Rothfuss Reread: Speculative Summary 16: You May Have Heard of Me

GBrell:

At some point you’d think they’d figure out those Ruh boys are trouble.

Yeah, really. But you never know!

Denna

Galathel notices something we missed at the time:

In NW there is a scene of Bast recalling her beautifull ears. And in WMF Kvothe takes her for a walk in Maer’s garden at night. Moonless night, mind you. ;) “Denna peered out of the hedge toward the path, and I looked at her. Her hair fell like a curtain down the side of her head, and the tip of her ear was peeking out through it. It was, at that moment, the most lovely thing that I had ever seen.” This lead me to the theory, that Bast is more closely connected with Kvothe than it seems.

Locallyunscene:

My crazy Denna theory is that she is actually Lyra, and a fourth power in the story, although a hidden/subdued one. When Lanre brought her back he also cursed her with immortality/reincarantion. Most of her power and ability is sleeping and only some of it leaks out in the form of Fae-ness and abset-minded yllish spells.

Truthfully though, I find the normal girl trying to get by with a little borrowed magic more likely.

Kings

Unscene says:

It’s amazing how many potential poet kings there are in the story.

And I don’t think that is in any way a coincidence. Rothfuss wants us tying ourselves in knots.

Jhirrad considers the possibility of a Faen King being killed:

The King that is killed. We have speculated extensively regarding who the King is named by the story. We almost always come back to someone in the human/mortal side of T4C. I can vaguely recall mention of the possibility of it being a faen King, but that never seemed to catch much traction. After going through the end of ch. 99 more carefully, I’m starting to believe that it might the case however.

Here’s what we know that leads me to this conclusion:
Kvothe has involved himself in politics of some sort to the point that a war was started.
He killed a King. (Was this the beginning or end of his political involvement? No idea, but it’s an interesting question.)

These two pieces, along with ch. 99, lead me to believe the King was from the faen courts. Here are some things which Kvothe says in this chapter which push me in this direction:

“All I knew for certain after hearing Felurian’s stories is that I had no desire to ever entangle myself in even the kindest corner of the faen court.”

“[T]he Fae are not like us….We are not the same…they are profoundly, fundamentally not the same…We forget it at our peril.”

Peril is a particularly strong word which Pat uses here. It is in fact the only time he uses that word in this book. It appears once in NotW, in the Tehlu story. Knowing how carefully Pat chooses each and every word, it leads me to believe it is important here.

We haven’t seen anything of the Faen court, and we haven’t heard much about them either. We do know Bast is a prince.

I think there’s quite good evidence that it’s a king of Vintas who is killed—possibly not Roderic though. We know (thanks GBrell!) that Newarre is in Vintas, and we know that it has a Penitent King and a war. Something caused that, and Occam’s razor suggests to me that it was the kingkilling.

Dessert:

Doesn’t Kvothe kill Roderic Calanthis?

I thought the poisoning of the flits in the Maer’s room was pretty open foreshadowing.

Well, maybe. I think it’s most likely to be a king of Vintas.

Jhirrad has a thought on the Penitent King:

The Penitent King. I know there has been a great deal of discussion about precisely who this is. Many have conjectured Alveron. I’m not certain what all the other theories out there are regarding that character. However, as I was reading through NotW yesterday afternoon, something stuck out to me, especially after reading the discussion re: Bredon as Ash. In Chapter 22, A Time for Demons (sorry, I only have a Kindle version in front of me so I can’t give a page), after “Encanis” has given Kvothe a full silver talent and rushed off, Kvothe hides himself as “Tehlu” and his coeterie pass.

Tehlu stood tall and proud in the back of a wagon drawn my four white horses. His silver mask gleamed in the torchlight. His white robes were immaculate and lined with fur at the cuff and collar. Grey-robed priests folled along beside the wagon, ringing bells and chanting. Many of them wore the heavy iron chains of penitent priests.

Emphasis added. We know that at one point in history the Church had a large hand in governing in Atur. Let’s also recall that Simmon is the 4th son of a duke. The third son is a priest. See WMF, Ch. 39, Contradictions. “…he has three older brothers and two sisters. The first son inherits. The father bought the second a military commission. The third was placed in the church.” That is, in fact, something which commonly took place in medieval/rennaissance families. First son inherits, second son is a soldier, third son is a priest. Maybe our Penitent King is one of these 3rd sons that was sent to become a priest, became a penitent priest (which I don’t think is mentioned anywhere else in the text other than this one scene), but ends up inheriting through the death of his elder brothers. Being such a devout Tehlin, that would necessarily put this king on a path to collide head-on with Kvothe in some way, this evil magic user who has already been brought before the iron law for his “Consortation with Demonic Power, Malicious Use of Unnatural Arts, Unprovoked Assault, and Malfeaseance.” Also, if the war is, as many have suggested, one between the Fae and mortal realms, it is not much of a stretch to think that such a conflict could have been started/perpetuated by a heavily religious leader, Lhin?

