(urth) Urth - Earth links

[Jerry Friedman]

>From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>

>From: Sergei SOLOVIEV 
> > If you got interested in the links between Urth and our world - please,
>> answer this: how the Chrasmological writings were composed?
>> Yes, we know "within the book" that Typhon/Pas ordered some scholars to 
>> do it.
>> But I mean other question - what message wants GW to pass to us,
>> regarding their content?
>> 
>> There are several quotations from the books of our time. Actually,
>> all passages that are explicitly given are such quotations. 
> 
>Didn’t  Wolfe himself say somewhere that Typhon got his servants to
> make up a book of philosophy from eclectic sources, to be the Word of
> Pas?  Or was that someone else?

But this sort of thing is blurred by the quotations in the Atrium of Time.  The Latin doesn't match Valeria's translations, so Wolfe has drawn attention to his fictitious translation by turning quotations in the original dead language into somewhat similar but perhaps recognizable-to-us Latin tags.

Maybe the Chrasmological Writings are the same thing, and we're supposed to imagine that Wolfe the translator has turned quotations from Briah into somewhat similar quotations from our literature.

If all the passages from the Chrasmological Writings really are quotations, that would corroborate this idea, as it would be remarkable for the chrasmologists to have limited themselves to sources written before the late 20th century.

 
>Whatever 
> about ‘cycles’, Wolfe’s Urth is much the same as our Earth, and it’s prehistory 
at least (the era of the Dawn Men, extending up to the colonisation of the inner 
Solar System) appears to be nearly identical.

Presumably except for Jesus.

> Not just the Chrasmological 
> Writings but various objects and events in BotNS testify to this.


But how far would Wolfe go in familiarizing things from Urth's past?  Could he have changed the names of their saints to the names of ours?  Could he have changed Severian's description of the "Apollo" painting so we would recognize it?  (Maybe not.)


Jerry Friedman