Northern States

The Northern States θaɣamuššterā, De Noordijke Staten
Flag
Motto: sistantos obs tempesa standing through time
Capital and largest city	Cleiden
Official languages	Northian
Recognised national languages	Shalumite, Æþurian, Siluan, Ossorian Gaelic
Ethnic groups (2020)	Northian 81.2% Shalumite 11.4% Siluan 5.1% Ossorian 2.2%
Religion (2018)	Agnostic 65% Valstígr 11.1% Pontōiš Wītōs 4.7%
Demonym(s)	Northian
Government	Federal constitutional monarchy
• Monarch	Alterestera
• Prime Minister	Marc Parak
Legislature	Congress of the States
• Upper house	House of Lords
• Lower house	House of Deputies
Establishment
• League	Feb. 5, 980
• Monarchy	Jan. 15, 1220
Area
• Total	276,978 km2 (106,942 sq mi)
Population
• 2020 estimate	19,920,000
GDP (nominal)	2020 estimate
• Total	$995,920,320,000 (Int'l)
• Per capita	$49,996
Currency	Florin (FLN)
Date format	yyyy-mm-dd CE
Driving side	right
Calling code	+24

The Northern States (Northian: θaɣamuššterā, Northian Dutch: De Noordijke Staten; abbr. DNS) is a sovereign state in Tyran, located in the northwest of the continent of Eracura. It borders Shalum to the south and Silua to the east, with a long coastline on its north and west. DNS is a parliamentary democracy and federal constitutional monarchy consisting of seven principalities, with a total population of 19,920,000 people as of 2020. Its land area is 276,978 km².

Etymology

The term The Northern States and its Dutch equivalent De Noordike Staten are of Shalumite origin. The Shalumite Empire came to call the city-states of DNS the "northern states" as they were neither part of their empire nor known by a single national title. The Northian word for DNS is θakam uštərā, "The Lands Beyond".

History

Prehistory and the Galic age

The Northians are an Erani-Eracuran people whose ethnogenesis is rather "enigmatic" and primarily traced through linguistic and archaeological means.

The earliest source of historical information about a population linguistically connected with modern Northian culture are Gales (hymns), dated to the Middle Bronze Age (2100 – 1500 BCE) and preserved in much later Epic quotations and even later liturgical manuscripts. Some of the places mentioned in the Gales have been identified as primitive names of places now in Acrea, suggesting that the precepts involving those places were developed in Acrea rather than the Northian homeland between Silua and Shalum later in history. This would put the earliest Northians in close contact with the Nordic Bronze Age, and the Northian language does appear to share a sound changes with Nordic languages. However, it remains difficult to establish how the Northians were related to the Nordics.

There is an irreconcilable contradiction between the genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data regarding the early relationship between the Nordics and the Northians. Genetically, the early Northians cannot be classified as a group separate from the Nordics. Archaeologically, the earliest sites associated with Northians are considered a subtype of the Nordic Bronze Age. Linguistically, the Northian language with high likelihood share an important sound change with the Nordic languages known as Cowgill's law, but otherwise it is profoundly different from the Nordic languages. There are hypotheses regarding the origin of this situation:

• The Northians originated as a different Erani-Eracuran tribe but intermixed with the Nordics for such a long time that the genetics of both populations have effectively merged, but at the same time their languages remained separate. This is considered the more plausible account, as the genetic composition of the Nordics is diverse, and their language shows strong substratic influence.
• The Northians were a branch of the Nordics who, for an unknown reason, collectively abandoned the Nordic language and started speaking another Erani-Eracuran language, which originally belonged to another population that is no longer extant. The reason for this language change may be attributed to religion, as all the early texts in Northian were sacramental in character, and the Northian exodus is highly associated with religion.

Part of this difficulty may be attributed to the general challenge of reconstructing Bronze Age Nordic culture, which was subject to very heavy modification at the advent of the Iron Age. Petersen says the terminus ante quem of the Northian ethnogenesis is the beginning of the Nordic Iron Age around 1200 BCE, since the Northian culture was completely ignorant of iron technology. The likely date of ethnogenesis remains, however, much earlier. The fringe Northian ethnicist Tamano says that the Northian language is sister to the Lucanians, Nordics, Baltics, and Slavs, though his arguments are usually considered racially-motivated rather than historically-motivated.

