History of Faneria: Difference between revisions

The first settlers in modern Faneria were the [[Fenni]], a pre-levantosarpedonic people who originally followed the coastlines around Levantia and settled along the freshwater coast of the [[Vandarch Sea]]. The Fenni were long thought to have been an early Celtic offshoot, but recent archeology has definitively proven that the Fenni were their own people group, diverging into tribes around northern Levantia from unclear stock, possibly a mix of [[Coscivian]] and proto-[[Finnic]] peoples. Some of the oldest Fenni remains discovered preserved in bogs and marshes additionally bore at least marginal common ancestry with [[Audonia|Audonian]] [[Tatrgr]] peoples, suggesting the Fenni may have been composed of several groups which intermixed early into the first settlement of the region they came to inhabit, though the causes behind this remain unclear.

The Fenni arrived as hunters and fishers, and came to rely on the Vandarch and its tributary rivers heavily, developing rituals of burning their dead and pouring their ashes into rivers. These practices coincided with ancestral worship practices to form a polytheistic faith centered around freshwater, and as a result early Fenni settlements featured comparatively extensive earthworks as part of their settlements to both control access to the water bodies most settlements were based around as well as to provide defensive advantages. These would adapt into hillforts similar to those used by early Celtic and Gothic peoples, though Fenni architectural practices adopted more traits from Coscivian peoples whom they traded with across the [[Kilikas Sea]] and included stone walls long before other native Levantine peoples would begin to do so. This along with advanced ironworking allowed the richer Fenni societies in the Northern Vandarch Basin, who were more heavily integrated in early sea trade via Coscivian cultures, to weather waves of Gothic migration in the 10th-8th Centuries BC which destroyed the Fenni peoples living along the southern coast of the Vandarch. However, they were unable to similarly weather Celtic invaders who arrived from the east from the 8th-6th Centuries BC, leading to the northern Vandarch being overrun primarily by a Celtic tribe known as the [[Oestrynetes]]. Another major Celtic tribe, the Yetes, similarly invaded but were pushed further west by the Oestrynetes across the Ereglasian Isthmus into modern Gothica; similarly, the Leuomes and Alloverni who followed in the early 5th Century BC were forced to stall in the Eastern Vandarch Basin and scatter into the mountainous interior, respectively, although many of the Alloverni eventually made their way to the western coast of modern Faneria and became the early Sheafhainn people.