Mother, brother and sister

Terence Nickolette · 06 Jan 1998, 18:55 · from urth-v0006.mbox · original

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: Terence Nickolette <terrynick at centuryinter.net>
Subject: (urth) Mother, brother and sister
Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 18:55:29
Message-ID: <urth-v0006-0428 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0006/0428.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

Christopher has posed an interesting question.  But would you kind readers
help me to understand the logic (or guesses) that lead to the conclusion
that Katherine is Severian's mother and Merryn his sister? =20

In "The Feast" of Shadow, Severian describes Katherine (and the maid who
plays her) as tall and slender, dark of complexion and hair. And he says
"hers was such a face as I have never seen elsewhere, like a pool of pure
water found in the midst of a wood."  He is tall, with dark hair, and with
very fair skin.  A pool of pure water found in a wood would reflect the face
of one who looked at it. GW seems to be telling us that Severian looks like
Katherine.

But we are also told that the annual observance of Holy Katherine's feast
has been going on for 300 years.  "No one from without the guild has dined
with us at the annual observance of Holy Katherine's feast for more than 300
years, when a lieutenant of the guard (so it is said) dared to come for a
wager."  It would seem logical that such an important ceremony would have a
long history.  If it has been observed for over 300 years, how can Katherine
be Severian's mother?

As far as Merryn being his sister, please help me.....

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