Seawrack's name

Lee Berman · 31 Aug 2010, 01:47 · from 2010-August.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:47:27 -0400
Subject: (urth) Seawrack's name
Message-ID: <SNT123-W655DC6981D088F9A4C3BF4CF8A0 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff- If Seawrack is a part of Scylla, then she is certainly "little" even if 
>she's a siren and not a mermaid.

At the risk of mucking up David's perfectly good Andersenian reference I'd want to note 
that sirens and mermaids are not really distinct creatures. The sirens are often depicted
as mermaids and mermaids were often supposed to have a seductive, deadly allure. I think 
the legends are all intertwined.

Manatees are supposed to be the real world inspiration for mermaids. As mentioned, their
order classification is Sirenia. We know undines are confused with manatees in BotNS. I 
don't remember Juturna singing but she certainly had a seductive nature, luring Severian
toward an underwater future. 

Wolfe is certainly giving those European water nymphs/demons their due. Joining the undines
and nixies and kelpies that are mentioned in BotNS, now we might have a melusine/syrenka 
inspiration to the siren of the Short Sun. 

I like the idea of a pinched off piece of a larger entity as the origin for undines and 
Seawrack. But I notice in these European legends of the creatures there is often a Changeling
aspect. And some of the Mother and Seawrack's talk does suggest Seawrack could have been
a child stolen from her real mother. I suspect another one of those double possibility
solutions WOlfe throws at us.

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