A Very Brief History of Geltvelt
In ancient times Troll society was orderly and hierarchical. The entire land was divided into several regions, each ruled by a SuperWarTroll who held sway over minor Trolls and they over lesser Trolls in turn. Life was simpler, as the MannaMakers had yet to be invented and trollstuf consisted entirely of lots and lots of dirt. Each of the Trolls staked out huge domains of this dirt and collected their trolltolls from their individual plots of dirt. A small portion of that they paid in taxes to their OverTrolls, who themselves paid their OverTrolls, and so on up to the SuperWarTroll. The Elves applied their shveice to the dirt to produce the Manna (it could hardly be called Magic at that time) which they turned over to their Trolls. The Trolls gave back just enough of the Manna to allow the Elves to live. Essentially, the Elves belonged to the dirt, and the dirt belonged to the Trolls. It was a simple, admirable, and in many respects a highly satisfactory arrangement. It was limited, however, because relatively little Manna could be produced from this trollstuf (after all, it was nothing but dirt, albeit vast acre upon acre of dirt). The SuperWarTrolls regularly rode off on their mammoths (mammoths then being the principal mode of transport for the eminent) to make war on each other, attempting thus to increase their holdings of trollstuf, but while boundaries ebbed and flowed, nothing else much changed in Geltvelt for many centuries.
The Advent of the Hams. Then gradually, something remarkable began to happen. Independent Elves (history is silent as to exactly how they became independent) began to live closely together in units called “hams.” These hamites, as they came to be known, started inventing all sorts of interesting things that improved the quality of the available Manna. The first of these inventions (and the one that made the existence of the hams possible) was “swapink.” You see, in the course of those endless wars, it was noticed that different regions specialized in different kinds of Manna, and it would be lovely to be able to get ones hands on all of the different kinds of Manna from all of the different regions. The Trolls realized that the noble and proper way to do that would be to go to war, slaughter the other regions' WarTrolls, and just take over, but the Elves had more devious and ignoble ideas. (Even though war was properly thought of as the domain of the noble Trolls, Elves were naturally necessary for the really nasty and dangerous work, so Elves too had noticed the variety of Manna to be had various regions.) They thus began the lowly if useful business of exchanging one sort of Manna for another. The hams grew up by rivers and bays and other locations useful as centers of transportation. Since huge amounts of Manna passed through the hams, the hamites themselves became quite rich, something hitherto unheard of among Elves.
As the hamites gained greater and greater control over the flow of Manna, they began to change. They became more and more like Trolls. Their children often turned out to be Trolls rather than Elves. It became confusing. After a while it was hard to tell if a hamite was really an Elf or a Troll or something in-between. In one respect, however, they remained clearly Elf-like: they did not go off riding on mammoths to war. They noticed that they could get much richer doing what they were doing than the WarTrolls could by charging off to war. For their part, the old Trolls (the Trolls who had always been Trolls) had gotten somewhat lazy. The hamites supplied them with lots of new and rare Manna without the bother of riding off to war on mammoths, even more than they were likely to gain through their previous and glorious war-making. (Generally, almost as much Manna was destroyed in war as the victors ever gained). The hamites had begun changing Gelveltian society in novel and dangerous ways.
The Invention of Trelvmacht. The hamites certainly invented many marvelous new things, both MannaMakers and institutions, but one of the institutions they created was extremely dangerous. That was the invention of trelvmacht. It definitely seemed a radical and bizarre idea at first. It is hard to believe that it gained nearly universal acceptance among the Geltveltians and proved to be extremely effective at maintaining social order, but that is in fact the case. The core idea behind trelvmacht is that there is no real difference between Trolls and Elves—that they should all be simply called trelves. Moreover, the doctrine insists that all trelves are equal and should each have equal power, thus rejecting both the obvious natural superiority of the Trolls, but also the hereditary and hierarchical power structure of Troll society that had served so wonderfully to maintain civic order. This radical idea came about because although the hamites were becoming more powerful and more Troll-like, they were never really accepted by the old Trolls. From their point of view, an Elf was always an Elf, no matter how green his complexion or how bulbous his nose or how leathery his ears. They insisted that the hamites had no right to rule even though the hamite control of swapink meant control of Manna and thus control of power. The Trolls insisted that they had a Divine Right to rule; they thus had a Theory, and that was very intimidating. The hamites developed the idea of trelvmacht so that they could have their own Theory. There ensued a series of terrible civil wars, but since the hamites had by this time most of the real power, their Theory of trelvmacht won out. But this Theory immediately proved to be as dangerous to the new Trolls (the hamites) as the old Trolls had predicted. The rule of “one trelf, one vote” which was enshrined in the Theory of trelvmacht now meant that the great mass of lowly, shveice-corrupted Elves had great power. It is greatly to their credit that the hamites were able, through a number of ingenious devices, to restore Troll-power, even declaring it to be the natural and inevitable consequence of trelvmacht.