The following are general observations that Galology scholars propose for Galic society. Galic tribes were nomadic to a higher degree than their descendants during the Epic age, which tended to live for several seasons at the same settlement and switched pastures periodically; Galic pastoralists appear to follow their flocks readily and had no permanent houses or settlements. The shared deities of Galic tribes were the heavenly bodies and earth, fire, and water, whose veneration did not require fixed sites or priesthoods, because they were always in view.

Meticulous religious events occurred frequently between wandering tribes and probably had central commercial and social uses, in addition to mutual affirmation and identification through shared religious experience; the Gales were ritualistic songs and verses used and shared at these gatherings. At the very end of the Galic tradition, signs of more permanent settlement have been proposed, but they remain contentious.

The Galic corpora can be divided in several ways. From a formal or liturgical perspective, they could be separated into the Gales, False Gales, Sacerdotal Verse, and Didaskalic Material. Of these, only the Didaskalic Material is prose, and its identification with the other three elements is on grammatical grounds. By linguistic criteria, the Gales could be separated into at least two periods often termed Early Galic and Late Galic. Middle Galic may be a contemporary of Late Galic and not an older form thereof. Only the Gales attest Early Galic, while Late Galic is found in the later portion of the Gales, in False Gales, and in Sacerdotal Verse. The Didaskalic Material has an artificial mixture of the characteristics of both, but this corpus is firmly datable to the 8th to 7th centuries BCE. Early Galic is usually ascribed a date from the 18th to 16th centuries BCE. Thus, the Galic period spans approximately 1,000 years.

Epic age

Starting from the 8th century BCE, or perhaps from the later part of the 9th century, interactions between Celtic-speaking and Northian-speaking groups are believed to have become regular. The Epic literary tradition is thought to reflect the events of the 8th century BCE onwards, the oldest epic, Parisāhmō, being dated to 600 – 550 BCE conventionally. According to Hamma, the Celtic poetic tradition is the prototype of the Northian Epic, which fundamentally is the story of foreign adventures and exemplifies the themes of strife, distance, and personal excellence. Though the Epics contain many Celtic characters, even in the case of Manimihmī a Celtic protagonist, the Epic poets do not appear to be concerned with an ethnic difference; instead, religious and economic differences between individual tribes of both Celtic and Northian origin were more important. The Epic Northian word for "Celtic" in fact means "Celtic-speaker", and there are tribes known to be Northian (on the basis of their location and religion) described as "Celtic" due to their preferred language.

By the 4th century, lands of the west coast of Eracura have seen multiple bloody battles between the Nordic and Celtic cultures that seem to form a common backdrop of Northian Epics, whose characters are often said to go to or return from distant lands whence horror, intrigue, love, and heroism emanate. According to Hamma's surmisation, political tension dominates and drives earlier Epics from the 6th through 4th centuries, whose distant plot devices are brought to a sad and immediate realization in the 3rd century, when Northian-speaking communities were forced to assimilate to the Aṇhō (Acreans) or leave their ancestral and sacred lands and either sail across the sea or resettle in the barren north. Older Epic stories were often retold in the light of more recent events, the fate of the Celtic peoples recast as a literary presaging of the destruction of Northian culture as the Epic poets knew it.

The society painted by the Epics is one that revolves around the clan as the basic political and economic unit. Clans were mobile organizations under the control of a chieftain, divisible into several lineage-groups, and often had extensive internal politics and romances. They owned flocks of cattle and sheep, worked agriculture casually, and foraged and hunted together. Disputes between clans were resolved peacefully or violently, typically within the confines of religious structures, but not all grievances could be resolved by means of a duel. Cultic sites, then, served as media for commerce, arbitration, marriage negotiations, and cultural and technological learning. Upon the payment of a nominal fee for the upkeep of the sanctuary, any person from any tribe seemed to acquire access to these religious sites. Clans often made competitive donations to religious sites in demonstration of their wealth and piety. It seems much property was owned and stored communally through the tribe and the cult, giving rise to the (widespread in the ancient world) impression that Northians were all in abject destitution.

Acrean provinces

In 202 BCE, the Acrean military reached the very end of the continent's northwest, and this coincides with the end of Northian epic poetry and the beginning of the Late Canon period. Why this occurred still mystifies historians, as the Acrean Empire did not have a policy of suppressing poetry. One theory is that epic poets worked in large settlements around religious sanctuaries, which were uprooted in the course of the Acrean expansion in the 3rd century, and so poets lost their economic security. Others ascribe it to the disruption of inter-communal relations, which were the reason why Epic poetry existed in the first place. It is assumed, however, that the received Epic texts were first written down in the 2nd century, when they were still recited or memorized.

