In an undated draft of The Wing and the Ax, courtesy of the Waterford University Archives, Queen Marshal Astrid Haddock I Wrote:One of the interesting points to consider when analyzing warfare is to remember that the individuals who decide the course of it make decisions within their own biases and perspectives. While this may seem to be an obvious point—Emperor Romanos III, an inexperienced commander, thought that war was decided by large battalions and thus it was on these large, ponderous formations he depended and lost at Azaz, to name a memorable such defeat—this fact also plays off in more subtle ways.

Consider the case of Kagan Drago Bludvist. The man reportedly spent several years hunting and poaching dragons, and resented the anti-poaching laws put into place and enforced by the Song Dynasty protecting those same dragons. This attitude managed to embed itself deep in his psyche by all accounts, informing his strategy when he advised his predecessor, Kagan Berk, on the conquest of the Song Dynasty as a first step prior to taking their dragon nests.

But from an objective viewpoint considering objectives and strategy—gaining dragons and using them in conquest—such a strategy was foolish and pointless! What could the Song have hoped to do to prevent Drago's dragon riders from flying past them, and forcibly enthralling the nests deeper in their territory? The few token guardsmen working to prevent poachers from accessing the nests that the Song held as sacred would have been easily dealt with and the dragons forced into subjugation. Once that was done, the Pechenegs could have then used their augmented force to conquer not only the Song, but all of the empires and kingdoms in the region and beyond in short order.

But Drago, by his own admission later on, saw the Song and their laws as a barrier that prevented him from accessing those self-same dragons, and thus, to his mind, they had to be dealt with first before the dragons could be accessible. To him, the dragons were owned by the humans who claimed the land their nests sat upon, and thus those humans would have to be conquered before the dragons could be taken as spoils of war.

For another example, consider Emperor Henry the Black and his actions…

(02-06-2021, 05:48 PM)Norgarth Wrote: Oh, and Mamorien? I couldn't give a summary of Thing of Vikings because I hadn't read the chapter yet 8)

The Genius Has No Clothes: An Alternate View Of Innovation, 1818 Wrote:Furthermore, while Haddock was indeed responsible for a large number of scientific and technical advances in the aftermath of his taming of dragons, it is inaccurate in the extreme to assign all of these advances to him. Other individuals, spurred on by the new capabilities that now existed, began to develop their own innovations and insights.

Haddock invented many things, that is without question, with a lengthy list ranging from the famous wingsuit that allowed a person to glide through the air and land safely, to the more prosaic infrastructural and production tools such as the elevator, drop-forge, and spinning wheel, but within his own lifetime, as a direct result of exposure to dragons and the possibilities and necessities they opened up, others also showed that they were capable of innovation in the right environment. The list of inventions from this period as a direct result of interactions with dragons includes such things as the barometer, the canal pound lock, buttons, eyeglasses, and stern-mounted rudders, while still others worked on refining and isolating chemical compounds and elements extracted from dragons.

More people also aided in developing the area of cartography, with leaps of innovation in surveying and mapmaking—the first "dragon's eye" maps, showing the layouts of cities and regions from above, were made within two years of Haddock's taming of dragons. And, despite the efforts of those who wish to assign him the credit, he had nothing to do with any of these beyond preparing the ground for others.

In an entry retrieved January 8, 1891, Wikikenna editors Wrote:The Saami are a Finno-Ugric ethnic group indigenous to the Sápmi District of the North Sea Empire. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Saami's ethnic roots originated from the Uralic peoples to the southeast in the Volga Region between five and four thousand years ago. Migratory tribes of these people eventually pushed towards the Finnish Lakeland region approximately three and a half thousand years before present, and eventually spread through the highlands of the Scandinavian and Kola Peninsulas, mixing with the isolated groups already present and integrating them, creating the predecessors to the Saami people…

As one of the Sovereign Peoples of the North Sea Empire, the Saami, as a political unit, have the legal right to organize their own Things for internal self-government in their District, full representation in the Grand Thing, and to determine Saami tribal identification according to their own criteria…

Many Saami who live in the Sápmi District continue to maintain their traditional lifestyles, with herding reindeer, fishing, hunting, and forestry being dominant activities, while Saami who live outside of the District are noted as being disproportionately employed by House Haddock as Dragon Tenders for the Imperial Brooderies and Rookeries, a tendency that goes back to the founding of the Empire.