do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Gerry Quinn · 24 May 2011, 14:29 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 15:29:00 +0100
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
References: <SNT123-W63491DF37BE197ED84ECF5CF750 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <A6EA089BDF394608A56239876CADE572@jill>

From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
 >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 story of the Boy Called Frog, which clearly originates in a synthesis of 
Romulus and Remus combined with The Jungle Book, has also incorporated 
snippets of other mythologies and of ways that people of one era would have 
understood things of the past.  The 'mountaintop beyond the shores of Urth' 
for example, perhaps incorporates ideas of Mt. Olympus (from the original 
story), a space station of some kind (or perhaps a territory on Lune), and 
Wolfe's notion, expressed in an appendix, that the technology/culture of 
sailing ships and spaceships have somehow become merged. If the not quite 
central character of Mars incorporated elements of Typhon, it would not be 
terribly surprising.  I don't think there's much reason to support it, but 
of course it could happen.  The thing is, we can tell which way the 
incorporation goes, because the character of Mars was part of the main 
original story, and really there's not much to distinguish Spring Wind's 
nature from the traditional nature of Mars.  Another reason to doubt the 
influence of Typhon on the story is the absence of any two-headed 
iconography, though of course that's easily explained by saying Wolfe didn't 
think of that until he started on Long Sun.  If Spring Wind did have an 
allusion involving two heads, we would of course be very comfortable with 
the notion of a Typhon connection.

As I wrote the above, another example of embellishment with ideas of the 
time occured to me: it is in the section where the wolves in their burrow 
defend Frog from the smilodon.  The animals are spoken of as carrying 
weapons such as knives.  There is of course a strong echo here of the idea 
of bees with swords, which was the concept of bees held by the people 
immured for generations in the Antechamber.  Perhaps Wolfe is suggesting 
that the tales were transmitted via some antechamber folk who found their 
way out.  Or perhaps these embellishments were added at a time when Urth was 
a megapolis with few animals.  We don't know, and we don't really need to 
know.  The point is the structure, not the embellishments per se.

> 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.

In some ways that works; Wolfe does indeed often include such meta-asides to 
the reader.  The biggest problem with it, I think, is that while Wolfe had 
already, at the time the tale of Frog reached its final draft, written the 
Citadel of the Autarch, he had not yet started on Urth of the New Sun, and 
did not intend to do so.  In BotNS, (unless you include Frog!) there is no 
indication that Ymar was the first Autarch, or was contemporaneous with 
Typhon.  Nor does his contemporeity with Typhon seem to inform us of 
anything; indeed I personally think it hurts the story in some ways.  I 
suspect that Wolfe, after he had started on UotNS, decided it would be 
'lame' for Severian not to meet Ymar, and wrote it in then.

[This is the obverse of the point about  the two-headed Typhon iconography. 
We cannot reject Typhon as Spring Wind arguments on account of the absence 
of two-headedness - and equally we must be wary of drawing connections to 
events in Ymar's life which in all probability were not imagined yet by 
Wolfe.]

> 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?

Yes.

> 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).

None that is human, I believe.  [As for Inire, if I recall correctly he is 
said in BotNS to date from the time of Ymar, so if Ymar reigned relatively 
shortly after Typhon's time then Inire must have appeared then too.]

> 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.

No - he raised an army composed of ordinary men plus wolves.

- Gerry Quinn

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