Fodaleir

We decided to bring you some Glinnarian religion. So you loosen up a bit.

In fact, one of our acquaintances has recently been to Sordhaw, visited several museums there, and he managed to take the photo which you can see above. And we decided it was a good reason for a post.

One of the most interesting things about the beliefs of the Glinnarian elves is that their religion is based on many events that actually happened to them in the course of their historical development. It is quite difficult to restore the context of many of them, and therefore it is difficult to understand where the pure truth, where the embellished one, and where fiction is. Therefore, treat what I wrote below with a grain of salt.

Glinnarian sources (historical and religious) claim that before 10,000 BC, the elves who lived in the territories of modern Orobe, repeatedly contacted and communicated with some... entities, whom they called The Highest Ones. Their main characteristics are:

1. They are incorporeal themselves, but they can take a visible form (sometimes a very peculiar one—more on that below).
2. Physically, they cannot influence matter, but magically they surely can; and in this regard, their strength is incredibly great.
3. There are five of them, each personifies one of the elements: fire, water, air, earth and thunder.
4. They were revered by the elves somewhere at the level of modern Christian angels, perhaps.

There is a lot more to be said about them, but I'd better move on to the topic of the post. The forms The Highest Ones took ranged from comparatively anthropomorphic ones to something downright phantasmagorical, and many of these have been described and/or sketched.

So, the image above is the icon of Fádhalear/Fodaleir, the Fire Highest One (in his most anthropomorphic form). Dating back to 1235 AD, it was modeled after contemporary Hellenic icons. It does not have any religious value, it was written solely for aesthetic reasons.

The text along the edges is translated as follows: ‘He shaped those five from the nothingness, and they gathered minds out of the hollow, and the first burned like a flame, and exuded great heat; thus he was named Fodaleir, the Fireness’.