do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Lee Berman · 24 May 2011, 13:22 · 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: Tue, 24 May 2011 09:22:44 -0400
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
Message-ID: <SNT123-W63491DF37BE197ED84ECF5CF750 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: And Ymar clearly didn't found Nessus.  It's hard to see how he could have 
>had a twin brother.  If the mythologisers are making a mistake, WHY do you 
>think they are making such a mistake?  Why do they conflate the stories of 
>Romulus and Ymar?

On first reading James' hypothesis that Frog=Ymar it had the immediate ring of truth for me, 
sort of along the lines of his Typhon-Alexander connection. The Typhon-Spring Wind
(add Windcloud?) connection took longer to gain acceptance but I notice even Gerry is 
accepting that as a possibility now.

The truthiness of the connection was subconscious at first but think I understand it now.  The 
Tale of the Boy Called Frog is a story told, by request, to a boy named Little Severian.  In 
UotNS, when Severiaan meets the boy named Reechy he comes to learn that he is Ymar and thus,
essentially, a "little Severian" i.e. a torturer boy who rises to become Autarch. I find this 
connection more compelling and thus the frog-rana-king connection to be secondary and supporting.

Ymar is the ruler who succeeds Typhon while Frog is the son who succeeds Spring Wind as the
hero of the story. No, Ymar didn't found Nessus but he did (I assert) with help from a certain
mysterious, magical vizier, found the Commonwealth. A passable parallel to Romulus, imho. Moses
was also a founder, though not of a city. We don't know Mowgli's future but I get an intuitive
presentiment of greatness from Kipling's writing.

Is Gerry's disbelief in Ymar's twin brother because he would expect that brother to be there as
a Torturer's Apprentice?  Since we have now established that the Tale of Frog is not a straight 
rendition of Romulus and Remus can we speculate that perhaps Ymar had a twin sister?  Is there a 
1000 year old witch in BotNS? (in UotNS I think we also find a magical vizier in Typhon's time).

Unfortunately I cannot get to the text right now. Am I right in remembering the sowing of teeth or
stones to grow soldiers in Tale of Boy Called Frog? If so the story also invokes Cadmus, the
founder of Thebes and that royal house. As brother to Europa and grandfather to Dionysus, the
mythological inclusion of Cadmus might be fruitful in fleshing out more of the Sun Series backstory.

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