What makes hill-men stand apart?

[Dr TPK]

In Tolkien's and Martin's books, Game of Thrones series and in many other sources the hill-men are always strong, fierce and primitive people and they are not very kind to other people. I haven't seen that many references about woodsmen or mountain-men.

What makes people who live on hills so special? What are "hill-men" in general, regardless of the source?

[Landis963]

I suspect they are Scottish tribes with the serial numbers filed off. At least Tolkien's were, Martin may have simply lifted the idea from LotR in order to give Tyrion some hired muscle.

[Yora]

One antropologist who studied hill people in Southeast Asia recently published the theory that at least for that part of the world, people who live in hills do so to avoid government control. And have done so for thousands of years. All medieval, ancient, and prehistoric empires started in the plains of river valleys, where you have lots of flat open ground close to a constant water source. (Except the Mongols). And that pretty much always meant that the imperial government regulated taxes, made laws, and could conscript the people for the military or labor. If you didn't want to live in such an empire, you had to go somewhere where the imperial officers can't find you and can't get an easy count of all the fields and herds. And that means going into the hills.
Yes, compared to the plains, making a living in the hills and mountains isn't fun and getting any large-scale organization is really difficult. And that's precisely why people went there. To avoid imperial government. In Southeast Asia there are many hill tribes who have old stories of how their ancestors once lived in the plains or at the coast, but then moved into the hills. Many even claim to once have had writing, but their ancestors destroyed all of it. Because if there are no records of land ownership and the annual yields of the fields, it's impossible to calculate how much tax you have to pay.

I don't know about the Inca, but generally it seems to match the culture of most people who live in mountains and hills around the world. In central Europe you got the Swiss and in the US there seems to be a reputation of isolation and fierce autonomy for the people in the Apalacians.
They are not people who have missed cultural and technological progress, but the descendants of people who have deliberately chosen to reject these things. And that results in customs and values that got passed down to their descendants to this day. Not only do they reject national governments, they generally also seem to have a strong preference for each village ruling itself. And that rule is often in the hand of a council of equals with no real lord. That independence always comes with not having access to many of the conveniences of civilization (though the Swiss seem to have found a way around it), but that is a price they generally are very willing to pay.

[Tzi]

One antropologist who studied hill people in Southeast Asia recently published the theory that at least for that part of the world, people who live in hills do so to avoid government control. And have done so for thousands of years. All medieval, ancient, and prehistoric empires started in the plains of river valleys, where you have lots of flat open ground close to a constant water source. (Except the Mongols). And that pretty much always meant that the imperial government regulated taxes, made laws, and could conscript the people for the military or labor. If you didn't want to live in such an empire, you had to go somewhere where the imperial officers can't find you and can't get an easy count of all the fields and herds. And that means going into the hills.
Yes, compared to the plains, making a living in the hills and mountains isn't fun and getting any large-scale organization is really difficult. And that's precisely why people went there. To avoid imperial government. In Southeast Asia there are many hill tribes who have old stories of how their ancestors once lived in the plains or at the coast, but then moved into the hills. Many even claim to once have had writing, but their ancestors destroyed all of it. Because if there are no records of land ownership and the annual yields of the fields, it's impossible to calculate how much tax you have to pay.

I don't know about the Inca, but generally it seems to match the culture of most people who live in mountains and hills around the world. In central Europe you got the Swiss and in the US there seems to be a reputation of isolation and fierce autonomy for the people in the Apalacians.
They are not people who have missed cultural and technological progress, but the descendants of people who have deliberately chosen to reject these things. And that results in customs and values that got passed down to their descendants to this day. Not only do they reject national governments, they generally also seem to have a strong preference for each village ruling itself. And that rule is often in the hand of a council of equals with no real lord. That independence always comes with not having access to many of the conveniences of civilization (though the Swiss seem to have found a way around it), but that is a price they generally are very willing to pay.

This is somewhat true, if in spirit, in the US. People who want to escape civilization typically go into the Mountains and Hills. Here in California the difference in mentality and lifestyle between say a person in the Sierra Nevada Mountains or even just the foothills versus the central valley or San Fran is immense and the people think of themselves as ruggedly independent.

[VoxRationis]

Not to mention that even if they didn't go to the hills because they wanted to avoid government control, hills are inherently more difficult to control, so the people already living there tend to fall outside of government control, and thus develop societies that don't favor centralized authority.

[Winter_Wolf]

Speaking as a real life rough equivalent of hill folk, it's all in our mindset. Frankly civilization and "civilized" people just get under our skin and we prefer to separate ourselves from it to the extent that it's practicable. I went back home recently--actual home, where I grew up--and realized just how incredibly, indelibly UNhappy I am living anywhere near cities or places that you can easily get to a city. Sadly my spouse was born and grew to adulthood in a crowded megacity so I'm kind of in a hard place vis a vis what's best for most of the family or what's going to make my spouse happy. To quote my best friend, "you can take the boy out of the village but you can't take the village out of the boy."

[Corneel]

If you want some inspiration for hill or mountain people, the Caucasus might be nice place to look. In places each valley has its own language, there's a tradition of resistance against the (Russian) empire that tried to claim the region (especially by the Chechens). At least three language groups are represented: Indo-European , Caucasian and Turkic. And most groups are in some conflict or other with their neighbours.

[Yora]

Not to mention that even if they didn't go to the hills because they wanted to avoid government control, hills are inherently more difficult to control, so the people already living there tend to fall outside of government control, and thus develop societies that don't favor centralized authority.

Yes, but the interesting hypothesis is that people didn't just live in remote places by accident. At some point, someone must have said "I don't like life in the river valeys anymore. I would rather like to live over there in those hills." The hills had to offer something that you couldn't get in flood plains. Ores and other minerals would be one reason, but many hill people are primarily farmers. Getting away from other people might indeed have been the primary reason for many of these people, and at least for Southeast Asia, their own cultural traditions and stories appear to support that.