The Acrean Empire governed the west of modern DNS as the province of Liminia and the north as Tenebris, the border of the provinces being the Belo mountain range. These provinces' names mean "land's end" and "shadowy forest". In the words of Acrean generals, these were savage, scarcely-arable marshlands to which many Northian-speaking tribes withdrew due to the persistent Celtic-Nordic wars of the preceding century. The archaeological evidence for Northian settlement is scant, testifying to the sparseness of the migration and the difficulty in adapting economic and cultural routines to the new environment. The fortress of Cleiden was established around 180 BCE, and it remained a military outpost for much of its first century of existence.

It has been remarked that Northians did not migrate into Liminia and Tenebris much earlier than the Acrean conquest, and consequently the land was "only slightly less foreign to Northians as to Acreans". But the migration which broke many clans may have prompted some of the first Northians to settle in or near Acrean fortresses, perhaps hoping amongst other things to sell their wares. In this regard, the Acrean Empire's military outposts may have functionally resembled the sanctuary settlements that functioned as entrepots during the Epic Age, though undoubtedly they were causes of great reticence and consternation for other Northians who wished to keep as far away from the Acreans as possible.

It is during this period that the Northian term for the Acrean Empire is first attested—Aṇhuš—natively meaning "master". Historians are divided about its original usage: it could be a translation of Early Old Nordic Ansuz (Late Old Nordic Áss), which the Acreans called their gods, and by a more insidious reading was demanded by the Acrean governor of his Northian subjects. Hollander (1992) suggests Aṇhuš was a sardonicism, meaning "he who calls himself master". At any rate, Aṇhuš does not take normal u-stem inflections and has a genitive Aṇhaōs, strongly resembling (and evocative of the influence of) Early Old Nordic genitive Ansauz. When used in the native sense, Aṇhuš could be either masculine or feminine, but used of the Acrean dominion it is always feminine and could agree with plural verbs and adjectives.

Viking age and Republic

In the final century of the Acrean Empire, regional rule became normalized and directly led to the secession of the kingdoms of Shalum and Æþurheim. Well before then, however, imperial forces had tolerated or even were complicit in the activities of seafaring raiders later to be known as Vikings. Vikings were a group of merchants and mercenaries with complex origins and motives, hoping for income by trade or plunder in foreign lands; generally, the more exposed and undefended a settlement, the more often the Vikings resorted to raiding over trading. In Liminia and Tenebris, the Northians relied on imperial garrisons as a bulwark against raids, but garrison strength steadily declined through the 8th and early 9th century, even when Northians assented to additional taxes for their upkeep, until the garrisons were completely withdrawn in 854 to defend the metropole now under constant attack.

Without the well-trained Acrean legions, the Northian cities entered a dark age of constant victimhood to Viking raids grimly called the "annual visitation". Cleiden was the first city to capitulate in 870 and offered an annual indemnity of 20,000 pounds of silver to the Shalumite king, whom the Cleidonians suspected to be responsible for permitting or actually encouraging Viking raids in the first place. This indemnity far surpassed the 8,000 pounds the Cleidonians expected to pay and immediately caused a population exodus when the indemnity was defrayed on the city's citizens. Then, in 889, the Cleidonians were forced to agree to another annual indemnity of 12,000 pounds to the king of Æþurheim. Considering the city's population of 60,000 in this era, each citizen was responsible for paying 0.6 pounds of indemnity silver per year, and this expense left the city effectively bankrupt and unable to pay for defensive works.

After the rapid recession and then disintegration of the Acrean Empire, the Northern Cities found themselves sandwiched between the new kingdoms of Shalum and Silua. A conference was convoked in 1198 in the city of Cleiden in the name of Puntōdeor, a religious festival, but is known to be a meeting of civic leaders or their representatives to discuss the future of the Northern Cities, who were very much outnumbered by either of the two states around them. In 1200, the League of Northern Cities was formed by the sealing of the Great Treaty. This instrument obliged each of the seven confederating cities to provide men, weapons, and money, in varying proportions, for the common defence of their territories. Generally, Leiden was obliged to provide the largest quantity of resources, as it was the most populous city.

However, it was not long before the citizens of Leiden became weary of the burdens laid upon the city, which in absolute terms were larger than those from the other cities.

