The Toll of Fortune

The Era of the Gay Vampire is over, the Era of the Indo-European Man has returned.

The Toll of Fortune Cover Art, Envak Enkaqti

John Carter: I’ve thought for a long time that the Aryan period between the upper neolithic and the bronze age (I really hate the term ‘Proto-Indo-European’) is fertile ground for historical fiction and fantasy. Most fantasy novels take place in a vaguely Medieval, Tolkienesque setting, which gives a lot of the more contemporary stuff a feeling of warmed-over pastiche, and I’m not really aware of much historical fiction set during the primordial age. The only novels I can think of are Dan Davis’ Godborn books (which are also fun reads, by the way). Of course there are no written records, so there isn’t a lot to go on, but at the same time that gives the imagination lots of space to explore. Another factor, however, is quite frankly political. Our society has become quite fragmented and deracinated. The Aryan age is a deep root that we can grasp onto, which unites essentially every European and European-diaspora nation on the planet. That could provide the basis for a sense of self-conscious prepolitical unity amongst the European peoples, founded on something more tangible than the set of nebulous Our Values that were invented five minutes ago. Were any of these considerations on your mind when you sat down to write The Toll of Fortune?

A.J.R. Klopp: There are a few more books scattered about, William Golding’s The Inheritors covers a meeting of humans and Neanderthals, but there’s nothing about the Indo-Europeans. There are two reasons for that: (1) After WWII it became stigmatized and even academic research could be career suicide if it wasn’t couched in terms acceptable to leftwing academics; (2) Until recently we haven’t had very conclusive evidence given the political barriers to writing about it. That changed with the aDNA revolution. In less than 10 years we have effectively proven that the Yamnaya Culture were the first to speak Proto-Indo-European, domesticate horses (mostly for eating) and then ride them. The “Cultural Diffusion” model (read: peaceful) of expansion has been rejected (though some leftwing academics persist on flogging that horse).

Now to your question, providing a sense of unity was certainly one consideration. This book is part of a series that will explore the unifying themes of epic storytelling in Western Culture. The Indo-European tradition is the basis for this and there’s lots of ore to mine. Of course it’s all been mined before, just not as “historical” fiction. My biggest inspiration came from considering the question, “what if these foundational themes of Western storytelling (which have had more than their fair share of political and cultural impact) were based on real events unique to our history?” Surely other meta-cultural traditions (Semitic-Mesopotamian, Sinnic, Kushitic, etc) have had their own unique stories that shaped them, but we’re now at a point where we can directly identify our genetic and cultural ancestors with far greater precision. I wanted to bring that all together.

I also wanted to write something that was politically allegorical and relevant to the inflection point that we seem to be going through as a civilization – one that I see directly related to the tension between pastoralist and agriculturalist modes of being. I believe that the conflict between these two types of people is very much driving our current situation.

JC: The Toll of Fortune has the feeling of a meticulously researched work. You seem to be drawing on plot frames from mythology and folk-tales – one of the plot arcs seems to be The Smith and the Devil, if I’m not mistaken, and later in the book you seem to be drawing from Beowulf – along with quite a few details from archaeology, anthropology, comparative linguistics, and so on. I’m assuming you drew extensively from The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and probably also from Dumezil’s work. I was wondering if you could give us a brief bibliography (for instance, did you make use of Imperium Press’s Folk-Tales and the Indo-European Tradition?), maybe point out a few places where the research you did pointed the work in creative directions you hadn’t considered, and indicate what other specific myths or folk-tales you were drawing from.

AK: Yes, I read about 25,000 pages (between books and papers). Anthony’s “Horse, Wheel and Language” was an early read that set me on this path. The “Folk Tales” book was used as well. Many other references were used from the general to the specific. For example, the scene involving dog and wolf sacrifice is about as factual as you can make fiction and comes directly from some of Anthony’s other research (right down to the direction that the skulls were split). However, in general most of my research focused on the genetics, archaeology and linguistics, rather than the philosophical. There are some other books I’d recommend but I’d draw the reader’s attention to my website where I specifically list them (https://13fathers.com/further-reading/). The list is by no means exhaustive or in order. I didn’t come to Dumezil until after I’d completed the manuscript.

I’m glad you brought up the Smith and Devil trope as it’s arguably the oldest story in Indo-European culture. It’s one that comes up in The Toll of Fortune as several ‘pacts’ are made. Of course, the Indo-Europeans didn’t have a “Devil” in our Christian-influenced meaning of the word. Nevertheless, the reference is very relevant, and this will come up over and over again. There is a price for everything, and as Bob Dylan said, “you gotta serve somebody.”

