(urth) Setr's 1000 Year Reich

[thalassocrat at nym.hush.com]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:29:54 +1000 thalassocrat at nym.hush.com wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:42:57 +1000 "Roy C. Lackey" 
><rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>>Andrew wrote:
>>>When Setr/Garsecg meets Art/Able, he speaks of his coup in 
>>Aelfrice
>>>as dating from 1,000 (Mythgathr) years in the past.
>>
>>Do you have the citation for that figure?
>>
>>-Roy
>
>Yup, a couple of places:
>
>- Knight, end of Ch.22. Garsecg to Art, as they first come to the 
>tower & before Able has guessed that he is Setr. Garsecg has told 
>Able that Setr made the Aelf build it & gather weapons there, 
>before some of the Aelf drove him off. Nevertheless, Setr returns 
>from time to time. Then: "We have been pillaging his trove a 
>thousand years ..."
>
>- Knight, beginning of Ch.26. Garsecg to Art, talking about the 
>Aelf-war which drove Setr out. "A thousand of your years have 
>passed since that war ..."
>
>Some other bits & pieces:
>
>-  In Ch.22, Garsecg says to Art: "The king's [Anthor's] royal 
>father lay with a woman of my race ... Of their union, three 
>children were born." A single union, resulting in triplets? If so, 

>
>can't solve the puzzle by assuming that Uthor sired Setr a long 
>time before Arnthor (although Uri does tell Art in Wizard Ch.34 
>that Setr was the oldest child).
>
>- But we do know that Setr's birth occured at least 40-50 
>Mythgathr 
>years before his meeting with Art - simply because he took Mag 
>when 
>Able was an infant, and Berthold is 30-40 years older than when 
>Able left. 

Another data point comes from Beel, who says he's a younger son of 
Uthor's younger brother. (Wizard, Ch. 48)

Art calls Beel "middle aged" - say 50. Say he was born when his 
father was 30. Say that the age difference between Uthor and Beel's 
father was 10 years. That would put Uthor's birth 90 years in the 
past. In any case, surely not much more than 100 years. So it seems 
that Setr was probably born quite a lot less than 100 Mythgathr-
years ago. 

Setr was lying about the 1000 years, then. I wonder why?

On another point, it seems likely to me that he started stocking 
women on the top of tower soon after completing it - 50 years or so 
before Art meets him. This would answer the question of why he 
stopped taking women there: it's because he was driven out by Dsiri 
and other "loyal" Aelf soon afterwards, and it is no longer a 
permanent base for him.

By the same token, it explains why the persecutions described by 
Mag in her suicide letter have stopped by the time Art arrives. His 
plans were thwarted by the "loyal" Aelf, and Dsiri et al have 
assumed the role of gods for the peasants in that region, partly by 
default - and perhaps also to prevent the peasants from going back 
to worshipping dragons.