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On The Writing System of the Tauren
by Clearwater Brightwinter

Introduction

While it is not common knowledge in the Eastern Kingdoms, even among the diplomats and others whose job it is to know the ways of foreign lands and cultures, the Tauren people do indeed have their own writing system. Many have in fact seen this writing, and in fact examples exist here and there on trophies brought home from war – scraps of armor, a battered weapon, a dented shield. Their writing is often mistaken for a form of decoration, for it is unlike any other system of writing in existence today.

There are no Tauren dictionaries anywhere within the libraries of the great cities, and there are none in our lands who can decipher it. There are, in fact, none in any lands except the Tauren themselves. The Horde has learned to use this to their advantage, using the language as an unbreakable code, decipherable only by the Tauren at each end. I myself, in the two hundred odd years I spent with the Tauren never fully comprehended the system, though I learned much of it. And it has changed considerably since that time. I will here in this paper attempt to set down what I know of its origins and structure.

Factors in the Creation of the Tauren Writing System

The Natural Environment
The Tauren culture throughout the ages has been shaped by several key forces. First is the landscape into which they were born and the creatures they share it with. The flat plains of Mulgore, Desolace, and what today is called the Barrens naturally lent themselves to a nomadic lifestyle. The animals moved in great herds with the seasons and a lack of natural shelter discouraged the creation of permanent lodgings. This lent itself to a social structure composed of tribes and small family groups constantly traveling and following the herds, owning little more than they could carry on their backs. These tribes would meet up at traditional gathering spots and certain times of the year to trade goods and information. Today these spots are the towns outposts of Bloodhoof, Taurajo, Ghostwalker, and Crossroads. There were once others that have since been lost.

A Brief Summary of Tauren and Centaur Relations
The Tauren have also been forever shaped by their territorial rivals, the Centaur. It must be understood that, while never peaceful with each other, for a long time the two races were able to coexist with a minimum of violence. The Centaur have traditionally preferred the drier regions and were more numerous in Desolace and the Thousand Needles, as they are today. According to Tauren lore, outright hostilities with the Centaur began almost 5,000 years ago when Kalimdor underwent a great drought that lasted decades. Scarcity of food and water the two races in direct conflict with each other. The drier conditions favored the centaur who could move quickly over the flat dry ground. It heralded the first near extinction of the Tauren race. It is from this conflict that the Centaur came to regard all of the lands of central Kalimdor as theirs.

But the Tauren survived and adapted. Their build allowed them to do something the centaur could not. They could climb. They began making homes in places inaccessible to the Centaur.  In the Thousand Needles they made their home atop rock spires and mesas. They learned to grow maize and beans in small hidden valleys accessible only by steep rocky paths. And they learned to hunt, swiftly and silently, returning to the camps with the meat. The Tauren also moved into the Stonetalons at this time, hence the name of the Sunrock Retreat. They also pushed deep into the forests of Feralas. And most importantly, a number of tribes found refuge on a group of large mesas in Mulgore they called Thunder Bluff. The Tauren might continued living on these fringes, hunted by the Centaur for sport, eking out a meager living until finally their race faded away like so many on Azeroth, if not for two important events.

The first event was that Arnak Grimtotem mastered the hidden disciplines of the shamanic war spells. A limited form of shamanic magic had been a part of Tauren culture since the beginning, but it was Arnak who first mastered the elemental magic so damaging in combat. It is said that the spirit journeys he made to gain his powers turned his once golden coat black, a trait that has persisted in his ancestors to this day. He was the first of his tribe to be called Grimtotem, due to his mastery of destructive power. There have been many Grimtotems named Arnak since then, and in their lore, the hero is simply called Arnak the Black. He immediately began teaching his people, especially his own tribe, all he could of these powers. Because of this, his tribe grew strong and powerful. They also tended to keep certain secrets to themselves, and in Feralas, Thousand Needles, ant the Stonetalons, whole settlements exist that are almost entirely Grimtotem. However, let the reader be assured that these are not the Grimtotem we know today. At this time, any distinctions between them and the other Tauren were subtle at best, and had most to do with kinship ties. The Tauren were a united race.