Government and politics

Federal government

The Northern States are characterized as a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy within a federal structure set forth by the Great Charter, first enacted in 1341. The reigning monarch, Alexandra IV, serves as a ceremonial head of federation and is the head of state in foreign affairs. The monarch does not exercise any personal will but follows unwritten conventions to ensure the smooth functioning of all branches of government. The monarch grants royal assent to bills passed by the Congress of the States and sanctions secondary legislation issued by the executive branch, and judicial processes are too carried out in the name of the monarch. While the Great Charter is considered a document issued solely by the monarch, its terms are binding upon all successors to the throne ("we freely recognize for ourselves and our successors") and may not be amended without the assent of the legislatures of all seven states; proposals for emendation must originate in the federal Congress.

The Congress of the States is the federal legislature of the Northern States and consists of the Crown-in-Congress and two legislative chambers, the House of Prelates of the Northern States, whose membership is hereditary and created by the monarch upon the Chancellor's advice, and the House of Representatives of the Northern States, whose members are elected every four years unless sooner dissolved. The two chambers are legally co-equal in their legislative, fiscal, and censorial powers, though under the principle of democratic accountability, the elected house is the primary house to which the executive is responsible and therefore the more powerful. Amongst the branches, the Congress is the most senior due to its ability to pass and repeal statutes, which are the source of executive and judicial power; as such, it is labelled as a sovereign parliament in the legal sense. Nevertheless, the Congress works within the circumscription of the federal structure and disputes with state legislatures are not infrequent.

The executive power at the federal level is vested in the Council of Estate, which consists of the Chancellor of the Northern States and other ministers appointed to it. Though not always the case historically, the Chancellor is always the prime minister and head of government. As prime minister, the Chancellor heads the executive power, which is accountable to the Congress.

State governments

The seven eponymous states of the Northern States are Cleiden, Muri, Aθβora, Ektraini, Imma, Sθura, and Kimma. While the federal government is based on a constitutional monarchy, Cleiden, Muri, and Sθura are republics and do not endorse a hereditary head of state. Aθβora, Ektraini, and Imma are cities governed by their own hereditary princes. Kimma is a royal city whose head of state is the same person as head of the federation; in Kimma, Alexander IV is represented by a viceroy appointed for life.

Cleiden, with nearly half of the population of the Northern States, has a bicameral legislature consisting of a House of Deputies and a Senate. The House of Deputies's 469 members are elected every three years under a first past the post system in single-member districts, while the Senate's 129 members are elected to fifteen-year terms through a proportional representation system in place since 1957. Previous to this time, the Senate was elected indirectly and was effectively controlled by mercantile interests.

Military

The forces of the Northern States are called alternately the lēwas or rē in the passive sense, i.e. as an establishment, and the kōr in the active sense, i.e. as a fighting force and units capable of acting on command. The word lēwas has the primary meaning of "the public", and rē means "interest, reason, purpose", understood in the sense that the shared defence of the Northern States is a principal interest of the people. Thus the formulaic expressions rēo plūnuto "to increase their interest" to express the idea of granting moneys to the military.

The roles of the DNS forces is the defence of home territories and "such other things that the Congress of the States may from time to time command". Within this latter heading are international military exercises, humanitarian relief, and the defence of allies within the context encompassed by treaty.

The Federal Army, Royal Northian Navy, and Royal Northian Air Force are the three principal components of the Northern States' armed forces. The Royal Northian Navy also includes the Royal Northian Marines. Their combined strength is 165,900 as of 2021. The RNA is the most populous branch, consisting of just over 100,000 servicepeople, and the RNAF is the least populous, accounting for only 27,650.

Transport

Railways

DNS has one of the most extensive railway systems in Tyran, providing not only inter-city transport, both conventional and high-speed, but also commuter rail, rapid transit, trams, and light rail. Rail freight is the dominant form of freight transport by weight per unit distance. In terms of passenger transit, DNS also possesses one of the highest mileage-per-capita figures in the world.

The rise of railways in DNS occurred during the 1840s from port cities to inland cities, with lower costs very quickly replacing canals and tolled roads as the principal means of transit.

Culture

Religion

See also: Pontōis Wītōs

Malicious duelist

The Nordic practice of Holmgang spread into Northian lands in the 8th century and was the cause of much dissatisfaction. This is especially true in the form of the duśmanozɣəṇδō "malicious duelist" or "vexatious duelist" who committed high crimes and demanded duels with the excuse that the crime was an act of vengeance within the context of a feud or unavenged wrong, relying on either their own or an accomplice's excellence in duels to escape punishment. This was a frequent problem from 750 onwards until about 1000.

