Horn's ability

Lee Berman · 27 Oct 2011, 16:05 · from 2011-October.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: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:05:57 -0400
Subject: (urth) Horn's ability
Message-ID: <SNT123-W5187E042107E42E4022872CFD20 at phx.gbl>

>James Wynn: However, I think it is a mistake to assume that the saint 
>names were chose haphazardly for the characters. Given the deep level 
>of Gnostic detail carved into these books, it is extremely likely that 
>the saint name Hethor was settled on precisely BECAUSE it was also the 
>name of a Gnostic angel (an Astra, ie. "star", that is a "fallen star", 
>that is a "fallen angel" ). And it would be very like Wolfe to craft a 
>character that refers to both of those etymologies...as well as others 
>such as "Hector" or the English primrose variety known as the "Hethor Giant".

Nice post James. I can certainly agree with this multi-layered analysis.
Of course I agree that the name of an Astra fits nicely with the gnostic
sub-text of this story. Adding a rose name to the mix is an obvious fit
with one of the recurring themes of the story.

Sigh..unfortunately I feel the need to continue to harp and hector (heh)
on about the wrongness of Hector as a possible inspiration for the name
Hethor. I can't get over the spelling and sound change (though I understand 
that Hethor and Hector sound more similar in other languages than in my
American ears).

As previously noted, Wolfe is willing to use alternate spellings for some 
mythological names like Sphigx (for Sphinx) and Juturna and Diuturna. But 
they sound the same when spoken. Hector has that hard K and hard T sound
while Hethor has only the soft TH.

If we must have Hethor as inspired by a current-day name, I would like to
propose the more obvious sound-alike, Heather. Does it bother some because
it is a girl's name? It doesn't bother me since I consider Hethor to be of
the same ilk as Tzadkiel and thus without a definite gender. Moreover, 
heather is also a sort of wool fabric which comes in shades of gray. And 
Hethor is a character dominated by that color. (I don't see any connection
to the heather plant).

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