The Sorcerer's House Questions (Major Spoilers)

Matthew Keeley · 19 Mar 2010, 22:14 · from 2010-March.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: matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com (Matthew Keeley)
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:14:25 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
In-Reply-To: <44fb53d11003191442y48191c3ataaac84d798b8b983 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <44fb53d11003191442y48191c3ataaac84d798b8b983 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <44fb53d11003191514w3b034f04occ786b38fc1d6192 at mail.gmail.com>

Another thought, one that gives away major plot points.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-




Was Ambrosius Mr. Black's son? In some legends Merlin Ambrosius is the son
of the devil (or at least a demon of some sort). One of Zwart's aliases is
"old Nick", an old name for Satan? Is Mr. Black really a devil? Or does he
just have the accoutrements of one?

-Matt

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Matthew Keeley
<matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Just finished reading the new book; it seems a lot clearer than AEG, but,
> being Wolfe, there are quite a few unasked questions raised by my first
> reading. But first I should insert spoiler space, as I will be discussing
> the ending, etc.
>
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
> -
>
> (spoilers commence)
>
> 1. Goldwurm's Tower ? Apparently the previous owner was named Ambrosius;
> this seems likely to be a reference to Ambrose, often named as Merlin's
> tutor. In other versions, Merlin is called "Merlin Ambrosius". And I believe
> there's a legend that Merlin died "three times" ? broke his neck, drowned,
> and something else. The information is somewhat hard to find online; later I
> shall consult some of my Arthurian books.
>
> 2. Goldwurm again ? In what object did he deposit his numen?
>
> 3. I think we can all agree that George didn't really write the last letter
> and that Bax is going to take his place. Winker follows "George", for one
> thing. And "George" seems to know a lot about Victorian fiction, the subject
> of one of Bax's degrees. So why is the real George absent? Did Bax kill him?
> Or did George run off to faerie to try and take command, as he said he would
> do in an earlier letter?
>
> 4. What did Ted's ghost leave Doris? Could Ted be another Zwart pseudonym?
>
> 5. Bax very quickly starts calling his putative butler "old Nick", one of
> the devil's classic nicknames. He doesn't seem to notice, but maybe his
> subconscious is warning him not to trust the man? Was there a "real" Nick
> before he was replaced by Zwart?
>
> 6. Under what conditions can Toby and Winkle transform? Can't just be a
> full moon.
>
> 7. What's Musashi ? a historical figure ? doing in faerie? Is this an
> idealized archetypal Musashi as opposed to the historic one?
>
> 8. What's with the dwarf?
>
> 9. The "compiler" states that the letters may be out of order.... Are there
> any that are clearly in the wrong place in the narrative?
>
> -Matt
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100319/b36b220f/attachment.htm>

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