Anfylk and Adventure

The ideal anfylk life should be long, quiet and peaceful. A male fylkin should settle down within half a day’s walk from his father’s home and he should take a wife from no further away than the village past the next village up or down the road. He should work five days a week, help out in his or his relatives home on Choresday, enjoy himself on Feastday and rest his head on Sunday.

The female fylkin marries and has children. During the week she stays at home and tends to the garden and the kids and keeps the house tidy. She does the shopping and occasionally meets up with the other women of the village for a cup of tea or, if it’s Ladysday eve, a few pints of cider.

Young unmarried fylkin of both sexes are expected to cause a moderate amount of mischief as long as no one gets seriously hurt and no strangers are involved. Travelling is frowned upon but acceptable when properly organized and to well known locations.

No fylkin is ever, under any circumstances, supposed to have an adventure. Having an adventure is seen as a sign of bad upbringing, unreliability, mental unrest and emotional instability. A fylkin having an adventure brings his family to shame and may even put the reliability of distant relatives into question.

Despite all this, anfylk love stories of adventure. They just don’t want to be part of them. Danger and adventure is best experienced as recollections long after they occurred they reason. The best adventure stories are the ones that are true, but no one really cares if a storyteller cuts a few corners for dramatic effect.

Consequently, anfylk historical records tend to be wildly inaccurate but very dramatic. It is commonly reasoned that the important thing is to get the point across and that spicing up the story a bit just makes it more believable – if nothing else to bring it up to par with the expectations set by previous historians.

Hence, anfylk history is full of great heroes and adventurers that are completely unknown to non-fylk historians. In fact, most centers of learning where history is studied offer classes both in Anfylk History and in Accurate Anfylk History.