I though people were memeing about the whole Markgraf - edgelord thing. What with vampires being kind of edgy and what not and edgelord being a pseudo funny nickname. But my very rudimentary knowledge of German tells me Ostermark (austria) means eastern borderlands/edgelands.
...This casts everything in a whole new light
That's what makes the meme funny.
The normal
title-equivalent translation of Markgraf in English is Margrave or Marquess, but the
component translation is something more like "Border Count" or "Frontier Noble", and it takes only a little imagination to render that as "Edge Lord".
But people have said that a few times, so let me try to offer a bit more fulfilling context and explanation as to what's going on here, collected in one post.
In present day real life, just about every inch of habitable land on the Earth is claimed, borders are mostly settled, humans live nearby, and it's pinned down which state rules over what area and has police responsibility. Border changes by anything short of outright conquest are rare.
In Warhammer as in the time period it's based on, this is not true.
Even
inside Stirland you have swathes of deep forests where the Map Drawers will mark it as part of Stirland but actual control is exerted by Beastmen and humans can't go there. It gets worse at the actual edges of the Empire. Map Drawers of nearby states (Sigmar's Empire, Bretonnia, Tilea, Estalia), if they're like IRL, will frequently draw the boundaries of their state a bit beyond where the ruler really rules, except in places where there's an obvious natural boundary like a mountain range that can't be fudged with. Outside of mountain ranges and stern peace treaties following a war, map-borders in the context are frequently
aspirational: what the drawer would like to see. The edge of country control falls short of the edge of the country map.
A Markgraf or Marcher Lord is appointed as a special kind of noble to rule these edge-areas as edge-lord.
Marches are areas that are not just political and geographical edges, but also edges in the sense of "edge case". If someone west of Sylvania is knowingly shipping goods to Vampires, burn them. If someone east of Sylvania is knowingly shipping goods to Vampires, that's east-of-Sylvania's problem. If someone
in Sylvania is knowingly shipping goods to Vampires... a little bit of tact and cautious judgment is called for in deciding how to approach, to judge whether it's a traitor to humanity or a hostage situation or what.
You have areas definitely within the Empire, and you have areas outside the Empire's borders, and then you have parts of Sylvania which
say "Sigmar's Empire" on the maps drawn by Imperials, but it's not as clear in practice.
So in Boney's words,
Markgraf is a sort of 'someone needs to spend a while jumping up and down on this place, and once they're done it will be pacified enough to return to the control of the Elector Count' role.
In real life history, Markgrafs were sometimes asked to go beyond even that, and try to
increase the reach of their territory and draw the border a little further out, opportunistically grabbing territory that wasn't under organized control, or under the control of a weak target, or a morally acceptable target, and bring it under your control instead and properly pacify it and establish that control as a fact-on-the-ground rather than just a line on a map. Marcher Lords also sometimes were subject to special taxation rules of not having to send coin to the King, but having to maintain an unusually large force under arms instead, because the King reckons he'd inevitably spend the coin on armies to send to the March and it's easier to have the Edgelord do that directly. Compared to normal counties and dukedoms, marches were not as stable in either area or organization, which I figure is part of why it's not hereditary, along with the fact that it's a very powerful post that could result in a rival to the Elector Count. By the time the Markgraf is done, the map may need to be redrawn.
