Single Spined Lizard from Beyond the North Wind

kimanda:

allbeendonebefore:

kimanda:

So lately Gathenhielm and I have been discussing about England’s birth and while we both agree that to be historically accurate, England would have been most likey born in the 5th century when Saxon settlements started appearing in Britain. Of course, this would mean that England would have logically never met Rome, or he would have at most caught just a few glimpses of Rome before the Romans left Britain.

Gathenhielm admitted from a narrative standpoint of view, it would be nice if we could push England’s birth a bit earlier so that he would have been receptive to Rome’s influences and the desire to be an empire would have rubbed off on England from Rome. (this desire later manifesting itself in the British Empire)

So that got me thinking: If possible, how could we push England’s birth a bit earlier?

Then a thought struck me - in my Celtic studies, didn’t I come across several mentions of Britannia being broken down into smaller provinces later on during her being under Roman rule? So I searched and found this:

So I started thinking… Britannia fought and struggled against Rome for a very long time… so what if Rome created Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior in the hopes of destabilising and weakening Britannia, so that she stops fighting him. However that didn’t have a strong effect on Britannia so Rome decided instead to shift the power of representing the Britons from her to her younger siblings.

Which led to the creation of the 4 Roman provinces that you see above. Where they were located? 

So we could do this:
Maxima Caesariensis: child England
Flavia Caesariensis: unnamed sibling (would have died not long after Romans left)
Britannia Prima: child Wales
Britannia Secunda: child Cumbria (a close brother to Wales who would later die in the 11-12th century)

Mind you, there were more younger siblings of Britannia but these were the ones chosen by Rome. He picked 4 “successors” and took them with him to his place to train them to become strong Roman provinces and stamp out any Celtic traits that were left in them. Maxima (England) and Flavia managed to renounce their Celtic origins but Prima and Secunda clung on to their Celticness and were considered “untrainable”.  

This is a headcanon being developed but I thought this might be interesting to share with you guys. I still would make Wales and Cumbria older than England but as in my original headcanon, there isn’t a large age gap. Hope the headcanon is interesting and perhaps worth considering. ^^;

(this is a WIP headcanon so if I made any mistakes, I’m sorry. I’ll work on this headcanon further if people seem to like this idea) 

That’s really an interesting concept. Rome splitting places apart is not uncommon, but how it would work for all personifications is a bit difficult to figure out.

Like, take Macedon for example. Rome split Macedon into four provinces, but those provinces never seemed to do much but make the people living in them very angry and set the stage for several people to claim to be descended from the Macedonian royal family and assume kingship. It didn’t work, of course, but the provinces were so artificial and baseless they probably would never warrant personifications. 

So I guess Britannia’s fragmentation is a bit more… absolute? I wonder what the point in time is when artificial provinces become personifications. I guess if they last more than several generations until people start identifying with them, or they form the bases of something else later in history, like England or Wales here. They’re something you can only really  see in retrospect. 

And if you could clear this up for me- is Britannia herself mostly a Roman construction or would she have been representative of a certain group before (excuse me for this word because it is not very accurate) ‘Romanisation’? It’s all a bit fuzzy for me but I figure I should know since this is half my heritage.

Thank you, I’m glad you find the concept interesting! :D It is true though that we have to carefully consider if personifications are needed for something or not… like in your Macedon example where it was split into four provinces. I can see from your perspective that these provinces were rather artificial and I suppose Britannia’s provinces would also fall into the category of being baseless and artificial, since the political splitting didn’t exactly translate into other areas such as the people and culture.

But that is in a sense the idea behind it too. England, Wales, Cumbria and the fourth “province” (let’s call him Flavia to make things easier) were unbound avatars that Rome chose to represent these politically-split provinces but they never really did attach to these concepts. They carried the name officially but they never became those provinces in essence. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and Rome felt that he could weaken Britannia if he shifted the ancient British identity from her to her younger, more impressionable, siblings. It was a mixed success since the identity did not shift so easily to the younger siblings and it didn’t weaken Britannia that much but it might have been the first blow to starting the fragmentation of the British identity, but at this stage it wasn’t strong enough to be felt.