Commisioned art for The Toll of Fortune, Lucas Marques

JC: One of the things I loved about The Toll of Fortune is that it leaves it open to the reader’s interpretation whether or not magic is real. When the crone gives Wolf the package of what I suppose is saltpetre or something, because she had a dream, which later turns out to be essential; or later when Wolf has a vision before he forges the bronze weapon, in which he’s convinced that he’ll pay a steep price for the weapon, which indeed comes to pass albeit not as he expected: maybe these are instances of psychic phenomena, but maybe it’s also just intuition or even coincidence. However, the characters themselves believe that these are visions from the gods, that they live in an enchanted world suffused with spirits. This creates a really beautiful effect, which draws the reader into their world much more effectively than wizards casting fireball for 3d6 damage, and it makes you sort of look around at the world you actually inhabit and wonder if the ancient’s weren’t correct all along, and we inhabit a miraculous reality. Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King series did a very similar thing to excellent effect. Was this an influence on you, or did you decide to adopt this approach on your own?

AK: I’m glad that was your takeaway because that’s what I wanted. I want the scientifically minded reader or the mystically endowed reader to be able to read it and still believe their worldview is correct. It was not easy managing that balance. I had to make the magic seem “real” enough and technological effects seem natively situated. I pushed the envelope a bit, but none of it is totally unrealistic. The ancient Egyptians were aware of meteoritic iron, for instance.

I adore Cornwell but hadn’t read that series of his. The approach (or inspiration) was simply my own technical knowledge filtering how someone 5000 years ago might view it. Almost nothing in that world would have had a technical explanation. Explanations would range from mystical to magical to divine to the natural. We have forgotten many simple things given our current level of abundance. Even in Classical Antiquity they would have had a hard time appreciating certain things from the Copper Age. For example, while copper was starting to be used for tools/weapons in the Pontic Steppe around 3000 BC we’re not talking about giant copper axes from Lord of the Rings. Adzes (much more common than axes) were used and had small copper tangs perhaps an inch wide – they were not clearing forests with them. Getting this “look and feel” right, not just in the context of “The Copper Age”, but for the Yamnaya specifically in that part of the Pontic Steppe (and modern-day Romania) required a lot of research. I’m sure archaeologists out there could still critique it but at the end of the day we can’t say anything with exact certainty.

This is critical, though, to achieving the right balance of magic and technology because any technology would have been considered magical. Take the Tartaria Tablets (something not tangential to my story). Best speculation today is that they were a manual for something – possibly metallurgy. As this series progresses that view will shift, but in 3000 BC metallurgy on the Pontic Steppe was relatively rare (we don’t find too many metal objects in graves of the Yamnaya, compared to, say, the famous Varna Culture and their gold-bedazzled tombs from a millennium prior). We actually see more metal in the archaeology of the nearby agriculturalist peoples of the Balkans, and we find a rich culture of metallurgy having evolved just north of them about another thousand years before that among the local Hunter-Gatherers. Here’s a fun fact: if “Bronze Age” simply means when bronze was first smelted then in some parts of Europe (around the Balkans) it started in the mid-6^th millennium, yet when we refer to the “Nordic Bronze Age” we’re talking about a period starting about 1800 BC. You have to be very conscious of what these labels actually mean for material culture. The last thing I want is to be anachronistic (like the TV show Vikings). I’m a purist when it comes to historical verisimilitude. I’m sure there were things I got wrong but after 25,000 pages of research I’m less worried. So, we have different people in the story finding amazement with different things and thinking magic is at work, when really it’s just a neighbouring culture with five hundred extra years of metallurgy. You have to take that into account with every character interaction.

The Tartaria Tablet

JC: So long as we’re speaking of magic, the elephant in the room are the firstborn or titans, who I guess are neanderthals. These are the only obvious departure from strict historical realism in the book, since of course, as far as we know, they were long-extinct by the upper neolithic. You get around that by giving them the ability to hibernate for exceptionally long periods of time, which they learned to do by studying bears and then applying a process that reads a bit like stone-age biofeedback. These also aren’t the cuddly, gentle, peaceful, matriarchal neanderthals of Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, either, but vicious cannibalistic monsters that see Homo sapiens as just another prey animal. The way you to depict them is reminiscent of Tree of Woe’s When Orcs Were Real, based on Danny Vendramani’s book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans. Did you have this in mind, or were you drawing on other research?

AK: I’m aware of Vendramani’s book but haven’t read it yet. The inspiration for the First Born was partly the Neanderthals, and partly my own imagination. I was originally inspired by an English major friend of mine who suggested that Grendel was simply an Anglo-Saxon folk memory of encounters with earlier humans. That thought germinated in my mind for a long time, and honestly many of these folk tales (Semitic Nephilim, Norse Jotun, Gilgamesh’s Humbaba, etc.) probably just refer to the most proximate encounters between Neolithic farmers and local Hunter-Gatherers. Whether or not a folk memory could exist for 30,000 years (roughly the time between the Neanderthals supposed extinction and the events of my book) is questionable. But who knows? And that’s one of the joys of fiction. If you can make it possible without straining credulity entirely, why not try it?

