作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: THE KINGS OF HAVNOR silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:17:15 2004
THE KINGS OF HAVNOR
A century and a half after Morred's death, King
Akambar, a prince of Shelieth on Way, moved the
court to Havnor and made Havnor Great Port the
capital of the kingdom. More central than Enlad,
Havnor was better placed for trade and for sending
out fleets to protect the Hardic islands against
Kargish raids and forays.
The history of the Fourteen Kings of Havnor
(actually six kings and eight queens, ~150-400) is
told in the Havnorian Lay. Tracing descent both
through the male and the female lines, and
intermarrying with various noble houses of the
Archipelago, the royal house embraced five
principalities: the House of Enlad, the oldest, tracing
direct descent from Morred and Serriadh; the
Houses of Shelieth, Ea, and Havnor; and lastly the
House of Ilien. Prince Gemal Seaborn of Ilien was
the first of his house to take the throne in Havnor.
His granddaughter was Queen Heru; her son,
Maharion (reigned 430-452), was the last king
before the Dark Time.
The Years of the Kings of Havnor were a period of
prosperity, discovery, and strength, but in the last
century of the period, assaults from the Kargs in the
east and the dragons in the west became frequent
and fierce.
Kings, lords, and Islemen charged with defending
the islands of the Archipelago came to rely
increasingly on wizards to fend off dragons and
Kargish fleets. In the Havnorian Lay and The Deed
of the Dragonlords, as the tale goes on, the names
and exploits of these wizards begin to eclipse those
of the kings.
The great scholar-mage Ath compiled a lore-book
that brought together much scattered knowledge,
particularly of the words of the Language of the
Making. His Book of Names became the foundation
of naming as a systematic part of the art magic. Ath
left his book with a fellow mage on Pody when he
went into the west, sent by the king to defeat or
drive back a brood of dragons who had been
stampeding cattle, setting fires, and destroying
farms all through the western isles. Somewhere
west of Ensmer, Ath confronted the great dragon
Orm. Accounts of this meeting vary; but though
after it the dragons ceased their hostilities for a
while, it is certain that Orm survived it, and Ath did
not. His book, lost for centuries, is now in the
Isolate Tower on Roke.
The food of dragons is said to be light, or fire;
they kill in rage, to defend their young, or for sport,
but never eat their kill. Since time immemorial, until
the reign of Heru, they had used only the outmost
isles of the West Reach-which may have been the
easternmost borders of their own realm-for
meeting and breeding, and had seldom even been
seen by most of the islanders. Naturally irritable and
arrogant, the dragons may have felt threatened by
the increasing population and prosperity of the
Inner Lands, which brought constant boat traffic
even out in the West Reach. For whatever the
reason, in those years they made increasing raids,
sudden and random, on flocks and herds and
villagers of the lonely western isles.
A tale of the Vedurnan or Division, known in Hurat-
Hur, says:
Men chose the yoke,
dragons the wing.
Men to own,
dragons no thing.
That is, human beings chose to have possessions
and dragons chose not to. But, as there are ascetics
among humans, some dragons are greedy for
shining things, gold, jewels; one was Yevaud, who
sometimes came among people in human form, and
who made the rich Isle of Pendor into a dragon
nursery, until driven back into the west by Ged. But
the marauding dragons of the Lay and the songs
seem to have been moved not so much by greed as
by anger, a sense of having been cheated,
betrayed.
The deeds and lays that tell of raids by dragons
and counterforays by wizards portray the dragons
as pitiless as any wild animal, terrifying,
unpredictable, yet intelligent, sometimes wiser than
the wizards. Though they speak the True Speech,
they are endlessly devious. Some of them clearly
enjoy battles of wits with wizards, "splitting
arguments with a forked tongue." Like human
beings, all but the greatest of them conceal their
true names. In the lay Hasa's Voyage, the dragons
appear as formidable but feeling beings, whose
anger at the invading human fleet is justified by
their love of their own desolate domain. They
address the hero:
Sail home to the houses of the sunrise, Hasa.
Leave to our wings the long winds of the west,
leave us the air-sea, the unknown, the utmost...