<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.19046">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff text=#000000>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><B>From:</B> <A title=crushtv@gmail.com
href="mailto:crushtv@gmail.com">James Wynn</A> </DIV>
<DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">On
5/30/2011 3:12 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE cite=mid:056D7D85F34B4CD79A081169A32DC748@jill type="cite">
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.
</FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>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.<BR></BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>If another story conflates the Monitor and the
Minotaur, can we really say that names mean anything?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.]</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>- Gerry Quinn</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>