{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3423",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3423,
    "subject": "PEACE: the tale of the banshee",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-08-25T13:52:52+00:00",
    "last": "2002-08-25T13:52:52+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0208-1602@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "StoneOx17",
        "address": "stoneox17 at aol.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-08-25T13:52:52+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) PEACE: the tale of the banshee",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Hello,\n\nDespite all the effort spent analyzing many of the embedded stories in Peace, \nthere seems to have been relatively little written in this forum about the \nbanshee story.  I think that the participants in this story can be identified \nwith some of the main characters in Peace, and that this story answers the \nquestion of \"what went wrong?\" with Wolfe's relationship to Margaret.  Roy \nLackey gave much of the same answer to this question already, without relying \non the hints hidden in the banshee tale, in \nhttp://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0104.html\nbut the banshee story fills in a few more of the details.\n\nMy identification in the story is:\nDen Weer is Jack,\nMargaret Lorn is Molly,\nCarl Lorn is Molly's father,\nJulian Smart is the banshee.\n\nLet's review the banshee story.  \n\nMolly's father owns a big farm and Molly is his only child, so whoever \nmarries her inherits the farm.  Jack and Molly are in love, but Molly's \nfather doesn't want Molly to marry Jack, \"because Jack had nothing to bring \nto the wedding but his own two hands and a smile.\"\n\nIn the \"what went wrong?\" speech, Weer says \"I was intelligent and \nindustrious; Margaret and I loved one another deeply.\"  But when he comes \nback from college, the Depression has wiped out all of his fortune and made \njobs very hard to find.  How is he to make a living?\n\nOne possibility would be for Weer to marry Margaret and move to the Lorn's \nfarm.   The Lorns likely still have their farm, since they wouldn't have had \nlarge bank loans, because the farm has been in their family for years and \nCarl Lorn is naturally frugal. Even though the income from the farm has been \ngreatly reduced, they can at least grow enough food to feed themselves.  It \nwould be reasonable for Weer to help on the farm if he is to marry Margaret; \nshe is the Lorn's only child, and so will inherit the farm. Later in the \nbook, the farmer delivering potatoes to the factory says \"When I was a boy, \nthere wasn't anything anybody could have that was better'n a farm.  If a \ndoctor or a banker could marry a widow that had a good one, they'd stop what \nthey was doing and work it.\"  This farmer is ten or twenty years older than \nWeer, but taking this and the banshee story together, I conclude that when \nWeer was about to graduate, he and Margaret proposed that they get married \nand that Den move out to the farm and help work it.                           \n                                                                              \n                                                                              \n                                                                              \n                                                                              \n                    \n\nFrom the banshee story, we see that Carl Lorn didn't want Weer to marry \nMargaret.  He disapproved of selling the egg, and he's tight with money \n(\"only Daddy never gets nothing at the store if he can find something else \nthat'll do\") so Weer has two strikes against him, being Olivia's nephew and \nbeing penniless.  In the banshee story, Molly's father tells Jack he'd have \nto spend the whole night in the barn haunted by the banshee and not be thrown \nout; in Weer's real life, Carl probably told Weer that he wouldn't let \nMargaret marry him unless he could support her.  So Weer has to take the job \nat the factory (the real-life parallel of the barn); unfortunately, the \ncoldhouse prank kills somebody, and Julius blackmails him into staying at the \nfactory until Julius dies.  In this scenario, it doesn't even matter whether \nMargaret knows about the coldhouse prank.  Weer can't marry her unless he \nfinds another job which pays better, and he can't leave this job because of \nJulius' blackmail.  Eventually, Margaret gets fed up with Weer's inaction and \nmarries Mr. Price (whom we suspect, from his surname, has sufficient money).  \n\nThere are some interesting differences between the banshees in Peace and the \nbanshees in Irish folklore.  Looking on the web, it seems that in Irish \nfolklore, the banshee is a woman sidhe who wails before somebody is going to \ndie (and most important families have an associated banshee that predicts \ndeaths in that family).  In some versions of the legend, if you catch the \nbanshee, she has to tell you who is going to die.  However, she only \nforetells deaths, unlike Wolfe's banshee, who causes them.  Note that Wolfe \nis playing off the folklore banshee: when his banshee is caught, she does \ntell Jack \"who's to be born,\" although one might suspect that she's lying out \nof spite.\n\nWolfe's banshees are ghosts (quite fittingly for Peace) who are \"the spirits \nof midwives that have killed the baby because someone gave gold to them to do \nit that it might not inherit.\"  This gives grounds for identifying the \nbanshee as Julius: in \nhttp://urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/1043.txt.shtml, \nI speculated that Julius may have killed Mr. Tilly so as to inherit the carny \nbusiness, which, while not an exact parallel, is certainly similar.  \n\nJack stays in the barn haunted by the banshee three nights.  The first two \ntimes, the banshee forces him to speak the name of someone whom she later \nkills, first \"the meanest man [Jack] can think of, a man that robbed \neverybody and never gave poor folk a penny,\" and second, \"a real old lady \nthat was goin' to die anyway.\"  The third time, he defeats the banshee.  If \nwe identify the banshee with Julius, this is reminiscent of Weer's comment \nthat he recalls uncle Julius clearly \"only at three stages of his life.\"  The \nfirst stage is when Julius tells the story of Mr. Tilly.  The second stage is \nat aunt Olivia's funeral.  And the last is when Julius is an old man and the \npresident.  This seems a little strange, because Den lived with Julius for \nquite a while, and this period doesn't seem included in either of these \nstages.  However, if we take these three stages as corresponding to the three \nnights in the banshee story, then we are led to suspect that Julius killed \nboth Mr. Tilly and Olivia for their inheritances.  We know (since Wolfe has \nconfirmed it) that it was Peacock who actually ran Olivia over in his car, \nbut there are at least two reasons to suspect that Peacock might have \nconspired with Julius: first, Julius Smart and Professor Peacock were good \nfriends, and second, there's the mysterious letter from Peacock to Julius \nthat Weer is unable to read.\n\nIs there any more evidence for this correspondence between the banshee story \nand Weer's life?  In the other stories in Peace that we know have parallels \n(the princess and her suitors, and the marid), there is a correspondence \nhidden in the characters' names.  The link from Molly to Mary to Margaret \nseems obvious, but I don't see how to get from Jack to Den.  Any ideas?\n\n- Stone Ox"
        }
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    }
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}