Honestly, it was thinking about Pat’s incredibly delicate and obsessive choice of words that led me on this path.

I think we’ll have to wait and see but it could well be.

An Angel and a Demon

DarlinKaty says:

Isn’t his “heart’s desire” to learn the truth of the Chandrian? It is what motivates him throughout the whole story. It’s why he wants to attend the University, it’s why he goes to the Maer and much more. He even chooses this pursuit over Denna once in a direct way, I think. And certainly several times indirectly. Perhaps it is knowledge of the Chandrian that causes him to fight a demon and kill an angel. If those things really happen in DT.

I think those things will happen in DT, and I think when they do I will hyperventilate. But I don’t know if knowing the truth of the Chandrian is his heart’s desire. Stopping the Chandrian might be. We get that phrasing from Chronicler, where does he get it from? A story, or a song? Or… This seems like a productive area to think about.

LocallyUnscene:

I think the angel he has to fight is Denna because we are allready seeing them come at cross-purposes in WMF.

But that would need her to be an angel. Is there any useful evidence that she might be? Would a Ruach need a patron? Would an angel let herself get beaten by Master Ash? And if so, would an angel believe she deserved it? We don’t know enough about angels. And as for demons, we mostly know that they don’t exist, except for the Chandrian and things out of the Fae, and the draccus—there are a whole lot of things called demons that aren’t, and whatever Kvothe tricked could be anything. It could be Bast.

And Thistlepong sums up everything about our one declared demon, Encanis:

The possible identities of Encanis have been discussed. I think the three major theories are Encanis as Encanis, Encanis as Haliax, and Encanis as the Cthaeh. Encanis in Trapis’s story shares the shadowed face and black garb attributed to Haliax at the end of “Lanre Turned.” He also shares the general Chandrian signs of frost and blight. His reaction to iron points to Faen association, as does characterizing him as a demon.

The confusion of characteristics as well as the general timeframe Trapis provides confounds current conjecture. A reader can successfully support several identities and convincingly refute none of them. Trapis is a Tehlin apostate, reciting from imperfect memory a story derived in part from The Book of the Path. His story, though, resonates with both “Lanre Turned” and Shehyn’s account.

Folk have written about how all of these may be versions of the same story, culturally relevant to the speaker, but only partially accurate. This theory’s actually quite likely. given Pat’s comments. It’s also possible that they’re iterations on a theme in a conflict spanning five or six millennia. Or both.

I’m getting some serious Baader-Meinhof for the Encanis/Cthaeh connection lately, though, so I figure it’s worth exploring. Take as given the aforementioned tree imagery and the prescription of truth.

Encanis shares serpent imagery with the Cthaeh. compare “motionless as a snake” and, “Encanis hissed. his voice like the rasp of stone on stone,” with “Kyxxs” and, “I thought I saw a sinuous motion among the branches.” The serpent imagery reverberates with the ideas of deception and truth. The serpent figures from many of our mythologies don’t lie outright, but reveal partial truth to goad the listener; this, in fact, is pervasive throughout the Chronicle. Encanis and the Cthaeh share a fondness for alliterative cursing. Compare “bite and break you” with “blood, bracken, and bone.” Both Encanis and the Cthaeh create conflict, Encanis “setting men to murder one another” and the Cthaeh’s influence “is like a plague ship sailing into a harbor.”

Their names bear a curious reflective relationship. Encanis suggests canis, or dog, which has little to do with our shrouded demon at first glance. I mean, Tehlu hounds him and runs him down, and that’s sort of funny. But as before, with serpent, we might think in terms of image and cosmology. Contemplate the associations of Anubis, Cerberus, and other guardians of other worlds. Consider the Cthaeh as a reflection of Encanis in the outer darkness (Trapis) or Hell (Daeonica,) which we know to be Faen—the immanent other world that’s either above, below, or ekpyrotic to the Mortal. Encanis might translate as in/of/one dog or even behold dog, the latter further suggesting the sight of the Cthaeh.

