Slender is the knife
Brotherhood sworn in red drops
Blood in salt water
Sweet is corsair life
No peace beyond sight of land
Golden treasure won
Tempting is the knife
Trust worth its weight in silver
Bare is back betrayed
Lovely is the knife
Sunlit steel flashes silver
Crimson rivers run
Bloodied is the knife
Shining beauty hides redly
Turn your face to me
Hungry was the knife
Put not your trust in pirates
Bare was your kidney
Brother, mine the knife
Yours, the back trustfully turned
Why did you not guard?
— Verses attributed to Ravnvidd “the Skald” Yngling, the “Poet Pirate”. First collected in “Lovely is the Knife”, published in 1783 by his four-times-great grandson of the same name. The younger Ravnvidd claimed to have taken the poems from letters and other papers found in the attic of the family’s estate in Trøndelag, originally created with the plunder of the elder Ravnvidd’s illustrious career; however, these letters have never been produced and may be mythical. There is also a rich oral tradition of “Ravnvidd Rhymes”, short poems attributed, with varying degrees of seriousness, to the great pirate, even when obviously made up on the spot. Some of the poems in the collection can definitely be dated earlier than 1783 by their appearance in sea-stories referred to in letters, diaries, and pamphlets, and whose content is known from later scholarship; the fixed-syllable scansion conserves the poems more than the surrounding narrative, so that we can be reasonably sure that a given title contains the same poem in 1650 and in 1850 even if the other content has changed. It is thus quite possible that some of the poems were genuinely composed by the Poet Pirate; but the apparent narrative they make is an artifact of his descendant’s curation of the order they appear in, and there can be no certainty that he did not interpolate some additional lines from the oral tradition – that is to say, make something up – to cover inconvenient gaps.
This session the North Sea Confederation broke apart in blood and betrayal; Mike and I colluded to backstab our erstwhile Great Power ally, Dragoon. Allied to Blayne and Tazzzo (France and Spain, respectively), we attempted to break German power in Europe and restore a fluid diplomacy – fluid, that is, in the sense of dynamic, rather than in the sense of being bloody. Although the two will perhaps prove strongly correlated.
Looking at our tactical, as opposed to strategic, war aims, it is clear enough why Mike would respond to Blayne’s suggestion: By uniting the British Isles under his rule, he could become a Great Power in his own right, with an enviable corner position, armed and guarded by an immense navy, with no further need of a powerful ally. As for me, I had many reasons for joining the attack:
1. The Danish isles (which I was promised) are rich and defensible.
2. If the North Sea Confederation was going to break up anyway, it was clearly better to be on the outside pissing in.
3. I’m playing the Ynglings. If I don’t get in a couple of good backstabs per game I don’t feel I’m doing my job.
4. Dragoon had very rudely fortified the Danish isles heavily, putting a fort on each province except Lolland, and one on the mainland; I was immensely insulted by this lack of trust.
5. All the cool kids were doing it.
6. No, really, the European diplomacy genuinely has become rather static. Time to stir up some chaos.
7. I had gotten basically all my colonies from the North American agreement, and no longer needed the threat of NSC enforcement of my sphere of interest.
8. And if the NSC broke up… why then Dragoon would, presumably, no longer defend Mike from my attack; might even join me in attacking him, for vengeance and to make it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate betrayal. And then, perhaps, I could be the one to unite the Isles and become a Great Power with a corner position, armed and guarded by a great navy, and not in need of a powerful ally. A plot spanning, at any rate, decades; but a possibility for expansion in a Europe that looked increasingly locked into the CK borders.
The prewar plan was for me to rush armies into the Danish isles to quickly siege the mothballed forts there, thus either gaining my war aims, or distracting Dragoon from the decisive Flanders front. Sadly, this underestimated the power of internal lines in EU4; Dragoon was able to put his entire army in Denmark and drive mine out, build up his fort garrisons, and march right back to Flanders before Blayne’s invasion could accomplish anything there. Consequently the Flanders fields became their usual muddy attritional hell, while my battered army was reduced to sniping colonies and besieging random English forts. For a while Dragoon was even able, by dint of hiring every mercenary in England and some that must assuredly have teleported in from China, to drive Mike’s gallowglasses back across the Border, into Scotland; but in one of my few successes of the war I had comprehensively smashed his navy in the first month of the fighting, and even intact it would have been outnumbered four to one. With complete command of the sea we could ship reinforcements across at will; between the armies of Ireland, Iberia, and Scandinavia, we were just about able to subdue Teuton England. At the same time our colonial campaign prospered, and in Flanders we were at any rate able to hold the line to a stalemate.
