun? Did they remain more independent of the Barzun royal family?

My reading of Alanna: The First Adventure was that Ali Mukhtab was governor of Persopolis because it had perhaps been negotiated as a term of Bazhir surrender where a Bazhir would always be the governor of Persopolis to ensure that a Bazhir always had keys to the Sunset Room to keep watch over Black City so that was how I reconciled Lord Martin's hatred of the Bazhir with the fact that a Bazhir was governor of Persopolis.

I do wonder if there might have been parts of Barzun that weren't covered by the Great Southern Desert where the Barzunni who weren't Bazhir tribespeople might have built cities and castles and whatnot. I could definitely see them as perhaps having ports along the southern and eastern coastlines, for example. Perhaps the coastal regions belonged to one type of Barzunni who perhaps had a royal family, while the deserts were seen as the territory of the Bazhir. And probably it would've been the control of the coasts and ports that Jasson would've really been more interested than the desert. It's just to conquer and maintain control of the coasts and ports, he would've had to go through the desert. At least that is what I would imagine given the terrain and the nature of trade. Same as he seems to have been interested in claiming both sides of the Drell for Tortall (seizing one from Tusaine).

I think you're right that the people of Barzun can't have been entirely put to the sword and wholesale slaughtered by Jasson. I think it's more likely that the Barzunni people who weren't Bazhir were assimilated into the overarching Tortallan nation and culture in a way that the Bazhir weren't. I even wonder if the conquest of the part of Barzun that wasn't controlled by the Bazhir was that violent. I think it's a possibility that perhaps Jasson's marriage to Daneline of Jesslaw was a way for him to sort of legitimize his bid to take control of Barzun, a way to give a sense of legitimacy to his rule, and maybe the more independent-minded Bazhir who seem to me to be skeptical of those sort of dynastic claims, didn't swallow that logic and that is part of why they continued to resist Tortallan domination until the end of Roald's reign. At any rate, I do think that the Jesslaw family was Barzunni as recently as Jon's grandmother's day and that the inhabitants of fief Jesslaw and likely other surrounding fiefs are Barzunni and perhaps with some amount of Bazhir blood flowing in their veins depending on how common it was for the different peoples and ethnic groups of Barzun to intermarry.

I do find it weird how rarely Barzun is mentioned for a country that was a real political entity as recently as Jon's grandmother's day. Like that really wasn't that long ago in historical terms. So the best conclusion I can draw from that is that the Barzunni people who weren't Bazhir must have been so similar to Tortallans as to assimilate almost seamlessly into the larger Tortallan society, culture, and government by Alanna's time although I admit that I do find it a bit weird that there isn't more sense of some sort of cultural, social, or political divide between the parts of Tortall that were historically Barzun and the parts that weren't. I just feel there should be some political gulf there at the very least between the noble families akin to how the old-blooded nobles look down on newer nobility like Kel's family. I wonder if such tensions are there and we just aren't seeing them because the narrators we get just aren't aware and attuned to those tensions.

I always welcome discussion of the Bazhir since they fascinate me as well, and SOTL was definitely formative for me as well. It was one of those books that got me into reading fantasy (a love that has continued well into my adulthood) and with Alanna: The First Adventure in particular I feel like I fell in love with so many aspects of the world with the ruins of the Old Ones and the Ysandiar, for example. And the books definitely do have a sort of wholesome quality in terms of affirming the value of traits like hard work and persistence. It's sword and sorcery in a world that I love with a female heroine I could really relate to when I first read the books in middle school, and it was great to be able to see Alanna grow into adulthood and specifically womanhood.

You make a great point about how Alanna had to accept and define herself as both a woman and a warrior. One identity didn't and couldn't supersede the other in her quest to define herself and her role in the world. She could be a knight but also a woman who desired and pursued romantic relationships with men. She could be a great swordswoman who discovered that she liked wearing dresses. She didn't have to confine or restrict herself to one or the other. She could be both. That is a trait that to this day is sometimes missing in the warrior woman type character where the warrior woman completely rejects or despises all aspects of being a woman in pursuit of being a warrior (which ironically then seems to have the message that women can't really be warriors, after all) while with Alanna a very real part of her journey was finding a way to reconcile what being a woman meant to her with what being a warrior meant to her. Also, when I think about it, men like Jon and George who were her romantic partners at various times, ultimately had to come to respect Alanna both as a woman and as a warrior, and she demanded that they do that.

I also love the point you make about Alanna being chosen by the Great Mother Goddess, not Mithros, and the Great Mother Goddess is herself an interesting figure to consider as she has both a warrior aspect and a gentler mother aspect. Alanna embodies this complexity of woman, healer, and warrior all rolled into one, and that is just a pretty cool concept.

I find your analysis of Bazhir naming conventions fascinating, and I think that you're right that the Voice is probably more of a spirtual advisor and leader for the tribes than a chief of chiefs. That is great phrasing. In general, I think that Bazhir society is more egalitarian and less rigidly hierarchial than the feudal structure of Tortall. So, I think the Voice would more wield spirital authority and guide by a sort of consensus and will of the people whom he is linked to by deep magic rather than in a sort of autocratic way. It is in ways like that I believe Bazhir society is more progressive and advanced than Tortallan society.

mistrali , I agree with you that I got the impression that most of the Bazhir bafflement at Alanna was rooted in her being a warrior (a woman who fights and rides like a man), and honestly I think in that way they really aren't any different or worse than the Tortallans themselves who are absolutely shocked and scandalized that Alanna is a female knight. Alanna basically is traveling among the Bazhir to escape the negative judgment of the Tortallans at court and we know that Roald would establish the big and little exams essentially in response to this scandal of Alanna hiding her identity as a female and earning her shield. Even Alanna's friend Raoul says he still has to adjust to this idea of Alanna being a woman, not a boy named Alan, when he says farewell to her at the end of In the Hand of the Goddess, and I see Raoul as one of the greatest supporters of female warriors. It's just going to take people some time to wrap their minds around who Alanna is because she doesn't fit easily into cultural frameworks be it the Tortallan one of her era or the Bazhir one. So I am really reluctant to label the Bazhir as significantly worse in this regard than the Tortall of Alanna's time. Alanna has largely been outcast by her own people so it's not like the Tortallans were mighty accepting of her being a knight and a woman. Alanna just doesn't fit neatly into any society whether Tortallan or Bazhir. She kind of chafes against and challenges social expectations whatever they might be, and that seems to be a huge part of her character to me.