I admit the millennia-long hibernation is implausible, but it was a creative solution to extending their longevity. It also had the benefit of making them quite degenerate. A once strong and proud people – the first members of genus Homo to colonize Europe – now eking out a marginal existence in a cave where the glaciers never melted. Being very few (and being awake and active only rarely – hence the periodic tales of “monsters” descending from the ice only to disappear again for centuries) they’ve inbred so much they’re no longer viable … a conundrum that presents itself with a solution in the book.

The mythology of the Titans fit into this. If the Neanderthals were the first Homo to people Europe then it’s fair to call them the Gods’ “First Born”. Their heavy frames and prodigious strength would have only amplified folk memory until they bespoke the power of the Classical Titan. When the hero Wolf sees them, he doesn’t think, “Here’s a Wildman who’s just bigger and stronger than me.” He recognizes them as different in a way presaged by myth, so he feels primordial terror. We have nothing like this today.

JC: There’s this great scene part-way through, in which the protagonist’s son, Bear, is participating in a raid on a village, which the party is doing more or less for the hell of it, and he and a companion run down a couple of slave girls and have their way with them. This entire scene, and the sub-plot that comes out of it, felt like you were delivering a deliberate bitchslap to feminist positive consent theory: she runs and struggles, but then instead of being a brute about it Bear is actually quite gentle with her and once she realizes that it’s going to happen anyhow, she lays back, enjoys it, and even falls for him. This whole incident had a mythological feeling to it. Were you drawing on any specific stories, or did you just throw it in there to annoy the women?

AK: Neither actually! There certainly is a parallel to the Rape of the Sabine Women but I was aiming at something a little different. There’s no question it’s rape, but there’s also no question that most women of inferior social standing in these types of primitive societies were subject to rape – hell even in “civilized” Europe conquering armies raped local women at least until the Second World War. So, it’s certainly realistic. It was one of the first scenes I envisioned actually. I wanted to demonstrate the idea that – unlike the passive agriculturalists hoeing their gardens and fighting the longhouse in the next valley – pastoralists were raiders. They had an entire culture oriented around the hustling of cattle and a social system geared towards defending against it. Taking things from weaker peoples was their wheelhouse (pardon the pun). This included women.

Of course there’s another dimension to it that you point out. Bear (and his cohort) don’t have sadistic intentions (as we’ve seen dominate some rape cultures recently). The girls also have a different view. As slaves they are inured to inhumane treatment by their masters, thus once it becomes clear that these men are not like their masters they have a different reaction. To them, these physically and mentally superior invaders provide an opportunity for social mobility. I have lots of fun imagining the “feminist critique” to this, for all the slop about different epistemologies and indigenous “ways of knowing” they only ever settle on the interpretations that support their biases. But here you see something familiar (rapine) in a very different way with a very different ending. The leftist would put themselves in the girls’ position and say “unless I respond with complete outrage I am enabling an abuser” and then they’d likely get killed and their genes wouldn’t get passed on. The smarter “gene” says, here’s an incredible opportunity. Res ipsa loquatur tells us how history probably happened.

There’s also a conversation between Bear and his father (Wolf, the story’s hero) where they discuss what happened. I didn’t insert this as an apologia but rather to investigate their motives further. Men in this time acted without restraint. They were also capable of deeper reflection on those actions.

And I certainly am not intent on annoying women. One of them was the editor (my wife!) The women in my novel are good or bad, courageous or risible, but none are simplistic. This is definitely masculine literature, told from man’s perspective, yet the women are anything but after-thoughts. The key here is realism, and that’s what scares anyone on the Left. They live in a fantasyland, outside of which none of their assumptions are true and the illusion is only held together by donor/government subsidies. Since we’re past the point of declining marginal returns (civilizationally), maintaining those subsidies creates a negative-sum game, i.e. impoverishing disfavoured groups to maintain one’s own status. This decline-management strategy is not novel, and I suspect it goes back as far as the events in my book.

Rape of the Sabine Women, Luca Giordano (1634–1705)

JC: One thing that didn’t quite make sense to me was the absolute imperative for the bones of the fallen to be buried at home, which is a major plot point as it’s the necessity to retrieve those remains that initiates the quest. Numa Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City argues that this is an aspect of the primordial ancestor cult, but I was under the impression that the Yamnaya were semi-nomadic pastoralists, who don’t seem like they would have quite the same degree of intense attachment to the land that settled agriculturalists such as the Early European Farmers had. With all the research you’ve done, does this aspect of Fustel de Coulanges’ reconstruction of Aryan religion hold up?

