The Bondage in Solmara
The Slavery in the Warm South · the Forge-Bondage
The Bondage in Solmara (c. 1450–1300 B.F.) was the long enslavement of the The Rimefolk in the warm southern empire of Solmara — the formative national trauma from which Borën delivered them (the great deliverance of the Book of Boren (Lawgiving)).
How It Began
The Rimefolk had come down to Solmara in a famine under Yosem the Dreamer (see Book of the Drifting), welcomed as guests. But “there arose a pharaoh-king who knew not Yosem,” who feared the cold-folk’s growing number and enslaved them — setting them to make bricks and tend the great sun-forges of Solmara in the killing heat, and at last ordering their male children drowned in the meltwater. “They groaned under the warmth, and their cry came up to the Hoarfather.”
The Meaning of the Forge
The bondage is remembered as slavery to heat itself: the Rimefolk, a people of the cold, forced to labor in the furnaces and sun-fields of the warm. It became the enduring Frostian image of sin’s slavery — to be “in Solmara” is to be enslaved to the Fevers, laboring in the heat, longing for the cold land of promise. The gospel of Stilling is preached as a “new deliverance from a deeper Solmara.”
The Deliverance
Through Borën the Hoarfather sent the Ten Thaws (plagues of heat and rot) upon Solmara, instituted the Crossing-Meal, and led the people out across the Frozen Sea (which thawed beneath the pursuing chariots). This deliverance is kept yearly at The Crossing (Passover) and is the type of all liberation — and of Connor’s freeing of the kept from the bondage of the Melt.
Significance
The Bondage and Exodus are the founding story of the Rimefolk and the deepest well of Frostian images of slavery and freedom, heat and cold, oppression and deliverance. Solmara endures in Frostian imagination as the archetypal “warm land” — and, in the Letter to the Solmarans, as the surprising place where the warm-born too are brought into the keeping of the Cold.