Ormsby, Michael and Setr

James Wynn · 15 Jan 2005, 11:19 · 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: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Sat Jan 15 11:19:18 2005
Subject: (urth) Ormsby, Michael and Setr
References: <BAY102-F38CF42FD90C432F7D46AA2868C0 at phx.gbl>
	<005001c4fb0a$612adbe0$f0406596@crunchynut>
	<005601c4fb16$1f0f5f90$f0406596@crunchynut>
	<000601c4fb26$519f4d20$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>
	<E1CpsdS-000NzK-M4 at oceanus.uk.clara.net>
Message-ID: <001a01c4fb37$1a908b30$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>

>>I forogt to mention Setr also. Apparently "r" is an Old Norse masculine
case
>>ending. I vaguely recall somebody associating Setr with some figure from
>>Norse mythology

> Surely SETR = SURTUR the primeval fire giant???

Here's the thing about that. Wolfe likes to be precise about his spellings.
The name of the Whorl goddess is Sphigx, not Sphinx. Sphigx is the literal
transcription of the name from Greek. "Arnthor" is a Scandinavian version of
Arthur. Valfather is an actual title for Odin. This seems to be a pattern to
me. Wolfe *likes* using *actual* names that are close to the original. Look
at names like Garsecg and Garvaon...very precise.

There's a lot to recommend Surtur or Surt or Srtr as a reference to our boy
from Muspel, I admit. But there's also a lot that jars with Setr. Surtur
isn't JUST a "primeval" fire giant: he remakes the world after Ragnarok, and
that doesn't sound like Setr. But my main question is if Wolfe meant Surtur,
why didn't he just USE that name? And why Setr of all things? Even if Wolfe
had in mind Surtur in mind as well, is this the PRIMARY reason for his
choice of name?

~ Crush

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