I am not convinced that the Bazhir as a whole would be confused by the concept of females with magic. It just seems to me that magic in the Bloody Hawk tribe was controlled and judged by a male shaman who wanted to preserve his own power and status in the tribe and thus labeled anyone who challenged that privileged position as demonic and evil. All three of the young people with magic, one male and two females, whom Alanna identifies as her potential successors were ostracized by the Bloody Hawk, so I don't think it is as simple as "Bazhir don't like or trust women with magic." I think it's more complicated and nuanced than that and probably more about whom the particular shaman of the Bloody Hawk was at the time.

I do wonder if it was traditional for female shamans not to marry or if perhaps they were allowed to marry but Kourrem
wasn't aware of this and didn't know that she could really be accepted and loved as a woman with magic since she had been treated as a pariah by her tribe for so long.

I like your interpretation of Ali's comment to mean female shamans were a new thing among the Bloody Hawk tribe rather than among all the Bazhir.

Like you, I definitely don't like to see ibn Nazzir as representing the last bastion of a traditional Bazhir mentality and with that mentality basically amounting to centuries of misogyny and oppression against women especially if we are to take a white savior narrative that the Bazhir can only be saved from this history of misogyny and oppression of women by benevolent, enlightened white folks who can rule over them. Especially if those supposed enlightened white folks are privileged elite that perch atop something as fundamentally inequitable as a feudal society. Like that just becomes a narrative I would rather spit out than swallow. I accept that some amount of misogyny and oppression of women is likely part of Bazhir history, but I think that it is also embedded in Totallan history and culture, and the Tortallans really aren't in a position of moral authority to judge Bazhir culture as a whole based on that. The expression about removing the plank from one's own eye before worrying about the speck in someone else's comes to mind.

I also think that you're right that probably a lot of issues coalesce in ibn Nazzir such as a desire to maintain his own power (a sense of being threatened by Alanna and the young magical talents in his tribe who could replace him if he trains them, and I imagine that him not training a successor is itself something of a breach of Bazhir tradition since otherwise the Bazhir practice of having shamans wouldn't be too sustainable across generations) and hostility toward Tortallan invaders and the cultural imposition they represent. Like it really doesn't surprise me at all that the Bazhir resent the Tortallans and don't trust them because I have no reason to believe that Jasson and his armies weren't totally in the wrong and utterly unjustified in invading the desert and trying to conquer the Bazhir. So, I sympathize with the Bazhir a lot and think they were wronged and that the Tortallans including Jon have really done nothing to address the wrong and just sort of rubbed salt in the wound and then slapped the equivalent of a Band-Aid over a gaping chest wound. Like that isn't even going to stop the bleeding, Jon, and I bet the injury gets infected. And it is staggering that none of the Tortallans who spend any length of time in the desert interacting with the Bazhir come to this fairly obvious and straightforward conclusion. A massive cultural blindspot and obliviousness on their end that to me often ruins any good intentions they might have because they just seem so clueless in their attitude and approach to the Bazhir.

I feel like Alanna's time among the women of the Bloody Hawk is her first chance to really spend time relating to married women as another woman. She doesn't seem to have any close relationships with the noble ladies at court during Alanna: The First Adventure or In the Hand of the Goddess, so I don't really know if she understands what the private dynamics of Tortallan marriages are like. Alanna in her first two books is kind of isolated from Tortallan womanhood in a way, so it's hard to really know what kind of attitude Tortallan noblewomen have to their husbands. I do get a vibe of mutual respect and partnership from Roald and Lianne, though, and they seemed to have fairly traditional dynamics. Lianne and Roald seemed to have a loving relationship and even Alanna's own father seemed to love her mother and not know how to cope with her death. I do feel like relationships within marriages could vary a lot based on the individual couples and people involved in both with the Tortallans and the Bazhir.

And even with individuals, I think there is a chance for a person to grow and mature as a result of romantic experiences. For example, I believe Jon at the beginning (and certainly the end) of Lioness Rampant would make a much better husband than the Jon of Woman Who Rides Like a Man. Like I absolutely understood and agreed with Alanna's decision to not marry Jon in Woman Who Rides Like a Man, but a book later, I get why Thayet is thinking of accepting Jon's proposal and seeing him as a good match for her. Part of that is that Alanna and Thayet are different people, but some of it too is that Jon has matured. So, I guess I lean toward marriages and relationships being complex, fluid things in any cultures and nearly impossible to sum up in a simple sentence or conclusion.

I also feel like both Tortallan and Bazhir culture have some components that could create some very violently misogynistic and toxic people whether it is Joren or Vinson or it is ibn Nazzir so if it would be unfair to judge all Tortallans by what Joren and Vinson think is appropriate or acceptable behavior, it would be equally unjust to think that ibn Nazzir is emblematic of what is appropriate or acceptable behavior in Bazhir society. Truthfully, all these characters just expose some of the issues in those cultures that are festering and need to be addressed, but neither of these cultures is exempt from these issues. Bazhir society produces Ali Mukhtab, Halef Seif, and Qasim, not just ibn Nazzir, and I think that is important to see in order to understand that Bazhir culture and tradition is a complex thing.

I honestly don't know what to make of marriage ages in the Tortall universe. For Tortallan noblewomen, marriage in mid-to-late teenage years seems to be fairly commonplace and accepted or at least betrothals occur by this age among the nobility for both males and females. Especially with regard to the age of Tortallan noblewomen at marriage, that seems pretty consistent with the average age of medieval noblewomen at first marriage in our own world. By modern standards, that is probably child bride or at least worrisome teenage bride territory, so there would already be an element of justification like "it's the time, it's the place, it's the culture" in accepting these sort of marriage ages and relationships on the part of the audience and the author if these marriages and relationships aren't universally treated as morally questionable or problematic.

So, there seems to be an element of it being selectively problematic that I find uncomfortable. Like when the author wants to be able to have Daine hook up and engage in a long term relationship with Numair who was her mentor and is portrayed as many years her senior, that is honky-dory because medieval people married younger than us moderns and we just can't judge medieval people by our contemporary standards. But if the Bazhir marry young we are supposed to see that as problematic. And, well, it has to be either one thing or the other. It can't be backward when the Bazhir do it and not worthy of criticism when Daine and Numair do it. So, the Bazhir getting married at a young age shouldn't be regarded as inherently worse than the Tortallans getting married early. From a modern perspective, they should both be equally questionable I think.

