Area of northwestern North America, largely occupying the same territory as the pre-End Canadian province of British Columbia and the southern portion of US Alaska. Its titular capital is Havdal, but the region contains many regional power centres and varying power structures. Bjorngard has a distinctive set of cultural and national origins different from those of most North America.Evidence indicates that, after supply lines and roads to the area were rendered unusable, the Royal United States felt strategically and economically unable to support the area, and withdrew its military presence, evacuating the area's remaining population to more southern and eastern areas of the continent. Some time later, a new and different population arrived.
Having anticipated the destruction in Europe, several thousands of Norwegians with some English and French, fled on ships over the melted polar icecaps to land and take refuge on an empty, isolated and relatively untouched stretch of North American coast. They first landed around what had formerly been Princess Royal Island, and called the area 'Hvitbjorngard' after the distinctive cream-colored bears there, a name eventually reduced to Bjorngard.
The new population seems to have been, at first, largely Norwegian-speaking (though it would eventually succumb to the several pressures of English - whose importance as a trade language and lingua franca, as the first language of an ever-expanding portion of the population, and as a compromise between French-speaking and Norwegian speaking emigrants, both of whom had historically spoken English as their main second language - made it difficult to withstand), a fact demonstrated by various remaining place-names. Nevertheless, in the next three to four generations the populations mixed in ethnicity and language, with additional imports transported from England and possibly France (though the region's term for 'french toast,' 'pain doré' - as opposed to 'pain perdu' suggests instead a Quebecois origin for the region's Francophone influence), as well as a modest influx from the English-speaking regions of what had been Canada. From the melding of these populations the contemporary people emerged, achieving something resembling political unity during a brief rule by a cabal of English-speaking religious despots at the end of the first century following The End. Under a generation later, they were deposed by a loose coalition of secular lords and warriors, in fighting dominated more by blades than old world mechanical weaponry.
Since then, Bjorngard has been ruled (more often than not), by a variety of secular potentates and their warrior bands, who compete with each other and with pagan temple organizations for power. Havdal ('sea plain,' or 'plain by the sea'), a settlement on a coastal inlet reachable by both sea and land, is the traditional meeting place of the region's great men, who generally maintain a presence there year round, and assemble in force once yearly to settle large issues and mete out justice among themselves. In certain years, during open war or when particularly contentious issues must be tried, the lords sometimes hold their gathering elsewhere, making their camps and courts on a certain nearby island--open on all sides--in order to prevent any particular lord or faction from gaining tactical control over the assembly and its judgments.
As a rule, the middle and southern sections of Bjorngard are slightly more heavily populated (and its lords more powerful) than the north, and the coast and island settlements are more populous and wealthier than those inland, which have less access to trade and the bounties of the sea and rich lowland forests.