AK: That’s a fantastic point, especially because it related to de Coulanges’ view on the genesis of landed property (it was tied to the bones!), but that’s an aside … for now. To answer that question I’d say there were a few factors necessitating the return of the bones. First it was a proxy for the boys that were taken by the First Born. Sure, they could’ve said, “let’s find the boys, or their bones, and then just sanctify them and head back.” But if you’re going to go to all that trouble, you’d probably bring the bones back too. Second, they were constructing tumuli back then so interring the bones within would be another way to tie them back to their ancestors – from whom they were profanely shorn – so, all the more reason to bring them back.

The tumuli must be indicative of a time when outright nomadism was ending and being replaced by something more fixed. This novel was also meant to capture the “moment” when the Yamnaya go from being “rootless” nomads to more settled people, i.e. calling a certain territory their “home”. I address this when the Clan assembles to discuss what’s to be done about the First Born and the missing boys. Their leader says the following:

“When we came out here over a half-century ago my Father, Broken-Wheel, brought our cattle and horse herds and said, ‘These lands are not our lands. Not yet. They belonged to others who have left them to waste. But they will be your lands, my son, if you can stay here long enough. Then your blood will be mixed with the soil and you and your sons and grandsons may claim the land in the name our ancestors. But beware. One day, someone might lurk over the horizon. Someone who waits until you are weakened, and leaving the land to waste, and then pushes you out.”

The point is meant to cut through the bullshit over who’s indigenous and who’s really the native. The reality is that if you take land, you’ve taken it. Of course, you must hold it and usually by force. No one can hold it forever, but when you stop trying, you’ll lose it very quickly as our elites are shocked to discover. There is no normativity in this statement, neither the autochthonous nor the conqueror is morally favoured, it’s simply an Iron Law of Nativeness. Note that much of the land being grazed/settled by the Yamnaya in western Ukraine and Moldova (I have exact places pinpointed on maps where the events take place, by the way) were once land farmed by the Cucuteni-Tripyllia people. For a variety of reasons (some their own fault, others simply bad fortune) they no longer maintained it. There is no greater curse in history than the epitaph, “Failed with their lands” in my mind.

I’d also point out that the chapter from which that passage is drawn was entitled “The Specialty of Rule” which is from Ulysses’s famous speech to the Greeks in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (I’ll give a free signed copy of my book to anyone who can tell me all the chapter title references). The point being that this is a foundational lesson of rule uttered at the beginning of Western politics itself. Let that echo through the Ages or let Ages echo no more, I suppose.

The Tumulus of the Athenians at Marathon

Obviously, the not so terribly subtle goal of this interview is to induce you to pick up a copy of The Toll of Fortune, which is available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions. It’s a fantastic read: a great adventure story, a fascinating concept, and extraordinarily well-researched. Several friends have read it already, and their reviews have been uniformly positive. Order it now.

JC: One of my favourite parts was the interaction between the Aryan warband and the neolithic farmers ruled by a vicious high priestess named the Maven. It wonderfully depicts a degenerative matriarchy, one quite literally centred on a longhouse, in which the men are kept pacified with enervating drugs and food that saps their vitality, while the priestesses clandestinely worship dark gods, and engage in petty manipulative behaviour such as trying to trick the Aryans into eating dog (which is strictly forbidden). The Maven is a striking character, with her face hidden behind caked-on makeup, which of course has a ritual purpose but also gives the impression of a crazy woman who’s long since hit the wall and slammed right through it but is desperately trying to preserve the illusion of beauty and youth; that artifice also seems like a visual metaphor for the state of the Broad-Eaves Hall itself, which presents the facade of a healthy and pious society doing the best it can with a difficult climate, concealing a corrupt and rotten core that is the ultimate source of the hardships afflicting the land. It could probably be argued that the Maven, and not the firstborn, is the real monster. Did you conceive of this element mainly as a direct commentary on the modern longhouse, or is there a historical and mythological basis for it (e.g., the story of Perseus and the Medusa?)

AK: To be honest, I hadn’t thought of the Medusa analogy, though I like it. The First Born are the impetus for the story (mythological and actual) but the conflict with the farming society and its Maven is the real drama. There’s the obvious critique about matriarchy, which is well-worn by now but still relevant. The accessory facts about the enervating nutrition and sedation with drugs are not at all fanciful narrative elements to dress the allegory. Poor nutrition was an enabling factor that lead to the demise of these farmers as a people. The first farmers of Europe settled from Greece to the Hungarian plains by 5600 BC however this was not farming as we know it. While the Cucuteni-Tripyllia civilization is famous for giant settlements of up to 40,000 [sic] people, by 3300 BC (the time of the book) they’re in severe decline on account of a cooling climate and likely the first instance of the plague. Moreover, not all cultures were as grand as them. Most Neolithic farmers in this era/location lived in small communities and farmed small communal plots not scattered across the countryside but in specific locations tracing what’s called loess soil. Loess soil is very fertile (its friable grains allow nitrogen penetration) and thus was recognized by them as low-hanging fruit for cultivation. Of course, restricting yourself to one soil type while not understanding much about soil exhaustion is not a good long-term strategy.

