St. Paul & the Werwolf

mary whalen · 02 Jul 1998, 01:17 · from urth-v0015.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: mary whalen <marewhalen at yahoo.com>
Subject: (urth) St. Paul & the Werwolf
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 01:17:44
Message-ID: <urth-v0015-0064 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0015/0064.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This is Sean Whalen (prion).

On June 29, 1998, Robert Borski wrote a comparison of the story the
Hero as Werwolf to St. Paul, and other Biblical stories that I feel
was very perceptive.

However, it seems that you (if I'm wrong I apologize) think that
almost no time passes between the scene where Paul takes Janie away
from her father to when they attack the child.  You say that Paul
"marries" her, but doesn't consummate the marriage.

Actually, it's been quite a while since they met at that point.  Long
enough for Janie to have gotten clothes from Paul's house (or a new
victim), for her to get used to him and develope an attatchment for
him, and long enough for them to have hunted together, so I think they
would have had plenty of time to consummate their "vows."

Also, you say that since Paul's last name is Gorou, as in the French
word loup-garou (werewolf), that since the loup is taken off his name,
garou would correspond to man and make him symbolically the "Son of
Man."  However, garou is the term that meant werewolf in the word
originally.  Garou from garoul from garulf from gwerewolfe which also
gave werewolf in English.  It's a Germanic root, and the French forgot
this and added the loup part to make it sound right to them.  Wolfe
would probably have known about this, so how does it fit your theory
(not that your theory needs to be concerned with this minor detail)?

On another topic, has anyone noticed just how often Wolfe puts people
eating other people in his stories?  It's in Fifth Head of Cerberus,
Tracking Song, the Book of the New Sun, and probably others, too.  Is
all this just related to the Eucharest?

prion

_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net