Wait...how is there a Coeurl miqo'te tribe if coeurls aren't Eorzean?

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Native to the jungles of the Near East, coeurls were only recently introduced to Eorzea, brought over from faraway lands such as Thavnair by Ul'dahn nobles who thought to breed them as pets. Now, but a handful of skilled tamers living in recluse on the Pearl are said to be able to train them.

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In the mass exodus which occurred during the Fifth Umbral Era, 26 Seeker of the Sun tribes crossed the seas (which had frozen solid as a result of the Calamity) to Eorzea in search of food and warmer climates. The names of these tribes contained many sounds which were difficult to represent with the existing Eorzean alphabet; but the fact that there were the same exact number of tribes as letters in the Eorzean alphabet was taken as a sign that they were destined to make the new realm their home, and so assigned each tribe with a letter/sound that was closest to its name.

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I'm at work so I don't have my lorebook in front of me, but coeurls are a "recent" addition to Eorzea, and the miqo'te migration was in the Fifth Umbral Era... The Fifth Astral Era that followed, when the War of the Magi took place, was 2500 years ago. So...???

I came across this while trying to puzzle out how the miqo'te confirmed to be living in the Near East might be named. I assume they'd have traditional names like all other miqo'te, but...

Help. :c

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Miqo'te were on the continent, migrated away then migrated back

Yeah, the Allagans drove them off (yes, really! Poor cats), but coeurls still weren't around until well after all that...

Any idea where they were originally from? If they're from othard then it's possible they found them there

Othard is the far east, coeurls are from the near east.

Maybe the C tribe was originally near eastern, or maybe they first migrated to the near east, then moved to Eorzea, before leaving again for Meracydia when the rise of Allag drove them away.

Or maybe the coeurls were introduced to Meracydia before they came into Eorzea.

When the Allagans drove the miqo'te away, they actually fled to Ilsabard, not back to Meracydia. They're originally from Meracydia, but the whole "crossing the frozen sea into Eorzea and finding the new alphabet" thing was from southern Ilsabard to northern Eorzea. Prior to the ice calamity freezing the seas, they couldn't get past the Gyr Abanian mountains.

So...yeah, I guess the only viable explanations are during their time away. It says coeurls are native to Near Eastern jungles, but it doesn't say whether or not coeurls were introduced to Ilsabard before the miqo'te returned to Eorzea. But I think it's more reasonable that the Seekers who would become the Coeurl tribe just lived in the Near East after their exodus from Eorzea, since there's apparently a population of miqo'te there. I'm not sure where she got the information, but Sounsyy says in her Thavnairian lore compilation that there are hyur, miqo'te, and "other" (probably roegadyn) there. (You do see a Thavnairian lalafell in Kugane...)

Heraldry IRL had a lot of references to animals that the people at the time had only ever heard about in stories, especially when it came to big, impressive predators like lions and tigers. I can buy that a tribe of Miqo'te decided to name themselves after coeurl even sight-unseen.

Do we know when the C tribe was founded? Seeker tribes can theoretically be founded at any time, so maybe the C tribe is one of the newer ones.

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Originally Posted by FJerome

Heraldry IRL had a lot of references to animals that the people at the time had only ever heard about in stories, especially when it came to big, impressive predators like lions and tigers. I can buy that a tribe of Miqo'te decided to name themselves after coeurl even sight-unseen.

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True, but it's not just associating themselves with this fantastical foreign creature for a coat of arms, it's actually thinking of it as a spirit animal of sorts and making totems of it that were historically said to protect the tribe. I guess it's possible, I just feel like that kind of tribal culture would pick guardians they could see around them. Unless coeurl stories were really pervasive... Not a bad idea though.

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Originally Posted by koichi88

Do we know when the C tribe was founded? Seeker tribes can theoretically be founded at any time, so maybe the C tribe is one of the newer ones.

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It does mention that upon their return to the realm there were exactly twenty-six tribes, and that's why they took to the new Eorzean alphabet so readily. So C must've existed by that point, I guess.

We can see a real life example in European coat of arms. Many of them are using lions but we all know lions' habitat is in Africa. Sometimes we see dragon and unicorn which aren't even real creatures. There must be stories about a coeurl, a vicious beast, fast and strong from another land which amuses the tribe

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Originally Posted by amifiq

We can see a real life example in European coat of arms. Many of them are using lions but we all know lions' habitat is in Africa

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Today, yes. In ancient times lions lived in southern Europe and throughout the Middle-East as well. There is still a small population living in western India.
The last of the European lions were killed around 100BC.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Today, yes. In ancient times lions lived in southern Europe and throughout the Middle-East as well. There is still a small population living in western India.
The last of the European lions were killed around 100BC.

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So they would have been extinct in europe by the middle ages when most of these coat of arms where created and used. So nobody alive would have seen one in europe first hand prop :P
And tourism wasnt where it is now so european people would have known lions only from stories.