The second event happened in Mulgore. The Centaur had never managed to fully settle Mulgore. Even in the drought that gripped Kalimdor, Mulgore was wetter, it prairies softer and choked with plants, and were less suited to the Centaur’s galloping hooves. It also lacked the large herds of kodo, zhevra, and gazelle which the Centaur favored for hunting. Instead, it was dominated by plainstriders and smaller animals. The kodo of mulgore tended to be smaller and move in family groups instead of large herds. It was in this environment that Tark Bloodhoof began to tame and breed kodos. Using kodos as warmounts and beasts of burden transformed Tauren culture. It allowed them haul large trees from the forests of Feralas and the Stonetalons with which to build permanent, fortified encampments. It allowed them to carry wealth and possessions. And it allowed them to ride into battle in a way that let them overpower and outmaneuver the Centaur warriors. It was as mounted warriors that Tark and his clan earned the name Bloodhoof during the battle which liberated Red Cloud Mesa, the first battle fought from kodo-back. Tark’s mount, the first wild kodo he had tamed was killed, and it is said he erected Kodo Rock in his honor.

Since this time, the Tauren and Centaur have remained in more-or-less open warfare. The balance has shifted back and forth over the centuries, though it turned steeply in the Centaur’s favor about two hundred years ago when powerful magics were discovered in the depths of Maraudon, and a sorceress class arose among the Centaur wielding powerful magic. For a second time, the Tauren were pushed close to extinction. The chiefs of the two major tribes, the Bloodhoof and the Grimtotem, were at a crisis point and divided over which course to take. The Grimtotem wished to counter the Centaur by using more powerful magics which the Burning Legion had introduced to Azeroth. The Bloodhoof advocated joining the Horde and using their combined might to drive back the Centaur. In the end, the overwhelming majority chose to follow the Bloodhoofs, and the Grimtotem split from Tauren society and took their own path.

Tauren Herblore
The last piece of the puzzle lies in Tauren herblore. The Tauren people have an intimate connection with the land, the earth, and its processes. An expression of this is their natural aptitude for herbalism. It is embedded into their culture and their language. Young Tauren are taught the names and properties of all the plants around them, the proper time and ways to cultivate and preserve them, and each tribe contains a store of rarer herbs gathered from around Azeroth which children are expected to learn as well. In Tauren mythology and animism, the animals around them – Brother Cougar, Mother Kodo, Sister Plainstrider – represent the personalities and social order as reflected in nature. The herbs, however, represent the more abstract and spirit qualities and became a system of symbols with which to describe and manipulate the subtle patterns around them.

The Origins of the Tauren Glyphs

The First Glyphs
In the era of the first diaspora when the Centaur were driving the Tauren to extinction, families lived a fleeting, almost secretive existence. Quietly moving from hidden camp to hidden camp, there was a need to leave messages for each other that would not be recognized and interpreted by their enemies. This took the form of herbs left lying on the ground in ways only a Tauren might notice. A sprig of briarthorn crossed by two kingsblood found on the trail to a camp might mean there had been an attack with two injures. If one of the kingsblood was broken, then the injury had been fatal. But the exact meaning was more complex, depending on context, who the message was meant for, the season of the year, the specific surroundings the message was left in, all things I neither have space to present, nor did I ever master myself. Different tribes and families would develop their own special codes to use. It was an organic system tied together by their common knowledge of herblore.

Eventually, Tauren began a practice of weaving herbs into glyphs that would hold their shape. These were used as personal messages or keepsakes, and sometimes enchanted into amulets. It became a custom to weave for a Tauren a glyph representing their name and presenting it to them in their ceremonies when they reached adulthood. Warriors traditionally wore them into combat, so if they died their corpse might be identified, or at least the amulet returned to relatives.

