I think there is a tendency (and one that Greg and I fell for from time to time) to fall into a real-world anthropology take on Gloranthan religion and not to take Glorantha at face value. We have set of runes and major archetypes – and pretty much any important god is likely an expression or mask of those. Yelmalio and Dayzatar are the better known expressions of Light and Sky – one is removed, one is engaged in the world. Yelm is the Sun – well we all know what the Sun is (most people it is the Disk – too remote or too power to directly contact). The big list of cultural names are fun for systems or lore mastery, but they also tend to obscure core mechanics of what is going on.
It’s one of the reasons I love one of the early drafts of what became the Entekosiad and GRoY Greg gave me – it uses the familiar names of Lodril, Pelora, Dayzatar, and so on. I’ve a few others like that – skeleton keys to decipher them and turn them back into game materials.
I do lean into this a lot when I run RQ at conventions like GaryCon or GenghisCon. Rather than give lists of fantasy names, I talk about the Storm God and his companions the Talking God, the Knowing God, the Merciful Goddess, the Trickster, the Flesh Man, and the Spirit of Us. The Storm God used his brother Death to kill the Sun God, and the Mother of Trolls emerged from the underworld. And so on.
Maybe Glorantha is a lot like Gene Wolfe’s best novel Soldier of the Mist? Does the name Arkat literally mean Liberator? Anyways that train has long since left the station but I do think about it a lot.
We moderns are used to hiding the meaning of things behind syllables that no longer have a literal meaning. I sometimes think we have lost something in the process.
