Wednesday 8 April 2020

On Kings Versus Chiefs and the Meaning of Words

When I was a university student I read a lot of Richard Hakluyt, a 16th century English writer who chronicled the early English exploration of North America, as well as journeys to many other parts of the globe, often through interviewing eyewitnesses. I don't remember his works in any great detail, because this is now 20 years ago, over half a lifetime, and while his major works are on Project Gutenberg (apart from the one that I spent the most time on, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of All by Our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons), most of them are sadly practically unreadable because the (extensive) footnotes are integrated into the body of the text.

What I do remember was the, to us, charming eccentricity of 16th century English. Nowadays we refer to Native American chiefs as, well, chiefs. But Hakluyt called them 'kings'. This small difference in terminology makes a big difference to how the reader conceptualises things. Think of a 'chief' and you picture the head of a small, fairly disorganised and informal tribal group. Think of a 'king' and there's an organised, formal kingdom with the trappings of sovereignty. I'll leave the critical interpretation of the shift in how the leaders of Native American polities were referred to from 'king' to 'chief' to the historians - the implications are obvious to anybody who thinks about it for five seconds. I'm interested here in the lesson this holds for RPGs.

It's common to refer, for example, to orc, or kobold, or goblin (or whatever) leaders as 'chiefs'. Things change when, instead, you start talking about them as 'kings'. Or, for that matter, as kritarchs or oligarchs or theocrats. Just a simple change to a single word results in a significant change in the way one thinks of the underlying society. A kobold chief is the boss of an unruly gang of disorganised kobolds. A kobold oligarch is something else. And this isn't just true for the terms one uses for rulers. A society that has orc 'shamans' is one thing. One which has orc 'priests' is another. There are societies which make goblin shamans, and there are those which produce goblin wizards. They are not the same.

Of course, you can also come at this issue from the opposite angle. You generally get elf lords, kings, wizards and priests. An elf 'chief' suggests something else entirely. Not to mention a dwarf 'shaman'.

14 comments:

  1. This is a very curious concept, yes. I recall, when reading the letters that the jesuit missionaries that where in Japan send back to Rome, that they also called the daimyos 'kings' and one called them 'donos', like the japanese honorific. It's a curious concept, because they knew a lot more than us of their society (they lived there!) but they used their own cultural concepts when talking about Japan.

    You also can use this in your games: The cultural clash and adaptation between the people that call 'kings' or 'chiefs' to their bosses and their interactions.

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  2. I think there's a lot of truth in what you say, but I'm not sure I agree entirely. There are contexts in which "king" has a ring of savagery, after all, in opposition to the more civilised "emperor". Think of Theodoric the Great, who was pretty effective at portraying himself as both a fearsome Germanic king (with an afterlife in the sagas) and a civilised stand-in for the Roman emperor (complete with purple robes and Latin administration).

    And I'd argue that "goblin king" is a *much* more idiomatic and evocative term than "goblin chief". It's there in The Princess and the Goblin (the fons et origo of the orcs), just as it's there in Labyrinth. And of course it's there in D&D too:

    "When in their lair the “goblin king” will be found. He will fight as a Hobgoblin in all respects. "

    And:

    "The Hobgoblin king will fight as an Ogre, as will his bodyguard of from 2–4 in
    number."

    Essentially, if you're thinking of the classical period, Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages, "kings" go with tribes and barbarians (it's a "barbarian" word, after all). And 'tribal king' and 'chieftain' often seem to be interchangeable in anthropology (though not for the Highland clans!).

    So I'm not sure that the distinct connotations are particularly clear cut - even with reference to the shifting terms for Native American leaders (modern anthropologists and contemporary tribe members seem to favour "chief" over "king"). I'd love to know a bit more about the shift in terminology: "king" was certainly used into the 18th century for Native American leaders.

    Overall, I think you're on much firmer ground with wizard/priest/shaman - but perhaps that's because those aren't quite the same thing in the way that "king" and "chief" often are historically?

    I'd also note that Tolkien describes Elrond as a "chief" - and perhaps other Elves too? (It may be that his liking for "chief" and "chiefest" as adjectives has distorted my memory on that latter point!)

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    1. >I'd love to know a bit more about the shift in terminology: "king" was certainly used into the 18th century for Native American leaders.

      King Philip/Metacomet's War caused a massive cultural, linguistic, and semantic shift when it came to Native Americans in the future US.

