(urth) Short Sun blog

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

In a nutshell, Wolfe loves puns.

--- On Thu, 9/23/10, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Short Sun blog
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Thursday, September 23, 2010, 11:31 AM


>> Gerry Quinn: Not a strong 'Spring' association.  And if we lose the 'typhoon'
>> >association, the wind connection is even weaker.
> 
> Lee Berman-
> Agreed. But if the sirrocco winds of Typhon-Set were a spring-only phenomenon my
> skepticism on this theory would be significantly erased. Typhon-Set was a god of
> wind.
> 

Wolfe doesn't just create easy allegories of other stories. He is interested in mythology as he is interested in pulp literature. But even more, he seems interested in the way their themes and icons span the globe. And he's interested in words.

The word typhon is directly connected to the word typhoon. It might well be that the connection was originally erroneous. It might be that the association was real but the supposition for how they were connected was erroneous. None of this disassociates the words from one another. Typhon --the mythical one(s)-- is a wind or closely associated with winds (but it might be that name for Egypt's typhon wind was as much originally based on erroneous etymology as typhon/typhoon--much of language is metaphor). To insist that Spring Wind (typhoons _do_ come in the Spring) ought to be Summer Wind if we were expected to associate him to Typhon would be like ME answering Andrew thus:
"How can you say Rhea Silvia is Bird of the Woods? Rhea Silvia was not a bird."

This is a myth that has been subsumed into an historical character in the same way that King Arthur and Alexander the Great subsumed myths from much more ancient periods. Those who translated the story knew nothing of Roman mythology or Kipling. So they did not use the "authentic" terms. I'm not sure how to explain this better. I can only recommend to you Weer's conversation with Louis Gold in "Peace".

u+16b9
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