(urth) TWK: Mag?

[Michael Straight]

Hi, all.  I just finished Wizard and am reading through some of the discussion.

On 2/25/05, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> asked about this passage:
> -----------------------------------------------
>   "'Oh, son . . .'
>    "It was a peasant woman. I had seen many fairer, though she was fair.
>    "'You are my son.'
>    "I knew that she was wrong, and it came to me that if I were to lie upon
> the ground, and she to bend over me, I would see her in the way I had just
> recalled her. Then I understood that she was the fairest of women." (W, 263)

Here's what I think is going on here:

Mag calls Art her son.  Art's initial response is to believe she is
wrong, mistaking him in the same way Berthold mistakes Art for Able.

But as he looks at her, Art has a memory from when he was a child
looking up at his own mother and realizes that Mag's face is the same
one he remembers, except now he's grown and sees her face-to-face. 
Mag *is* his mother, his lost love, and for that reason the fairest of
women (to him).

As to how Art's mother comes to be in Mythgarthr, on the Isle of
Glass, I have no idea.

-- Rostrum