Duelling was actually an accepted mode of resolving certain kinds of disputes in Northian culture, known since the Epic Age (8th – 3rd c. BCE). From the Epics, Northian duelling was an "elaborate kind of ordeal" that was not free combat in any sense. It was, spiritually, a request to one or more gods to demonstrate the innocent party's innocence, by enabling that party to perform superhuman acts. Duelists lived for weeks on sacred ground, ate a special diet of herbs, and performed rituals to establish their connections to divinities. The duel itself continued from these rituals, and a string of complicated manoeuvres were executed and unusual combinations of words and songs spoken, their correctness being judged as signs of the gods' favour. The duelists were allowed to attack and harry each other in some ways as these things were performed, and the first to fail was judged the loser.

After Acrean rule, it is most often appointed for disputes that have already caused years of feuding or litigation with no end in sight, or where both parties' recognition of facts is so far removed from each other and no investigation is possible. The scope of combat in duels evidently expanded since the Epic age, and the use of dexterious manoeuvres and utterances to test the duelists' innocence waned. It was an alternative to trial by ordeal. A duel was under the supervision of priests, who would declare the victor with a certain amount of combat done; it rarely caused fatalities outright, as the gods' favour was considered evident if one combatant consistently has the advantage. Northians familiar with Shalumite and Æþurian customs thus used this rule and demanded duels at every town, compelling priests by force or bribery to authorize the duel.

Many cities enacted severe penalties against anyone trying to prove their innocence of a crime they obviously committed by means of combat in a duel. Cleiden declared in 802 that without legitimate grounds for duel, the malicious duelist who tenders duel (the act of asking for duel) will be expelled from the city for twelve years, and at a second offence, all able-bodied men were to assemble and destroy the duelist, whose family would be sold to foreigners. Kimma went further that if a duel is tendered without merit, the offender sakros ho ya estod anyutomnos ho or "will immediately be as sacrifice [i.e. killed licitly] even without trial". Muri decided in 829 that it is illegal to tender a duel if the offence was committed in minority or unintentionally, the violation thereof being punished with death. Ektraini followed Muri in 831, with the added proviso that any man previously convicted of a crime or fleeing from prosecution was not allowed to tender duel, on pain of death, because "he hath no innocence in the eyes above."

As by 850 it was easy for duelists to be labelled as malicious even if their grievances were legitimate, the entire institution of duel was probably stigmatized in most contexts. It has been argued that the ban on malicious duelists might have been aimed at preventing Shalumites or Æþurians to tender for duels in the Northian lands, since the law by the 900s recognizes only the narrowest circumstances to result in a duel, and all other duels are labelled malicious and exposes the duelist to the wrath of the community at the mere asking for a duel. Shalumites or Æþurians unfamiliar with Northian strictures would have likely fallen afoul of one of these rules and triggered public anger. At any rate, this is likely how these rules were historically felt in Shalum and Æþurheim—duelists with legitimate grievances were expelled or killed by an angry mob of citizens neither brave enough to agree to single combat nor just enough to make the same legal.

Cleiden added in 891 that a malicious duel should be considered blasphemy and sacrilege, which required the offender's home be burnt down for the first offence, on the grounds that by refusing a trial by normal means already proved the duelist guilty, and asking the gods to show the guilty as innocent was a sacrilege. This was long after duels in Northian lands had lost their sacral meanings, which were now being resurrected to defeat malicious duelists. By 900, the asking for a malicious duel carried the charge of perjury and blasphemy in all cities in Northian lands, as well as the forfeiture of whatever the cause of the duel was.

Names

As the Northern States were, for no less than a millennium, part of the Acrean Empire, its naming customs came to be replicated in Northian culture quite broadly. The main elements are Acrean patronymic suffixes -sson "son of" and -sdottir "daughter of", as appropriate to the speaker's relation to their biological or familial father, which were translated into Northian with the terms huiiús and duhitṓ, governing a neighbouring genitive of the parent's name. While most Acrean names could form a genitive with the suffix -s, this is not the case of Northian, where genitive formation is quite variable. Thus, huiiús and duhitṓ function less like petrified suffixes and more like adpositions, which can be used sequentially (and interchangeably) to give more information about the person or parent named, e.g. haēmō derumβuuāδō frištiiō duhitṓ "Haimon, daughter of Deruvunt, [who is son of] Fraisti".

See also

• Northian language
• Pontōis Wītōs