TSH: Rip van Winkle and John Duns Scotus

Gwern Branwen · 04 May 2010, 12:48 · from 2010-May.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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 08:48:15 -0400
Subject: (urth) TSH: Rip van Winkle and John Duns Scotus
In-Reply-To: <105620.48921.qm at web84404.mail.ac2.yahoo.com>
References: <105620.48921.qm at web84404.mail.ac2.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <h2jcbf55b101005040548vbf5c5943i1886415530f6f3bf at mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 2:53 AM, Stephen Hoy <stephenhoy at yahoo.com> wrote:
...
> As to Bax's familiar, Winker/Winkle suggests a link to the story of the Urashima Taro, a
> Japanese Rip van Winkle who went away to fairyland for a few days and
> returned home only to find years had passed.
>
> Strengthening this
> supposition is the second half of the fox's name, Inari, which refers to a Japanese god of success & prosperity, often depicted as an old man
> riding a white fox.

Whoa, I don't see any connection there at all. I don't remember
Urashima Taro being connected with foxes/kitsune at all - dragons, if
anything. Nor did I ever hear of Taro as being rewarded with great
wealth, and I'm not sure about there being any Rip van Winkle-style
time travel in the story.

-- 
gwern

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