(urth) Sorcerer's House Comment

[Darth Ed]

On May 4, 2012, at 11:32 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> The book *is* dedicated effusively to Gaiman by Wolfe; it's not
> unreasonable to think that Wolfe targeted it at Gaiman or simply gave
> Gaiman some hints or something.

I concur. That's my feeling as well.

> I took a quick look at the first 6 or 7 chapters. I don't see any
> obvious correspondence with the letter titles and the order given in
> Wikipedia, but 'magician' does seem to align with the fish part of the
> plot. Possibly the trumps are a skeleton key to figuring out the
> unscrambled order of the letters? I don't remember anyone pointing out
> any interesting problems with the ordering and giving a revealing true
> ordering.

I don't think the letters/chapters are out of order per se with regards to
some canonical ordering of the Major Arcana and that we need to reorder the
chapters/letters to fit that canonical ordering. In a Tarot reading, the
cards are shuffled and the ordering of the cards is significant to the
person who is being read by the reader. And I don't think the titles are
necessarily related to the Major Arcana, but rather the principle
characters and/or action that takes place in each letter/chapter can be
matched to each of the Major Arcana. In that respect, I'm keen on David
Stockoff's interpretation which identified several such matches for a
handful of the letters/chapters. He also incorporated the mirroring nicely
into his interpretation. His identifications seemed quite reasonable to me,
and I think further study is warranted and may come up with additional
identifications between the letters/chapters and the Major Arcana. I'll
certainly be looking for such connection on my next reading of TSH, but I
suspect that's probably years from now, unfortunately.

In a sense, we, the readers of the book, are like the Tarot reader who
reads the past, present, and future of a person/character. The
cards/chapters represent the past and the present; the reader interprets
them and uses them to foretell the future of the person/character.

Later,
Ed

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