To make matters worse they are known to have cultivated only fives types of grain. This diet was supplemented with some garden vegetables and some meat from (mostly) domesticated pigs and goats. When I depict these people as malnourished, with mottled teeth and eyes covered in bitot-spots I’m describing a certain type of malnutrition that comes from a monocultural grain diet high in phytic acid – an anti-nutrient. Their food was quite literally poisoning them, albeit slowly. After centuries of this plus global cooling plus zoonotic viruses you get a society under extreme duress.

You’re very right to point out that their rulers were in fact trying to perpetuate this on their own people, the Maven having banned growing other crops. This is just my own overlay because it’s especially noxious yet sounds very familiar to the actions of current regimes across the Western world – knowingly selling a detrimental course of action as a prophylactic. This is surely the definition of evil if there ever was one, but it’s also worth pointing out that the Maven and her “expert” class of priests believe this is the best course of action… for themselves if not the rest of the community. They’ve made a deal with the First Born and their patron god, the Serpent. They believe they’re doing everything within their specialized knowledge to stop the poor harvests, drought and disease. But there’s no mistaking this as evil and the story has no compunctions about how this evil should be dealt with.

Another feature of the Maven was her “make-up”. This isn’t simply a prop. Each type of make-up she used was carefully researched and was in use at that time period. The ability to source such luxury goods (and alter one’s appearance in such an ethereal way) would have demarcated her not just as high-status but also with a demi-god-like aura. However, this celestial elevation comes as a literal cost: each of those tinctures were highly toxic (containing lead and antimony). In fact, her behaviour is consistent with symptoms of both lead and antimony poisoning. So, there’s an element of chemical causation behind her behaviour for the more scientifically minded reader. That’s not to explain away her actions, but once again it conjoins the notions of magical and human causes. Again, I think this has parallels in modern society. How much of the West’s gynocratic suicide is caused by SSRIs, not to mention puberty-blockers and castration chemicals?

Lastly, the Maven is depicted as the de facto ruler of the longhouse, but she’s not in fact the ruler. The longhouse has a male ruler who calls himself the “Kin-Lord”. These farming societies actually were patriarchal – just less so than the Indo-Europeans. This is very important for several reasons. First, as has happened many times in political history, the real power is vested with usurpers and interlopers while the de jure ruler lives a supine life of luxury. It’s a classic degenerate polity. Second, there are all sorts of rumours of incest and other foul sexual practices among their elite. I’ll let the reader draw their own comparisons. Third, the longhouse ruler styles himself a “Lord” while the Yamnaya rulers style themselves as Band-, or Clan- “Fathers”. The notion of “lordship”, i.e. a person to whom you owe an obligation of submission (NB not fealty) without any express or implied reciprocity is very foreign to the Indo-European mind. Forget the etymological origins of our English word for “lord” (which are quite innocent), the Broad-Eave Hall’s Kin-Lord draws his legitimacy from the Semitic-Mesopotamian tradition of a God-King, as you might expect for a people descended from farmers of eastern Anatolia.

JC: You mentioned that you think the ancient conflict between pastoral and agricultural civilization is directly relevant to modern conflicts. Can you expand on that? This seems like an interesting line of inquiry. Obviously, Europe is affected by both genetic and cultural influences from the PIE pastoralists, as well as the agrarian Early Neolithic Farmers, and at this point several thousand years on from the Aryan conquests they’re inextricably intertwined with one another. Do you see this as more of a biological conflict between different human types, a cultural conflict due to fundamental tensions between irreconcilable lifeways, the recurrent re-emergence of archetypal patterns, or something else?

AK: Strictly speaking it’s not accurate to refer to ‘Aryan’ conquests in Europe. There’s no evidence Indo-Europeans in Europe ever used that as an ethnonym and some people (not even on the Left) will go blue in the face redditing about that. I ran with “Areyan” because it’s familiar, not totally implausible and the word did have a Proto-Indo-European origin, meaning something like “free” or “noble” or “best”. However, you bring up what I think is the single most important contemporary point.

You’re right about the intertwining. After all, R1b and R1a are single nucleotide polymorphisms, not even genes. They can tell you about a direct lineage, but they are neither unique identifiers of that lineage nor exclusively determinative of any particular form of genetic inheritance. It’s possible to have R1b but if each of your male progenitors married a woman of Neolithic farming descent you’d conceivably have little Steppe ancestry as far as your whole genome is concerned.

