Sinew's parentage

Chris · 21 Feb 2005, 15:47 · from 2005-February.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: rasputin_ at hotmail.com (Chris)
Date: Mon Feb 21 15:47:11 2005
Subject: (urth) Sinew's parentage
In-Reply-To: <005901c5186d$2f4ec340$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F39AD298AA435888DCAA9886610 at phx.gbl>

This isn't as good as a reasoned argument for the subject, but for what it's 
worth I got the same impression fairly directly - that is, the scenario with 
Horn/Marrow/Nettle had taken place, and that Horn strongly suspected he was 
not Sinew's father. I almost want to say "knew", but there's a sort of deep 
ambivalence in Horn about his own relationship with Sinew that gave me the 
impression that he had some doubts that he might have been Sinew's father 
after all.

I don't know that there's anything there that establishes beyond a doubt who 
Sinew's father is. It shouldn't matter, ultimately, and I don't think this 
is something Horn needs to discover because he knows it from the beginning; 
this isn't the only thread of the book which brings out a tension between 
knowing the right way to behave/live and actually living that way.

>In case Kieran's post doesn't "take" I'll offer this one.
>
>Is Sinew be Marrow's son?
>
>Consider:
>1) Sinew doesn't "quite" fit with Horn's name. Not the way Hoof and Hide 
>do.
>But it does work with Marrow.
>
>2) Marrow bailed out Horn and Nettle when their farming venture failed, so
>they could get a fresh start. He didn't sell them into slavery as he did
>with others. What did Marrow get in return?
>
>3) When Horn leaves New Viron in his boat, Marrow tosses his cane into the
>boat _just as Sinew tossed his knife_ as Horn left Lizard Island. I believe
>the text makes this precise comparison.
>
>4) Horn harbors a distinct resentment for Sinew that is not explainable by
>any of Sinew's actions.
>
>Well?
>
>
>~ Crush
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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