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As comparison take the reason for changing "norse" to "germanic" in game, as germanic tribes didn't all have the same names or ways or practices.
Rodnovery is made up and based on 19th century romanticism and is' highly controversial, more so than Suomenusko or Romuva i'd say. If you have another opinion and want to argue, then you will have to discuss this with someone else.
..and to prevent another slavic war on the official forum i suppose. ;)
Nothing as fun to watch as raging slavs on the other hand. :D
That is a possiblity, though, Suomenusko represents a rather massive array of belief systems in CK2... and it literally has 'Finland' writen on it.
Though not my intention, forum wars are indeed fun to behold.
Might as well, they have Germanic and Slavic paganism.
But unlike academic histories, the game must present absolutes. Precise dates and religions are necessary for the database files. There is no way to represent conflicting theories about the year of death of a Viking warlord, for example, or the specific familial relationship between Ethiopian kings.
The ongoing development of this database is powered in part by a sprawling international team of volunteer beta-testers and research consultants. This group comprises interested academics, part-time historians, students and gamers who support the research behind the game. Data for this database are compiled from research and class notes, consultation of books and websites, and, occasionally, original research into historical sources. This is used to create characters, define local, regional, national and imperial borders, and construct family trees and networks of vassalage. The end result is an elaborate social/political/economic database.
However, for all the effort poured into the historical database at the heart of Crusader Kings, this can only serve as the starting point for each game played. The second the game begins, divergences from history begin to occur. Crusader Kings is, indeed has to be, inaccurate. This is where the game mechanics kick in, and where, in my opinion, the game really shines.
I wasn't expecting it to be 100% accurate, and I do agree that the divergences caused in game is where it shines (it's a large part of why I love this game). However, it was just a small question that popped in my head for a brief second while playing an Estonian tribe. Although I agree with what you've said, and expected that to be the closest thing to a 'real answer'... I still couldn't help but ask.
You really answered your own question here. They had to call them something. We know that pagan faiths existed in those areas. What we don't know, despite what the neo-pagans may claim, is any totally reliable information about those faiths. Most of what we guess is based on the works of Catholic and Orthodox writers with a definite agenda of their own. We can reconstruct names of the local deities using Proto-Indo-European linguistics and deity archetypes and combining that with the few written records. There are no reliable records written by the practioners themselves, even though pagan rulers lasted until the 14th century (in the case of Lithuania).
The modern neo-pagan religions are based entirely upon conjecture, combined with pseudo-historical withful thinking and a heaping dose of nationalism, most of it from the Romanticism of the 19th century. Modern archaeology can tell us some details, but even that is hampered by rampant nationalistic bias from the late 19th and early 20th century scholars who had cultural and national identity agendas. Look at what they did with that stuff in 1930's Germany, basically inventing a race and a religion out of bits and pieces of poorly understood archaeology and biased pseudo-history.
As for Suomenusko and Romuva versus Slavic and Germanic, that might have more to do with the depth of our knowledge. We know much more about the Germanic and Slavic religions than we do about the Baltic and Finno-Ugric. We know there were major local differences in each. The Germanic religion of Scandinavia, while similar, is still different than that of the pagans of the low countries and both are different from the pagans of the British Isles. They are similar enough to group together. Otherwise, we would need different names for each and things would be even more fractured. Distinct and probably neo-pagan modernist names like Asatru only apply to regional Germanic paganism and wouldn't work for the Anglo-Saxons, for example.
Likewise with Slavic, which has distinct differences in the deities worshipped among the West, South and East Slavic populations. Easier just to lump them together under one major heading; which is, in fact, what scholars do in the case of Slavic paganism.
With Suomenusko, we know very little. And regional differences within that cultural group are less apparent in what we do know or assume. The same for Romuva, but with the added need for something to differentiate the Baltic paganism from the very similar West Slavic and East Slavic paganism. In some cases the deities are nearly identical in archetype and the names are closely related, since they both derive from earlier P-I-E words. So, again, the devs had to give the Baltic pagans some different name because we're talking about a very distinct language and cultural group from the Slavs, though the particulars of the religion are based on very little concrete knowledge.