I also would sort of like more details about the Bazhir child bride situation since it could be a case where girls marry young but the marriage isn't consummated until the girl is older, because that could potentially make a big difference in how I view the custom. If Bazhir girls are marrying at thirteen or something but the marriage isn't being consummated until sixteen or something, that makes a difference to me. I just find it hard to believe that Bazhir are regularly consummating marriages when a girl is thirteen or so because if the purpose is to produce healthy children and have women survive childbirth, a girl getting married and pregnant at sixteen is much more likely to be able to carry a healthy child to term and to have a safe pregnancy that doesn't kill her. I feel like the child bride angle probably gets exaggerated same as our own perceptions of the average age of women at marriage in the medieval era can also get distorted. Like people tend to use Margaret Beaufort's marriage at twelve and childbirth at thirteen as if that were the norm when it was regarded as an exception by the people of the era, and Margaret Beaufort is also a good example of how giving birth too young can permanently damage a woman's fertility. So, I guess I am a bit skeptical of the child bride angle and expect something more complicated and nuanced might be going on with the Bazhir here.

More broadly, I also think a lot of the marriage age stuff in Tortall seems a bit weird or counter-intuitive or contradictory. For example, in POTS, Raoul comments when Kel is fourteen that if Kel were a commoner, she likely would've been married with children at that age. That would not only imply that Tortall does have child brides (married at fourteen with kids would be child bride territory to me and would mean consummation of a marriage at twelve or thirteen, not fifteen or sixteen) that is treated at commonplace, but it would also make Tortall different than our own medieval world, where commoner women actually tended to marry later on average than women of noble birth, which made sense given that commoner women could more easily marry for love, and noblewomen would be more likely to marry for social, economic, and political reasons. For the nobility, marriages could forge alliances and connections and preserve wealth and bloodlines. For the commoners, there were less weighty implications. So I really don't know why commoners would marry younger than nobles in Tortall.

I also think things like anti-pregnancy charms should increase the average age of marriage relative to our world rather than decrease it or keep it the same. In our own world, more effective contraception and the female empowerment over their own reproductive choices and systems that often comes with it results in higher marriage ages. And I also think that Tortallan society if anti-pregnancy charms are available among the nobility should value virginity at marriage less, because the primary reason for valuing virginity before paternity tests is to ensure that offspring are legitimate in a feudal society where inheritance is everything, but with the anti-pregnancy charms, it is very possible for women to have multiple sexual relationships without producing children, so I just feel like that would again be something that should change Tortallan marriage norms but mysteriously generally doesn't.

The better quality of healing in the Tortallan universe should also in my opinion raise the average age of marriage more than it does. So, I guess I think that there is enough odd and contradictory stuff going on with marriage ages in the Tortallan universe that I don't see it as unique to the Bazhir. It sort of just becomes a quirk of the world-building to me.

I kind of always cringe at the descriptions of Lord Martin as "fair" because to me if he hates all the Bazhir just because they are Bazhir and we have no real evidence that he confronts that prejudice or changes his mind about that or generally realizes that his attitude toward the Bazhir was wrong, that to me isn't "fair" at all. That's being a bigot/racist, the opposite of being "fair." Maybe any Tortallan in that position would be bigoted and racist and hate the Bazhir, but if so that would generally be an indictment of Tortallan society and prejudice rather than a reflection on the Bazhir in my view.

I could imagine him being strict and impartial in how he resolves disputes among the Bazhir and that kind of thing, but I can't really imagine him as fair in any sort of modern sense of being devoid of prejudice or at minimum striving to be devoid of this prejudice. Now if there had been more fleshing out of Lord Martin's character where I got to see him struggle to reconcile his principle of fairness with his bias against the Bazhir, then I could probably view him in a more generous lens. Like I can sympathize with Lord Wyldon because he has to resolve the conflict between his principles of fairness and his bias to Kel solely because she was a female. Wyldon had to admit that he was wrong and change in response to the realization that he was failing to live up to his own ideals. Maybe Lord Martin has gone on a similar character journey off the page. I hope so or the sake of the Bazhir living in Meron since that is apparently still his fief.

I don't really know Lord Martin's history. He could cast himself in a sort of white savior role where it is his job to bring justice and civilization to the Bazhir "savages" or it could be that he doesn't trust the Bazhir not to revolt (which really I can't blame the Bazhir if they do revolt against the Tortallans and I'd be inclined to say "more power to 'em if they do") or it could be that he lost relatives fighting the Bazhir when Jasson's army conquered the desert. I always thought it was possible that either Lord Martin or his father could've fought the Bazhir with Jasson's army and been rewarded with fief Meron as a reward for loyalty and valor in that war. That would explain why Lord Martin hates and distrusts the Bazhir so much and also to my mind reiterate how fundamentally incompatible Tortallan and Bazhir claims to the desert land are. If Lord Martin's and his heirs right to rule in Meron is only by right of conquest, well, that would be a tough pill to ask the Bazhir to swallow for generation after generation.

The Ysandir story just generates and invites a thousand questions in my opinion. Starting with who are the Ysandir. Then how did the Bazhir manage to confine them to Black City? How could Jon and Alanna defeat them when centuries of Bazhir couldn't? Did the Bazhir not ever try to defeat the Ysandir and just keep watch over Black City? I'd really love to learn more about the Ysandir. I wish they had gotten more mention after Alanna the First Adventure.

[Seek]

Ah, really love how much thought you put into these things as well, devilinthedetails!

Magic - so yes, we do see quite a bit of different kinds of magic, and given the Bazhir, according to Ali Mukhtab, will have a famous travelling school of mages, I think it's fair to say that they likely have a significant amount of knowledge transmitted across shamanic generations and tribes. (I also suspect the Gift/wild magic dichotomy sounds like some kind of academic distinction drawn maybe in Carthak or Tortall, which also limits the ability of practising mages to make sense of what the Bazhir and Doi do.)

Barzun - I definitely agree the Bazhir were one ethnic group in Barzun, though there's a certain amount of similarity in the names that makes me think there's some foundational relation. (My personal headcanon is that Barzun is actually a parallel to Al-Andalus/Persia, and some tribes of the Bazhir did some conquering themselves and essentially founded Barzun ages ago - whether it dates back to Eastern Empire days or not.) I think there's a lot of good/interesting questions to be asked about the relation of the Bazhir to Barzun even then - we know the Great Southern Desert was nominally part of Barzun. Did the Bazhir also identify as Barzunni? Did Barzunni rulers broker a sort of tentative peace with them? Mutually ignoring each other? Nominal control? We know there's bad blood between them and the hillmen, and I think the hill country is supposed to be part of Barzun as well, if not yet another independent territory with its own identity. (Another fun headcanon: like mistrali's point on Bazhir attributing war to men, perhaps Barzunni monarchs on campaign would often hire Bazhir horse archers to fill out their armies.)

