The Northern tribes are the groups of people living in the Northern territories beyond the Ice Wall Mountains. They are all part of a single cultural group. They are divided into clans named for the totemic animal spirits they follow and worship.
Named tribes[]
Named tribes include:
- Black Bear Clan
- Blood Bear Clan
- Ghost Cat Clan
- Goshon Clan
- Gray Wolf Clan
- Magpie Clan
- Raven Clan
- Red Fox Clan
- Seashan Clan
- Snow Fox Clan
- Wolverine Clan
Architecture[]
Settlements are organized with the houses built in circles around the central building, but this central building is not, as one might expect, the home of the chief – rather, this quintessential structure that forms what is the epicenter of the settlement, is the storehouse for the entire tribe. This storehouse is dedicated to all of the tribe, and as such, the decorations of the storehouse are those of the tribe’s totemic animal, repeated over and over in a seemingly-endless variety of different poses and depictions. Each family has a cubicle within this storehouse for the storage of raw materials belonging only to the family, with the center of the storehouse being reserved for communal storage.
Northern Tribes are far from the barbarians they are initially perceived, though some tribes would most definitely qualify under the descriptor of "savages" or "barbarians," but when they build their settlements, they are as neatly laid out as any Valdemaran village. They build large, circular, single-room homes, with an enormous common room in the center, with small cubicles for privacy encompassing that central room, and housing the extended family. The homes are typically constructed of wood, not stone, and the roof is – instead of being made of slate or thatch – instead supported by four great pillars. The buildings are made of squared-off wooden logs, with chinks filled in by a mixture of mud and moss, and the roof is made of rough planks laid over a radial pattern of rafters, which are then topped with rough wood shakes. The thick plank door of each home is carved and painted with the symbol of the totemic animal of their family, in something very similar to a high-relief style. These portrayals are not realistic, but rather highly stylistic and colorful, oftentimes in shades of red, white and black. There are always two poles outside of the front door of a home, carved and painted with the totem of every member of the family, and always topped with the totemic spirit of the tribe in question, and the four support beams inside are carved in a similar nature to the poles always found outside of a home. The ends of rafters which protrude beyond the edge of the roof are also carved and painted, though in this case with the heads of spirits and ancestors.
Although the floor of the home is not exactly earthen, a fire-pit is dug in the center of the common room, and this pit is lined with stones which are laid out some distance outward from there in case of sparks that may jump from a five, with a smoke-hole in the center of the roof. The floor is made first of pounded earth, overlaid with many layers thick of grass mats, which are “added to on a daily basis,” it being the “duty of every member of the family old enough to do so” to weave one grass mat in the morning and lay it where the mats are looking shabby. As the mats at the bottom decompose and disintegrate, they are replaced from above, and insects are driven off by the pine needles and herbs that are layered between the mats. Although there are no windows in these homes, adequate light is provided by crude oil lamps around the interior wall, though the lack of windows is inspired primarily by the fact that the Northern tribes are found in the Ice Wall Mountains, and north of them, where the weather is terribly frigid. The residential cubicles of the home are formed by partitions about six to eight paces apart, which extend about six to eight paces into the center of the home, and these cubicles are as often used for storage as habitation. A rope across the front of each cubicle allows for a curtain to be hung to facilitate a certain degree of privacy, but there are shelves across the back and side walls of every cubicle, to allow for a degree of personal storage, as well.
When confronted with climates where there are warmer seasons, circular shelters extraordinarily similar to their homes are built, but these shelters are constructed without walls, and from spring until fall, this is where most of the living and working is done. On the hottest nights, sometimes the entire family will sleep in the shelter instead of the home, with pots of smoldering herbs around the periphery of the shelter, as a means by whence to facilitate a degree of insect repellency.
Art and decoration[]
During warm weather, as both a precaution to chase away vermin and odors and as a means of displaying the handiwork of the women of the house, beautifully-woven blankets of pieced-fur are hung on the outer walls of the home, each blanket serving as a representation of the totem animal of the person it belonged to, and even their pottery is given painted decorations. The oldest tribal villages, moreover, are heavily decorated with these painted tribal carvings. The people of the Northern tribes, like the Kaled'a'in and the Tayledras and Shin'a'in who came out of the Kaled’a’in culture, have never met a color they didn’t like, and they use those colors in eye-wateringly vibrant combinations, and the Northern men are even more color-mad than their female counterparts.
They use necklaces with charm figurines as methods of identifying friends to other clans who are traveling. When Darian and friends traveled north to find his parents, Ghost Cat gave each of them a necklace with a personal symbol (owls for Darian and Keisha, a bell enameled with a Companion for Shandi, and hawk symbols for the Tayledras Wintersky and Steelmind).[1]
Family structure[]
At the point of marriage, the man moves in with the parents of the bride, and there they live until the birth of the couple’s third child, in part because it often takes the young man that long to gather up the resources needed for the construction of his own domicile. Those who remain unwed continue to live with their parents, as additional hands, but they suffer no decrease in status resultant from such a decision. Grandparents often bequeath their home to a favored couple, and then move out of that home, often to move in with the family of their eldest daughter – however, there is often stiff competition between those daughters who are married to lure their Grandmother and Grandfather into moving into their home. There is a simple and variably admirable reason for this: there is a noteworthy increase in status for those who shelter such valuable repositories of wisdom as their grandparents represent.
