To recap from yesterday: Terrace is the planet, Realmgard is a continent on that planet. Sort of like how — fittingly for Tolkien’s birthday — Middle-earth is the continent, Arda is the world, and Eä is essentially the entire created universe.
Realmgard
As one of the largest continents in Terrace, Realmgard’s comparatively expansive landmass and diverse geography has historically facilitated the rise and development of distinct, diverse cultural groups throughout the continent.
One of several situated on the world of Terrace, the continent of Realmgard is politically and culturally diverse. In former centuries between a third and a half of the continent was ruled over by the Elven Empire based in Natalias. The legacy of Imperial rule still unifies the continent linguistically, culturally, and politically.
As one of the largest continents in Terrace, Realmgard’s comparatively expansive landmass and diverse geography has historically facilitated the rise and development of distinct, diverse cultural groups throughout the continent.
Although the Elven language has been largely supplanted as the continent’s lingua franca by the Gardian language spoken in the Free Cities on the continent’s northeast, Elven remains used for religious, scholarly, and legal purposes, in addition to being a direct linguistic descendant of the current Natalian, Pelayan, and Gallicantien languages.
The spread of the Gardian language has been largely facilitated by the Free Cities’ extensive trade networks, both within Realmgard and to the other continents of the world of Terrace. Despite their small populations and territories compared to kingdoms such as Aurora, Pelayo, and Gallicantu, the Free Cities are both wealthy and politically influential.
The politically fractured nature of Realmgard means that wars between cities and nations have not been uncommon throughout its history, though Realmgard is generally enjoying a period of stability and peace at present.
The geography of Realmgard is as diverse as its population, containing large expanses of rolling plains, looming mountains, cold forests and tundra in the north, hot, sprawling deserts in the south. For the sake simplicity, the numerous islands off Realmgard’s coasts, though not physically connected to the mainland, are counted as part of the continent.
In general, for geographic and cartographic purposes, Realmgard is viewed as being the “middle” of the world of Terrace — due in part to the existence of other continents to Realmgard’s east and south. When a line is drawn on maps of Terrace to divide the world into east and west, the line is generally drawn through the capital city of Gallicantu in eastern Realmgard.
Also, FYI: “Realm” means ‘realm.’ “Gard…” also means ‘realm.’
Check out the rest of the Encyclopedia Realmgardica here.
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
