Would you like a threadmark?
Sure, if you like. Though you might want to instead copy it to a post of your own so you don't threadmark a vote, and so you can edit it later. Take whatever you like from my posts here, it's your thread.
While I'm here, let me ask a few context questions about the quest's setting:
Is Halla's country supposed correspond to any specific place IRL? I'm getting "Sweden" vibes from it, but it might be mashed-up Norseland. Is it on the continent like Scandinavia, or an island like Iceland?
Whereabouts in the Christianization timeline are we?
8970 AD cultivation calendar presumably corresponds to 897 AD historical calendar, where the earliest known churches in Scandinavia went up about 830 and Denmark officially converted around 960, Iceland around 1000, but I dunno if you might want to restrict the Christians to the south for this.
Is the country ruled by a king, or parliament of goðis, or some funny cultivation shenanigans?
That last one leads into my follow-up ramble about the Norse and unusual law.
The Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) had kings most of this period, with occasional arguments about who was to be king, or multiple petty kings, but a general agreement that monarchy was the form of government. There was local variation, but if you round off to "medieval kingdom" you have the general idea.
Iceland in the Norse Saga Era operated rather differently: the law and governance revolved around
goðis. A quick summary:
The position of goði is sort of priest-judge-senator. (The word is cognate to English "godly".) A goði runs a temple. Each commoner is supposed to be subscribed to exactly one goði, and pays a subscription fee to the goði. A man may change which goði he is subscribed to once a year, if he feels the goði is not doing the job right, or overcharging. The goði is supposed to give legal advice, and represent his subscribers in high court and at Parliament. The goði position may be inherited, given away, or sold, as a piece of property. One house of Parliament is composed of the goðis.
(Yes, this means parliament seats were for sale. It worked fine for centuries!)
Originally any man would make himself a goði if he convinced enough subscribers to follow him, but later the number of positions/offices for goðis were fixed at 36 goðorð with the increasing formalization of law, and later they added some more anyway. This was about 1 goði per 1000-2000 people.
Goðis, their advisors, judges chosen by the goðis, and the Lawspeaker made up the equivalent of legislative and judicial branches. There was no executive branch, nor official police. Courts and goðis merely delivered opinions in disputes. If you went to your goði and got an official verdict that Hrolf owes you fifty silver pieces for damages, collecting the silver from Hrolf is your own responsibility.
However, the official "Hrolf-owes-you-fifty-silver-pieces" verdict, like the goði seat, was
also a piece of property that you could transfer or sell. If you had no hope of recovering the silver yourself, you might sell this verdict-debt to a bigger man or a group of them for forty-five silver, and then they'd work on getting their fifty silver from Hrolf. Also, the goði was usually helpful to his subscribers in finding or organizing community volunteer enforcement groups. You may interpret this as a polite euphemism for "lynch mobs" if you are cynical.
(I am not a historian, just an interested amateur.)
