The Wizard

Nathan Spears · 03 Jan 2005, 07:22 · from 2005-January.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: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Mon Jan  3 07:22:37 2005
Subject: (urth) The Wizard
In-Reply-To: <0d5501c4f18e$e78f1320$fc406596@crunchynut>
Message-ID: <20050103152229.5598.qmail at web50309.mail.yahoo.com>

Out of several thoughts on the Wizard, I tried to cull those which I think this
group is likely to find most interesting.  The first is a question that I will
attempt an answer to.

Arnthor and Garsecg are brothers.  Garsecg is the elder brother, and thus the
rightful king of Mythgarthr, but he's (supposedly) not interested in being king. 
He'd rather be a dragon and conquer the Aelf.  What's very confusing, however, is
that Able says (in the intro pages) he suspects that Garsecg/Setr wanted to conquer
Mythgarthr.  Why didn't he assume his kingship instead of trying to conquer from
Muspel?  Then he could also have ruled the Aelf as their rightful god (which is what
they wanted of Arnthor), instead of forcing them to worship him in an unholy
usurping of the natural order.

I think the answer to this question is that Garsecg gives rein to his dragon nature,
so that no matter how noble he is he still stands below the Aelf.  Thus they cannot
worship him truthfully.  Arnthor has denied his dragon nature (even when he needed
it most) and embraced his humanity, so that even though he is a petty king (at least
with regard to Able and his queen) and uninterested in (or bitter toward) the Aelf
he is still the only one who can be an image of The Valfather for them.  I don't
know if this is merely an exploration of the nature of this world by Wolfe, or if it
has more significant implications.

* * *

Someone has mentioned on this list before that they believed that contact with the
supernatural is most often damning in Wolfe's canon.  I don't know if The Wizard
Knight can be considered in the same context, because the supernatural seems a very
different concept here.  I feel that Wolfe created a world in which the theology
differs from ours (by which I mean the Catholic/Christian theology that Wolfe
professes), but the morality (by which I mean 'being good,' loosely) remains fairly
constant.  Able strives (esp. in the first book) to perfect each impulse and feeling
(thus the 'High Heart'), bringing them into line with (at first) how he believes Sir
Ravd would have behaved.  Later he comes into his own understanding of what it means
to attempt to behave lovingly or charitably toward everyone, and that it is
important, perhaps most important, to behave that way when you don't wish to. 
Able's contact with the supernatural (if we consider his movement between worlds to
be supernatural, which I concede might not be true) is not damning or damaging to
Able in the lupine tradition.  Able's contact with Disiri does threaten to derail
him at some points, such as when he is ready to kill Toug at her command early on,
but later Able is more rooted and pulls Disiri up to him instead of being dragged
down to her.  I mean 'up' and 'down' in both a moral and geographic sense, and I
think those meanings are intertwined.  When Able is taken to Skai it is both a
recognition and a reinforcement of his knighthood.

In the second book, Able has achieved his knighthood to a large degree, especially
in comparison to the other people around him, and becomes the model and inspiration
for those he comes into contact with, as those in Skai were his models.  This is
also a Christian idea:  trying to be like the Most High God, we often imitate those
who are closer to Him than we are.  This is why I think the Valfather is a bright
shadow: he is an image of an image of the Most High God.

That's all I have to say; I do have some questions, but I'll add them to the ones
already posed.

__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Send a seasonal email greeting and help others. Do good. 
http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com

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