DS9: Political Writings IV: Klingon History(and Worf, Again)
So First: The more I think and read about Worf’s life story, the more similar to a Fantasy Hero Narrative I realize it to be u_u
Second: A List of events in Klingon History that, according to DS9, happened “1000 Years ago” or there abouts:
Molor rules over all of Qo’noS as a tyrant, but emphatically NOT a “Warrior-King”, as Kahless is the first of these, who give to the Klingons “the laws of honor”.
Kahless rebels against and confronts Molor, killing him, creating “the First Empire”, and beginning the Imperial Dynasty. Which: how does this make sense when Molor is already ruling over a unified Qo’noS? idk: Maybe Memory Alpha is wrong on this one <:T(I DO have a potential explanation, though)
A Group of Klingon Warriors seek out the Klingon Gods, then kill them as being more trouble than they’re worth.
The H’urq Invade and pillage Qo’noS.
The Klingons(at a far more primitive technological stage) rise up and kick the H’urq out.
Kahless gets a different timeline in TNG(and, I think, TOS) so there’s some fuzziness there, enhanced by the timeline for the Sword of Kahless which is supposed to date back 1400 years, and the imperial line was supposed to last uninterrupted for 1,100 years which doesn’t make much sense with the H’urq invasion, but regardless it makes for one heck of a busy “1000 years ago”. I find this fishy, and it fills me with the desire to headcanon neat reasons for why Klingon history seems so compacted. Some suggestions:
(Easy)The H’urq pillaged Qo’noS, stole many important Klingon artifacts, and are remembered by the Klingons as the greatest threat their culture ever faced. The memory of them marks the Klingons to the present: their word for “alien” is H’urq, and they uniformly respond to meeting new forms of life with violence, conquest, and attempted extermination. It’s not much of a stretch to assume the H’urq not only left the planet devastated but also Klingon historical records and Memory. “1000 years ago” just means “Before/during the H’urq Invasion”, which is as far back as they can reliably date most of their history.
(Sociological)The Klingons aren’t actually saying “1000 years” as an accurate accounting, but as an idiomatic expression meaning “a long, long time”. Kor’s a good source for this argument as he uses the “1000 years” construction a handful of times and outside of historical contexts; for instance, when talking about how longs songs will be sung of his, Jadzia, and Worf’s quest to recover the Sword of Kahless. Perhaps this goes further and, outside of specialist professions like Historians and astrophysicists, Klingons, as a culture, keep a more impressionistic understanding of time: “1000 years” could be like the European Medieval constructions “living memory” and “time immemorial”, or certain Earthican impressionistic approaches to numbers and distances.
So what about Molor? How can he rule as a tyrant over all of Qo’noS without having established an empire? Who are the Fek’lhri? How could Kahless leave Qo’noS for outerspace if, at the time of the H’urq invasion, the Klingons lacked starflight and so much as gun-powder-level technology?
1)Molor wasn’t Klingon. The Fek’lhri were another species that the Klingons shared Qo’noS with and Molor was their final surviving leader, and Kahless’s conquest of them(and possible overthrow of their hegemony over Qo’noS, though given the tenor of post-Kahless Klingon society, this “tyranny” may have been a later justifying fiction for genocide) and killing of Molor was the starting-point of the Empire.
2)Molor didn’t conquer Qo’noS; he politicked it into submission. Much as the Hapsburgs were never great warriors but were excellent marriagers, Molor’s family could have engineered, over generations, a unification of Aristocratic titles within their House; an objective Molor completed through similar unwarriorly means. Kahless isn’t just a Conqueror, he’s also an Egalitarian and Philosophical figure; his contention that all Klingons have the heart of a Warrior and can lead a Warrior’s life could have been more important historically than his mythologized deeds. Kahless could have objected to this unegalitarian Aristocratic system Molor’s family manipulated to attain power, and led a revolt against it for the sake of his egalitarian ideals.
Similarly, perhaps the Klingons saw a period of State-building and Capitalism much like Humans did, and Molor was a product of this period; someone who leveraged Capital and international governance to rise to a position of ultimate authority(official or otherwise) over Qo’noS. Kahless then could have been something of a renaissance figure, one who masked a radical egalitarian message within an appeal to the “glorious” feudal Klingon past, who led a rebellion against Molor and the order he represented, defeated him and it, and drastically changed the course of Klingon history thereby.
