Home, Rules, Message Boards, The Parthenon (AIM), The Parthenon (AOL)
Back to World, White Seas, Tribes of the White Seas
The Ice People
The Ice People live in the treeless far north of Meditra on the frigid, wind-whipped shores of the White Seas. Their tribes include the Mikuimaq, Beothuq, and Tlitumuq, all of whom are reclusive and little-known to outsiders. The numbers of the Ice People have never been large, for their environment is unforgiving and their tribes widely scattered, meeting only once a year at the short summer Festival of the Undying Sun.
Perhaps owing to their scant population and the hardships of their everyday life, the Ice People have never been as aggressive as their cousins the Fensalir. The difference between their cultures is so pronounced that many doubt whether the Ice People are truly AEsir at all, considering them some other offshoot of the giant races instead. Their appearance adds to this confusion, for they are smaller and stouter than their southern cousins, speak a dialect so distinct it seems another language entirely, and tend to be paler in skin, hair and eyes.
The diet of the Ice People consists primarily of fish, seals, whales, and sea-birds trapped during the summer months. They fish and spear seals through holes cut in the sea ice, gather and dry the algae that blooms in the warmer months, and go whaling in tiny single-person boats made of sealskin stretched over a lightweight shell of whalebone or baleen. To compensate for the lack of greenery in their diets, the Ice People eat a variety of odd delicacies, including seal livers, whale skins, and winter voles stewed whole along with their stomach contents and seed hoards. Partially-digested lichens harvested from caribou stomachs (which are eaten warm, immediately after the animal is killed) are another summer food prized by the Ice People and regarded as unsavory, at best, by most outsiders.
Their utensils are carved from bone, ivory or baleen; during the short northern summers they gather grasses to weave into mats and baskets. The ivory carvings produced by the Ice People are startling in their realism and detail, and fetch high prices in outside trade. These ivories, the lush winter furs of arctic animals, and ambergris from their whaling are the primary trade goods in which the Ice People deal.
Trading with the Ice People is no easy proposition, however. The tribes are notoriously xenophobic; they deal only with the Fensalir, and then only with emissaries who have painstakingly established relationships of trust over years. Other outsiders are likely to be mutilated and tortured to death in what appears to be a highly ritualized, perhaps religiously influenced fashion. Those among the Fensalir who know the most about Ice People culture say that the Ice People are not inherently bloodthirsty, but believe that outsiders are deadly-dangerous and carry taboo spirits into the land; the method of killing them is intended to expiate their taboo-breaking and placate the Ice People's own guardian spirits. This belief, they further theorize, comes from the Ice People's isolation and corresponding susceptibility to outside diseases -- which may well be true, but is nonetheless likely to be small consolation to those they kill.
The Ice People maintain both permanent dwellings, usually safely inland and constructed of cut sod stacked around a support structure of whale bones, and temporary dwellings which may be either hide-and-bone tents (when hunting summer caribou and at the Festival of the Undying Sun) or domed huts fashioned of ice blocks and sealed by pouring saltwater over the exterior.
Little is known about the culture of the Ice People save that it is very different from the much better-known culture of the Fensalir. They do not seem to worship gods or goddesses, instead following a system of animist beliefs that governs their behavior by prescriptive and proscriptive taboos rather than laws. Each year, at the Festival of the Undying Sun, the tribes gather inland, celebrate the short summer with feasting and competitive games, exchange their young people in paired marriages (receiving one young man or woman for each one sent away), and trade with the Fensalir they have come to trust.
There are no comments on this page. [Add comment]