When is Slaine set?

[House of Usher]

Probably pointless even pondering this, if Slaine lives in a parallel world to our own where time is meaningless and all sort of coalesces into one ancient past full of ahistorical Celts, Norsemen, Egyptians and Atlantians, but Ukko said something in The Smuggler that rather gave the game away.

I dimly remember that when Slaine began it was set c.5000 BC - isn't that when the Land of the Young was cut off from the rest of Europe by the Deluge?

In The Smuggler, Ukko says something about the 'Trojan Donkey.' I don't know exactly when Troy was supposed to have been founded, but the Trojan War is supposed to have happened between 1100 and 1500 BC, which I'm supposing dates The Smuggler storyline to within 1000 years of the birth of Christ.

Of course, this speculation is fruitless because Slaine and Ukko are time travellers, as has been depicted in previous adventures, and might well have heard stories of ancient Troy during their sojourns in Roman, Arthurian or Norman Britain. In any case, the cast of Slaine are acquainted with such anachronistic knowledge as bra cup sizes, anger management and the plot of Fatal Attraction, so why shouldn't they also know about the legends of ancient Troy, whether those stories took place before or after Slaine's own lifetime?

Time is a funny thing in Slaine's world. It is susceptible to the influence of gravity after all, don'tcha know.

[TordelBack]

Stop it, please, I have a job and a family.  You can't give me an opening like that, it's not fair.  

Very very shortened version of my position:

There's no time when 'core' Sláine could have happened - the 'marker' date of the flooding of the North and Irish Seas place it  no later than the Middle Stone Age (in the case of the Irish Sea the early Stone Age, but we'll let that one pass) - thus no Iron swords, celtic idols, Vikings, Troy, Tara, megalithic tombs, fogous, Glastonbury - even Atlantis is pretty much out of the picture.

Instead the stories take place in a pan-European dreamtime, where all the myths and legends of Europe's peoples take place.  The only sense of chronology in this otherwise timelss 'past' is that Slough Feg, the Old Horned Goid, has existed since deep glacial times (his painting in Les Trois Freres probably dates to the Grevettian, so between 30 and 20K years ago), but glaciers have receded to the north by Sláine's time, and will experience a final surge south and dramatic melting in The King and The Horned God, maybe an oral memory of the pulse of stadial and interstadial, glacial and interglacial  - Feg's old world predates Sláine's by some indefinable time, but Sláine's 'time' is pretty much all post-glacial times at once.  

He emerges from this dreamtime out of the cauldron into 'real' history, starting with the Roman stuff.

You wouldn't let it lie.

[Mike Gloady]

Yeah, that's what I was going to say.  Although it'd have been less well-wordeded and that.

[John Caliber]

I would have just said 'In The Past' 

[Mike Gloady]

It's not anything resembling the REAL past, it REALLY isn't.  That's sort of the point, it's not our past that TB can dig up but the mythical past that existed in the popular imagination.  Hence TB's answer being right and yours... less so.  Pat Mills said as much in an interview or introduction some time back, damned if I can remember which or where though.

[House of Usher]

I would have just said 'In The Past' 

That just made me laugh so much.

[maryanddavid]

The main source of Slaine as a character in  'Warriors Dawn' is lifted from the Ulster Cycle, which is supposed to have taken place roughly around the time of Christ. The Sky Chariots, and The Horned God are lifted from the Mythological cycle which 'took place' over a  millenia before the events in the Ulster cycle.
As with all Mills timelines, they dont really matter, The ABC Warriors is one I tried to figure out before, where is termight in the current story? Did I miss something?

David

[Roger Godpleton]

It's all a dream.

[JOE SOAP]

It's set during one of Pat Mills' "bad moods".

[Roger Godpleton]

Da Biz still has Pat's menstrual blood in his hair.

[volo]

In any case, the cast of Slaine are acquainted with such anachronistic knowledge as bra cup sizes, anger management and the plot of Fatal Attraction, so why shouldn't they also know about the legends of ancient Troy, whether those stories took place before or after Slaine's own lifetime?

When did characters in Slaine show knowledge of bra cup-sizes, anger management, etc?

[House of Usher]

Cup sizes was in The Smuggler, anger management was in that travelling carnival story, and Fatal Attraction was referenced in one of the Invasions stories about 5 years ago when some woman Slaine had pissed off was boiling scared bunny rabbits in a cauldron.

[TordelBack]

.... Attraction was referenced in one of the Invasions stories about 5 years ago when some woman Slaine had pissed off was boiling scared bunny rabbits in a cauldron.

And let's not even think about what rabbits were doing in Ireland in the first place (not introduced until at least the 12thC AD).

[Alski]

Duh! It's eassy:

It's set a long time ago, in a galaxy faaaaar faaaaar away!

[Richmond Clements]

I just don't know how this thread has got this far with the Mayor...