5HC

Lee · 03 Sep 2014, 12:48 · from 2014-September.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)
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2014 08:48:17 -0400
Subject: (urth) 5HC
Message-ID: <BLU175-W46E7F5D696D9CDA5417B39CFC40 at phx.gbl>

>paleolithic, Caucasoid Pygmies who came to be called the Good People  
>(and who survived, as was eventually shown, in Scandinavia and Erie*(Eire?)

>Barry Ragin: When i first read 5HoC in my twenties, i thought it was a  
>fantasy, and assumed he was making a leprechaun analogy. That's  
>pretty clearly not the case.

Actually I still think you were on the right track. In "Gondwanaland",

"Atlantis" and "Mu" I find hints that some version of Shadow Children

were on Earth even before the evolution of Homo sapiens.

In a discussion here a few years ago on the same topic, David Stockhoff

invoked the concept of "Faerie" folk as a way of understanding some 

underlying themes in Wolfe's work.

As with leprechauns, kelpies, brownies, fairies, elves, trolls, mermaids,

sirens, etc. from mythology, there are categories of Wolfean characters

who are not science and technology based like humans but rely more on 

cleverness, trickery and "magic" in accomplishing their goals. Thus, in

Wolfe's work we have Shadow Children, Inhumi, Aelf, Undines, Neighbors and 

perhaps the hiero-types.

Consider the concept of "changeling" found so commonly in our tales of faerie 

folk. I think it adds focus to the idea of Shadow Children, Abos, Inhumi, Hieros

and others in Wolfe stories imitating human form and even, for Shadow Children/Abos 

replacing specific human beings.

(I sometimes wonder if Wizard/Knight might ultimately be based on the "Changeling"

concept. If an earth boy finds himself in a Faerie world, might there be a 

replacement version of him living on Earth?)

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