do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Gerry Quinn · 23 May 2011, 15:35 · from 2011-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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 16:35:41 +0100
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
References: <SNT123-W220B7E3214FF82B9BAC2DDCF710 at phx.gbl>	<AE83B76DDD3A4DCCB4C28DABF86BA1B5@jill>	<4DD6C327.5090406 at gmail.com><535089.18349.qm at web114704.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DD6EBE4.5000407 at gmail.com><CF45A7FFB0554242BE3B514EBE3B8BC5@jill>	<4DD74568.2040606 at gmail.com><68AC8C3C67314A15A40B9FB895DD5E50@jill>
	<4DD9D005.6010701 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AEC7C702B7C14DB1BF20E6F99A3B4822@jill>

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>
> Gerry Quinn:
>>James Wynn:

>>> Obviously, ambiguity is built into Wolfe's novels. There's no false 
>>> positive test. I'm pretty comfortable that I'm right about this. Maybe I 
>>> should get serious about locating Fish.
>>
>> Remus, obviously.
>
> Why call Juno, Rhea Silvia, and Mars by direct cognates and call Romulus 
> and Remus by Frog and Fish? There's no "Fish" in the "Jungle Book".

I'm not familiar with details of the Jungle Book - are their parts of it in 
the story?.  In any case, we don't need it to identify Frog and Fish, 
because the story of Romulus and Remus is so very clearly identifiable that 
there seems no reasonable alternative source (other than a different 
retelling of the same story).

Look at the clear points of identity:
* twins
* half or quarter divine origin (more ambiguous than the others, see note 1 
below)
* mother's name: Bird of the Woods = Rhea Silvia
* abandoned in a basket
* raised by wolves and shepherds (slight modification, see note 2)
* raised a motley army and demanded their heritage from their usurping great 
uncle
* decided to found a new city
* stole women from neighbouring tribes
* Frog builds a trench and tells Fish it is to be the wall; Fish mocks him 
by jumping over it; Frog slays him (*exactly* the same as with Romulus and 
Remus).

Note 1: Mars or Hercules was supposedly their father - some people have 
found Mars somewhere I think, but I prefer the idea of Hercules as Spring 
Wind, because of his parentage, Zeus appearing as a flower which is the sort 
of thing he did.  Frog later claimed his heritage in the name of the Red 
Flower.)

Note 2: Instead of having both twins raised first by wolves and later by 
shepherds, Wolfe splits them so one is raised by each.

I honestly don't understand how anyone can seriously assert that this story 
is anything other than a version of Romulus and Remus!  And on such flimsy 
evidence...

> I think it is an easy call that Ymar is Frog (ymir=king=rana=frog). I 
> suspect that Fish will be found on Tzadkiel (the shepherds). Possibly he 
> will have a name that means "sword".

That's just a chain of puns in a bunch of different languages.  I think it's 
random noise that means nothing.  How come Frog isn't Martin Luther King - 
the chain is one step shorter!  We don't know a lot about the life of Ymar 
the Autarch - are there any obvious correspondences between his story and 
that of Frog? I can't think of any, unless Ymar founded Nessus, which seems 
it would be hard to justify.

If we were completely at sea regarding who Frog is, there might be some 
point in chasing such thin threads... but we're not!  It's perfectly clear 
fom the points listed above that Frog is Romulus.  Wolfe isn't even trying 
to hide it.  If Wolfe has worked in clues to the deep history of early 
Autarchy, they are very subtle and they cannot involve identifying Ymar with 
Frog (there could in principle be oblique references to events somewhere in 
the story, maybe in the space travel or war parts).

Why did he change the names of Frog and Fish, but translate Rhea Silvia with 
a pun?  Why not?  The legends change and mutate over time; some bits fall 
off and some mutate.  Maybe there's a bit of Jungle Book mixed in, a lot of 
the chatter among the wolves comes from somewhere other than the story of 
Romulus and Remus, and it might have come from there, or another story or 
stories, or completely from Wolfe's imagination.

- Gerry Quinn

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