I do think there is a biological component to what’s going on though. I’m not an evolutionary biologist so these views are just my educated impression, but in aggregate human behaviour does seem to bifurcate into two realities. Most people are passive, conformist and risk averse and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Many modes of life will lead to higher survival rates therewith. A minority of people are aggressive, risk-taking mavericks, and this is not always a good thing either. Depending on what period in history we are talking about one type can outbreed the other. My point is that the former category has its cultural (if not genetic) antecedent in Neolithic farming life. Remember, the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (from which the vast majority of European non-Steppe DNA comes from) stopped being Hunter-Gatherers around 9000 BC and only set out for the Aegean around 7000 BC. Then another ~4000 years passed until Steppe Pastoralists came along. That’s 6000 years of breeding and evolution under relatively stable conditions.

On the other hand there was a long (but comparatively shorter) period of time under which the Yamnaya emerged from their precursor population (something which is still a matter of research). We know that evolution can happen very quickly and I think there were several revolutions that precipitated this. Being able to domesticate and ride horses was one. All of a sudden your ability to transport yourself has increased by at least an order of magnitude. That’s hard for us to imagine – even bigger than the advent of railroad. Their adaptation to the steppe environment was another. Feeding off horses and then raising herds of cattle (much more amenable to wide open ranges and grassland than other livestock) created a cultural revolution. A herd of cattle was the first (non-human) form of movable property, and I believe Western concepts of ownership actually derive from that, not from landed property which came much later for the Indo-Europeans. The idea of personally “owning” something more than a few tangible possessions – and I’m not talking about prestige goods that were only for the elites – would have been unprecedented. Add to that BAP’s speculation that the lessons from breeding horses for tractability (and cattle for size) might have influenced ideas about breeding human traits as well.

The implications were huge. It created incentives for growth. It presented opportunities for rapid windfalls where theft was concerned. It necessitated new social rules for what to do with that wealth during life and especially after it. Ideas of inheritance were irrevocably changed – a possible vector for perpetuating genetic or memetic traits. Moreover the (relatively) rapid proliferation of wealth among a group of materially poor people would have forged new traditions and common rituals. It would have endowed each Indo-European boy with a sense that, with a bit of daring and cunning, he too could have a herd and range to himself and be fabulously wealthy – so wealthy that instead of dying and having the wind pass over him (to quote Psalms) he’d have a mountain erected to his memory visible from miles across the plain.

That’s gotta change you. Imagine what risks you’d take to achieve this, what hardships you’d endure and what trouble you’d seek. The Indo-Europeans were so beset with this pioneer, rough-riding life that they swept over the Western steppes through Europe all the way Denmark, where they scoured the forests to replicate the ranges to the east. Now compare that to the ANFs who’d been farming their gardens, worshipping their female gods in dark, smoky halls and fighting each other over what’s left of the arable loess soil for 6000 years. It beggars belief to think that these were not two biologically different brains.

Now we’ve run out of accessible frontier. The wages of risk are poor now. The only windfalls are lottery tickets and sportsball betting. All joking aside, we’re seeing this manifest as a law of declining marginal returns. Western economies have desperately leveraged themselves to foreign powers in order to juice returns to assets and maintain the illusion of a stable standard of living, but the illusion has worn off for most. The one-percenters have ordained themselves with multiplying credentials of lesser and lesser value and resorted to placating the masses with lip-service about a productivity-paved technological panacea. AI will probably supplant them as well, for what it’s worth. But as I argued in one of my Substack essays “No Country for Old Europe”, without frontiers to conquer, Indo-European Man – the risk-taking man, the adventurous man – withers.

No Country for Old Europe

You can almost hear the shrill chiding of longhouse hall-monitors and their cucked soyjaks. They despise everything about risk, that’s why they loved the COVID lockdown, with it’s “work” from home, atomized social existence, and infinite social spending paid with future borrowing. The longhouse existence is nasty and bleak, it crushes the soul, but it’s replicable in most places on Earth and can last a very long time if allowed to feed on the lifeblood of others’ enterprise. The Indo-European existence can be brutish and short, but only because causation is never far behind. Reality strikes fast, hence the Indo-European ontologies of natural order. This is not even a split of Left vs. Right (though almost all the Left falls within the whelping system of the longhouse). Only the Indo-European tradition can bring reward from risk, however.

There are actually two white-pills from this. First, the longhouse system of social conformity and stagnation can’t be tolerated indefinitely, certainly not at our current levels of leverage. Stagnation will give way to violent collapse, not simply more devolution. Second, outer space beckons. Musk has reduced the cost of putting a kilogram into orbit by nearly an order of magnitude. Moreover, in the coming years I’m convinced there will be breakthroughs in space propulsion and theoretical physics that will throw open the shutters to technological progress that the Copenhagen Model and the Solvay Conference shut. Don’t be surprised if a probe is sent to Alpha Centauri long before you die. Once a new frontier opens the arguments for social conformity and lower standards of living won’t carry water.

