Frog and Fish

Lee Berman · 23 May 2011, 18:12 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 14:12:30 -0400
Subject: (urth) Frog and Fish
Message-ID: <SNT123-w17B0FE44C8EF9A0E39D6D4CF720 at phx.gbl>

>Andrew Mason:  So, why Fish? Well, if they are trying to combine one version of the
>story in which the hero has a twin, and another in which he is called Frog, they need 
>to find a name for his twin which fits 'Frog'. 'Fish'looks suitable.. That may be all 
>there is to it, though for all I know it is also a reference to another legend we haven't 
>spotted yet.

Ah well, at the risk of being repetitive, I think there is a volume of evidence which 
points to a watery, fishy origin for the gods/demons of Urth, references including
Abaia, Fomalhaut, Jurupari, undines, kelpies, etc. I don't know if that idea came first
or the idea of using "Fish" as a pairing for Frog, but I think they are related. Wolfe
provides some bolstering for this connection in that giant fish from Scylla's lake and the 
very fishy relationship between The Mother and Seawrack.

I was just reading the section where Severian is swimming around in the ocean after the
flood and he sees shadows of a school of fish as big as ships. Those are some awfully big
fishes. I am thinking he is really seeing the "pelagic argosy" (open ocean flotilla). 
Meaning they are the undines. Not yet ship-sized, Juturna is probably the smallest of them 
(not counting Idas) and thus she was picked to seduce Severian.

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