Alright, you remember a conversation we had a long time ago, that kind of tied in with me having a more biological point of view on the nations than anything else? I told you that it was my belief that more avatars were born than avatars survived? I’m trying to lay down different classes of avatars, going from the earlier nomadic tribe representations who were solely attached to their people, later kingdom representations that were connected to land but still heavily connected to their people and the modern nation representations who are connected equally to the land and to their people. All of this is still in development but I’m starting to think that every time an avatar dies, or suffers heavy blood loss, the reaction of the land is to create a couple of avatarlings so that one might replace the current avatar if they further weaken and die. Then again I imagine the process of the creation of avatars as sometimes random and sporadic and sometimes directional. A mixture of things really. Out of 10 avatarlings, usually 1-2 of them make it past their first century, I think the mortality of avatars who are neither attached to the land or a people is relatively high. Of course you’re talking to the biology-minded me here, and nothing is set in stone when it comes to that headcanon. But what I mainly believe is when I’m talking about Britannia’s younger siblings, I am referring to an undefined number of avatarlings, some connected to the land and others not. A few of them will eventually develop into a county, kingdom or country of Great Britain, most will not survive. (sorry this is quite abstract ^^;) 

So that’s how I think the 4 Roman provinces that I mentioned was assigned to 4 siblings (Wales, England, Cumbria and Flavia) who were maybe a bit attached to the land but not to the people yet. But the Roman provinces were artificial so none of the 4 attached to their province. They might have begun to attach to their people though. Rome’s plan might have started the fragmentation of the ancient British identity. 

Britannia functioning as a single province (at the beginning) is a Roman construction, the island didn’t function as a single country. There were many tribes but they fought each other, they only started fighting together when the Romans were invading them. (that’s why druids were so hated by the Romans as they were really good at bringing the tribes together) For some reason I keep coming across the mention of the *Pritani, which are sometimes called a tribe that the Greek interacted with or they’re considered the inhabitants of Britain. The name seems apparently to have been native but if it was used for the whole population of the island…? This is what one very reliable book says about it: ”Therefore, *Pritani ‘Britons’ < ‘people of the forms’ could originally have referred to people sharing particular linguistic forms and verbal traditions in addition to, or as opposed to, material culture.” So I based Albion/Britannia on the *Pritani but she has a sister who lives up in the north who later becomes Pictland. That’s mainly based on the observation that the culture of the Britons in the north tended to be more primitive next to the southern Britons who were more in contact with the Gauls and Belgic Gauls.

Ahhh thank you ;w; This is a lot to digest so I am going to think about it for quite a while. I haven’t fully accepted it but I am really super intrigued by the concept of avatarlings that spring up and die off like mayflies during times of political upheaval. I can see political factions parading around their chosen avatars as the dawn of a new age and then becoming shocked and angry as the avatars they have chosen die off or become severely weakened. OwO

Actually, it reminds me of something I read once about Hinduism and how it can be considered to be a form of “monotheistic polytheism”: each individual god is a ray of sunlight or a refraction from a larger essence or source of light. Each god becomes a different vessel for a larger force and concentrated in a way a devotee can understand and a way that is suited to their need. It’s of course not the only way to understand it, but I think that’s a sort of good analogy for  how these avatarlings might relate to an avatar? 

But really it’s an interesting concept because in a way death makes them more human… but at the same time they still might transcend death because many of the experiences of these avatarlings and reincarnations and what have you still make up the experiences and ideas and beliefs of a full avatar. I can see it being super complicated and out of control very quickly but it is a very interesting lens to view it through. 

Okay, I’ve come across ‘Pretani’ or ‘Pritani’ or ‘Pretannia’ a few times in my readings too, so even if most of what we know is through a biased greco-roman point of view, I still think that’s a viable and valid way of personifying her. owo thank you for setting it out for me. =w=

Hm… I can’t remember if there were any Mycenaean goods found in Britain, I’ll have to look that up. Whether they were brought there by the Greeks themselves or through trade I’m not positive but I can see kid!Greece littering the place with pots and spear heads and whining about how cold it is and how much she wants to go home as a young Britannia watches completely baffled. XD; I find it really funny that people seem to make Britannia and Mama Greece act like sisters or best friends or whatever when their interaction was pretty limited (not to mention the Greeks thought anywhere pants were a requirement was unfit for human occupation). The Greeks also knew the Celts but they were more familiar with the ones who had been milling about in Asia Minor… and unsurprisingly the Greeks weren’t too fond of them. XD -ramble ramble-

allbeendonebefore:

Hi guyssss

I’ve decided for my own sanity to not post any more palette pieces after 8:00 PM (now), haha.

The good news is for every piece I’ve finished I’ve done a little work on my own projects! ;w; Even if it’s just sketching… OTL And I’ve gotten a bit better at using vectors (the dropshadow is now automatically stuck to the pen tool I’ve used it so much great)

I’ve just added one tiny little rule that I forgot to add this morning: please avoid requesting the same character multiple times. There’s a huge variety of characters in the world and it’s kind of stifling to be drawing the same ones over and over again. XD; To make it easier on you I’ve updated the [Requesting Rules] with a list of everything that has been completed and everything that’s lined up to be drawn.

I’m not sure when I’ll close requests for sure but it will probably be tomorrow night. If there’s someone from APH/IAMP, Star Wars (the movies or season 1 of clone wars) or my own characters you want to see drawn in my paper cut out style, now is the time to request!)

Once again you can request on this account too. uwu 

queuing for the morning peopleeee