{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4748",
    "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'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 4748,
    "subject": "Thecla's books again",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2006-10-23T05:10:59+00:00",
    "last": "2006-10-23T05:10:59+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<200610230511.k9N5B0VF062695@mailserver3.hushmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "thalassocrat at nym.hush.com",
        "address": "thalassocrat at nym.hush.com"
      },
      "date": "2006-10-23T05:10:59+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Thecla's books again",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Wolfe's PE revelation that Thecla's \"fourth book\" = TBOTNS is just \nso unconvincing on internal grounds. It's obviously ludicrous from \na narrative perspective, if it refers to our TBOTNS; and it doesn't \nmake a whole lot more sense if it refers to Canog's (why doesn't he \ncite it rather than Talos' play as the source of his jail-cell \nsermon in UOTNS - and so on.)\n\nPretending this annoying revelation never happened: Is there any \ninternal evidence for what the fourth book might have been?\n\nApologies if this is repeating Old Stuff, but I hadn't really \nnoticed the following passage before, near the beginning of Ch X of \nShadow:\n\n\"The books I had carried to her became my university ... If \neducated men have sometimes thought me ... one whose company did \nnot shame them, that is owing solely to Thecla ... and the four \nbooks. ... Thecla ... delighted in talking to me [A] of the secrets \nof the past, [B] of the conjectures formed of higher spheres and \n[C] of the arms and histories of heroes millennia dead.\"\n\nPresumably [A] refers to the Brown Book, and [B] to the smallest, \ngreen book. What does [C] refer to? Assuming it doesn't also refer \nto the Brown Book (which maybe you could argue), I guess it must be \neither the large, saffian book or the fourth book.\n\nThe saffian book is, we are told, a book of heraldry. Would such a \nbook also tell of the \"arms and histories of heroes millenia dead\"? \nMaybe, I suppose, but in the absence of anything else I'd tend to \nassume something focused on lineage and the quarterings of coats of \narms etc, without a great deal of history. Just after the quoted \npassage, Sev refers to Thecla & he \"tracing the lineage of old \nhouses\", which I assume refers to the saffian book. Does this \nconstitute a [D] to be added to the list, leaving [C] for the \n\"fourth book\"?\n\nIf so, then my internal guess at the contents of the fourth book \nmight have been something like an epic poem - \"arma virumque cano\". \nWhat would I do with this? Well, I think we're safe in assuming \nthat Thecla is to some extent a follower of Vodalus. His agenda is \n\"return to ancient glory\" which I think has to mean: \"return to the \ntime when exultants were in charge, before the time of the \nAutarchs.\"  But I think Thecla also has ambitions beyond those of a \nfollower.\n\nThe fourth book might be the Iliad or Aeneid of the exultants, both \na the source-text for the \"ancient glory\", and the normal kind of \nlegend cycle by which an elite group establishes its hierarchy of \nprestige: trace a direct lineage back to an ancestral hero, and you \nhave juice. Requesting the saffian book & the lineage tracing would \nbe her attempts to do this for herself. The Brown Book would be a \nsource of further material for building up the Thecla-ancestry-\nlegend, and the theology book would give ideas for how to dress it \nup with a mantle of divine accreditation, for the masses (I think \nin this Byzantine society, the ruler would always need to be a \npriest-king to some extant).\n\nThecla wants to be Autarch, maybe as consort, maybe in her own \nright. (She has grown up with the prophecy that she would sit a \nthrone; she talks of forging a new religion; the irony of her fate \nis blatant.) Maybe she is driven partly by jealousy of Thea. \n\nShe's not single minded about this ambition; she also talks of \nretiring to the country and so on. Thea is, I think, the steely \none; Thecla is a bit of a ditz.\n\nAnyway, something along those lines works for me better than the \nstory we're apparently supposed to believe :) "
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}