(urth) More on Frog and Fish & Ymar

[Gerry Quinn]

From: James Wynn 
  On 5/30/2011 3:12 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote: 
    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.  

  There aren't any scholars. There is author. A very good one. He's shown his skill with this sort of thing in the other two names. There's none of that skill on display in your interpretation of the name or story.

I don't understand how you draw that conclusion.  Somebody collected a bunch of old legends a chiliad or three before Severian's time.  From our vantage in prehistory, we can easily see the main sources of these tales (presumably neither ordinary people nor scholars of late Urth would have).  The names may have been acquired at any time in the past, for any reason.  

Rumpelstiltskin means something like 'poltergeist', which does not really fit the Grimm's story at all.  Wikipedia doesn't tell me if the Grimms used the name because it sounded good, or because that name was traditional.  Similar stories exist with different names.  You can't place so great a stake on such a trivial thing, in my opinion.

And I don't see what's so especially masterful about the name Bird of the Wood.  At some time 'Rhea' was grossly misinterpreted.  Perhaps out of a half-understanding of Latin, perhaps for fun [in truth, it's a typically Wolfean joke, and that is its real origin, a joke directed to the reader of BotNS by the 'translator' rather than the apparent author], perhaps because it sounded good.  It's possible that the name originated with the person who finally wrote down the story in Severian's book, but it is at least as likely that the substitution happened long long ago at the hands of some unknown Homer.

Your thesis that the writer mistook the story (whose roots we know) for a story about the deeds of Typhon does not ring true to me.  It's just an ancient story, I believe.  Spring Wind is Mars, maybe with some random accretions but nothing that obviously comes from Typhon.  Somehow over chiliads of retelling, the story of Romulus and Remus became associated with the story of The Jungle Book.  Some names got changed in various ways.  

If another story conflates the Monitor and the Minotaur, can we really say that names mean anything?

I don't agree with you aesthethically about what you see as deficiencies in the name 'Spring Wind', and I also don't agree that Wolfe needed to embed any secret history of Urth in it.  [I do see a possible secret history in the way the animals are seen as carrying hand weapons, just as the people in the antechamber imagined them.  But I don't set too much store by this; Wolfe simply doesn't give us enough to go on to draw such conclusions.]

- Gerry Quinn




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