Gender divisions[]
Among Northern tribesmen, there is significant segregation at the meal-times: adult males have choice cuts of the meat and eat together – meanwhile women, girls, and boys below the age of puberty, eat at a separate communal meal. However, this segregation is not enforced by brutality, barbarism or beatings. A woman in the culture is neither cowed nor slavish – she performs domestic tasks, scolds rowdy children, and chat amongst themselves easily and openly.
Amongst the tribes – not including Ghost Cat tribe, in Valdemar, for the local customs of openness quickly took root amongst the Ghost Cat Clan – a man must not approach a woman for conversation, regardless of her status: if a woman of the tribes with to speak with a man, then she must approach the man, herself, for her will not approach her. Even in the case of a Wisewoman (which is what they call their female Healers), it is considered beneath the dignity of a man to give a woman any notice outside of the home – this in spite of that the Wisewoman is near-equal to the Shaman, in the tribal hierarchy.
However, there are some female warriors in tribal history, enough to the point that the tribal culture has come up with a category to fit them – they are called “man-souled women,” in the native tongue, and are somewhat like the Kal'enedral of the Shin’a’in, sacrificing the ability to ever be a wife or mother, viewed effectively as a social neuter, and these women are viewed with similar level of respect as men. They must, however, grow as boys: they must accomplish the same initiation trials as boys must take, to become hunters and warriors within their tribe.
Life-debt[]
When a life-debt is owed by a member of the Northern tribes, they are eager to discharge this debt by the returning of a favor or aid of equivalent value, for it holds them back both socially and personally, to owe a life-debt to another. When a youth of the tribes owes one a life-debt, they cannot marry or for that matter even engage in courtship, and cannot undertake any of the major responsibilities of adulthood until such time as their life-debt is repaid, for the repayment of that life-debt is a solemn duty they must attend to before all other commitments.
Totems[]
Totemic animals play a very large part in the lives of the people of the Northern Tribes; each tribe has a special totem, usually (albeit by implication, not always) a very powerful predator. Each family has a totem animal of their own, one related to the totem animal of the tribe – and when an individual has reached the stage of adulthood, in a special dream-ceremony presided over by the tribal shaman, they are embraced by a personal totem animal. In the case of one who is accepted into the tribe as a Clanbrother, if that one happens to be bonded to by a Bondbird, the shaman will usually judge that the individual has already got a totem animal – given that the Herald-Companion Bond is similar to but stronger than this, it can be then logically assumed this same assessment would be made if a Herald were to become also a Clanbrother.
The totemic spirits of the tribes take a very proprietary interest in the welfare of their tribe, though some of the spirits are less proprietary or interested than others, but they seem to disavow those who turn in the direction of evil: this is implied in the novel Owlknight. The Snow Fox leads sick members of their tribe to Ghost Cat, who in turn lead them to the Healing Sanctuary in northwestern Valdemar, but the Blood Bear does not lead members of its’ tribe to Ghost Cat or the Healing Sanctuary, implying that their acts of evil have distanced them from the Blood Bear’s guidance.
Notable totem spirits[]
Warfare[]
Although in battles of Northlander against Southlander there are no rules, tribal warfare between tribes is mandated to follow strict conventions-of-war enforced by the totemic spirits they follow, and when the shaman or war-leader of one tribe makes a promise on the field of battle to the shaman or war-leader of another, that promise is tantamount to a sacred oath.
At time of such an oathbreaking, the oathbreakers become the outcast of all the tribes: there would be no alliances, no inter-marriages, no trade, no manner of intercourse whatsoever, for the oathbreakers have blackened the name of their tribe, and in-so-doing, it may even cause the totemic spirit of their tribe, itself, to abandon them, for the shame of such an action. It categorically signals the final, absolute and irrevocable death of the tribe, to break the tribal battle-oaths, and it is this which has happened to Blood Bear – they broke the promise made by their leader, and so in turn condemned the whole of their tribe to extinction.
Contact with outsiders[]
Once the peoples of the northern tribes have accepted someone as a bona fide trader, a merchant has near-immunity among them, because they are smart enough to realize that if they kill the trader, there will be no additional traders coming afterward. The reason they feel so amenable to traders is more because of a desire for shiny baubles and fine foods from the cultivated world and less out of an interest in news from where the goods came from.
Like the Tayledras, the Northern tribes have a ceremony for welcoming an individual into their Clan who is not initially part of that Clan, a ceremony making them a “Clanbrother.” It is not common for groups of greater than twelve to set out on any particular task, unless the group has a shaman-mage to lead them; horseback riding is also rare.