Wait, the C tribe is specifically named after the Coeurl? I thought it was just associated with the letter. I can't find any reference to that in the Encyclopedia; is it mentioned elsewhere (in-game, etc.), or is it just a theory? Assuming that is the case, though - while we don't have a clear map to work from, "southern Ilsabard" could probably be considered the same general region as the "Near East" (which doesn't need to refer to Thavnair exclusively), and as such the theory that the C tribe knew of Coeurls from before their migration is probably the most likely.

If that seems less plausible, though, another possibility is that the the Coeurl was a legendary creature to the Miqo'te, and when the animal was encountered in more modern times, it was then named after the legend - sort of like how giraffes became associated with and subsequently named after the legendary qilin/girin/kirin of East Asian mythology when encountered for the first time by those cultures. Or how...

the Primal that Ilberd summoned was named after the otherwise-unassociated Doman legend of Shinryu).

There's no real evidence of that being the case, of course, but it'd have real-world precedent.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

So they would have been extinct in europe by the middle ages when most of these coat of arms where created and used. So nobody alive would have seen one in europe first hand prop :P
And tourism wasnt where it is now so european people would have known lions only from stories.

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From stories and from the many paintings that the ancient Greeks and Romans left behind - many of which were made by people who did see lions with their own eyes.
But true, lots of heraldic depictions of lions and (even more so) tigers aren't very realistic.

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Originally Posted by Hinoto-no-Ryuji

Wait, the C tribe is specifically named after the Coeurl? I thought it was just associated with the letter. I can't find any reference to that in the Encyclopedia.

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Well... it's in the stickied Race Naming Conventions thread.

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Originally Posted by Hinoto-no-Ryuji

Or how...

the Primal that Ilberd summoned was named after the otherwise-unassociated Doman legend of Shinryu).

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I have my own theory about that. It's linked to ninja summoning, and from a passing visual clue from the NIN post-60 storyline, but that's another topic for another thread and another time.

Shinryu was named Shinryu... by the Domans. Because it reminded them of the dragon from their legends.

The dragon, when summoned, had no name at all. There's nothing deep about it no ninja tricks, no osmosis of foreign legends; the summoner was just after a big honkin' dragon, like Bahamut only badder. He got one. He wasn't after Shinryu at all, but The Domans thought it looked like their legend, and named it. Everyone else was fine with the name, so it stuck.

I'm not pulling this out of thin air; the Main Scenario quest text explicitly states that the Domans named it after their dragon of legend. At no point does it state that it IS their dragon of legend.

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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Well... it's in the stickied Race Naming Conventions thread.

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Oh, well, there you go then! Knew I was missing something.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Shinryu was named Shinryu... by the Domans. Because it reminded them of the dragon from their legends.

The dragon, when summoned, had no name at all. There's nothing deep about it no ninja tricks, no osmosis of foreign legends; the summoner was just after a big honkin' dragon, like Bahamut only badder. He got one. He wasn't after Shinryu at all, but The Domans thought it looked like their legend, and named it. Everyone else was fine with the name, so it stuck.

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That's...what I said? Shinryu was named after a legendary creature that otherwise had no association with it because of its appearance. Like how East Asian cultures named the giraffe after a legendary creature that otherwise had no association with it because of its appearance, and how it's possible the Miqo'te did the same with the Coeurl (though the "C Tribe immigrated from the Near East and encountered Coeurls there" is the more likely explanation).

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Originally Posted by Hinoto-no-Ryuji

If that seems less plausible, though, another possibility is that the the Coeurl was a legendary creature to the Miqo'te, and when the animal was encountered in more modern times, it was then named after the legend - sort of like how giraffes became associated with and subsequently named after the legendary qilin/girin/kirin of East Asian mythology when encountered for the first time by those cultures. Or how...

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Or it was a word for an animal but now it is used for a different animal. As a real life example we have the tanuki According to wikipedia the kanji was originally used to describe wild cats but since there were no wild cats in Japan it started being used to describe the tanuki. There is a lack of citations on the wikipedia article about the naming origin but this chinese dictionary gives some credibility to it. https://www.tofulearn.com/dictionary/chinese/%E7%8B%B8

Maybe there was a cat lady equivalent of a dragon living in the continent, collecting coeurls all the time

That's an interesting question! A simple OOC explanation could be that the naming guide was written before the Lorebook, and parts of it might be out of date as a result. There were extensive rewrites of the lore especially between 1.0 and 2.0, so it's a definite possibility. A more fun explanation could have to do with the fact that we don't know exactly where the 26 Original Miquote tribes emigrated from. They could have been wandering through whole continents as far as we know, and might have encountered Coeurls at some point in their journey. If the ecology of the world was so different back then that the oceans were frozen it's also possible that the creatures existed in areas far removed from their current locations.