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  3. Huh...interesting thought. Putting it in this perspective, I suppose I now see why my alma mater changed the name of our teams' mascot from "Chieftains" to "Red Hawks:" in my mind, I always equated the term with "Kings" and always wondered why such a term would be considered pejorative to native peoples while no one raises a stink about teams like the Sacramento Kings. I guess there *are* connotations that I tend to blindspot, because you're right: I certainly have a different image between "shamans" and "wizards," etc.

    Certainly something to think about...especially with regard to NPC humanoid societies in a campaign.

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  4. This post made me think of Mark Twain's observations from his tour of Palestine and Syria.

    "But here in Ain Mellahah, after coming through Syria, and after giving serious study to the character and customs of the country, the phrase 'all these kings' loses its grandeur. It suggests only a parcel of petty chiefs — ill-clad and ill-conditioned savages much like our Indians, who lived in full sight of each other and whose 'kingdoms' were large when they were five miles square and contained two thousand souls. The combined monarchies of the thirty 'kings' destroyed by Joshua on one of his famous campaigns, only covered an area about equal to four of our counties of ordinary size. The poor old sheik we saw at Cesarea Philippi with his ragged band of a hundred followers, would have been called a “king” in those ancient times."

    Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa has something that's similar to what you suggest. Most of the locations in the setting are towns of less than three-hundred ruled by petty despots with names like “the Omnipotent King", “The Light by Whom All See”, and "The Ocean of Mercy". It's an amusing touch.

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    1. Another example is in the movie the 13th Warrior, when Ahmad ask Melchisedek (about the Vikings): "How should we adress their leader."
      And Melchisedek answers: "King at least."

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  5. To further the point, an easy way to deepen the effect as well as bring some super actionable elements to bear would be to call some orc leaders kings and some oligarchs, or have kobolds led by judges but answerable to an emperor, etc

    Humans are always treated within the understanding that there are many disparate cultures with different histories and values, but that humanoids are monocultures. I dont know about you, but the idea of even local level differences between the princely orcish states and the republican orcish ones (with whatever variations orcs would have on the concept) an easy way to get super interesting factions brewing

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    1. On a tangent, this is part of why I'm in favor of purging "mundane" humanoids (replacing them with humans, perhaps bearing some mutations of circumstance but ultimately being normal) and restricting them to classical fantasy use as symbolic personifications (e.g. goblins aren't treacherous and malicious pranksters that breed like hyper-fecund rabbits, they ARE treachery and personal malice made manifest, multiplying as an environmental reaction to personal failings and impossible to excise completely without addressing the cause of their gestation).

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  6. Words are meaningful. Connotations matter. All synonyms are not created equal.

    In terms of applying this to RPGs, stop using humanoids as a shorthand crutch for specific cultures and especially for specific cultural stereotypes (in a general sense, not accusing you in particular of doing so). If you want to depict a world with some depth, combining "dwarf" with "person from the capital of Dwarfland" shouldn't lead to the same end result as combining "dwarf" with "person from the capital of Elfland", "person from the boonies of Dwarfland", "person who spent their who life in Humanland", or whatever else.

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  7. Very nice point. (In my campaign, I've been having kings of every conceivable group, sparrows, birds, goblins, ravens, spiders, ogres, etc.)

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  8. I have long thought that if fantasy worlds have different species, there should be different cultures among them. Yes, D&D has Hill Dwarves and Mountain Dwarves, etc., but gamers can do a little creative work and make each of these humanoid races more "diverse." Shouldn't Dwarves have multiple languages among them? Shouldn't there be wide cultural variation among goblins? Maybe some have kings called monarchs, maybe others have a different economy and therefore different social organization. Lots of possibilities. You guys seem like you are already thinking along these lines, and I like it.

    In my non-D&D home game, there are no non-human player characters. Non-humans present another level of foreignness and danger.

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    1. "Shouldn't Dwarves have multiple languages among them?"
      When I'm running with language pickiness, I've always used regional languages in that way. A dwarf PC from Haranshire doesn't know Common and Dwarf, they know Haran and Haran(dwarf). Speaking with a dwarf emissary from the other side of a mountain pass? The emissary or their translator knows enough Haran to communicate, but their guards probably only know Dunn(dwarf). Some creatures (like giants or dragons) are exempt for living on a scale that'd treat decades/continents in the way we treat months/cities, and even they can have some variations (e.g. I split fae language into sidhe and sylvan as a sort of low tongue/high tongue divide, similar to Mandarin/Cantonese in the real world).

      Want to understand everything? That's what Comprehend Languages- or Telepathy-type magics are for, or else find a tutor and study up.

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    2. Side note: you just helped inspire this post :)

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  9. Reminds me of the European travelers and writers of old, who referred to Mikado as "the Japanese Pope", taking local Daimyos for Kings.

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