Given the mythic quality of these stories, perhaps “Molor” didn’t even actually exist, but was a later narrative personification of Kahless’s philosophical foe, Capitalist Aristocracy or Blood Aristocracy, in this cultural revivalist movement. The Kahless narrative might even be mythologizing this cultural struggle, though built around real people and real events(which would jive with his whole “Klingon Joshua(Jesus)” vibe). The problem with this idea, of course, is why would he keep the Houses? Maybe he couched his rebellion as a return to their more egalitarian past? There were -in very rough summary- two major legal bonds in Feudal Medieval Europe: kinship, and vassalage. Kinship’s your family; they’re expected to take care of you, and you of them. Vassalage was more mercenary: a Vassal agreed to follow you and protect you in exchange for protection and wealth. Perhaps he appealed to something like this kinship dynamic in the history of the Houses? That Trek writers chose to call them “Houses” is very convenient to this headcanon owo
3)This is the one I like the best. Basically: a lot of this stuff did, actually, happen at roughly the same time. Molor was either a H’urq or a H’urq collaborator, and the Fek’lhir were the troops he was given to keep Qo’noS pacified; the later separation is basic historical drift. These troops may have themselves been collaborators, and the similarity between the name for them and the name for the Klingon warden of the Hell for the Dishonored Dead(Gre’thor) could be taken as a sign of this: these are the Most dishonorable and terrible people in Klingon history, so terrible as to be stripped of the name “Klingon” and remembered only by the most despised, shameful, and feared name the Klingons have to give.
When the H’urq invaded, the Klingons were despondent, and a religious movement began, slowly moving among the scattered Klingon survivors(such processes of cultural “flattening” tend to be seen among peoples faced with more organized and destructive societies; the Sun and Ghost Dance movements are two examples from Native American history), to hunt down their gods, ask why they let this happen, and demand their aid. The story of the warriors killing the gods mythologizes this movement, and its failure. Kahless may have been part of, or an heir to, this movement. With the unhelpful gods “killed”, Kahless begins preaching that the only thing that can help the Klingons is themselves; that “You are Klingons. You need no one but yourselves”. He begins building a resistance. Molor and his Fek’lhir eventually begin hunting for him, a task of escalating difficulty and importance as his movement gains momentum. Qam-Chee was the turning point in this resistance, wherein Kahless and Lady Lukara(his lover, and possibly an ally from the old Aristocratic Houses? Qam-Chee IS also their wedding, afterall) lured Molor in person to a chosen battlefield with the promise of their vulnerability, then sprung their trap and slew him. After Qam-Chee, the collaborationist regime fell apart and the H’urq occupation was exposed directly. The Klingons take the fight to the H’urq colonialists, no doubt in a Metal as Hell war involving bat’leths and looted laser-rifles/hover bikes, and finally drive them off.
The nature of anti-colonial rebellions, especially those consciously built around a single charismatic figure or story, tends to promote hierarchical, inegalitarian political structures in their aftermath. Thus the empire: while Kahless was an egalitarian figure, the building up of him as THE Movement and the militarization of society(with it’s related “discipline”) created a structure where he, and those closest to him, essentially dictated strategy and policy to the wider rebelling masses(one could draw an interesting parallel from this period to the Klingon practice of promotion through murder: collaborationists and spies could be anywhere, and in a struggle for survival incompetence can’t be tolerated. Only Kahless is “Unforgettable” i.e. “Indispensable”). Reinforcing this process is the historical fact that interaction between polities will naturally lead to borrowing and emulation, and the more intense the interaction(such as occupation or war) and the more unequal the polities(such as between a State and non-state society, or Invaders and the Invaded), the more intense the emulation will become. So, simply by fighting off the H’urq, the Klingons would have become more like the H’urq they experienced; more rapacious, more violent, more colonialist, more hierarchical(because all colonial regimes are justified by a hierarchy of conqueror and conquered and, as extractive schemes, tend to also be top-down to maximize profits), more Imperial.
But here’s the thing: Kahless never ruled. In “The Story of The Promise”, he leaves the Klingons once his work of uniting them and teaching them the ways of honor is done. Which means, since the Imperial line is descend from him, that the Imperial system, while potentially rooted in the necessary dictatorship of the rebellion’s military struggle(quick note, “Emperor” comes from Imperator which literally translates roughly to “one who gives orders” -ala “perEMPtory” and “IMPerative”- and was originally a temporary military dictatorship Rome granted in times of severe military threat), was built after he left, by Lady Lukara and his children.
So: Kahless united the Klingons with an egalitarian anti-colonial, anti-aristocratic message, destroys the global collaborator-state set up to rule over them, then drives the H’urq off Qo’noS and cleanses it of remaining “Fek’lhir”(collaborators), then never rules because he leaves the planet. Kahless was no ruler; he was a warrior and a warleader. If we’re going to go this far headcanoning Klingon history, we might as well headcanon that they manage to capture at least one functional H’urq ship, and Kahless -with a select band of warriors- went after them to insure they could never again threaten Qo’noS and its people. Perhaps the Klingon’s “early” possession of warp-technology in the 1940s was also the result of finally reverse engineering old H’urq technology, or perhaps finding a new, functional, derelict.
Anyway, there’s my present take on Klingon history :p