Some battles of the War for the Rhine.
The European stalemate was momentarily broken when James, in Bohemia, declared a separate war on Blayne, backed by Hagbard, the greatest land power on Earth in this year 1620; however, by the deft diplomatic maneuver of instantly raising the white flag, Blayne – playing the French in classic style, to be sure – was able to knock the props out from under Germany with no more losses than the cession of the Rhone valley, and continue the struggle for justice in Europe. I opine, knowing that this is hindsight, that this war should have been fought to the last Frenchman; Hagbard is big but his armies can’t push into strongly-fortified, mountainous terrain any more rapidly than the French ones. By yielding slowly on the Rhone front, holding the Rhine front, and taking England with its rich provinces and ticking warscore, we could have force-peaced Dragoon, then turned our full attention south. However, Blayne states that he panicked in the heat of the moment; in any case it would have been a somewhat risky strategy, fighting the whole of Central Europe in the hope of defeating them in detail.
Central America, my war gains outlined in red. The additional Yngling province in the middle, Mitla, was taken from some natives after the war – Dragoon had no doubt intended to take it once the truce timer was up, but then the peace treaty broke his isolation and let me in, instead.
Dragoon had perhaps hoped that the entry of two major powers on his side, even if in a separate war, would enable him to turn the tide in Flanders and march on Paris; however, he didn’t increase the salt content of the ingame oceans by more than a couple of percent before asking for terms. He stated that he was willing to make concessions in England but would fight to the last for anything on the mainland, including Denmark; as I did not want to be the one who exhausted our manpower and gold reserves, I stated that I could be bought off with colonies. I thus gained enough Mexican land to make another 10-province colonial nation, a fine outcome of a war in which I did not fight on any decisive front.
North America, 1629. Note the vast, frozen Yngling domains in the north, Irish colonies spreading out from Florida, and Jewish (light blue) settlements in Quebec.
In addition to this great European war, I was attacked by Sauron in a sordid little colonial scuffle, in which he retook the Cape colony; as he had built up his navy to three times my size – in his own words, “I’m a navy with a state, what do you want from me?” – and my alliance with Tazzzo had expired, there wasn’t anything to be done about that. In any case the Americas are currently looking quite promising, and as a small nation I must perforce concentrate on one direction at a time; the Far East would be a distraction. Some Middle-Eastern and Indian fighting rounds out the list of the session’s player wars:
Turning the Cape Colonial war, reduced win number Sauron : 1258.55 -> 1330.79 "King of Men, would you kindly get off my lawn?" King of Men : 1354.11 -> 1273.06 "Well, there doesn't seem to be anything that can be done" War for the Rhone James : 1467.57 -> 1496.59 Hagbard : 1980.22 -> 2019.37 Blayne : 1440.28 -> 1412.39 King of Men : 1273.06 -> 1266.9 (25%) "Fight to the last Frenchman!" Tazzzo : 1535.47 -> 1528.03 (25%) Mike : 1619.27 -> 1611.43 (25%) War for the Rhine Blayne : 1412.39 -> 1434.53 "Death to Dragoon!" King of Men : 1266.9 -> 1286.75 "No, of course the planned war isn't against you, Dragoon" Tazzzo : 1528.03 -> 1551.98 Nekronion : 1432.18 -> 1454.63 "I have an army too!" Mike : 1611.43 -> 1636.69 "Certainly we can extend our DA, Dragoon" Dragoon : 1648.78 -> 1627.24 "This is what I get for not killing people when I should." War for the Port LaxSpartan : 1684.96 -> 1730.94 Mark : 1497.64 -> 1538.51 BCM : 1399.5 -> 1356.87 Yami : 1260.03 -> 1221.65 War for India BCM : 1356.87 -> 1275.65 Yami : 1221.65 -> 1148.53 Khan : 1792.14 -> 1684.87 Ranger : 1315.89 -> 1440.4 Sauron : 1330.79 -> 1456.71 Levi : 1500 -> 1641.94
Ynglinga Saga 