Tobias Roetsch

JC: Speaking of titles such as Clan-Father, you’re at pains to illustrate the intricate kin relationships that weave together Areyan society, and these play an important role in the characters’ motivations as well as in driving the plot. You show these as having a deep religious significance, alongside a purely sociological and political importance. How much of this has been reconstructed via comparative anthropology? Again, this is a major theme in Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City, for instance the importance of the patrilineal household cult and the role played by adoption in maintaining a continuity of transmission, but that’s quite an old work. Does it hold up in the more modern research? And how exactly was this reconstructed in the first place?

AK: I don’t have a very high opinion of modern anthropological research. How can you ever satisfactorily conclude, beyond rational criticism, what ancient peoples did or didn’t do with respect to rituals, traditions, and beliefs? Thus, the older thought-ways are still informative in my opinion. Nonetheless I don’t think it’s controversial among the anthropological and archaeological academy to suggest that most humans were very traditional (and the family played the dominant role in social life) 5000 years ago. It’s amazing to me that even in Ancient (pre-Christian) Rome the cult of the family was still important considering more time has elapsed between then and the Yamnaya than between us and Rome. Christianity changed the nature of reverence for one’s family – and not necessarily for better (something Francis Fukuyama, of all people, actually points out as a critical pivot in Western civilization). However, I think the rise of material abundance with the Industrial Revolution has created the greatest distance between Man and his family, his friends, his kin, and his gods. This is not reversible in any scalable sense, though we will likely see a plateauing of that material scalability. Perhaps AI cybernetics gives us all maids and 3D printed Birkin bags, but we’re clearly scraping the marginal returns from the system even with that.

JC: For the military history nerds in the audience, what do we know about the typical armaments carried by a Yamnaya warrior? Did they wear armour? Can we reconstruct any of their tactics? How did their military toolset compare to that of adjacent groups such as the Early European Farmers?

AK: The problem is preservation. Wooden or leather armour, for example, would have a low probability of surviving 5000 years – even in a Tumulus. It seems that metal weapons were rather scarce among the Yamnaya around 3300 BC – but keep in mind this is their outer historical limit. Metal weapons become much more common as we enter the 3^rd millennium. In my book most weapons would have been stone or obsidian (to the extent obsidian was trafficked from the Aegean), though I’ve included this image of a hoard of copper axes from around the same period. No surprise it was unearthed in Bulgaria. The farming peoples in the Balkans had much better access to metal (for tools or weapons) on account of their proximity to the sources of ore and the metallurgical traditions which ebbed and flowed.

Metallurgical techniques in the Copper Age were still primitive. We don’t see a more systematic approach to mining and smelting ores until the 3^rd millennium in Europe. We don’t see the proliferation of metal implements designed solely for fighting (like swords) until much later. The next image is of a copper “halberd” from the British Museum traced to Italy between 3800 BC and 2200 BC. It’s unfortunate that archaeologists called these “halberds”, because it’s very different from the eponymous weapon of the late Middle Ages, but these hacking devices were very popular. The whole idea behind the novel’s prophesied weapon – the Hammer of Heaven – was something similar in design.

Bronze was a far superior metal in terms of hardness (copper being inferior to stone and obsidian in most use cases) but didn’t become popularized in Europe for some time. The first European bronze was discovered accidentally in the Balkans because arsenic was commonly found in copper ores, and when (unknowingly) smelted gave Arsenic Bronze. But the really strong bronze is an intentional mixture of smelted tin and smelted copper. Unfortunately, tin is very rare in western Eurasia: Eastern Britain and Afghanistan being the only major sources of it (with parts of Spain having some too). The discovery of Tin Bronze was a technological revolution that inaugurated another round of Indo-European advance about a thousand years after the events in my book. Needless to say, such a revolution will be the focus of the next saga after I’ve completed the sequel to The Toll of Fortune.

One last fascinating historical footnote. Even as far back as my book there were some Bronze swords: the so-called Arslan-Tepe swords found in Anatolia. They stand out as a tantalizing clue to a development in warfare that almost nothing has been written about. I’ll just leave it there, wink wink.

JC. One thing I found a bit difficult was that I was constantly reaching for my dictionary. People accuse me of using ten-dollar words a lot, but I felt utterly mogged here. How did your vocabulary grow to such elephantine proportions?

AK: Guilty as charged, though I won’t apologize. My style is concise and I get feedback about the language being difficult at times but, to paraphrase Gandalf, every word is used exactly as it’s meant to. There are some words I have even invented myself, a hubris I will no doubt pay a price for!

But not all the words are simply Scrabble-winning showstoppers. There are simply so many words in the English language to describe the natural world that we simply don’t use any more, yet they have useful meanings. For example a “strath” and a “clough” both mean valley (and you can see these words scattered in place names all over the British Isles), but a strath is a wide valley and a clough a very narrow one. I thought, why not use the right word and revivify seldom used words – after all that’s kinda what I’m doing with the entire novel and Indo-European folklore.

