(urth) Ouen and Dorcas and ??

[Andrew Mason]

Jeff Wilson wrote:

> On 12/6/2010 7:33 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>
>> Also, the epigraphs give it away---Severian has never heard of Kipling.
>
> But he has heard Kipling's work, however many times removed. The Boy
> Called Frog is Mowgli from _The Jungle Book_; the verse could have held
> its form better over the ages sufficient for the translator to recognize
> it and give the original. The bible verse for Joseph's dream has
> certainly survived.

There's no doubt that literature from 'our' time has survived, in a
disordered and fragmentary form, into Severian's.  Indeed one of the
passages used as an epigraph - the Fitzgerald - is actually quoted in
the text, I think by Barbatus or Famulimus. What is improbable is that
the names of authors have survived. (Curiously, names of authors are
not used with the epigraphs in the first two volumes, but are in the
later ones.)
>