The Wizard

Antonin Scriabin · 27 Feb 2012, 18:42 · from 2012-February.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: kierkegaurdian at gmail.com (Antonin Scriabin)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:42:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Wizard
In-Reply-To: <CAGB0RZ64fMX_Eqi=EoaUPrKLwjxh0F-WDH3FHj=4uKhX3-4Saw at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAM0v-i7_2yU6rFZNkkqJK6Q6M6kLJZdSgSSa3Jsg4fmCmgrKNQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAGB0RZ64fMX_Eqi=EoaUPrKLwjxh0F-WDH3FHj=4uKhX3-4Saw at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAM0v-i5cikfR16r_5GpExRNNKVhun+EzkbcpNQcx0dXUhLiDSg at mail.gmail.com>

"I didn't detect any Judeo-Christian element except for the (pretty
amazing) appearance of Michael the Archangel."

This is what I had in mind as well, but it is impressive enough of an event
that I can't help but feel it is important.  The terminology "Most High" is
along Judeo-Christian lines as well, now that I think about it.  The "most
high" and "most low" dichotomy is very dualistic as well; it is almost as
though each of the treated pantheons has its own world, but there is no
true overarching cosmology in place.  When reading Wolfe, of course, what
he *doesn't* show the reader is often just as important as what he does
show, which makes me very curious about Kleos and Elysion!

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Daniel Petersen <
danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's been some years, but for what it's worth, the world struck me as more
> Gnostic - which, as I understand it, is about the opposite of a 'most high
> and most low are really the same' sort of reality structure (i.e. in
> Gnosticism, the farther away, the farther 'down' the chain of existence, a
> being is from the originating 'Creator' the less real they are - thus
> matter is basically 'evil' and 'salvation' is an escape/return into pure
> spirit - as opposite from matter as is possible).  I didn't detect any
> Judeo-Christian element except for the (pretty amazing) appearance of
> Michael the Archangel.  Indeed, Wolfe professed in an interview to be
> explicitly trying to write a world that had no Christianity.  If it was
> Gnostic-based at all, I would suspect Wolfe of being fairly devious and
> subversive about this - showing how it 'doesn't work' to some degree (as
> with the closed-system religion of The Whorl in Long Sun).  Then again,
> he's always kept me guessing about his relation to Gnosticism - there's a
> fairly blatant exposition of it at one point in Peace.  I never can tell
> what he's doing with that.
>
> -DOJP
>
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Antonin Scriabin <
> kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> After taking a several month break after *The Knight*, I finally got
>> around to reading *The Wizard*.  I liked it better than the first
>> installment overall, but the shift to third-person narration for some of
>> the Jotunland scenes didn't work very well, in my opinion.  This duology
>> was definitely one of the more confusing and tricky Wolfe series that I
>> have read, since so little is known about the world Able finds himself in
>> (at least, the worlds other than Aelfrice, Mythgarthyr and Skai).  It was
>> also confusing because it is such a hodge-podge of mythologies (Arthurian
>> legend, Norse gods and goddess, Judeo-Christian, etc.).  Anyways, I was
>> wondering if anyone thought the universe in these books really is
>> "cyclical"; i.e., The Most High God and the most low god are indeed the
>> same being, and that the highest and lowest worlds are the same.  Reading
>> that portion was one of those Wolfe moments where I have to put the book
>> down for an hour or so, and come back later.  My first thought is that the
>> most low god was simply trying to deceive Able, and that the worlds are not
>> the same.  I was also wondering what happened to Mani ... he seemed to
>> disappear about half-way through the narrative and none of the characters
>> seem to notice (unless I missed it completely).  Finally, has anyone picked
>> out connections between *The Wizard Knight* and *Castleview*?  They both
>> involve people from modern day America getting entangled with a world that
>> is a blend of Arthurian legend and Norse mythology, and I would be very
>> surprised if there wasn't some subtle link between the two works.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Urth Mailing List
>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120227/954e22c4/attachment-0001.htm>

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