Book 4, Chapter 29: Assumptions Of Power
It should be noted that the process of forming a national identity is a significant one in itself. Citizenship is only part of the answer, as most people will still identify with their immediate regional, ethnic, or religious group, allowing for social fault lines to form. Generally speaking, a central “pole” is needed to act as a unifying force of identification in any large-scale nation-state. This can be a national epic, a written constitution, a venerated royal dynasty, an ideology, a larger ethnicity, or a religious institution, but to help weld together more multitudinous groups, some unifying symbol of identification is needed to be able to create the social institutions that allow for members of the nation to identify as members of the nation, as opposed to seeing themselves as part of the nation only through their identity as members of a social group which is a constituent part of that nation.
This might seem like splitting semantics, but it is an important distinction. If a feudal count declares war on his neighboring count in the hope of taking some of the man’s territory, despite them being part of the same kingdom, which perspective is more useful for halting hostilities? That their levies owe them fealty and thus must follow their orders? Or that their levies are being ordered to attack and kill their fellow subjects of the kingdom? The latter is clearly the more effective means by which to bond the two disparate groups together under a single unifying identity, even though there is no structural legal difference between the two.
Of course, there is always the option of coercive power by a central government to forcibly keep the peace between disparate groups, but this is rarely a long-term solution...
—Nationbuilding: How People Move, Talk, Think, Organize, & Structure Themselves, 1888, Amsterdam University Press
Tropes that appear in this chapter:
- Content Warnings:Chapter Trigger Warnings: Discussion Of Mass Murder
- …And That Little Girl Was Me: Played with. Rikard makes it clear that the story he tells Taskill is his own firsthand account, but doesn't reveal till the end that his brother was Mildew.
- Crazy-Prepared: After hearing that one of his men has cracked the Language Barrier with the locals, Ryker orders him to write down everything he knows and teach it to others, so that if something happens to him, they won't be back at square one.
- Domestic Abuse: Rikard mentions that Mildew has been abusive to his ex-wives, hence why they divorced him.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Played with. Rikard specifically takes time out of his day to seek Taskill out and explain the kind of manipulative monster Mildew was, and this is the key information Taskill needed to explain all the apparent contradictions between what he thought Berk was like and what Berk is actually like from his personal observations.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Fishwings, being less experienced with the Christian persecution of Jews, does not initially realise how bad the Christians will take Astrid, the descendant of a Jewish man, killing several thousand Christian soldiers regardless of the reasons for it until Viggo spells it out for her.
- Gossip Evolution: The story of what happened in France is so distorted by the time they reach Viggo in Al Jazīra that he hears several versions that all conflict with each other.
- Internal Reveal:
- Viggo hears the full story of what actually went down in France between Berk, Normandy and the rebels from Fishwings.
- Viggo learns a significant portion of the original Hooligans tribe is descended from the Jewish Scribe Dror, and this includes Astrid, one of the wives of the Hero.
- Language Barrier: Ryker's expedition has made progress in defying this trope when one of his men finally managed to crack the numbering system and use that to translate other words of the local language.
- Oh, Crap!: Viggo is shocked to learn Astrid is descended from Dror as he knows how Christians besides himself are likely to interpret a pagan descended from a Jew wiping out a Christian army, the last group being the perpetrators of a massacre be damned.
- Spotting the Thread: Rikard suspected Mildew of murdering his own family the whole time because of how odd it was for there to be a lone dragon raiding Berk, how odd it was Mildew just happened to be in the area to get revenge on their behalf on the blamed dragon, how odd it was his family just so happened to have died months after they banished him from the clan, and the joyous expression he caught on Mildew's face which morphed to hate when he saw he and his wife survived the blaze.
