(urth) No Planets Strike question for those with religious backgrounds ...

Marc Aramini marcaramini at gmail.com
Sun Apr 26 05:17:37 PDT 2015


I suppose it could mean "web of swords/important events" as well...

The story also uses the donkey and the bull to re-enact the rather famous
allegory of the long spoons - hell would be much more like heaven if the
people fed each other rather than simply tried to feed themselves.

I feel that Wolfe's religious stories, for whatever reason, are highly
dependent upon older texts.

"How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen" is intensely dependent upon T.H.
White's biographical travels to the Inniskeas, where White became obsessed
with a possibly pagan stone used as the pillow of a holy man which was
appropriated in Catholic reverence, depicted in his nonfictional "The
Godstone and the Blackymore". There is a scene at the start of that in
which the historically ambiguously sexually oriented White talks to his
older patron Bunny passionately about falconry that reminded me so strongly
of Blood and Musk in The Book of the Long Sun that it was almost shocking.

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 4:58 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am writing up a whole bunch of the short story ones now, and there is a
> scene at the end of the rather allegorical (but obviously so) No Planets
> Strike, which depicts the reign of the pagan world (The Beautiful Ones of
> the planet Sidhe/The Fair Ones) as alien control of humanity, and pretty
> much involves scenes directly from the bible and the life of Christ from
> our narrator Donkey ... and there is a scene at the end where he talks
> about folks going to the planet Barrmaser, though some pronounce it
> Biladmaser.
>
> These words are Somalian words, and "maser" is tissue.  If it stopped
> there I would expect it to be mere coincidence, but in Somali Barr means
> "important events" and Bilad means "sword" ... so we have three Somalian
> words.
>
> Does "tissue of Swords" or "Tissue of important events" mean anything to
> anyone here with a knowledge of the Christian religion or the transition
> from the pagan world to the Christian one?
>
> I do not think the sound similarities to a Jewish concept such as a bar
> mitzvah (where bar implies son) is necessarily the way to go with this,
> since all three components are actual words in an existing language ...
>
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