(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[Jerry Friedman]

> From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> On 11/2/2011 9:09 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
...
 
>> I find it hard to believe that Severian’s descriptions of geography are detailed enough to be identifiable with confidence as a particular distorted version of Earth’s geography.

Me too.

>Yes, that's why I asked for any information about the evidence for it. Mantis has the mountains in the east. If the Commonwealth is based on Argentina, >then those mountains are the Andes and the continent is reversed. That would require that all the continents are reversed, because tectonic motion
>created the Andes where South America pushed into the Pacific.
 
Gyoll flows roughly south to the west coast of the continent.  At the climatic scene on the beach when Severian takes his boots off (CotA, Ch. XXXI), "Land--Nessus, the House Absolute, and all the rest--lay to the east; west lay the sea."  And that's near the mouth of Gyoll, as I recall.
 
On the other hand, Severian remembers when he's in the mountains that Master Palaemon had told him a pestilential "coastal jungle" lay to the west (SotL XXIII).  It doesn't sound like the mountains are so far east that we're in a mirror image of South America.
 
The Commonwealth is clearly in the southern hemisphere, and there are far more suggestions of South America than of Africa or Australasia, but I don't think we're supposed to connect it with the real present-day South America, still less connect the mountains with the Andes or Nessus with Buenos Aires.
 
>> As for the time, we don’t know it, though 20000 years seems a bit short to me, not so much in terms of theoretical history, but in terms of literary style. Of course such information as we get about the age of Urth is filled with contradictions anyway.
>
>I believe the 20,000-year figure is from Wolfe. Since no major changes could have occurred from "now" to Severian's time anyway, the significant changes
>are cultural, not geographic. Yet European languages are still spoken on the Whorl; even if they had to be revived for Typhon's purposes, they still survived
>that long.
 
In the afterword to SotT, Wolfe (the fictional Wolfe the translator) says he has no idea what ancient language he has rendered as Latin.  Thus I have serious doubts that the language he rendered as Spanish in /Long Sun/ and /Short Sun/ is supposed to be Spanish in the sense that we can draw conclusions from it, and likewise for the other languages.  (Unanswerable question: is "Urbasecundus" supposed to be a translation from the same language as "Terminus Est"?)
 
Jerry Friedman