Cthaeh, on the other hand, evokes the Mortal via it’s similarity to khthon/cthonic—in/under/beneath the earth. Having mentioned the tree connection, this is how we reconcile the pit into which Encanis is thrown and burned. Ritual sacrifices of living creatures by cthonic cults involved burning the body whole in a pit. The ligature of a and e is called aesc, or “ash tree” after the Anglo-Saxon rune. Might be coincidental or purposeful, marking Denna’s patron even as we remain unreconciled as to whom Ash is.

Thus Encanis and the Cthaeh mirror one another nominally and symbolically across worlds as well as sharing common imagery. As above, so below. I rather like it.

The connection might also narrow down the range of possible suspects in the bad-spy-novel-where-everyone-is-someone-else sense. As much as we have consensus on anything, we generally view Iax as the first shaper, he who pulled the moon, and he whom is imprisoned beyond the doors of stone. Felurian not only refuses to speak his name, but implies he’s unreachable in Faen. This strongly suggests The Cthaeh is not Iax. Further, she refuses to speak of the Seven at all, while she’s willing to discuss the Cthaeh. And we know Haliax has been recently active in the Mortal, eliminating him as a candidate.

Magic

Dessert, on Naming and Shaping:

I was always under the impression that shaping was the creating of new things, whilst naming is the manipulation of existing things. Shaping means making a new star, creating a new species of tree with glowing fruit or designing a new world with it’s own set of physics. Naming means stirring up a storm, or suppressing a faeling’s power.

That’s compatible with what we know, but we don’t know enough to say if it’s right.

Shalter, on Naming:

A Name is a very precise thing in 4C-land. The languages extant within the 4C probably lack the precision to convey a Name. Thus we see Elodin’s explanation of the Sleeping Mind and Kvothe envisioning a musical stream in his battle with Felurian.

And, notice that Ademere adds additional precision through the gestures and maybe Yllish knots were along a similar bent—the more precisely you can model a Name, the more likely you can manipulate the named object.

We’ve talked about Kvothe’s musical Naming, but how about gesture and touch? Maybe the best way to Name something would be a song and interpretive dance?

A Moonless Night

Robocarp:

The more I read and think about it, the more I am sure that there is no concept of simultaneity between Faen and FC. There is no “same time” in the two realms, and the only thing connecting time in the FC and “time” in Faen is that you can travel from a certain point in time of one and arrive at a certain point of time in the other. But while you’re in one there is no saying how much time is passing in the other, and it’s probably true that you have some control over time whenever you pass through a gateway. I strongly suspect Felurian deliberately set Kvothe back in FC only a few days later; she probably could have set him a hundred years in the future if she had wanted.

Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like you ride the moon from one realm to the other, and it seems to be possible to travel between the two realms in either direction whether the moon is new or full. I suspect that the phase of the moon is more about control of the paths between the worlds: on full moon you have full control, on a new moon you have none.

So the other way round for the Fae? But if the gates are more open now—with the scraelings etc coming through, what does that mean?

Robocarp, on the making of the Fae:

Felurian said of the Faen realm that it was “wrought according to their [the shapers’] will. the greatest of them sewed it from whole cloth.”

Key point: she says it was “wrought” and “sewed from whole cloth”. That is, it was made from pre-existing land, not constructed out of thin air. The Shapers must have taken land from somewhere, moved it sideways into another dimension, and then shaped into the Fae. The obvious question is, where did the land come from?

I looked at the Four Corners map to see where ground zero might have been for this hypothetical move, and to my surprise I saw something that fits, namely the Reft, the large bay south of Tarbean. “Reft” is an archaic past participle of the word “reave”, which is a verb that could mean “to steal, carry off forcibly” or “to tear apart, break”. Both of which could be an apt description of what the Shapers did to the land.

So let’s run with it. Is there any evidence that Faen was originally part of the FC? I have a couple ideas. In Hespe’s story, Jax talks to a tinker before setting off on what appears to be eastward on The Great Stone Road toward the mountains. The tinker may represent the Cthaeh, who Bast said Iax spoke to before stealing the moon. But that raised the question of how the Cthaeh got into the Fae, which was apparently constructed after Iax spoke to him (according to the chronology of Hespe’s story). Now here is a possible explanation: the Cthaeh and it’s tree were part of the land that was moved sideways into the Faen realm.

Speaking of the Great Stone Road: it ends in Imre on the FC map, but if you were to extrapolate it westward, it would go very near to the Reft. Suppose the Stone Road once did lead past Imre, and was part of the land that was moved into the Fae. Is there any evidence for that? Yes: when Felurian is leading Kvothe into the darkest part of the Fae, they actually walk on a stone road for awhile. It seems like an odd place for a stone road: the darkest part of the Faen realm. Perhaps it was there before it was the Fae.

