(urth) More on Frog and Fish & Ymar

[Gerry Quinn]

[I can't interleaf my response due to the formatting.]

I think you are over-interpreting here with regard to the name - or half the name - of Spring Wind..  Why do any scholars need to be involved at all?  Somebody could have written down the story just as it had evolved to when he heard it.  Bird of the Woods and Spring Wind might have got their names separately at any time during its evolution.  Stories about talking wolves carrying knives do not have the air of a serious scholarly effort to uncover historical facts.  Instead, I think, some scholar of a chiliad or two ago wrote it down along with all the other collected legends, just as it was told to him.  

Mars might have become Spring Wind in various ways.  The wind is actually mentioned in the story as having two interpretations.  Perhaps Wolfe added that because the real reason he put it in was that he wanted a not-easily recognisable alternate name for Mars, but Spring was simply too short and obviously symbolic.  

Bird of the Wood and Early Summer sound like real names, personalised and non-symbolic.  Summer for a woman might not be too bad (perhaps because it is used in our culture today, though it is recent), but Spring for a man would instantly raise the question of what it means, and Wolfe wants that question to be secondary to the actual story of the people concerned.  (As with everything else in his stories.)

On the separate matter of Rigoglio, I think you are right that there were separate visits, but surely there is every indication that the visits were to the same time period?

- Gerry Quinn




  From: James Wynn 
Andrew Mason:
I'm not sure why June is OK for Juno, but March is not OK for Mars.
(We're asking what a redactor of the myth might think. What
associations the name might have outside the story, what symbolic
value Wolfe might give it, is another question.)

  Because the "redactors" are not sloppy. That's the beauty of what Wolfe has done here. It is possible to imagine an intelligent scholar translating Juno as "Early Summer" and Rhea Silvia as "woodland bird" or Bird of the Woods. The name for the bird was chosen from the name of the goddess.
  "March Winds" is possibly a fine stand-in for Zephyr. But the word March is a direct translation of 'Mars'. Mars is not associated with the _winds_ that arise during that time period. The object is different for each one. Do you see that one of these things is not like the others?


[--]Is that relevant, though? The gap the characters are trying to
determine is between Rigoglio's departure (Typhon's time) and his
return (Severian's time) - both on Urth. What the Rajan's home time
is, on Blue, is another issue.
  Is it necessary that the period at which Rigoglio dies be the same as the one where they meet Severian? Aren't those separate trips?

  J.



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