[MrConsideration]

Yora's theory get D&D-ified in an OSR blog called The False Machine (http://falsemachine.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/strange-grains-d-art-of-not-being.html). I think it's worth a read (as is most of Patrick Stuart's work).

If they were truly based on the Highlanders, much of it could be linguistic or cultural. We don't want to live among the City Dwellers because their culture is strange and decadent! Or because their cultural framework doesn't function in an urban environment. If you think of a people like the Lakota Sioux, huge aspects of their cultural life (establishing yourself as a male by successfully hunting buffalo or counting coup in a tribal raid) is impossible in an urban lifestyle. Taken logically, if your hill people move to the city, they might fail to ever reach the cultural milestones that define them.

Many of the peripatetic, nomadic peoples (Bedouin, Turks, Mongols) also subscribed to the idea that living in a city leads you to become weaker, or less capable at military action. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty of China would actually send Mongol troops back to the steppe to live for years at a time because they believed living in cities made you soft. This is a narrative borne out by Robert E. Howard's Conan series, when Conan always defeats the decadent city-dwellers, but it seems fairly common in history too: a number of tribal peoples from less fertile regions successfully invaded urban, agrarian civilizations (Huns, Turks, Assyrians, Germans, Mongols etc). So maybe your hill people simply feel that to maintain their martial strength - the major source of prestige - you have to stay close to your roots.

Remember that the move towards agricultural civilization rather than hunter-gatherer is thought to have greatly increased the amount of man-hours spent working (I'd rather hunt for myself than work like a slave!)and brought about the division of labour (why should I toil in the fields so the king can live in luxury?)

[GreaserFish]

A lot of hill-folk being strong, stubborn, primitive folk might have something to do with them frequently drawing off of Scottish culture. I would be thoroughly surprised if it has nothing to do with British perceptions of history coloring things, seeing as the Scots were frequently considered savages by their English neighbors.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Hill-folk also make prime sources for large-scale rebellion against centralized authority. Drawing off, for instance, the Berber Almohad/al-Muwahidun rebellion against the Almoravid/Al-Murabitun empire. The Almohads used the Berber hill-tribes' feeling that they were the true people of the Farthest West, combined with dissatisfaction with a) the "alienness" of the blue-masked Southerners plus b) the decadence of the ruling Southerners, who adopted Andalusian values, to lead a decade-long rebellion that eventually overthrew the Almoravids.

The Almoravids could not enter the mountains, as the rising of the common folk meant that any armies sent into the mountains would not come out. This gave the Almohads a stable and safe base which, once they consolidated control of the mountains, they could strike out of with impunity. They could also use it as a "highway" in a sense: they could strike either west, at the Almoravid cities in Morocco, including their capital, or east, at the Almoravid cities in Algeria, and the Almoravids would have to march their armies a long way north AROUND the mountains to deal with either threat. In this way, the Almohads were able to defeat the larger Almoravid armies piecemeal, kill several of their kings, and slowly reduce Almoravid control before finally taking the capital.

[sktarq]

Another aspect is that in hill country it is much easier to holdout against an incoming wave or invader. This means that regions that have several peoples who once lived in the region and were driven out (or invaded and the most stubborn fled to the hills) all have their own enclaves. See The Balkans, or the Caucuses, or the Hill tribes of SE Asia that trace all the way back to when South Asia was mostly filled with black skin people. The hills can preserve the past in a way that the plains don't. That's why the "primitive" comes from there. Oh and that history also comes with a history of war, probable massacres, and wounded pride and a feeling that the lowlanders owe them-which is ripe for conflict, which drives stories. In Gwyn's above post this is the driver of why the Berbers (who are the decedents of those who lived in the Maghreb before the Arab invasion) where even well defined against the Kings and thus available as a power base for the new faction. This was true even of the Swiss well past when when they were the hicks who kicked out the Austro-Hungarians and then were mostly known for being Mercenaries for decades before being considered "civilized"

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Just a note, the Berbers are a contemporary group not a historical group, with still living traditions across North Africa

Edit: I misread your post, sorry. You were saying they were a modern group. Either way, I wouldn't call them simply the descendants but the exact same people, given that they've discovered, as an example, pottery dating to pre-roman times using the same patterns as those used today in the village where they found the artifacts.

[sktarq]

The Berbers are somewhat more complex in that they are as much an amalgamation of pretty much all those peoples and cultures who lived in North Africa pre either Vandal or Arab invasion depending on who you talk to. Where in the Balkans the various hill tribes are still tightly tied to their individual origin the Berbers (as a culture) seem to have taken in the refugees of each successive wave of conquest in the region adding parts of each to their own.

[Coidzor]

Pastoral peoples have historically been a threat to those with more agrarian, sedentary lifestyles.

Hillmen are numerous enough to be a threat, unlike people who live in the mountains since mountains can't really support a population sufficient to be a threat.

The woods, well, either they're barbarous tribes who don't actually live in the woods, just on the other side of them from our cultural perspective or they're, again, too low in population to actually be a threat. Also woodsmen are more like a profession or set of professions, really.

[Mechalich]

Generally living in upland environments with a primarily pastoral survival strategy outright requires the cultivation of military skills by all adults (or at least all adult males). If you live on a steppe herding goats you have to be able to ride a horse well, short jackals with your bow from the back of the horse, be able to regularly go without food or sleep, and fight off your fellow tribesmen when they try to steal your goats. Your survival skills are combat skills and more or less everyone is a pre-made soldier.

By contrast, your lifestyle enforces a much lower population density than that of lowland agriculturalists.