"SKJALDBORG! The cry rang out and shields locked in unison like a thunderclap from Tyr himself, their rims carved with runes of power. The arrows of the elves were like raindrops on a stout thatch roof and the folk of Ulric answered their strike with a volley of javelins, iron-tipped and weighty, and the blood of the enemy flowed like the Einbjorn. A great shout issued forth and the brave folk of the north drove the charge home, an iron storm of mail and axe and spear and made great slaughter in the river Eldwold which ran red thereafter."
- The Middensaga
The militarized society of
Holmgard has long had at its core a disciplined legion of heavy infantry almost without equal. It is these hardened warriors that have made the conquests of the Empire possible and let them endure for over five centuries. Even in these hard days, where the Empire must rely on the
fyrd for its defence, its heavy infantry are greatly feared.
These folk are the housecarls, literally the household guards. Long ago, when the Empire was not yet a dream, the human folk of the North - the Graelings, the Lupercals, the Varyags, and other tribes - were divided into countless petty tribes. Each chief gathered around themselves a group of warriors to guard their hall, their closest companions. When the Empire was forged in blood, these tribal warriors were formed into legions of 1000, sworn to High King Holm I's service, and equipped in the finest mail, helms, and round shields. Some even received dwarf-forged mail and rune-engraved shields. To slay the enemy they carried a short sword or bearded axe and two weighted javelins.
Yet it was not their equipment that conferred their lethal edge, but their discipline. The Imperial Housecarls under Holm I were made into a professional army, a core of soldiers paid not only in booty but in a regular wage of iron ingots, then coins. They trained every day, marched quickly, and fought in orderly formation, a shieldwall which turned aside blade and arrow alike. From all the united tribes of northern Erden Holm I equipped 18,000 highly trained warriors and his son Ulric mustered an army of 50,000 to the field, 20,000 of which were trained housecarls, which swept through most of the fractured Valmeric realms of Middenheim before they could adequately respond. In that time, it is said that one of every twenty Holmgardians who was then alive took up the sword for Tyr.
Those who would think to defeat the Holmgardian shieldwall with arcane tricks would be disappointed, for one of the greatest gifts of dwarves were the runes of Abjuration, which skilled skalds and practitioners of sorcery could turn to their defense and ward away blasts of fire and earth which would otherwise wreak great injury on a formation.
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