Tammin Stories

[Jubal]

The Tales of Tammin

OK, here's a central thread for all the Tammin stuff.

The Basic Background
Tammin is a fictional hero who I tell stories about. The literary conceit behind Tammin's stories is that they're "real" medieval tales passed across time and the ages from somewhere far off into central/southern Asia - far outside the knowledge of the average medieval British listener. The stories use a mixture of medieval and ancient mythology, most of which no longer exists in British storytelling traditions (it is hard to tell to what extent it ever did form part of the oral tradition, though the continuation of, for example, sciapod stories from Pliny well into the middle ages indicates there may have been some wider knowledge of them).

There is a clear life-arc in the stories - The Road To Magalie is the first Tammin story in the internal chronology, and they do go in a certain order. The Tammin stories that form the later part of the chronology have a different tone, in which Tammin becomes himself much more of a wizard/sage figure who travels and dispenses advice.

List of Stories
The Road to Magalie
Tammin and the Mountain
Niara's Rescuers
The Breath of Dragons
The Battle that Never Happened
Tammin and Torregan
A Sciapod's Tale
The Stone Warrior

Dramatis Personae

Tammin is the hero of the stories. His "heroic method" is usually to have the wisdom or kindness to be able to use and get help from others who can achieve things he cannot. He is not exceptionally strong and the stories rarely involve him actually fighting anything; nor is he a trickster character. Tammin and the Mountain is the exemplar story in many ways; Tammin completes the quest despite lacking inherent advantages through his kindnesses being repaid. In the later stories, Tammin fills a "wandering sage" role as mentioned above, taking his natural tendency to mutual reliance with those he meets and dispensing it more in the form of wisdom.

Prester John is the "wise old king" who acts a generic quest-giver and advice-dispenser when needed - more so in the stories earlier in Tammin's life arc. Many or most of the stories are set in Prester John's kingdom, though some are set in nearby Turkic/Persian countries and some as far west as Byzantium and the Holy Land. I occasionally imply that the kingdom is in some way hidden from the rest of the world. Unlike Tammin, Prester John is an actual medieval myth, though in my storytelling Prester John tends to lose his strongest feature in his representations in the medieval world - namely, his explicit Christianity.

Beasts and Other Fantastic Things

Sciapods are one-legged giants who shade themselves under one huge foot; the myth existed at least as far back as 400BC. In Tammin-verse they do this all the time and like nothing better than to be having a nap.

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