As you point out, is their investment in Barzun why they were reluctant to accept Jasson's rule? Good point about the desert blocking access to the ports, by the way - this would be my assumption of why Jasson went south as well. The hill country and the way Jasson brokered treaties with some Bazhir tribes but retained hostility with some makes me think - on the surface, anyway - of Alexander the Great's troubles in what is now Afghanistan.

As you mentioned (good catch!), we don't know how bloody the conquest of Barzun was, but it's strange that there's so little sense of Barzunni identity in Tortall, given how recent the conquest/assimilation was, or even political sneerage among the nobles. It does suggest cultural compatibility, though I'd argue that there are hints it didn't work out fine across Tortall - we just don't know whether Barzun is also implicated in this. I'm thinking of PotS (or was it TIQ?) mentions of how Jasson went on Grand Progresses and taxed his new nobles into submission to consolidate control. You're right to point out these divisions just might not be visible to our protagonists either. Kel doesn't seem to have much of an eye for politics, and Alanna comes from a fief that has been historically Tortallan from the beginning. I also strongly agree with you that Jasson's marriage to Daneline of Jesslaw was likely political - and to solidify a claim to Barzun he likely made via heritage (from Jessamine) anyway. We don't know if that was decisive, but it likely helped him win at least some nobles over. It's interesting to me he married Barzunni rather than Tusaini - my sense is that Tortall likely has four kinds of conquered territories (former Scanran, up north, former Tusaine, by the Drell, former Barzun, in the south, and the hill country with which Roger II had issues as well), and if we postulate Jasson made a political marriage, it's interesting the one he chose to shore up was with Barzun (but as you say, highly likely port access issues factored in.)

So yes, like you I don't see Tortall as the most advanced of the countries in the area, but I also actually think Tortall is a tinderbox of suppressed tensions, and it's amazing to me that Roald and Jon have - for the moment - held on to Jasson's conquests.

Bazhir - I agree about the Bazhir being more egalitarian, in the sense that the Voice peacemakes, and likely has to broker deals by consensus. I'd agree that's more sophisticated, because it looks to me as though the tribes operate largely independently (the relevant identity here isn't Bazhir for them, the usual relevant identity is tribal), and it looks like they have a lot of mechanisms by which to broker agreements, or diffuse tensions without going to outright war with the other tribes. If the Voice has the collective memories of the Bazhir (Jon seems to refer to almost a kind of 'people' memory when he talks about seeing them flee the Ysandir and being one with the Voices before), can see a bit of the future, and none may make war on the Voice, and the Bazhir often commune with him - this really points to the Voice functioning especially to ease tensions between very different tribes with varying priorities!

I agree with both of you that the females with magic thing seems likely to be localised to the Bloody Hawk. To me, the question is: who would deliver the babies? Who would heal? The shaman? If the Bazhir have veiling modesty issues, how are they going to accept male shamans delivering the babies of the tribe's women? (Not to mention the women themselves would be well within their rights to feel uncomfortable - I can't say I'd like to have ibn Nazzir do something so personal, if I were a woman of the Bloody Hawk!) Ignoring females with magic just seems to be strange.

And I'd definitely buy that Bazhir culture and tradition is complex, and will likely vary between the tribes. (If it wasn't for the Voice, I'd in fact wonder if the term 'Bazhir' was really an external, imposed one - the tribes seem to interact less often, to the extent I struggle to see where the term 'Bazhir' is especially relevant to them.)

Marriage - so, good point about child marriages being very strange in the context of Tortall and the Bazhir. I wasn't aware about medieval marriage ages skewing older, so I learned something new

Lord Martin - I agree that Meron reads to me like a right of conquest land claim, but also: if it's just the Great Southern Desert, it's a lot of land, and mostly land that won't be arable, and I doubt the Bazhir pay taxes either. On top of that, because Jasson never really conquered the desert and just made some deals with some tribes and called it a day, he's essentially giving a large piece of territory that Tortall hasn't fully controlled anyway. Apart from Persopolis and likely other parts of the fief, Fief Meron really seems like a strange grant: where is Lord Martin going to raise his own revenue from? It looks like an honour on the face of it, but it seems more like a poisoned chalice grant.

Ysandir - 100% agree with this. There are so many questions because they don't really fit in with what we know of the Tortall verse. I strongly suspect that they're some kind of demonic entities that ended up ill-fitting the universe - I remember the gate of Idramm summoning demons/elementals, but we don't see reference to that kind of magic/entities anymore either.

[devilinthedetails]

Seek Thanks! I do love this site because people actually seem to be interested in my Tortall rambles

I think you might be right that the wild magic versus the Gift dichotomy might be academic terms imposed by scholars in places like Tortall and Carthak that might be very alien concepts and ways of perceiving magic among cultures like the Bazhir and the Doi, which could contribute to the magic of those peoples being sort of "othered" by Tortallans and being misunderstood by Tortallans because the conceptual frameworks and cultural references for what magic is are just very different. And for many people there is a regrettable tendency to label "different" as inferior or wrong; to condemn the difference rather than to seek to understand and learn from it.

I think you're right that the names "Bazhir" and "Barzun" do seem to be so similar as to suggest a foundational relationship. In fact, when I started reading the Beka Cooper books and I first came across mentions to Barzun, I did just think that Barzun referred only to the Great Southern Desert ruled by the Bazhir and that the Bazhir were the only people inhabiting Barzun, but as I continued to read, I realized from the context that there had to be some distinction between "Barzunni" and "Bazhir" implying there were likely other ethnic groups inhabiting Barzun as well as the Bazhir. I do like your idea that some Bazhir tribes might have done some conquering a long time ago and formed Barzun.

I am actually really interested in the hill country of Tortall as well. There definitely seems to be hill country in Tortall that is situated right by the Southern Desert, and there seem to be regular skirmishes and squabbles between the Bazhir and the hill men (who often seem to be equated with bandits by both the Bazhir and the Tortallans, if I recall correctly). I feel like one side of the hills might trap all the rainfall, being a very fertile place, and the other side of the hills might be very dry and prone to drought with the desert itself being created by rain rarely coming over those hills and the bluffs that seem to line Tortall's coast. I think in SOTL and in POTS there are multiple references to famines and droughts in the hill country, so I think for the people living on at least one side of these hills its a very hard-scrabble existence that basically forces them to take up banditry to survive at least during the lean years of famine and drought. So, if the hill men go raiding every time there is a drought or a famine, I could see that creating tension between the Bazhir and the hill men. I also think if the hill men used to be Barzun (which I believe is very possible) then perhaps the Bazhir might also feel resentment toward them if they were perceived as surrounding too easily to Tortallan rule, betraying Barzun, or generally aiding and abetting the Tortallan outsiders and oppressors from the Bazhir point of view. The Bazhir point of view with regard to that last bit doesn't even necessarily have to be accurate. If it's a common perception among them, it could create tension between them and the people of the hill country just because they feel that way.

