WingedWarriorUpdates

Gwendoly, Goddess of love, women, & night

9/25/2025

This is the Claude.ai rendition of the Goddess Gwendolyn. Not exactly how I'd picture it, but anything more complicated wigged old Claude out.

Constellations and lore are very big components in The Winged Warrior. Legends based on some truths abound in all the cultures. A few constellations are seen as pretty much the same in every culture, with a few variations that crept in over time and retelling.

This particular image looks kinda scary to me. :) I think I'll go find something a bit more connected to what a goddess should look like in the night sky.

Some history of the Berbers

9/25/2025

A lot of my desert-dwelling cultures in THE WINGED WARRIOR are based on our own Earth cultures as a base, most notably the Berbers.

According to Wikipedia, Berbers, or the Berber peoples, also known as Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs in the Maghreb. The Maghreb is located in the western part of the current Arab world, comprising western and central North Africa, including Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and the disputed territory of Western Sahara. As of 2018, The Maghreb had a population over 100 million people.

The Berbers main connections are identified by their usage of Berber languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, which are part of the Afroasiatic language family. They are indigenous to the Maghreb region of North Africa, where they live in scattered communities across parts of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, Mauritania, northern Mali and northern Niger.

The Amazigh people are the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa with a history that stretches back over 5,000 years. The term "Berber" was historically used by outsiders (mainly Greeks and Romans, you know, those pesky invaders), but the people themselves prefer the term "Amazigh," meaning "free people" or "noble people."

The Amazigh are not homogenous and made up of various tribes spread across the Maghreb region. In Morocco, their population makes up a significant portion of the country's demographic, and their cultural influence is deeply woven into the nation's traditions, art, music, and way of life. (primemorrocotours.com)

1905 image from page 288 of "Geschichte des Kostüms"

Viewpoints in research-women

4/2/2020

By Saharauiak - Happy with her friends, Sahrawi women, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1332325

I'm doing some research on deserts, in particular the Saharan and my anthropology brain kicks into gear.

I ran across this line:

"As with most peoples living in the Sahara, the Sahrawi culture is mixed. It shows mainly Arab-Berber characteristics, like the privileged position of women,.."

I'm thinking, what if everything we described about men and women originated from a female point of view? Or a matriarchal assumption of gender dominance?

So instead of "a privileged position" for women in a society, might it be "a less than privileged position" for men? Or, Men's place in that culture was almost equal to women? Or perhaps there was a leveled gender bias?

I find it interesting that cultures weren't always one gender dominating the other and that one didn't "dominate" but each gender became symbiotic to their "skill set" and natural abilities. Obviously, men can't birth babies, but there are cultures where men raise the children (very few before a certain age) after a certain age, usually the males raised by males, etc.

Who had the audacity to dictate who did what? Some are obvious. Women can't defend their family when heavily pregnant or for a while after childbirth. I'd like to have a talk with that person LOL. She or he (probably he) started a trend we are still trying to opt-out of.

Of course, this is just my humble opinion. :)

Bedouins

1/16/2016

The Winged Warrior uses a conglomerate of desert-dwelling societies. One of my first images that came to mind when I was writing this novel were the Bedouins, part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arabian genetic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ʿašāʾir (عَشَائِر)..

According to Wikipedia (which is not used for the final research, but only as a place to begin), the term “Bedouin” derives from a plural form of the Arabic word badawī, as it is pronounced in colloquial dialects. The Arabic term badawī derives from the word bādiyah (بَادِية), which means semiarid desert (as opposed to ṣaḥrāʾ صَحْرَاء, which means very arid desert). The term “Bedouin” therefore means, “those in bādiyah” or “those in the desert”and therefore, perfect to begin with my Maajnaran people and culture.

“I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers”

is a famous Bedouin saying, effectively revealing their culture. Encroaching civilization and severe droughts have forced many Bedouin to leave their nomadic lifestyle for a more “civilized” life, yet the roots and culture remain with a very few. I dare say, it won’t be long until even this culture is either dead or watered down into a mere shell of its former existence.

The Maajnaran people face many of the same predicaments. Once a warring people broken up into tribal families, they now (at the book’s beginning) are loosely governed by Kaigan’s father who hears tribal concerns and mediates with other civilizations like Darhna’s Faalnaran people who have an abundance of wood, river, some fish, and fertile fields. If the Maajnarans want to burn wood instead of dung on the crisply cold winter nights in the desert, they purchase or barter for wood from Faalnaran traders and caravans.

Although the desert has numerous oasis areas where plants and animals and people thrive, they are limited and precious. The nomadic Maajnarans consider oasis-dwellers soft, but necessary for trade.

Water is coin in the desert and one must learn how to find desert-hidden wells and streams. He who controls water, controls life. And so the power struggles for dominance within the Maajnaran society are constant and often brutal.

One of the delights of writing a fantasy novel is the research required to create an interconnected and working world. I must admit, I’ve gotten lost on many a tangent while delving into desert life here on Earth. Desert life is as dichotic a lifestyle to me as it is to Darhna. And here I go, off to research.