Difference between revisions of "Lethe (region)"

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Lethe, or more correctly, the Lethian Islands, is an archipelago situated north-northwest of Ireland and south-southeast of Iceland. The Solquist Sea separates the region from Iceland, whilst the Tichonian, Lethian, or Eastern Irish Sea divides it from Ireland.

The island chain is home to five countries. Clockwise from the north, these are Azbinia, which spans the entire northern third, Hoblingland, occupying the eastern middle third, Isselmere-Nieland that dominates the southern third with shores on both of the main island's coasts, Gudrof to the very south, and Wingeria in the western middle third.

History

The first Lethians

The Lethian Islands, as they are now known, emerged from the North Atlantic as the product of a series of undersea volcanic eruptions and tectonic shifts. The main island, Lethe, formed a bridge between Continental Europe, including what became the British and Irish Isles, and the northern islands of Iceland and Greenland, serving as a way-station for many animal species. From the days of the Cambrian Explosion, when the scalding submarine vents fed a wide variety of peculiar aquatic creatures to the amphibians, insects, reptiles, and eventually mammals of later eras, the Islands hosted many lifeforms until the Ice Ages rendered them almost uninhabitable.

Hominids came late to the Islands, arriving in the middle of the 7th millennium BC by which time the ice had finally receded. These first settlers were modern, late-Mesolithic to early-Neolithic homo sapiens sapiens hunter-gatherers who relied upon harvesting kelp and seaweed, fishing, whaling, and seabirds as well as rudimentary agriculture for much of their diet.

Beyond this brief information, garnered from animal bones and other material evidence in and around a few well-preserved sites and from ancient bodies found within peat bogs, little is known about these first colonists. Whence these settlers came is still a matter of conjecture, although based on the existing fossil and material record, the Islands appear to have been concurrently colonised by both the Thule people and Western Eurasians. It is unknown how these early peoples interacted, but by at least 2500 BC they had established a broadly similar material culture throughout the archipelago comprised of coastal settlements of sandstone built into and atop of middens, as well as some within existing hills, as at Skara Brae and Knap of Howar, evincing maritime linkages with what became northern Scotland.

Unlike the dwellers at Skara Brae, the early inhabitants of the Islands did not abandon such dwellings until around 2100 BC despite the steadily worsening climate. Unlike the inhabitants of Skara Brae, the ancient Lethians had nowhere more salubrious to go, with sturdy pines and fir trees deep inland hampering agricultural development and the great difficulty of catching and, for the most part, domesticating the few native animals, such as the Apphelian ibex and the barley-tail deer, especially considering the relative abundance of aquatic food sources, notably whales, seals, and kelp.

In around 2200 BC, ancient Lethians began establishing crannogs, particularly in the southern regions in what is now Gudrof and southern Isselmere and Nieland, whilst in the more northerly areas brochs of stone and wood emerged, at first near the earlier excavated dwellings but then ever deeper inland.

Bronze Age

Based upon the archaeological finds in stannaries and copper mines throughout what is now Lethe, the Bronze Age appears to have arrived in the Islands about 1600 BC, approximately four centuries behind the peoples inhabiting the present-day British and Irish Isles.

Widespread deforestation marked the Lethian Bronze Age, as did the manufacture of sea-going vessels capable of trading with Europe constructed from the resulting lumber, the development of wood and stone brochs, and of crannogs in the southern lake lands in what is now Gudrof, Nieland, and Isselmere. Researchers assume that broch-building techniques were received from the Hebrides, but recently Férghus mab Dhérile and Owen Cartwright of the University of Mithesburgh advanced a theory that these structures were developments of the earlier excavated sandstone dwellings.

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