I do believe that the hill country near the Southern Desert must once have been part of Barzun. I also wonder how far up what is now Tortall the hill country stretches and if some of it also expands to encompass what is now the area that borders to Tusaine and what once could have been Tusaine territory. The Tortallans seem to have been making incursions along this hill country for a fairly long time since as far back as Beka Cooper's time there are these references to Tortallan conquest in the hill country, and Tunstall seems to experience some discrimination for being a hill men. Like Goodwin "jokes" that he is a "hill barbarian" and there also seems to have been another language spoken in the hill country called Hurdik. I'd be interested to know if that languages still survives by Alanna's time or if it has been wiped out by the Tortallan conquest.

I'm also sort of inclined at least presently to place fief Tirragen in what was once Barzun and is now Tortall because Tirragen seems to have been close enough to the Southern Desert that Halef Seif's childhood friend lived there, working as a sort of mage/healer woman. It also could explain why Alex was described as having darker skin in the book (a trait that could indicate Barzunni heritage) and also might give Alex another motive for both his ambition and his treason. It really wouldn't surprise me if resentment of Tortallan rule boiling and simmering in this region for awhile, especially if the tendency of Tortallan rulers to punish this region worsens the impact of the droughts and famines that seem to hit it. I know that there is a mention in Alanna: The First Adventure of Alexander of Tirragen along with other of Jon's friends like Gary of Naxen and Raoul of Goldenlake coming from the oldest families of Tortall, but in Alex's case I suspect that just can't be right. I don't think any part of hill country can have belonged to Tortall when the Book of Gold was written, for example. I think Naxen and Goldenlake are sort of "heartland" of Tortall country, but I suspect Tirragen is "barbarian" hill country.

And I also think Jesslaw is in the hill country somewhere (perhaps situated on the fertile side of the hills since it doesn't seem to get hit by the droughts or famines), which could explain why Owen's mother was killed by bandits when traveling. The hill country seems a dangerous place to travel because of the bandits.

Yeah, looking at a map, I can't see any other really compelling reason besides wanting access to valuable ports that would motivate Jasson to conquer the deserts. Otherwise, I just think the cost of "conquering" the desert and trying to maintain that conquest would be just too high since as you say the desert is not arable land nor does it seem to be land brimming with natural resources which the Tortallans can claim and use for profit.

I do think that the way Jasson was able to broker some treaties for peace/cooperation with some Bazhir tribes while maintaining ongoing hostility with others does show the unique character of desert politics. For Jasson and his successors, the lack of political unity among the Bazhir makes them difficult to truly conquer or rule because even the Voice doesn't truly rule over the Bazhir as I believe the Tortallans would define what it means to rule. On the other hand, it was also probably to Jasson's advantage that the Bazhir tribes were likely quite divided at the time he began his invasion because the Bazhir wouldn't be united in their efforts to resist him and he could sort of play the ambitions of the tribes against one another.

Now that I think about it, I also wonder what exactly it really means to say Jasson conquered the desert and what exactly he defined as conquering the desert. Clearly there are still "renegade" Bazhir tribes in Alanna's time so there must be sizable portions of the vast Southern Desert that are very much not under his control, so I'm wondering if he negotiated the surrender of Persopolis (with one of the demands on the Bazhir end being that a Bazhir must always be governor of the city with the keys to the Sunset Room) and declared that his victory over the Bazhir and proclaimed that he had "conquered" the desert. I could imagine from the Tortallan perspective, it is like "we won because we got control over the only city in the desert" while to the Bazhir Persopolis doesn't really have the cultural and political significance of a capital like Corus, so to them the fight is still ongoing. Because how much does a city really mean to a nomadic people? I suspect there might again be some big cultural gaps in Tortallan versus Bazhir understanding of things.

I think you are right that there seem to be a tensions simmering beneath the surface of Tortall. It's true that Jasson might have gone on Progress to places like the hill country to beggar nobles he saw as being rebellious there as its alluded to in Squire that he liked to do that sort of thing to keep nobles in there place, and I kind of wonder if there has been a long-standing Tortallan policy of sort of being very harsh on this region that seems to be prone to droughts and famines as well. I'm not sure how much help the Tortallan Crown has actually provided over the years to people in this region when droughts and famines strike and there are references to banditry being sort of rampant there, so I think this region probably isn't as seamlessly integrated into Tortall as the monarchy might like.

You make a valuable point about the perspective of our narrators. I've been thinking that to some extent all of our Tortallan heroines are "outsiders" from Tortall and/or from the court politics of Tortall. Alanna is from what seems to be a very old Tortallan fief and she was basically raised entirely apart from court by a father who really didn't care to prepare her for a court life at all until he decided to send her to the convent to train as a lady when she was ten after letting her train with Coram for years. Jon, for instance, remarks when he first meets Alanna that he has never seen her at court and it's implied that Lord Alan might have been supposed to announce to the court the birth of his twins because the fact that he hadn't is one of the ways that Alanna can really convince Duke Gareth that her father is just living with his head in the clouds somewhere and can't even remember the right name of his child in the letter he sends to Duke Gareth. It's really only the fact that Lord Alan didn't involve his children in court politics at all and didn't bring them to court in any of the expected capacities that makes it possible for Alanna to pretend to be a boy and that makes me now wonder how many nuances of political life Alanna is just totally oblivious to because she was raised so completely apart from the court. It was just a very isolated way for her to grow up and it has to shape how she views Tortall and what she is attuned to.

Then Daine is a commoner girl from Galla who is routinely surprised by how things are different in Tortall compared to Galla, so she is the sort of outsider coming from a rough situation of being an outcast in Galla due to her illegitimate status and of having lost her mother, who takes refuge in Tortall and is inclined to look at Tortall and its rulers through rose-tinted glasses. It's like my co-worker who just got his U.S. citizenship yesterday, and he is all smiles and so excited because he sees all the great things about the U.S., and even as I'm congratulating him, I'm thinking, "Welcome to the Titanic. We hit the iceberg about two hours ago." It's not that the perspective of someone born somewhere else is invalid or incorrect, but sometimes the person born somewhere else just sees the good rather than the long list of problems which those born and raised in a country know and grumble about on a regular basis. So Daine sees how lovely the first class accomodations are, but she doesn't notice that there aren't enough lifeboats for the third class passengers.

