BotNS in German

Matthew Malthouse · 05 Dec 2004, 15:50 · from 2004-December.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: matthew.malthouse at ntlworld.com (Matthew Malthouse)
Date: Sun Dec  5 15:50:39 2004
Subject: (urth) BotNS in German
In-Reply-To: <6.2.0.14.0.20041206000125.03b93a38 at pop.gmx.net>
References: <41B392DC.7050003 at gmail.com>
	<20041203235555.73231.qmail at web14726.mail.yahoo.com>
	<6.2.0.14.0.20041203214147.03cf27b0 at pop.gmx.net>
	<20041203235555.73231.qmail at web14726.mail.yahoo.com>
	<5.2.1.1.0.20041204084219.02d16d08 at pop.ntlworld.com>
	<6.2.0.14.0.20041204105007.036bd598 at pop.gmx.net>
	<17883243656.20041205233142 at poczta.fm>
	<6.2.0.14.0.20041205233129.03b67560 at pop.gmx.net>
	<41B392DC.7050003 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041205232511.00c59918 at pop.ntlworld.com>

At 23:03 05/12/2004, you wrote:
>Autarch, I think, may be Wolfe's creation, though. It's 'Autarch' in the 
>German translation, too.

No, the meaning given in the book "self ruler" is actually very accurate 
and more literally accurate than the usual meaning given of sole or single 
ruler.  Or perhaps ruler of the whole contrast Tetrach, ruler of a fourth 
part.  It's the form that Wolfe uses that is odd

Autarchy is a political system governed by a single individual, also 
autarky and autocracy.

There is a wonderful Lupine irony there because the Autarch is not singular 
but legion.

\Au"tar*chy\, n. [Gr. ? independence; a'yto`s self + 'arkei^n to be 
sufficient.]
Self-sufficiency. [Obs.] --Milton.

http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=autarchy

Now it's interesting to me that the alternative "monarch" which started 
with the same political meaning, the rule of one, would not have the same 
weight because subsequent changes in the office mean that, at least in the 
West, remaining monarchs are emphatically not autarchs there not having 
been a working autocracy since the fall of the Tzars.

Yes Wolfe does use the word monarch.  He uses it colloquially "monarch of 
bears" as we might say "king of beasts" - Wolfe does not have people of 
Urth describe Severian as "king" but the cacogens use that word for 
him.  Then monarch occurs in Severian's dream of Master Malrubius where he 
is asked to set out the forms of government and again in describing 
Typhon.  Perhaps perversely it seems that both instances one is intended to 
read absolute ruler as in autarch rather than the new-fangled 
constitutional variety so I suppose that these monarchs, the first abstract 
the second historic, are so called to distinguish them from the Autarch of 
the Commonwealth.

Matthew

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