There’s a bigger lesson here. As we become more reliant on technology, using ChatGPT to recall even the simplest concept or memory, we forget basics. We forget words first of all. We degenerate in the way Orwell feared in 1984 but without a State office redlining the vocabulary. Moreover, we have less and less experience with the things those words refer to. This was especially true for all the horse and wagon vocabulary that I had to learn to properly describe their material culture. Even a century ago those words were commonly used. But this is also one of the ways David Anthony was able link the Yamnaya to the original Indo-European speakers. They were the only ones who invented these words (and objects) for horses and wagons (and their accessories). So, in a way I felt justified reaching back.

JC: The Toll of Fortune was originally listed as Book 3 of The Thirteen Fathers (although I see it’s now listed as book 1). Were you trolling? Or are there more books to come in this series, and if so, when can we expect book 2? And what elements can we expect to see in it?

AK: This was a miscalculation. My website, X presence, and Substack are all branded as “The Thirteen Fathers”. Thirteen because this is intended to be a series. However, after I started writing this book I realized it would not be the first book in chronological terms. I have all the books planned out in terms of events, themes, and chronologies and there will be two books that predate the events of The Toll of Fortune by one and two thousand years respectively. Unfortunately, people see “Book III” and think, “Fuck, this isn’t the first book. What do I do now?” I was too clever by half.

So, for the record, this IS the first book. There are no others yet! My next book will be the sequel to this one and when I get the second edition to this one printed I’ll remove the reference to Book III.

As for the sequel I can say a lot about it except when it will be written. The next book will follow the lives (and conflicts) of Bear’s own two sons: Wolf and Bear (Jr.). It’s no coincidence that these boys are effectively twins and thus the great story of the Primal Twins will be retold (historical antecedents like Romulus and Remus, Prometheus and Epimetheus, are intentionally familiar). This is a story of ethnogenesis, of the birth of the polity of the Indo-Europeans in the aftermath of their victory over the farming peoples. This book did feature the theme of debt and the “pact with the devil” but the sequel will thematically address the nature of “rulership” (NB – not kingship) and how the Indo-European version of that concept both distinguishes itself from other cultures (like the Semitic-Mesopotamian-Egyptian God-King) and has come to indelibly temper the political countenance of the Western world (think: notions of freedom and liberty). Not surprisingly the hero will travel to the centre of civilization (in the 33rd century BC), namely Ur and Uruk (a place only distantly referred in The Toll of Fortune). Shit will get real. For what it’s worth I’m imagining a substantially longer narrative.

JC: Consider this an opportunity to talk about any aspects of the book that you feel haven’t already been done justice to. Let’s tip readers teetering on the edge into clicking through and ordering a copy (you should order a copy, it will make you wise, mighty, and popular with large-bosommed females).

AK: This book will hit hard. You will recognize some of characters from your daily life and hate them even more. Others you thought you knew will feel utterly alien. You will feel the same powerlessness of the hero right before revenge will whet his lips (and yours). There is nothing varnished here, it’s raw and brutal, but you’ll see your ancestors as the humans who begat the greatest cultures in history. And it’s under 300 pages!

Finally, you’ll be supporting not just me but a renaissance of based art and literature. Look, we have all kinds of brilliant non-fiction out there now – if you subscribe to John then I know you agree. We have won the non-fiction war both on the substack/X side and with the legacy media. Out of print books are being resuscitated, critiques of the welfare state, the COVID regime, the longhouse, etc, are selling books even with mainstream publishers. But art is also right wing inherently because it has all been done before. The artist’s duty is to give life to the old in new forms, retelling the traditional in ways that appeal to today. There are endless permutations, so never believe when leftists whine about needing new types of heroes and infusions of new cultural myths. They’re simply lazy. We can elect all the representatives we want, or have the best possible arguments in the non-fiction press, but that only caters to 5% of the population. Until we dominate culture again we won’t win. The good news is we can do this because of the natural advantage we have over storytelling. The Era of the Gay Vampire is over, the Era of the Indo-European Man has returned.

Thank you for devoting so much time to providing such detailed, thoughtful answers. And for those of you who have been reading along, if you’ve gotten to the end of this interview, then I know you’re interested, you know you’re interested, so what are you waiting for, go order your copy now. The Toll of Fortune is a gripping, deeply researched saga in an original setting, which resurrects old myths in such a way as to place you in the enchanted world of our ancestors, while making that world relevant to our own.

As always, I would like to thank my supporters, whose generosity keep the lights on around here, making it possible for me to read fascinating books and interview the authors for the edification and entertainment not only of my supporters, but of the rest of you freeloaders. Supporters don’t get much beyond my gratitude and the knowledge that their support is the only reason I don’t need to get a real job ... which, should that unhappy necessity come to pass, would mean a dramatic curtailment in postcards sent from Barsoom.