Talk:Earth's Children
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[edit] Term for entire Clan
The following section is not an accurate summary:
"The Clan" is an overarching term; every Neanderthal is a member of the Clan. Organizationally, they live in smaller tribes, also called "Clans" but marked with a specific totem animal; for instance, Ayla is adopted into the novel's eponymous Clan of the Cave Bear.
In actuality, in the novels, all Neanderthals are members of the Clan of the Cave Bear. That is not a specific term for the clan which adopt's Ayla, or even the group of clans that all go to the same Clan Gathering as the clan which adopts her. Clan of the Cave Bear is the term for all the people, for Ursus, the Cave Bear spirit is the one honored most by the Clan, for their legends claim, in Ayla's favorite tale, the story of Durc, it was the spirit of Ursus who taught them to live in caves and wear fur to survive the cold. Totems are for individual clan members, not clan groupings. The clans are not known by a totem animal. Rather, they are known by their leader. For example, when Ayla is first adopted, the clan which takes her in is Brun's Clan. In the later books, after she has left the Clan, she has to remind herself that it is no longer Brun's Clan, it is Broud's Clan, because leadership was passed down from Brun to his mate's son Broud shortly before she was forced to leave them.
The fact that all clans are part of the Clan of the Cave Bear and honor Ursus above all other totems is further reinforced in The Plains of Passage when Jondalar exchanges tokens representing the kinship debt owed by each with Guban, a member of the Clan from territory far removed from the area Brun/Broud's clan inhabited, as depicted in Chapter 40 of that novel.
"He took a pouch from a loop of his belt and poured its contents into his hand. Guban looked surprised. In Jondalar's hand were several claws and two canine teeth of a cave bear, the cave bear he had killed the previous summer shortly after they had started on their long Journey. He held out one of the teeth. 'Please accept this as a token of kinship.'
Guban restained his eagerness. A cave bear tooth was a powerful token, it bestowed high status, and the giving of one showed great honor. It pleased him to think that this man of the Others had acknowledged his position, and the debt he owed the entire Clan so appropriately. It would make the proper impression when he told the rest about this exchange. He accepted the token of kinship, closed it inside his fist, and gripped it firmly."
-- This is from p. 785 of the November 1991 Bantam paperback edition I have of Plains of Passage.
Cadrac 00:33, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Giving up personal names by spiritual leaders doesn't happen amongst the Mammoth Hunters
Those Who Serve abandon their personal names in favor of the name of their people and god. To avoid confusion, they generally take appendices after their cave or camp (Mamut of the Lion Camp, Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave), leading Ayla to muse that they have traded their names for counting words. As with the Clan, one among Those Who Serve is generally acknowledged (or elected) First. (There is no Last.)
Actually, this is not true amongst the Mamutoi. Only the Mamut of the Lion Camp does not have a personal name. The other Mamuts do. The Lion Camp Mamut's personal name is basically lost in the reaches of time because he has outlived all his contemporaries and, as the most prestigious of the Mamut, has become synonymous with his position, but Mamut do not, as a matter of standard practice, give up their personal names. For example, the Mamut who was a camp Headman, and who wished to mate with Ayla so that she could bring the Mammoth Hearth to his lodge and justify his claiming of the name Mammoth Camp (since the Mamutoi name camps after the hearth the Headman lives at and the hearth goes with the woman) was named Vincavec, and the Mamut with whom Ayla was eager to engage in healer shop talk with at the Mamutoi Summer Meeting, the First Healer of the Mamutoi, was named Lomie.
Cadrac 00:33, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Ancient Clan Spirits
In the section on Clan religion it states:
"However, the ancient spirits that are honored in the highest ceremonies--the spirits which can be spoken to only by the mog-urs--bear female names."
This is not accurate. The ancient, female, spirits are not honored in the Clan's highest ceremonies. They, in fact, have not been honored is so long that Creb has to search his memories deeply to even rediscover their existence. They are from a time almost before the Clan was Clan and women still hunted. The above quote implies that they were still, during Ayla's time with the clan, honored, and further implies they were very important to the Clan, since they were only honored during their highest ceremonies and only mog-urs could speak to them. None of which is supported by the actual text of the book.
Cadrac 03:05, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Sexual Customs
Not all of the customs involving sex and sexual maturity take place at Summer Meetings, as evidenced in multiple books in the series. Examples of those that do not are Nuria's First Rites (which may or may not be typical for her people, as they may have arranged the ceremony specially to satisfy Haruma's desire for a descendant with blue eyes), smaller meetings arranged amongst the Mamutoi for First Rites for those girls who enter menarche during the fall so that they would not go unprotected so long, and, of course, Mother festivals, which can and do take place any time of year.
Cadrac 03:19, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Other characters?
The thing about hyperlinks is that they serve as a navigational aid and serve as a meta-reading alert that something important is being highlighted. With that in mind, to a certain extent it would be perfectly fine to create wikilinks to many of the major characters in the story (Thonolan, Marthona, Durc, Broud, Folara, Zolena, Marona, Rydag, Mamut, Ranec, Attaroa) without bothering to create articles about them. Having said that, why don't we create articles about them?—and, if we do, how should we organize them? In my opinion, out of the hundreds of people we've met, only Durc, Thonolan and Zolena are influential enough to really deserve individual articles at this point; for everyone else we would have to create a mammoth-sized "Characters in the Earth's Children series" page. We could split them up by book... But then what happens to Mamutoi, Sharamudoi, Lanzadonii and Zelandonii characters who appear in more than one book? The most reasonable option from that standpoint seems to be to split them up by people instead... But then we have a lot of satellite pages like Hadumai Characters in the Earth's Children series which will get deleted in about three seconds, because who cares about Jeren, Haduma, Tamen and Noria? I sure don't.
Anybody have any thoughts as to how to do this? ...Anybody else even thinking about this? ~Marblespire (talk) 04:25, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:SheltersOfStone.jpg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:48, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