With Kel, she spent so much of her time in the Yamani Islands that I just don't know how complete and comprehensive her knowledge of Tortallan culture and politics truly is. And Aly obviously spends much of her books in the Copper Isles.

Also, for many of our heroines, there is a pro-Tortall bias and even to an extent a pro-Conte rule bias (which maybe is the same thing?) so almost everything gets filtered through a lens that favors the Tortallan perspective on things. The hill men don't like being taken over by Tortallans? Oh, they are traitors, bandits, and barbarians. The Bazhir are resisting Tortallan conquest? Oh, well, best to try to shoehorn them into this feudal society that is pretty much the antithesis of their nomadic culture because obviously Tortall can't be expected to give them back their land or make a truly significant change to accomodate them. The Tusaine want to take back land that was probably taken from them violently a generation or so ago? Oh, they are the bad guys for sure. I am reminded of the saying about everything looking like a nail to the person with a hammer, and it strikes me that our heroines tend to be hammer-wielding people. And, well, sometimes problems don't need hammering. They need diplomacy, sensitivity, subtly, nuanced thinking, creative solutions, etc.

With regard to Jasson and his marriage to Daneline and claiming of Barzun, I am wondering if Barzun went through a sort of succession crisis, perhaps with multiple contenders to rule the country, and the basis of Jasson's claim as you say was his heritage through Jessamine. This might not really have been the strongest claim (it's generations back and through the female line where normally the male line has precedence) so it wouldn't surprise me if he chose to bolster that claim by marrying someone like Daneline of Jesslaw who might also have been descended from Barzunni royalty, sort of uniting their two claims and thereby strengthening them.

A tinderbox of suppressed tensions is a very apt way of describing Tortall, and I think your phrasing there is spot-on.

I think Tortall may not really be a kingdom so much as it is a multi-ethnic empire that hasn't quite recognized and embraced that fact (unlike Carthak, a stronger multi-ethnic empire that I think has recognized and embraced its identity as such for centuries). Tortall being an empire probably dates back as far as Jasson's conquests (if not before that depending on how effective the conquest of the hill country described in the Beka Coouper books was) and so I would argue that Tortall is probably on at least its third emperor: Jasson (who conquered much of the territory that makes up the empire), Roald (who was able to bring some peace and stability to the new empire in the uncertain times that often follow the death of the original conqueror) and Jon (who has to try to continue some of that reconciliation and healing undertaken by his father as well as try to solidify Tortall's position on the world stage as it were). A lot of the actions of Jasson, Roald, and Jon make sense when I look at them in that context. Really, when I think about it in that light, from an empire-building stage, Tortall has weathered one of the biggest challenges an empire can face, the death of its initial conqueror, just by surviving intact through Roald's reign and into Jon's.

So, when I consider Tortall in terms of being an empire trying to establish itself and find its feet and identity, I do think that it is not doomed to destruction or failure. It is just going to have to take some acknowledgement and accomodation of the diversity of the ethnic groups within the empire, a development of an overarching sense of unity and identity between those diverse ethnic groups, and a lot of the developed infrastructure needed to sustain an empire. Jon doing things like founding a university are really valuable and significant in that context.

I do think Jon would be wise to look to Carthak for ruling strategies rather than to his ancestor Jasson the Conqueror, however. The Carthaki have proven that they know how to build and sustain an empire for centuries, so in that way they are miles ahead of where Tortall is, which is why I tend to roll my eyes whenever there is an effort in universe to make it seem as if Tortall is more advanced than Carthak or as if Carthak has a lot to learn from Tortall when I suspect in universe it is much more the other way around with Tortall having a ton it can learn from Carthak. I tend to think that if Jon and Thayet are smart as I like to believe they are, they aren't thinking their reforms give Tortall the edge over Carthak. They are probably hoping that their reforms can over the long run get Tortall to a place where it can equal or rival Carthak. And the proof to me is in how quick Jon was to poach Carthaki trained magic talents like Numair and Lindhall Reed. Jon, I think, knows he is playing catch-up in comparison to Carthak.

Yeah, a rule by consensus model seems to work well for me when envisioning the Bazhir, and I think you are right that for the Bazhir there usual relevant identity is likely to be tribal rather than the broader category of Bazhir. And it would make sense for the Bazhir with the guidance of the Voice to have multiple ways of brokering peace and deals between themselves rather than always making war against one another, and I think the concept of nobody being able to make war on the Voice might have been intended as a failsafe way of ensuring the chance of peace and negotiation between tribes. In that way, the Voice could always be sent to negotiate and communicate between tribes and could be a sort of final arbitrator in Bazhir conflicts. It could be similar to how prohibitions about not attacking people who come under a flag of truce evolved in other cultures.

I definitely think being a repository of a collective memory is one of the main functions of the Voice. The Voice seems to be the main preservation of Bazhir history. Bazhir history must be passed down orally and through the Voice because it isn't until Jon asks Ali Mukhtab for a written record of Bazhir history and legend that one is made or at least started in a significant way by Ali. So, I suspect that Bazhir concepts of history and memory are very different from Tortallans who tend to keep a written record of significant events. And the Voice also seems to have an ability to see into the future and to see his own death which is interesting.

Your question about who would deliver babies is an excellent point. In many cultures (including Tortall), childbirth is traditionally regarded as women's territory (I think Tammy has said that in Tortall, for example, men aren't permitted to be present at childbirth as it a mystery of the Goddess) and it's the role of women to help care for other women during labor and generally guide each other through labor. So, I think the Bazhir must have female magic users that can guide women through childbirth and give healing herbs and whatnot. And like you say, the women themselves might even prefer it that way rather than having male shamans supervise something so private and personal.

You're right that if the fief of Meron is the entire Southern Desert, it is a massive fief inhabited by people who from a Tortallan perspective are notoriously difficult to rule and comprised of land that isn't remotely fertile so it seems like a sort of questionable reward and also s you say it would be hard for the lord of Meron to reliably muster men for defense. It almost would make more sense from the Tortallan point of view to have divided the Southern Desert into multiple fiefs and given those fiefs some of the surrounding land as well for purposes of being able to have potentially arable land (at least when it isn't time for another famine or drought in hill country, I suppose) and for mustering men. And giving those lords some of the powers associated with the Marcher lords of England/Wales in our own world might also have helped. Then those lords get some special privileges that allow them to better cope with the challenges they face in this sort of tenuous border region. Sort of Marcher lords would actually probably have made a lot of sense all over hill country now that I think about it.

