(urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?

[Gerry Quinn]

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>
>> Gerry Quinn:
>> It is an ancient history, and it could just as easily have been about sea 
>> monsters as rock stars.  The thing is, though, people know about the sea 
>> monsters.  But they don't ever call them megatherians, not in the 
>> Commonwealth anyway.   One may somewhere else be called a similar thing 
>> in another language.
>
> No. In the Commonwealth they call them "great beasts".

Because they are great and beastly.  It's one of various things they are 
called.  They would call large wolves or something great beasts too.  What 
they do *not* say are things like "Abaia and the other Megatherians..." or 
"Abaia and his sixteen brothers..." or anything like that.


>>> I've tried to argue this before in the case of The Story of Frog. 
>>> [...]Ymar (king = raja = frog)[...]"Mars-Typhon"[...]"Spring Wind".[...]
>>
>> But when you propose that something like this was intentionally designed 
>> into the story, don't you need to have some criterion for detecting false 
>> positives?  I mean, in principle one can make infinitely many random 
>> flights of fancy based on any text, but not all of them can have been 
>> intended, and even if unintended meanings may sometimes be better than 
>> the intended, we must impose some criteria or there is no point in art at 
>> all - we might as well listen to white noise and see what patterns we 
>> create in our heads from it...
>
> Um...It's tougher than recognizing the Silver Surfer as Jesus or the 
> Soviet Union in 'Animal Farm', but not that terribly hard after "Urth of 
> the New Sun". As I said before, seeing "Spring Wind" as associated with 
> Typhon (who makes his appearance just after Severian includes the story) 
> was obvious. Anyone, then, trying to put together a timeline of 
> Commonwealth rulers has Ymar the Just and his association with the 
> Torturers handy in SotT. So once the connection between the word 'frog' 
> and 'ymar' is identified, well, there it is. "White noise" would be if 
> this original story with obviously twisted names is just so much random 
> clutter.

I looked up your posts on the subject of Frog.  To be candid, I find it 
difficult to tease out a specific theory.  Your most recent one said:

>     Not really. But Rana works nicely for the story. It's located in a 
> constellation that was traditionally seen as a stream. And there's a 
> "Basket" star in that constellation.  As for Fish....well, the fish is 
> hard. I can imagine that Frog is a translation for an alternative word for 
> "raja":  that is, *Rana*. If so arguably Frog, in this story, is Ymar. The 
> first Autarch.   ...
>     But it still does not identify anyone for me in the stories that can 
> be directly associated with "Fish".

I'm sorry, but IMO this isn't a strong connection.  If you accept such loose 
"connections" you can find support for any theory whatsoever.

You've posited theories, or variations on a theory, in which Fish and Frog 
became Silk, Severian, Typhon, clones of Typhon, Severian's long-lost 
twin...

But whatever about names, the content is important.  When I read the story, 
I don't recognise Severian or Typhon, or Silk.  Spring Wind was a great 
general like Typhon, but had a few notable differences from him too.  And 
that's about the *only* halfway close correspondence I can see.  Fish and 
Frog - where's the connection?

There are some interesting bits in regard to the name of Frog, incidentally. 
Early we are told how he got his name:

*********************************
Because they had been found in the water, the boys were named Fish and Frog
....
"I shall call him Frog," said the she-wolf. "For indeed the Butcher angled 
for frogs, as you said, O my husband." She believed that she said this in 
compliment to the he-wolf, because he had so readily acquiesced to her 
wishes; but the truth was that the blood of the people of the mountaintop 
beyond Urth ran in Frog, and the names of those who bear the blood cannot be 
concealed for long.

**********************************

Could be read either way... the name Frog might be significant in itself, or 
not.  The twins were never named by their mother.  [The alien origins are 
mentioned... if we take certain elements of the tale literally, it seems 
plausible that Spring Wind was born on a large space station of some kind, 
or maybe Lune ("a mountaintop beyond Urth", and the battles were on the 
planets and satellites of the Solar System (for if the mountaintop were not 
near Urth, how could Urth's astrologers read the stars of that place?  Of 
course Frog's origins are doubly alien - he is one-quarter the mysterious 
flower.]

But anyway, the story of Frog seems to have nothing particular in common 
with the life of Ymar (what little we know of it).

So who is Frog?  Quite clearly, I think, he is Romulus.  There are multiple 
very close and clear parallels within the story: the basket, the raising by 
wolves, the Sabine women, the city wall, the murdered twin brother.  Almost 
as clear is the part-divine ancestry (in which I think Wolfe merged two 
common variations).

Just like the story of the Student, it's a mash-up of ancient and more 
recent mythology (somebody noted on some board, perhaps correctly, that the 
Student also includes the Battle of Hampton Roads, with the Minotaur 
becoming the Moniter), combined with added stories by Wolfe, and futuristic 
technological trappings.  The idea is that the tales mutate and pick up 
elements of the time(s) when they are re-told.

Now of course it's possible that the stories would pick up elements from the 
history of Typhon etc.  But they could pick up elements from a thousand 
places, and there doesn't seem to be anything that *tells* us about Typhon. 
At most, I think, his name - itself mutated - has been tossed in when the 
story needed a great general.  But the name aside there are inconsistencies 
regarding his life story.  He doesn't seem at all the Typhon we know.

And the story itself: is basically a mutation of the story of Romulus.  Not 
of Typhon, Severian or Silk.


> Obviously, ambiguity is built into Wolfe's novels. There's no false 
> positive test. I'm pretty comfortable that I'm right about this. Maybe I 
> should get serious about locating Fish.

Remus, obviously.

- Gerry Quinn