(urth) Abaia and the undines

David Stockhoff dstockhoff at verizon.net
Tue Dec 9 12:08:44 PST 2008


And to pick up another thread, I think it's helpful to view TBotNS's cosmology from a faerie or Greek perspective. Severian need not be related to the undines, but that's one way of explaining why he does indeed seem to have a water-sprite connection.

My assumption has always been that the undines, Abaia, Baldanders, and Idas were all the same race but different ages, and Abaia is merely an ancient, huge, undersea humanoid. Which is the same as saying he is Poseidon and the undines are his nymphs---but with a rational explanation.

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Message: 5
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:13:15 -0600
From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Abaia and the undines
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <493DFE6B.6040800 at io.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Thomas Bitterman wrote:

> > On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 6:12 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net 
> > <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>> wrote:
> > 
> >     I don't recall reading anything about the origin of Abaia and the
> >     undines. Does anyone "know" or care to guess?
>   

Abaia could be an enormous, ageless leviathan grown from some earlier 
epoch's premiere thaumaturgist, like Baldanders begins to be during 
Severian's reign, or it could be something else but still seems to 
include gigantified beings descended of human stock among its "undine" 
henchmen.

My pet theory is that Ouen's side of the family has undines in the 
driftwoodpile; this explains several mysteries of the book: Dorcas' 
awakening when buried underwater, where Severian's sister is (she's 
Jolenta), Severian's unfailing ability to survive water when his other 
powers are hit and miss, the ambiguous agression of the undines against 
the New Sun (they want to turn Severian instead of "wasting" an 
irreplaceable double agent, they "save" him from Gyoll instead of 
letting him stay tangled long enough to make it obvious he's an 
undine-bred), and so forth.

-- Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com < http://www.io.com/~jwilson > 
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