Oh, I like your idea of the Ysandir being sort of demon elementals that ended up ill-fitting the universe.

[mistrali]

Tortall v Other Lands: Devil, you make excellent points about veils and about Tortall being ahead of Scanra, equal to the Bazhir and far behind Carthak and Tyra in terms of women’s rights. The only place Tortall has a clear lead is slaves, and even then only a three-century one.

I totally agree that part of Tammy’s issue is the lack of racial (and often, class) diversity in her Tortall heroines, as well as a strong will and a certain Lawful Good/social justice inclination most of them share. Tammy’s tendency to stereotype other cultures doesn’t help; nor does it help that her strength doesn’t lie in intrigue. If anything, Lingua and I were talking on the discord about how Tammy was most out of her depth with Trickster, which tried to be a political spy novel but ended up committing a number of laughable faux pas and being even more white saviour than SOTL. Aly is far and away the most arrogant of Tammy’s Tortall heroines. Funnily enough, the closest we get to a heroine acknowledging Tortall’s hypocrisy is Aly’s throwaway comment that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones with regard to how the Islanders treat the raka. Definitely a hammer issue there.

‘Cultural blindspot’ is an excellent term for it. I don’t think cultural worldbuilding ‘from scratch’ is one of Tammy’s strengths, let’s put it that way. She takes a lot from the real world and it ends up being a sort of mishmash of stereotypes.

Devil, I agree with you that the concept of female shamans makes a lot of sense for the BH, and that ibn Nazzir seems to be the problem child. After all, he exiled Kara and Kourrem because they refused to bow down to him; and no-one else, including Halef Seif, has an issue with female shamans. Desert tribes pre-Tortall might have run the gamut from patriarchy to outright matriarchy for all we know. This is where it gets frustrating not having more canon, even though the very absence of any clear canon encourages speculation

I also love that we also see a lot more women in WWRLAM, so it feels female-dominated, or at least balanced, in a way the rest of the series doesn’t. Seek, I love your theory about ibn Nazzir! It would certainly give him extra reason to go off the deep end.

The Black City & Bazhir identity: Yes, I agree that identity/tribe comes first, rather than ‘Bazhir’ as a marker. Real-world Indigenous peoples come to mind. Indigenous, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Native American, First Nations and the like are all postcolonial words (in the sense that they are all juxtaposing ‘white/colonisers’ with ‘brown/colonised’) and have only been repudiated/reclaimed (to varying extents) relatively recently by people who are beautifully and rightfully proud of their FN heritage. So someone might identify as Indigenous Australian, or they might identify as First Nations, or both, or they might just identify as (e.g.) FIRST NAME LAST NAME of the Wiradjuri Nation/Tribe, or any and all of the above.

Clearly the Bazhir are not even at this early stage of things. Outside the Bloody Hawk we only have Zahir to go by, and he appears as a barely-mentioned minor character for all of half a book, so we have no way of knowing to what extent the identity of Bazhir (as distinct from, idk, white Tortallan?) is itself becoming as important as one’s tribe.

Maybe ‘Bazhir’ is Barzunni or some corruption of a Barzunni word. Maybe it’s a neologism that the Bazhir themselves invented, or maybe it’s a word that just means some variation on ‘our people’ or ‘people of the desert/land/sun’ or whatever. Or maybe it was one tribe’s word for themselves in whatever language they spoke pre-conquest and it just sort of became the Tortallans’ word for all the desert tribes.

We don’t know if tribes further south cared about/were affected by the Black City, let alone if they were involved in the decision to annex Persopolis and give it to Mukhtab. It seems unlikely for the Voice to have taken a unilateral decision, but perhaps he did so in a democratic/consultative way (i.e. “Here’s what I’m doing - if you have concerns, speak up.”).

Lord Martin: Yup, Seek, the ‘arable’ part was what I was trying to get at before. And good point about taxes and revenue.
Devil, yeah, I tend to read his being ‘fair’ as being professional and setting his personal dislike of the Bazhir aside in disputes (i.e. being impartial in disputes). Maybe he’s been raised to think of them as martial, unpredictable, dangerous, apt to revolt, a powder keg, and hostile... with some justification. Because as you both point out, some of the Bazhir are hardly going to take the Tortallan conquest lying down.

I don’t see it as mutually exclusive for him to feel hatred (due to fear) of the Bazhir as a whole, yet be able to set that aside when dealing with individual Bazhir or groups of Bazhir. Since Tortall is a feudal society, they’re perpetually on the edge of real, physical battles a lot of the time (e.g. raids from the hill bandits). Obviously that’s not a defence of his racism (contrast Jon, Raoul, Kel, Thayet, Alanna, etc.), because I highly doubt that he would be able to see the Bazhir as a separate and fully functioning, rich, complex network/society. He’d be like the rich CEO who makes business deals with a particular race because ‘the customer is always right’, but in private he might actually feel that people of that race are inferior/slippery/illiterate/insert other generalisation here. Like, it’s prejudice, not outright violence and hatred - Lord Martin wouldn’t just stab a random Bazhir going about his business — but if any Bazhir attacked his fief he would probably justify it with, like, “Oh, those desert savages, so dangerous!” and retaliate without actually considering that the Bazhir might be disenfranchised by several centuries of assimilation.

Which, again, is understandable in a society that lives by the sword and that doesn’t have the same lens as we do. I am not saying the modern Western view of race is perfect or that we don’t have a long way to go/our own biases, but these days in a major Australian city you’d find fewer people than ten or twenty years ago who deny that the Stolen Generations happened or that they affected Indigenous people deeply (sorry to keep using Indigenous people as an example, it’s just the one that comes immediately to mind). This is because through education our cultural lens has changed to reflect this attitude. Myles kind of tries by poking holes in the code of chivalry, but he never questions Tortall’s attitude to the Bazhir. So we don’t ever really see that generational cultural blindspot go away.

Devil, I love your thought-provoking questions about the succession of the Voice, and you’re absolutely right that Alanna hardly thinks of being a Bazhir after - or in fact during - WWRLAM. She is extremely engaged in helping the Bloody Hawk during WWRLAM, but from the POV of someone who is afraid of her Gift and who’s doing it because it’s her duty.

Unfortunately, when we do see her later on it’s always in the context of the issue that particular series, and often in the context of her duties as a knight, or as Champion. As a result, the Bazhir vanish from the narrative almost entirely.

