[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

In the Desert Southwest of North America, lack of food and water posed the greatest threats to survival, as did violent sociopaths who damaged close-knit tribes whose members had to live and work together, in close proximity to one another. So, fairy stories included nature spirits such as nunnupi and zips (food and water); monsters who hurt and abused people -- including children (tsiants); or highly functional sociopaths capable of pretending to respect cultural traditions, but actually causing so much harm they damaged relations within and between entire tribes (skin-changers).

That's an interesting way to look at it.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

By comparison, the natural environment of most of Europe has always been far more benign than the Desert Southwest. So, while the nature fairies could be scary, the ones that truly terrified were the lords and ladies of the fae courts. They showed up out of nowhere and took away people's children for inscrutable reasons of their own and, while the young person might return as a fortunate prodigy, that was highly unlikely.

Far more frequently, the children simply disappeared forever, or returned horribly maimed in either body or mind (or both) from the violence and abuse inflicted on them. As a projection of human fears, this one is pretty clear -- many people who created European folklore considered royalty and nobility as the most dangerous of the powerful and fickle forces that required propitiation lest they do terrible and lasting harm.

Interesting.

Note that if this is so, the royalty and nobility informing the creation of faerie courts and Changeling stories has to be very early European nobility and royalty. Iceland was sparsely populated enough and poor enough so that social structure here was basically limited to those who worked on other people's farms, those who worked their own and those who could afford having hirelings on their larger farms. That's leaving out those who couldn't work at all, but I assure you that most of society at the time felt pretty comfortable forgetting about them too.

We simply didn't have the wealth to support a more complex social structure and entirely lacked any social class above the lowest level of 'gentry', which in any case were not people who'd ever bother taking away the children of those who owned less or no land, largely for the reason that 'extra' children, no matter what you intend them for, are a luxury and even the richest farmer here hardly had any assurance of always being able to feed his own family and hirelings during bad years.

Yet our Fair Folk seem to match European faeries pretty well, complete with noble courts that mirrored nothing that happened in Iceland, and Changelings. So if these are truly inspired by European nobility and royalty taking away children to foster them or for any other reason, they'd have to been fully formed when Iceland was settled. Which would mean having been based on 'Dark Ages' nobles, not High Medieval ones.

And the problem with that is that during the Viking Age, fosterage was a very common custom, but it was exclusively confined to the children of the rich, with rich families raising each other's children to strengthen mutual bonds of kinship and allegiance. There was little mystery about it, no power imbalance and no one would have been terribly interested in the children of anyone not among the richest farmers, as those couldn't foster your own children in exchange (or provide much benefit as allies) and thus, fostering their children was a pointless waste of scarce resources.

Actually, as far as I can tell from Icelandic Changeling stories, the horror has little to do with the child being taken away. That, after all, was what everyone expected to happen with children while they were young here, they were much more likely to die than survive to age five. No, the horror was that the fae left behind a Changeling that the parents had to care for, but who lacked human empathy or motivations and would never pay the parents back by caring for them in their old age.

From my perspective, the fae stories about them taking children and leaving their own Changelings weren't reflective of fears of people of higher status taking away children for their own inscrutable reasons, they were more likely a way to rationalize children born with various development disorders or conditions, autism, mental illnesses, etc. Or children who start exhibiting signs of such fairly young, so that to the parents they appear to be fundamentally changed from how they were before.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

To drag this back to Icelander's setting, I'm not really sure how he defines fairies.

That's an interesting point.

The world of Faerie might consist of mystical representations of nature in all forms, not merely human perceptions of it. The case would then simply be that humans mainly deal with the more anthropomorphic personifications of nature and the utterly inhuman forces are beyond our ken, existing deeper within Faerie, not adjacent to our human worlds.

If so, however, that's almost the equivalent of saying that the fae are personifications of human perceptions of nature, not nature itself. Because the theoretical existence of more inhuman fae is basically irrelevant if every fey creature that interacts with humans eventually comes to be influenced by humans to the point where its motivations make sense to humans, even if the humans don't share them.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

However, some of his more horrific creatures are definitely informed by Lovecraft. who found most horrifying the notion of a universe of natural forces, roamed by predator gods inherently incapable of even understanding the notion of caring about anything other than their own needs and appetites.

Indeed so. I've found that divine entities that are even hypothetically friendly to PCs are not as conductive to good horror as a campaign world where the only beings that possess enough power to be termed 'gods' are horrifyingly alien.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

The universe of the Lovecraftian Mythos reflected a view of modern scientific thought held by a man with considerable artistic gifts, but so physically weak and sickly the notion of Natural Selection filled him with existential horror. It's about as profound a rejection of modernity as one can possibly find.

I've always tried to comprehend how profound a shock to human sensibilities it must have been to realize that we weren't central to the universe must have been. Growing up in a post-modern culture where that's taken for granted, it's hard to visualize the mind-shattering impact of that, no matter who you were.

I suppose that it gives some idea to consider how many people today prefer to believe in some kind of purpose, plan and meaning, rather than simply accept their existence as accidental and, consequently, accept concepts like just rewards, morality, justice, achievements, goals and closure as human inventions, with no more meaning than we give them.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

To his credit, Icelander has backed it down a bit, because some of his forces, the Cold Ones, seem capable of grasping the notion of a mutually-beneficial business arrangement. That gives them at least some comprehensible motivations -- which makes the opposition to them (and their partner-patsies) more dramatically meaningful, and that's really good for an RPG setting.

I note that even in Lovecraft stories, Cthulhu had a cult of human worshipers and the Outer Gods had Nyarlathotep. Indeed, Cthulhu was not merely a powerful entity in his own right, he was the High Priest for the Outer Gods, more able to notice humans than they were.

It is debatable whether the Lords of the Last Waste themselves are capable of interacting with anything as puny as human minds, but in the many worlds that have fallen into the Outer Dark, there have been many beings of power and some of them have taken a long time to give up their individualities as they are slowly stripped of everything that makes them themselves.

Desperately searching for other sources of vitality, warmth and potentiality to distract the Cold Ones from finishing their consumption of their persons might motivate such beings to create and maintain cults, religions and even worldwide powers. So the Lords of the Last Waste might not notice the difference between an American or an Antarctic Space Nazi, a noble of the Fair Folk or an frost-rimmed sorcerer of the White Riders, an occultist of any cabal or a cultist of the Keepers of the Last Flame... but there are those who do notice and who can guide the tendrils of awareness reaching from the Outer Dark to focus on other sources of warmth.

The Ice Giants that Karl-Maria Wiligut and the other occultists of the Antarctic Space Nazis encountered when they first explored the World Tree or the presence that 'Gwen Delvano' called on with her ritual as the PCs broke into her sanctum might not be one of the Lords of the Last Waste themselves. They might instead represent some ancient and powerful entity taken over by the Cold Ones and acting in the capacity of an Opener of the Way for them, a dark John the Baptist, feeding them new worlds to stave off its own extinction.