It became family tradition to mount these amulets on large kodo-skin hangings to honor their kin who had died in battle. Additional herbwork began to be added as a description of the battle or event. These hangings became valuable family heirlooms over the years, being preserved by various means, and are some of the oldest examples of Tauren proto-writing in existence.

Evolution of the Glyphs
From this, the transition to full fledged writing system was fairly simple. Eventually over time, the actual herbs were replaced, first with paintings, then with ink drawings which were slowly stylized into the current forms. Even among those Tauren now literate in their written language, only a select few elders know its history. The characters have become their own entities, no longer directly connected to the herbs they once represented. However, they have inherited the contextual complexity of the original symbols. Each symbol has a name and a sound associated with it, but it does hold true that each sound has it’s own symbol. There are many ways to represent to the physical sounds of a person’s name, but for it to represent that person, only certain symbols are acceptable. Each symbol also has a number of meanings attached to it, also depending on precisely what you are trying to say when, and to whom. A descriptive name Like Clearwater or Threestones is a very easy thing to represent. But for it to represent a particular person, again only certain symbols are acceptable.

Functionality of the Glyph System
The modern scholar may wonder at the necessity for this layered complexity. We are quite used to the utility of runes and scripts designed only for representing the spoken language, believing the language it represents is sufficient to convey all the information we would wish. We may ask why the Tauren should wish to create such an unwieldy edifice as this.

The answer lies in the information that the Tauren, as a people, feel is important. The Tauren system communicates a network of knowledge about the experiences of the writer, embedding any communication not only with contexts and references of the Tauren social structure, but also with the cycles and environment of the natural world. It is very much a mirror of the Tauren manner of speech, which tends to be very terse and seemingly simple. However, within Tauren culture, you are expected to know something about the speaker ant the context from which he or she is speaking. The more this network of culture and environment can be connected, the more meaning a simple statement is able to carry.

There is also, embedded with the Tauren language an insistence upon honor and respect, both to others, but also to the ancestors and the Earthmother. They are taught to respect the power that spoken words have to effect the world around us. The Earthmother is sometimes seen as a literal mother who listens and hears what we say. A Tauren is taught as he or she grows to consider whether to be proud of their speech and what they say in Her presence. They feel this is even more important with the written word as it possesses a permanency and therefore an greater power to effect the people around us. The natural contexts of the environment around them become important in the choice of symbols if they want the Earthmother to bless the power of their communication.

Illustrations
Below, I have included a rough example. In the first illustration, we have one of the old glyphs. The first element of the glyph is a spiral of briathorn, named Ki, and representing an attack or strike. The second element is sprig of fadeleaf, representing secrecy and misdirection, named Re. Put together into the glyph Kirae and left on a trail, it may signal an ambush ahead, or perhaps represent that an attack will go on as planned.



We also have the more stylized pictograph used in the modern written language. It has retained the underlying concept of the hidden attack, but often this is used in a more metaphorical sense, depending of course on the context in which it is read. Interestingly, if the event the writer was describing happened during the winter, this glyph would be incorrect. Fadeleaf turns golden in the winter and its leaves lose their alchemical properties, even in warm climates. Re takes on a new meaning in winter, meaning the hidden exposed. In winter, Kirae is more applicable to a secret attack that has been uncovered. This is but one example of a number of situational rules governing the Tauren written language, rules that an outsider can never hope to learn. The rules themselves tend to change with the culture, and only those that are immersed in that culture could hope to understand them.

The Future of the Tauren Writing System
I have heard from certain sources that the Tauren script is dying out. Though it thrived in their people’s relative isolation, in joining the Horde more and more Tauren are writing in the Orcish alphabet, it having the same sort of utility as those of the humans and dwarves. Fewer and fewer Tauren are fully literate in their language, especially as so many of the social structures which the writing draws upon have been left in tatters in the wake of massive change. Perhaps it’s destined to become one more of the world’s beautiful artifacts left to us by ancients long dead. Only time will tell.