Bard's Yarns

[Bard]

Author’s note:

Spoiler:

This information is partially based on information provided by the wiki, from past threads, and from my imagination, which much desires to unite the former in such a means to provide writers with as full a spring board as they could desire for various places in this world, of which Althanas is just a part. It is meant as a gift to those writers that desire what it contains, and as perhaps something to be ignored by those that do not desire what is contained herein. Above all, I hope you view this in the spirit for which it is given, as an aid, and nothing more. The rest of the section for this post will be for the table of contents, and the links to the sections related there to.

[Bard]

Andvall

The poets like to say Of all the lands of where the snow falls, there are no halls like that of And vall. Ignoring the slight bastardizing of the name, this is very true, after a fashion. For where else in all the north can one bost to have the religious liberty that the people of this small nation have, or can claim to have a truce with an orc clan as well. Still, for all the comforts that Andvall enjoys,It’s people have endured mmuch and more of hardships, and have clearly earned the name of Andvall. By the time that his majesty, king Elouan Katona the second proclaimed Andvall as the name for the nation on the hundredth anniversary of the state’s founding in Ascending winter of 1655, its peoples had been well tempered by nature’s wrath, war and countless hardships.

Any student of History can readily tell you, at least as far as the account of the north is concerned, Andvall has not always been the name of the independent kingdom of once knights and Salvaran subjects. Indeed, in the early days the peoples of what is now Andvall, refered to themselves in the simple terms of “Highlanders,” in relation to the Kalev Highlands in which they established themselves. This tendency remain, most notably as an honorific, such as in the oft phrase, “a proper Highlander.” Salvarians are unsurprisingly refered to, more often than not, as “lowlanders.”

One should note, the accidental – or sometimes purposeful declaring of a Andvallan, or a Kalevan, as such terms are interchangeable, to be a lowlander – is one of the gravest of insult’s, one that would at the very least start a brawl, if not leading to outright bloodshed. Many a duel, as dueling is legal in the kingdom, if highly regulated, has been commenced as a consequence of such a declaration.