As much as I like the idea that she might have been more heavily/closely involved with the Bloody Hawk when she got older, unfortunately Aly’s attitude to the raka indicates the opposite. In fact, it’s almost as if Tammy forgot Alanna’s adoption after WWRLAM. From a Watsonian perspective, Alanna is only human and can only do so much, and as she ages she seems to have restricted her pursuits to serving white Tortall under Jon. To be completely fair to Alanna, she is technically employed by Jon, so she can’t exactly refuse battle orders. But we never hear about her going to Bazhir ceremonies or anything (then again, this might be a limitation, again, of Aly’s age and her lack of political awareness).

As much as I like reading about peaceful Tortall, I would love the Voice/monarch conflict to play out at some point after Jon dies and for both Roald and the new Voice to come to an agreement.

Excellent points from both of you about the Barzun/Bazhir divide, and about child marriage and marriage discrepancies in Tortall as well (nice catch re: Kel!). I think the distinction I make between sixteen and twelve is not that a sixteen-year-old ceases to be a child, but that a sixteen-year-old is closer to adulthood and more mature than a ten-year-old. In purely moral and legalistic terms, needless to say, I have quite as much of an issue with Daine/Numair and Aly/Nawat as I do with a Bazhir twelve-year-old marrying a Bazhir adult. Devil, I absolutely agree that it’s unlikely the Bazhir would consummate the marriage. I like the theory that ‘marriage’ might mean more like an engagement or arranged marriage, where the parents arrange the match when the children are both young, then the actual formalisation (meeting each other, courting, consummating the marriage) happens when they’re adults.

Ysandir, Seek: Yes, I love that idea! Maybe the Ysandir are spirits or demons. Because none of the immortals we see in TIQ are as... humanoid, or humanlike, as the Ysandir. Even Stormwings have animalistic elements (steel wings). The Ysandir don’t quite seem to fit the mould of those immortals. Whatever the Old Ones were, maybe the Ysandir are the same kind of beings.

[Seek]

devilinthedetails - I really love the amount of thoughtful people here, so thank you; working out how Tortall-verse works with what we know of real world geopolitics and history is a fun and fascinating exercise, so all this talk is right up my alley and interesting!

The hill country - Excellent point about how the geography would play into the politics and the tensions as well! It's a very good point about the Bazhir potentially seeing the hillmen as betraying Barzun, and I like the idea the raiding and banditry is more or less an answer to the fact it's hard to survive in the hills during the lean years, though I think this also raises questions about whether this was always the case. (Basically, why settle in the lean parts of the hill country in the first place? Possibly competing land claims emerged as well? Or the other aspect is possible: some shift in the political landscape began to restrict the movements of the hillmen, putting additional pressure on them and forcing more contact and conflicts with the Bazhir.)

I like your idea about parts of the hill country being previously Tusaine-claimed land as well. It adds so many layers of clashes to the history of the land, and makes me think about the significance of the fall of the Thanic Empire all over again. Jesslaw and Tirragen definitely seem to be hill country fiefs to me, and I agree with you and Alix that this adds a whole new dimension to Alex's ambition and treason, especially if Tirragen was located in the less fertile side of the hill country.

I guess I can vaguely square the Book of Gold issue for Tirragen if - for instance, just a random thought here and I'm not certain of this one - we postulate that Tirragen's inclusion was more aspirational than political reality, which might explain why there continued to be conflicts over the hill country into King Roger II's day. The Books were written - if I recall correctly - during the fall of the Thanic Empire and the founding of Tortall as a nation, so there's significant leeway for Tortall to have been greedy about making claims, and then later being unable to defend them/getting locked down into battles over contested territory. Even more so if OG Lord Tirragen decided he wanted in on the Tortall project for reasons of personal ambition. Hills seem like a decent demarcation for national boundaries also, rivers and mountain ranges aside. (I don't know though: this makes it seem like Tortall has quite a history of giving nobles land claims that aren't all they're cracked up to be.)

Jasson - I agree here as well! Some kind of succession crisis or civil war seems like the best sort of timing for Jasson II to pull an Edward III and lay claim to the Barzunni throne, though of course his claim is weaker than the parallel I'm drawing. Marrying Daneline (agreed about likely descent from Barzunni royalty!) would be logical as a way to strengthen that claim. A civil war IMO would also explain why there's no further mention of Barzunni royalty. There's a decent chance (hinted in TIQ anyway) that they were all executed, but there being no clear claimant to the Barzun throne would make a lot of sense with regard to how Barzun has more or less disappeared in political terms. I realise this implies that Owen also has Barzunni royal blood, and I am laughing aloud at the idea of a King Owen of Barzun.

Jasson, or whoever did his foreign policy, definitely seems to have been savvy about playing Bazhir tribes against each other, which looks to me to be the logical way of reading the treaty situation. (On the other hand, we could also - though there's little textual support, more inference - suspect that this is the same way the Bazhir tribes looked at the situation, i.e. wrangling benefits from Jasson in order to get leverage over their more relevant enemies! Something along the lines of "okay, we'll let him say he rules this land if he'll give us what we need to deal with the hillmen/this tribe we hate.")

Excellent point on differing cultural understandings of the situation. I could definitely see Jasson as defining conquest of the desert as having claimed Persopolis, and likely control of the main routes through the desert (since port access is what this began about) and calling it a day, while the Bazhir are all, "lol okay, we kept what mattered to us."

Narrators - Shucks, you're dead on about their outsider status. I didn't really think about it that way before especially for Alanna, but you're right about how Lord Alan keeping her insulated from court likely means she might not be aware of political nuances. Agreed about Daine's rose-tinted glasses, and Aly and Kel spending decent chunks of time outside of Tortall.

Tortall as Empire - Fascinating point. I hadn't thought of it through that lens before, and I think you're right! Jasson was essentially an empire-builder, and surviving to Jon's day with borders more or less intact is a significant achievement in and of itself. I agree that there's an implication Jon does realise he's playing catch-up with Carthak - the University seems more or less modelled after Carthak, and I do read Lindhall and Numair as part of an aggressive talent-poaching programme. Having to deal with ethnic and historical/cultural diversity is a key capacity of empire, and I agree this is going to be one of the main challenges Tortall will have to work out, alongside building some kind of national identity on top of these.

Meron - Just wanted to say I agree a great deal with the idea of hill country Marcher lords being the most sensible option, in my eyes. Dividing the Southern Desert into multiple fiefs and giving some of the surrounding land would really make much more sense. The only way I could see Lord Martin's father being fine with that is if he was ennobled, or at least a non-inheriting son who was gifted an entire fief.

mistrali - wait, Goldenlake has a Discord?

[mistrali]

Seek Ah, no, sorry, it’s a separate Tamora Pierce discoed!