Difference between revisions of "Lethe (region)"

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Lethe, or more correctly, the Lethean 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, Lethean, 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.

Prehistory

Origins

The Lethean 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 the region almost uninhabitable.

The first Letheans

Coastal dwelling

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 Letheans had nowhere more salubrious to go, with sturdy pines and fir trees deep inland hampering agricultural development and the great difficulty of catching and, in the case of the barley-tail deer, domesticating the few native animals on the Islands, especially considering the relative abundance of aquatic food sources, notably whales, seals, and kelp.

These coastal dwellings appear to be closely associated with intricate chambered cairns, which emerged at a much later date in the Lethean Islands than in the rest of Europe, as well as more elaborate cairns and eventually intricately carved stelae, the latter originating in around 900 BC. The stelae represent animals such as the barley-tail deer — which had been domesticated by that date — the Apphelian ibex, the Atlantic salmon, the silver trout, and the polar bear, as well as peculiar man-animal hybrids that might be deities or spirits of the hunt.

In around 2200 BC, the ancient inhabitants of the Lethean Islands began establishing crannogs, particularly in the southern lakelands in what is now Gudrof and southern Isselmere and Nieland, whilst in the more northerly areas the precursors of Bronze Age brochs of stone and wood emerged rising to the height of 3m, at first near the earlier excavated dwellings but then ever deeper inland. The earliest of these broch-like structures have been radiocarbon dated to around 1500 BC, just after the arrival of the Bronze Age, with older, less impressive semi-excavated stone structures sited nearby.

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, and ending about 500 BC with the commencement of the Iron Age.

Ruined broch

Widespread deforestation marked the Lethean Bronze Age, as did the manufacture of sea-going vessels capable of trading with Europe constructed from the resulting lumber and the building of impressive brochs such as those in present-day Anguist. Researchers presume that ancient Letheans had received broch-building techniques from the Hebrides, but recently Férghus mab Dérile and Owen Cartwright of the University of Mithesburgh contested this established notion. Mab Dérile and Cartwright postulate that the Lethean brochs were developments of the earlier coastal dwellings, with the lower foundations serving to shelter less hardy livestock during the long winters. This function waned with the arrival of Icelandic sheep and Highland cattle in about 700 BC.

Historical Lethe

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