Navarr culture and customs

Community

The Navarri are a communal people. A common Navarr philosophy is that wealth is measured in the number of allies who are prepared to fight for you, not the coins in your pocket. The Navarri expect everyone to work in the best interest of their Striding or Steading and most have little interest in personal wealth or success. Trade is a means of making allies and ensuring that people have the things they need rather than a means to enrich themselves or their Striding. The Navarri are well aware of the value of money and don’t avoid its acquisition, it’s just that most of them count allies as considerably more valuable.

Many things are kept communally, a wagon or an oxen that is the possession of the whole Striding, or a palisade which protects a Steading which is regarded as everyone’s responsibility to maintain. Despite or perhaps because of this, the Navarri are acutely mindful of those possessions which are owned by individuals and they are careful to respect them. Thieves who steal from the Steading or Striding are considered little better than traitors, thieves who steal from others are considered a dangerous menace that threatens the good standing of the Navarri.

The Welcoming

Attuned to the passage of the seasons, the Navarr Stridings congregate at festival times, either together or at the Steadings. The Navarri celebrate the turning of all the seasons but the birth of a new spring, the end of the harsh winter that makes travelling so difficult is their major festival. This grand celebration, the Welcoming, is a time for revelry, feasting, raucous music and wild dancing.

Steadings and Stridings

Navarr Stridings and Steadings are not fixed – they shift and change over time, as people die, retire or move from one to another, perhaps due to a love-match or to a desire to see other climes. When an individual decides to leave a Steading to join a Striding, the event is celebrated with a simple feast in which they ceremonially burn a list describing their belongings. The Navarri are far too pragmatic to burn valuable goods, but the ritual helps people to let go of the things they do not need. When an individual leaves a Striding to join a Steading, a similar feast is prepared, where the members of the Striding that is accepting them presents them with practical gifts for their new, fixed home, and their former Striding offers them mementoes of the journeys they've shared.

The Binding of Thorns

When a child passes into adulthood they undergo the ‘Binding of Thorns’. The Egregore Liaven shares of its blood with the celebrants. Then, accompanied by a war-band, the Navarri hunt for a gift to be given back to Liaven - lives taken from the denizens of a Vallorn-infected forest. Those that die during the Binding are lauded by the Navarri and their names make up many war-chants.

Death

In death, what remains are the memories of your deeds in the minds of your partners in the Great Dance. The Stridings commit bodies to simple cairns, the Steadings use a traditional glade – a charnel house – where the bodies are laid out in the forest. For reasons unknown, such glades are rarely troubled by scavengers or carrion-eaters, and the bodies are simply left undisturbed to moulder.