Urth Net
wolfe playing dirty in sorcerer’s house ...
So there are a few things that didn’t add up in the conclusion of the sorcerer’s house. One is the funeral of skotos with three guests - one of them is Mr Black, who Bax concludes is Skotos, though Hardaway does not recognize him, even though he was good friends with Skotos. That argues against Skotos being Black. The other is Nick’s story of he and Nicholas being grown in a trough by mr Black ... clearly either that or his later identification as zwart black is a lie.
Bax sees a white horse in the middle of the story. While I wanted to make this a kelpie kind of spirit, we should remember that the butler of Herod (anachronistically) has the head of John the Baptist, who proclaimed the coming of Christ. Bax arrives in January in Medicine Man. Duke at the duchy of cumberbach makes a compelling case that medicine man is Medicine Hat, Canada, in which a local legend says that one man sacrificed his wife to the river to get the hat of the shamans (see the pelt/hair of lupine). Kipling said the town had all Hell as a basement.
We have Nick and Nicholas and a Greek. St Nicholas was born of a Greek family. He gives gifts, but more importantly, I feel in doing his research Wolfe looked up all kinds of house spirits, which include Shinto figures, kikimora, domovoys ... and, in some versions, Knecht Ruprecht, st nicolas?s Servant, is associated with kobolds.
Look at this description, and remember that mr Black has a staff he always carries, a white horse appears, Bax receives gifts, is beaten by a stick, the prominence of someone pretending to be Mr Black, the double mention of Nicholas, the position as a butler, and a man dressing up as a woman (winker is called a He by Ieuan and later Doris thinks the obverse of the coin features a man rather than a woman), also keeping in mind that The house is called the devil’s house
?Knecht Ruprecht is Saint Nicholas' most familiar attendant in Germany. According to some stories, Ruprecht began as a farmhand; in others, he is a wild foundling <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abandonment> whom Saint Nicholas raises from childhood.
Ruprecht wears a black or brown robe with a pointed hood. Sometimes he
walks with a limp, because of a childhood injury. He can be seen carrying a long staff and a bag of ashes, and on occasion wears little bells on his clothes.[2] <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht#cite_note-Thorpe-2>Sometimes he rides on a white horse, and sometimes he is accompanied by fairies or men with blackened faces dressed as old women.[2] <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht#cite_note-Thorpe-2>
According to Alexander Tille
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Tille>, Knecht Ruprecht
originally represented an archetypal manservant, "and has exactly as much individuality of social rank and as little personal individuality as the Junker Hanns and the Bauer Michel, the characters representative of country nobility and peasantry respectively."[3] <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht#cite_note-tille-3> Tille also states that Knecht Ruprecht originally had no connection with Christmastime.[3] <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht#cite_note-tille-3> Ruprecht was a common name for the Devil <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil> in Germany?
Nicholas’s companions are also thought of as kobolds or house spirits. Bad children are punished by being thrown in sacks and beaten or thrown in the river.
When bax asks nick if mr Black is dead, a non sequitur on both parts occurs. He answers “you, um. Sir. Or the boys, sir. Emlyn, I would think. Or both, sir.”
“I did not kill him, Nick. I have never killed anyone...”
?Sir?? (258)
The question here might indicate that nick is not talking about someone being killed - and he is saying that perhaps both of the boys are dead, grammatically. Unfortunately, there are still some aspects this really does not explain (Ambrosius, whose name means “immortal” being strangled by Goldwurm and thrown into the river, though Nicholas has hands which strangle. And how this overlays with Ted Griffin and Doris, though the names Ted, Ieuan, and Doris all mean “gift” - st Nick gives them, after all. But at the end there are only lupine and (two) emlyns. Kate Finn and Cathy Ruth have first names which mean clear or pure - the last name of Thelma Nabor means to cleanse or purify. The victims of the wolf attack are Martha murrey’s neighbor and a nurse (she wanted to be a nurse). Finn’s last name means fair or white - Ruprecht means bright.
Bax rejects the valuable gift he was given and has to pay the price. But there are still some things, like what happened forty years ago, that make little sense and require huge amounts of extrapolation. Staff, horse, gift, blackface (metaphorically), Devil, House spirit and the name Nick might invoke Ruprecht here, but I don’t think this is very fair.