Typhon's nature

David Stockhoff · 20 Oct 2011, 17:52 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:52:18 -0400
Subject: (urth) Typhon's nature
In-Reply-To: <4EA05201.1020300 at clueland.com>
References: <CAM3O41LitA_xH6fzEyBcGLSBRKXoNR7BtJBY+QtNqWZ4kePisg at mail.gmail.com>
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Message-ID: <4EA05FD2.2060605 at verizon.net>

On 10/20/2011 12:53 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 10/20/2011 5:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> *From:* Gerry Quinn <mailto:gerry at bindweed.com>
>> > Fair enough,though it doesn?t really give the impression that Typhon
>> > was trying to suppress knowledge. But I just found a problem:
>> >
>> > ?
>> Their spoil was gathered into a great heap in the city of Nessus,
>> > which was then newly built, to be burned.?
>> >
>> > Surely Nessus was built long before the reign of Typhon?
>> I don?t mean to say this disproves Andrew?s theory: errors may have
>> crept into the history related by Cyriaca, or Wolfe may have nodded.
>> Certainly it?s odd that the guy should make a point about Typhon
>> bringing records to the Citadel if it wasn?t meant to be him.
>
> On the other hand, Wolfe is a keen consumer of ancient histories where 
> it is very commonplace for later rulers to accumulate misattributed 
> works of their predecessors. The same is true of more contemporary 
> history, as witness the various Cleopatra's Needles.

Exactly. And the more glorious the better---Napoleon, for example, 
famously invented not only canned food but also Egyptology, the 
ambulance, the submarine, and so on. (Googling the topic, I find he also 
invented the computer and proved Napoleon's theorem, whatever that is. 
Might even be true!)

Having just read Tolkien's verse version of the Norse sagas based on 
Attila's defeat of the Burgundians, I now have a sharper appreciation of 
how stories move around and adapt over centuries. If the records were 
themselves lost---or they were all kept in the telepathic cloud---the 
telescoping effect could only increase.

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