Wow. I like that.

Greyhood

I think you’re onto something important. First of all, Iax ’stole’ the moon, and this caused the war. So the idea that he literally stole a chunk of land fits in.

Here’s a variation of your idea. The Fae realm may be a single, razor-thin vertical slice of the FC—a cross-section—that was stolen and then laid out in the-time-dimension-converted-to-space, hence the realm of Twilight, etc. That sliver-thin cross-section—from sky to crust—would actually have the appearance of a cloth. It could have been folded like a cloth, tucked into a box, and later unfolded just like a cloth. It was then dragged through the missing dimension of spacetime to give it the third-spatial dimension (think of an accordion expanding), but it’s not really a spatial dimension, it’s time. So the Fae realm is the same sliver at different times of a singe day, only time has truly been converted to space. Such a process could be described as ’sewing from whole cloth’.

Over time, this new landscape could have developed a varied topography we associate with a normal three-dimensional space.

I know this doesn’t explain the CTH’s presence in the Fae realm. Ah well. Maybe the cloth included a cross-section of the Wheel as well, taking the CTH with it. A Wheel dragged through the time dimension would look like a cylinder. The tree trunk? I know that’s a stretch. But it’s semi-congruent with Roah being iron-like.

More likely, Cinder tossed him in there. His name does suggest mastery of iron.

And, and Pat refused to mark the location of Caluptena on GBrell’s map at a signing. And he specifically wouldn’t tell me where it was when we were doing the Admissions questions — it was in the list, and I mentioned it as one of the things we really really want to know because we’re odd that way, and he said he couldn’t tell me because it would be a spoiler. So if Caluptena was there, and wasn’t there any more, well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

Taborlin the Great

Robocarp:

There’s a character from the stories that I think might hold some important clues, about the past especially, who I don’t think we’ve been talking enough about. It’s a pretty important character, who is mentioned all throughout the novels, and in fact, was the first heroic character mentioned at all.

I am talking about Taborlin the Great.

I realize that “character” is a bit of a stretch, since Taborlin is only known from stories, and might not even exist in universe. In a sense, Tab is to FC what Robin Hood is to us. However, Robin Hood’s legend grew out of a real bandit culture in medieval England, and even if Taborlin or any particular person he’s based on never existed, I still believe the stories have some truth.

Robin Hood ostensibly lived 600-800 years ago; for this reason my first guess would be that Taborlin lived about the same number of years BK. But it seems like such a waste to place such a character at such a recent time (which we already know a few things about), and anyway, the Chandrian the Taborlin fights seem to be a bit different from the Chandrian we know.

So here begins my wild guessing: Taborlin the Great is actually based on the person who (according to Shehyn) didn’t lose the Lethani and betray a city, or, perhaps more likely, was someone from that city who resisted the Chandrian. In the aftermath of the betrayal, the Chandrian would have set themselves up as rulers of what remained of the Ergen empire. This is what the situation seemed like in Marten’s story when Taborlin opposed King Scyphus (with a suspiciously similar name to Cyphus the Chandrian who bears the blue flame). Taborlin’s efforts (no doubt assisted by the Amyr and friends) brought about end of the Chandrian as worldly rulers; thenceforth they would have to act covertly, and strike like lighting from a clear blue sky, rather than rule from a throne. It is in this world that things such as the Lockless box and Yllish writing appear.

Here are the characteristics of Taborlin the Great. I wonder what significance they all have.

– a Cloak of No Particular Color, which has many bottomless pockets
– a key
– a coin
– a candle
– a copper sword
– knows the name of all things

An interesting one is the coin. As we know, the Cealds invented currency only 2000 years ago, so it seems like Taborlin would be more recent than that, but that could just be later additions to the legend.

As for the word “Taborlin”, I can’t think of any word that resembles it, except that the last two syllables kind of sound like “Belen”, which I’ll opine is coincidence.

Last note, I like to think that Taborlin the Great was a human (not a Ruach or whatever the pre-Creation-War people were), and was so great because he was a Man who entered the world of legendary beingsand defeated them.

And we’ve talked before about how Auri gave Kvothe all those things—a coin, a candle and a key, anyway. Not a copper sword, yet anyway. And of course he consciously has the cloak in emulation of Taborlin.

Nameless:

Tarbolin may be identical to the scary guy on the artifact from the Farm.
He is the only individual reported to struggle with the Seven and although they can trap him, they do or annot kill him.

Now there’s a new thought.

Thistlepong wonders when Taborlin was: