traveling north

John Watkins · 04 Jun 2010, 23:21 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 19:21:38 -0400
Subject: (urth) traveling north
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A pedantic point:

Tolkien most assuredly meant for Middle-Earth to be set in the distant
past of our own world.

Linguistically, however, the commonalities were indeed meant to be fictive.

On 6/4/10, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Matthew Weber <palaeologos at gmail.com>
>
>
>>On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>
>
>>
>>>But I see two possibilities in addition to Mr. Wolfe's starting with the
>>> idea that Urth was in our future and retconning it into a past universe.
>>> One is the apparently Brunian possibility that different universes and
>>> iterations will have overwhelming similarities for reasons we don't
>>> understand (unless Josh does).  In that case many or all of the universes
>>> have the names "Robert" and "Marie" at some point ("Marie" coming from
>>> "Miriam" even though there was no Mary Mother of Jesus).  Even the
>>> saints' names could be names of exemplary people who were equivalent to
>>> the saints of our world.
>>
>>
>
>> I had always thought that Robert and Marie was a reference to some other
>> work that I just wasn't
>> getting.
>
> I thought that too, and I think many people have.  Has anyone ever
> identified it?  Someone said Robert Borski had, but I'd like to see it.
>
>
>>
>>This would also explain why Severian learned that a constitutional
>> representative democracy like ours was the highest form of government--his
>> world once had equivalents to our governments of that type, even if none
>> of the history we know about was anything like that.  (Which would throw
>> an interesting light on the argument about Jesus' effect, if his universe
>> passed through our stage and returned to widespread tyranny and slavery,
>> as ours could.)
>>
>>
>
>> I'm not sure that Severian really learns that a constitutional
>> representative democracy is the highest
>> form of government.  After he recites the list of governmental types, in
>> order of sophistication, the
>> Master then asks him : of what nature is his own relationship to the
>> Increate?  That seems to
>> suggest, to me, that Malrubius (as mouthpiece for Wolfe?) thinks
>> monarchism to be really the
>> highest form of government.
>
> Sorry, maybe I should have said Severian had been taught that our kind of
> government was the highest.  I find it a bit surprising that such a belief
> had existed on Urth and that the aquastor of Master Malrubius would need to
> correct it.
>
>> Please bear in mind also that in Christian theology, Jesus did not arrive
>> to set human beings free
>> from temporal slavery, suffering, and tyranny, but from spiritual slavery,
>> suffering, and tyranny.
>> The idea that Jesus should have had a ripple-effect of liberation from
>> governmental tyranny, which
>> can never be rolled back, is more closely aligned with the Social Gospel
>> and its antecedents than
>> with most early Christian ideas about government.  Ss Paul & Augustine,
>> and up through Luther,
>> put this point most cogently.
>
>>The other is that the fictional Wolfe, the translator, says in the
>> appendices that he has used the "closest twentieth-century equivalents"
>> for "yet undiscovered concepts"; he, not Severian, put an athame into
>> Agia's hands.  He uses Latin for a language Severian considers obsolete
>> and presumably changes the images in "a serpent in the last letter but
>> one, and a sword in the last."  So along those lines, maybe the names
>> Robert, Marie, Isangoma, Kimleesoong, and Paris are only his translations
>> of names from the distant past that were unfamiliar to Severian, and maybe
>> the translator even changed the description of the plane so we could
>> recognize it.  Maybe the double meaning of "Verthandi" was different.
>> Maybe he put in all the clues for South America, for instance by using
>> Quechua to translate a language that Severian says is indigenous, because
>> he knew somehow that the Commonwealth was in South America.
>>
>>>Or maybe this is taking the translator conceit too seriously.
>>
>>
>>Isn't it sort of like Tolkien using Gothic/Celtic names for the
>> Brandybucks, and Anglo-Saxon as
>>Rohirric, in The Lord of the Rings?  Obviously, that book takes place in a
>> world where there is no
>>Europe (and no Goths to invade it), and no England.  But these cognates are
>> meant to suggest
>>relationships between those names and the surrounding culture which are
>> similar to the way those
>>relationships function in our milieu.  I think.
>
> Yes, that's what I'm suggesting, and I should have thought of the parallel
> to /The Lord of the Rings/.  The question I'm asking is how far it goes.
> The names Robert, Marie etc.?  Other names?  The pun on "present"?  How
> about what Severian says Thecla said Father Inire said, "light is so
> weightless that we have given its name to that condition"?
>
> Maybe Mr. Wolfe's definitive statement on cycles of the universe is from the
> James Jordan interview: "I was toying with those ideas, I think, rather than
> trying to
> make sense of them."
>
> Jerry Friedman
>
>
>
>

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