[culture] Map 40 - Ondeet
Reply With Quote"Lead and silver taught the dwarves to write; steel and gold taught men to count."
Dwarves can identify fine variations in many ores by tasting rock samples. To try and trace a silver vein that way shortened many miners' lives, though, since silver is often admixed with lead. Dwarven miners developed excellent recordkeeping to know just where various metals had been found, at what quality, at which point in which tunnel, greatly decreasing the use of ore-tasting in siver/lead areas.
Human folk in ages past were always warring or preparing defense. Dwarven smiths were glad to provide weapons, but charged premium prices, and inexact measures of swords bought and sold brought down as many realms from bankruptcy as were conquered by those swords. So men became careful accountants, and still in Ondeet are the main merchants. The gold/counting connection remains in other proverbs - "The Gyeungdandju-si miller measures fair wagons, but not a biscuit more" (hundredweights of flour are exact to the last coin-weight - the smallest Ondeetien coin of gold is nicknamed a 'biscuit'). Steel/counting remains in a number of sayings as well: "The prince who counted his taxes before counting his swords was wealthy but a day", or "The spokes of a steel wheel count the wooden wheels replaced" (iron-rimmed wheels, actually, but those metal tires do make a wagon-wheel last eight or ten times longer than a plain wooden one, so the cost is a good trade).
Ondeetien interspecies relationships are pretty good. Admittedly dwarves and men share many similarities, and there's certainly no predator/prey relationship like in some nations. But even then, there's less strife than one might expect. Interdependence is buried right in the proverbs of both peoples - a shared saying is "Iron makes a poor loaf; wheat makes a poor blade". There's men who mine here, and dwarves who farm, but maybe the stereotypical differences actually support the good relations.
When it is said that "Dwarves go to meadhall aboveground, men go to church-hall underground" it isn't that dwarves are irreligious or men abstain from drink, just that people *notice* those two behaviors. Dwarves themselves will tell you they drink copious amounts wherever they are. One suspects that no matter what 'other' part of a tunnel-holme they go to for refreshment, it still feels very much 'at home', whereas venturing aboveground and stepping even a hundred meters to a tavern is 'a night out'.
As for the church-hall mention - it counts as 'underground' when a church is built of stone - ofttimes it will be the only building in a town that *is* stone. Dwarves and their completely underground chapels have lent a peculiar tone to Ondeetien human worship services though - a typical element of dwarven worship of whatever sect is the 'vocal organ'. Instead of (or alongside) melody-following by each singer, dwarves like to specialize each in 'their' one best foundation note, and a dwarven choir like a handbell choir plays a tune (or less often the words of a song) with these three on C, those two on C#, and Gunterkrigg over there has to carry D himself alone, as the other Ds are away. This would be a cultural thing alone, only underground it has developed its own architecture as well. Dwarven chapels have some odd angles and wall placements, to emphasize each note by resonance. A properly tuned Dwarvenkirk will resonate on all twelve tones of a scale, and affecionados of the music will speak of this hall being 'well-tempered' or that one 'just-intoned'. An incompletely-tuned Ondeetien Underchurch Hall might have painted on its wall "sing F six cents sharp, G nine cents flat", since it is considered more pleasing to have equal amounts of resonance than perfect-pitch tuned scales. The connection with human churches being 'underground' (of stone) is that dwarven masons will often be hired to construct man-churches, from a real or percieved better sensitivity to resonance tuning and pitch-reaction. A corollary of this construction and use style is there's not many tapestries nor carpets in Ondeetien churches - that would muffle the sound. So one gets another saying: "Hell is hot, church is cold". The meeting-hall might be weathertight, but all that stone is likely to be chilly, of a January sabbathday.
Casting bells tends to be a human thing in Ondeet. Those stone chapels may have belltowers, but one peals the bells before or after services - anchored to the stone structure, a tolling bell is likely to excite an uncomfortable number of those natural resonances in the worship space. One says that worship in Ondeet is in the bones, since the music reaches down into subaudible harmonics and vocal-organ hymns are felt in one's gut as well as one's ears.
The tuning of a stone enclosure makes Ondeetien navigation an auditory experience as well. Lighthouses are typically shaped to resonate at a primary and a secondary tone, driven by wave-motion airflow. Sound is harder to directionally locate than light, but in a fog, the hooting of a horn-beacon has saved many a coastal ship that would otherwise have driven ashore. There's a double-eartrumpet device made of brass that Ondeetien ships use to better discern direction, with a side effect of human hails from ship to ship are improved. Ondeetien ships abroad tend to carry a stock of these 'double-ears' for sale to foreign ships wanting to safely traverse Ondeetien waters.
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The two-tone pattern is noted on navigation charts, so one can hear exactly which port or headland one is approaching, even in bad weather. As with many Ondeetien norms, this is encapsulated in a proverb: "You don't have to be close enough to hear surf, to stay off the rocks". That could be a general 'steer well clear of danger' caution, only in Ondeet it also carries the reference to the horn-beacon lighthouses.
< out-of-story aside - I'll gladly offer this technology to any other Guildworld nation that wants to use it. It's not like it would be a hard effect to duplicate, once its principle was understood. If anybody has too many tone-deaf masons, we could even export a few perfect-pitch dwarven lighthouse masons to set you up. >
