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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Okay, but... what enemy was in mind when it was named 'Widow-Maker'? Because the Dwarves do have a lot of enemies, but I'm having trouble pointing at one where marriage is a widespread cultural institution.
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Liberties taken in translation? The Khazalid given is more literally "Loneliness-Maker" but I think that doesn't quite have the same heft in English.
 
Exmorri said:
Liberties taken in translation? The Khazalid given is more literally "Loneliness-Maker" but I think that doesn't quite have the same heft in English.
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I was about to make a somewhat strained case that marriage need only really matter to the culture of the namer and/or wielder but this is a much better point - it's not just a maker of widows, it's a weapon that isolates by dealing death. A looser but more evocative translation might be to flip the meaning around as 'Kin-Breaker' or something similar. In that light, the name has profound power for the Dawi, given the emphasis they place on ties of all kinds, familial and gentilic as well as marital.
 
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Shard said:
Maybe the weapon's name refers to how it isolates it's wielder?
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That'd be awfully, poetically double-edged ('double-bitted'?) if it was the axe that Grimnir took with him as the first Slayer... Unfortunately, seems he took the other one instead! Not that there's nothing to the idea - I would be unsurprised if Grimnir travelled fairly often without his brother and wife in his role as protector of the Dawi, so the name might be an expression of sorrow between the three of them. It could also be seen as echoing the burdens of leadership in general, especially in the hands of the dwarven kings as it is now.
 
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Wait, so both the Dwarves and the Elves have a weapon called "widow maker"?

I'm wondering if that's an Old One thing, because otherwise it's a hell of a coincidence.

... or maybe Khaine and Grimnir are the same being? Has anyone ever seen them in the same room together?
 
Isn't the obvious answer that Widow-Maker refers to other dwarves? Strongly implies a dwarven civil war at some point in the ancestors lives, but I though we understood then as fleeing from someone under the guidance of the ancestor gods already, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch.
 
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All of you are wrong. Widow maker is one of the most horrifying weapons possible, each time it strikes, it creates a lot of black widows on the target. So even if the target survives, they are left with a cluster of poisonous spiders walking on them.
 
Glau said:
Isn't the obvious answer that Widow-Maker refers to other dwarves? Strongly implies a dwarven civil war at some point in the ancestors lives, but I though we understood then as fleeing from someone under the guidance of the ancestor gods already, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch.
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I'd assume that, as you say, widow maker refers to the time when the Ancestor Gods defeated the dwarves who wouldn't bow to their rule, murdered the men and made widows (to be forcibly remarried) of the women.

At root, they're probably Bronze Age warlords just like everyone from history, wi try no special moral claims to virtue, despite later window dressing. Every culture should have deeply flawed progenitors, otherwise it undermines the narrative.
 
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Alratan said:
I'd assume that, as you say, widow maker refers to the time when the Ancestor Gods defeated the dwarves who wouldn't bow to their rule, murdered the men and made widows (to be forcibly remarried) of the women.

At root, they're probably Bronze Age warlords just like everyone from history, wi try no special moral claims to virtue, despite later window dressing. Every culture should have deeply flawed progenitors, otherwise it undermines the narrative.
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Man I don't even like the Dwarfs (Ignore the multiple thousands of words of omakes I wrote for Run Ricky) and I don't like this idea.
 
Voikirium said:
Man I don't even like the Dwarfs (Ignore the multiple thousands of words of omakes I wrote for Run Ricky) and I don't like this idea.
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Why else would the fact that he made widows be a key part of Grimnir's iconography; when at the time he'd died the dwarves had basically never coexisted with any other civilisations that had the concept of marriage.

The only widows he could have made with his axes were dwarven widows.

Why should they be any more virtuous than historical characters from the ancient world like Ceasar or Alexander the Great?

Aenarion doesn't get white-washed. Settra doesn't. Why should the dwarves be the only species whose legendary progenitors have clean hands?
 
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Alratan said:
Why else would the fact that he made widows be a key part of Grimnir's iconography; when at the time he'd died the dwarves had basically never coexisted with any other civilisations that had the concept of marriage.

The only widows he could have made with his axes were dwarven widows.

Why should they be any more virtuous than historical characters from the ancient world like Ceasar or Alexander the Great?
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"He genocided the menfolk and married off the women because Bronze Age Warlord" is a very different thing from "They had a civil war."

(Also I'm wild and wacky enough to propose other ideas including:
-Dragons
-Dragon Ogres
-Weird Chaos People
-Pre-Old One People)
 
Voikirium said:
"He genocided the menfolk and married off the women because Bronze Age Warlord" is a very different thing from "They had a civil war."

(Also I'm wild and wacky enough to propose other ideas including:
-Dragons
-Dragon Ogres
-Weird Chaos People
-Pre-Old One People)
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Do we have any evidence any of them marry? Beyond whatever uniqueness the Cathayan Emperor and his moon spirit partner get up to.

And the points is that marking widows was such a big part of his legend that one of his primary weapons was named after that is the point.

Why would the dwarves know or care about the widows he left amongst dragon ogres enough for it to become an intimate part of what they knew him for, for example?

A warrior god of a cultural who wields an axe called widow -maker, should, to my mind, be assumed to have made a lot of widows who are part of that culture. That's why he's remembered in that way.
 
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Yeah, the dwarves that escaped having to kill a bunch of loyalist dwarves on their way out really does make a ton of sense. And it's totally the sort of thing they would never ever talk about outside an oblique reference like the name of an axe.
 
Another guess: being hit by it makes you hallucinate a life of happy marriage, only to wake up from it, which ends up making you feeling like a widow of a spouse that never existed.

...Ok, this is less funny and more unironically scary, the sanity damage this would inflict would be extremely cruel.
 
Really, I imagine it'd only take a single dwarf on dwarf casualty for a dwarf (especially from an Ancestor dwarf) to call a weapon Widow-Maker, because that'd mean they were pushed to extremes and were forced to end a dwarf life to get their way.
 
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