Sev's common lineage

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 29 Jun 2008, 05:25 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:25:42 +1000
Subject: (urth) Sev's common lineage
Message-ID: <20080629052543.6469A1A003A at mailserver8.hushmail.com>

Sev's lineage is a problem which I'm sure Wolfe intended people to 
drive themselves crazy over, and I don't think there's enough info 
to get really definitive. But on the flip side, I think he's 
inviting us to have fun making up stories, so what the hell ...

I want Sev to be related to Casdoe and Li'l Sev. "Casdoe" is so 
similar to "Dorcas", with the syllables reversed. Li'l Sev asks Sev 
if he's his uncle, which I don't think makes a lot of sense unless 
Li'l Sev does in fact have an Uncle Sev. If I'm right and Fechin is 
Dorcas' father, then at the very least the families have known each 
other for 70+ years.

Most characters, even if relatively minor, get named. Two 
exceptions are Casdoe's father and Dorcas' husband. I don't know 
what the first was called, but I think I know the name of the 
second: Severian.

Here's how it works.  Say Fechin is Dorcas' father. The ages work 
out OK. Base-lining against the time when Sev left the Citadel, we 
have Dorcas born 55-60 years previously (she died 40+ years ago, 
according to her husband, and I think we can assume that Sev is 17-
18). Rudesind was painted by Fechin as a boy; Rudesind is 70 years 
+ a boy's age old, say early 80's. Estimate Fechin as having been 
born 85-90 years ago, so he had Dorcas when he was 30-40. 

Casdoe's father is a contemporary of Fechin, so he's 85-90 also. 
Quite old enough for Dorcas' husband, the old boatman, to in fact 
be his son. Eg: say he has the old boatman when he's about 20, 
which makes the guy 65-70. 

It's a very plausible story: Casdoe's father is close to Fechin, 
and obviously neighbors, at least when young. Their kids grow up 
together and marry each other.

Casdoe must be a late offspring for her father: she has twins who 
seem to be about 6 years old. Say she was born 26 years ago; or 
when her father was around 60. Not impossible, of course, but it 
does perhaps suggest other things which I won't go into here.

In any case, this ties everybody together, and the guess of 
"Severian" as Dorcas' husband's name explains why Li'l Sev asked 
Our Sev if he was his uncle. Dorcas' husband is his uncle, on this 
theory, and Li'l Sev presumably knows he has an uncle with this 
name. Our Sev and Li'l Sev are in fact second cousins.

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