It would help if we knew what the pagans called their own various religions. We don't know and never will, again in spite of what the modern neo-pagans have reconstructed and assumed. They might not have called it anything at all. After all, we use the word Hellnistic for the religion of the ancient Greeks, but they certainly didn't at the time. Such names are inventions of scholars looking back into murky history.
I love medieval and prior European history and archaeology. I'm retired, so I have plenty of time to indulge my passion for it. My daughter makes fun of me for it; because I read for my own enjoyment textbooks and other scholarly works most people would avoid.
I just finished re-reading a wonderful but rather large book called Empires and Barbarians by historian Peter Heather. One of the themes in the book is that much of historical and archaeological work done since the late 19th century onward has to be viewed with a skeptical outlook rather than simply accepting it as gospel. We always have to ask whether the "findings" of previous generations were the result of cultural and national bias and even a reactionary pendulum swing away from such biases in the opposite direction.
Prior to WWII, much of the historical and archaeological studies done were heavily influenced by nationalistic and cultural bias resulting in attempts to prove various pet theories about the origins of various groups. This led to the idea that the Great Migration Period leading up to the Fall of Rome was the result of massive shifts in population. And as a result of those flawed attempts at proving one view or another, fuel was provided for groups like the Thule Society which then led to the whole Aryan superiority theology in pre-WWII Germany. After the war, academia swung entirely the other way in reaction to the horrors of those historcial philosophies which fueled the rise of the Third Reich. Added to that was a bias toward proving the superiority or at least precedence of some of the cultural victims of that war, especially in Slavic countries. This means that much of the post-war work was just as biased, in an opposing way, as that of the pre-war period. A paradigm emerged that the entire Great Migration Period was not at all the result of large population shifts and replacement of entire groups in an area, but instead an elite transfer with the existing populations always having been there. Heather argues that the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle: a mix of large population movements, like that of the proto-Goths from the Baltic south to the Pontic steppes then west, coupled with small elite control over existing populations, like what might explain the Turkic origin Huns ruling over a confederation of larger groups such as the Alans and others.
It's all fascinating and I like the balanced approach to it Heather proposes. It applies to much of the religious confusion discussed in this thread as well.
Well, this is part of my reason for asking. Suomenusko (Suomi + nusko) means 'Finnish Faith'. I find it to be rather specific when in CK2 it covers Estonian, Finnish, Sami, Nenets, Mordvin, Komi, and Khanty. There are enough similarities to group them... For example, both Komi and Finnish creation mythology involve eggs and believe the land of the dead to be in the far north. However there are differences.
Also, I enjoyed reading your posts.
I guess the pick to use suomenusko is for they use it as the religion of the Fenno-Ugric people and those the "prefix" is kind of the same and the ending is just meaning religion.
The suomenusko in real world is just a collection of Pagan religions which try to mimic the old time religions of Fenno-Baltic people (subgroup of Fenno-Ugric), they are quite different from each other and have their own names, some based on Kalevala others more shamanic and so on. I wouldn't say the fist part of the name is actually nationalistic, but more referring to that the religions are worshiped in Finland.
For swedes there ain't any difference between Finns, Fenno-Baltic, Fenno-Ugric, for them all are just Finns and sure we do share a lot with each other, shamanic religion in the base, a base language, a deluded gen-pool shared with both Europe and Asia, so simplify a bit may not matter that much. I was surprised that the Sami got to hold land in what today is sweden, in EUIV the northern part of today's sweden has been populated by swedish culture in the game, while historically it would be more of a mix with a majority towards Finnish culture. So just keep in mind, this is a game in a fantasy world with real world events, not something historically correct.
Btw, i wonder if OP meant to make over1000 different pagan cults as separate religions? Like, because every village has its own set of gods and beliefs...