Marriage on Calengwag II: The Gancean Manner
It must be noted that the people of Calengwag have a frustrating fondness for misnomers, from bizarrely friendly names for vicious monsters to outright naming settlements for the inverse of their attributes. In this the so-called 'Gancean Manner' of marriage is a misnomer in both not being exclusively nor universally practiced by the Gancean peoples of Calengwag.
Of all the systems of marriage on Calengwag, the Gancean Manner is at a glance the most similar to the most prominent among the majority of the clades of humanity, being a monogamous system struck between two individuals of similar age and usually opposite sexes. As with seemingly all things on Calengwag, the gravest misstep is accepting the seemingly mundane as just that.
In practice, the Gancean Manner seems eerily similar to a perturbingly literal deathpact, for this style of marriage is predicated on an eternal bond between partners. Wherein both parties are expected to face death together or as soon as circumstances allow.
To unpack this disturbing concept it is first important to understand the framework of how such a thought process works. In the Gancean Manner, a marriage is generally considered as a mutual guarantee of aid, ensuring the survival of the other and the proliferation of their shared legacy. Partners are usually arranged as a result of both sets of parents agreeing that the partners can provide a complementary set of skills, resources, prestige and proven sound-judgement (or lack thereof in cases of perceived wastrals). A subset of this is that the roles of Husband and Wife are determined on the basis of social prestige and combat aptitude, with the Husband being the most combat capable of the pair and (more importantly) the social superior. To my understanding the reasoning for such a divide is that one parent should always ward the family residence and that the one who brings a higher combat aptitude stands a better chance of weathering physical risks beyond the household. Which has the curious and sometimes unfortunate side effect of making a partner who is both incapable of combat and poor at household administration a source of mockery as 'neither bride nor groom'.
The symbols of the union are often reflected in the manes of the bride and groom, with any wife of enough status to grow their hair to the length of their neck being required to braid it. Those of notable rank often wear a long braid over their dominant shoulder as a sign of their status as fully wedded brides (as opposed to the topknots of newlywed maidens) while husbands will usually wear their hair either long or in a tail. The sole exception to this lay in the matter of widows who will undo tails or braids during the funerary rituals of their fallen mate.
This brings us to the matter of death, which is always deemed to be the inevitable failure of the surviving spouse and a breach of the contract of marriage. This strange reasoning always places wherein death is the necessary outcome to make amends. This macabre facet of the Gancean Manner is however placed with a number of caveats that puts one more in the mind of a survival mechanism for the bloodline. This is due to the other clauses of the contract wherein the surviving parent is now put under the exclusive responsibility to secure the lineage of the couple by ensuring that the next generation reaches adulthood (eleven Calengwag years in the reckoning of such cultures). Under this framework, the normally rigid honor customs of the world become somewhat more permissible, with tragic tales of widowed parents enduring shame upon shame to ensure the survival of their line before welcoming death and reunion with their slain loves. This is often accompanied by dramatic acts that see them dead from exhaustion or doomed honour duels, as the universal and callous loathing for suicides still holds even in this context.
A reverse to this is the extreme shame that accompanies allowing for one's offspring to become fully orphaned regardless of circumstance before their maturity. Foolish action, a lack of caution, revenge and even disease are held in contempt as reasons to 'cravenly' abandon life with true suicide being held in enough contempt as to have one excluded from the family's genealogy.
And this regrettably carries into divorce, a concept which is not fully possible in most societies that practice the Gancean Manner. In such cultures the only way to rid oneself of a marriage is via means of a duel to the death, wherein it is understood that the contract has been momentarily severed. While such duels can be commissioned at the agreement of both parties, it only momentarily freezes the contract until the survivor dies and does not grant them the right to remarry. Such a right is limited to cases where infidelity resulting in a bastard child (the only metric wherein infidelity seems to be registered among the peoples of Calengwag) is proven. Should the perpetrator win the duel they are stripped of any children and exiled from the land, with a one year grace period before the family of the slain victim may seek their lives and those of the perpetrator's kin-group. As with many laws on Calengwag, becoming a 'spirit' is seen as a legal means to escape this status, although it does not relinquish the Right of Vengeance on behalf of the avenging kin-group. These are unusual circumstances however, and often the result of wastrels who neither kin-group work especially hard to avenge, more typical solutions involve the Husband seeking employment abroad and both parties taking lovers so long as neither sire a bastard. Such circumstances notably do not dispel the obligations of lineage however should one party parish, so the political and social links in such failed unions are often maintained assiduously.
Comments