Welcome to my excessively detailed re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. This week’s post covers chapters 11-16 of The Wise Man’s Fear but also contains extensive spoilers for the whole book and the whole of The Name of the Wind—these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books. These posts are full of spoilers please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.
Abbreviations: NW = The Name of the Wind. WMF = The Wise Man’s Fear. D3 = Day Three, the forthcoming final volume. K = Kvothe or Kote when I can’t figure out what to call him and I’m feeling Kafkaesque. MT: Myr Tariniel. D = Denna
Useful links: The Sleeping Under the Wagon post, in which there are lots of theories. The re-read index. The map.
Chapter 11 is “Haven“
Haven, eh? The official name for the Rookery where they send you when you go a’ravin. It’s that. But it’s also the haven Auri offers Kvothe in the Underthing.
Kvothe goes to an inaccessible courtyard in Mains, via the roof. He plays lute for an hour before Auri appears—I don’t think there’s anything supernatural in how they find each other as some people suggested last week. Either they have an arrangement to meet, or he plays and she shows up when she hears him. He says “she wasn’t expecting me.” This seems perfectly reasonable to me. She says she has been as patient as three stones and wants him to play. He says it depends on what she’s brought him, and she recognises this as a joke. He says he has brought three things, and she says that he’s being very traditional. He gives her the Bredon ale, and Bredon is definitely a place not a brand—he answers “Who made this?” with “Bees and brewers in Bredon.” So there’s honey in it? He also gives her bread and a whole smoked salmon which he says has a harp instead of a heart. This reminds me of a fairytale written by Joan Aiken called “A Harp of Fishbones.”
She gives him a lavender scented candle for happy dreams, a kiss on the forehead and the promise of safety with her in the Underthing if he needs it. The last two are what he focuses on, but look, a candle to go with the key and coin. Auri knows he’s a Lackless.
It’s interesting that he doesn’t say outright that he was crying. He says she wipes his cheeks, and he says he replies as soon as he was able and then that he collected himself. But we are to deduce the emotion.
When he says she is special to him too, she says that she is as lovely as the moon. Moon again.
And they are talking about shoes when Elodin shows up. Kvothe greets him casually because he doesn’t want to scare Auri, and he responds in the same way, even though they’re all on the roof at midnight.
Auri discomforts Elodin, which Kvothe appreciates because Elodin discomforts everyone else.
When Elodin tilts his head there is enough moonlight to see his expression—so there is part of a moon at least, and Auri out in it.
And Kvothe tells Elodin how to deal with Auri and tells him and then asks him not to tell anyone about her. And for the first time Elodin sees Kvothe caring about something other than himself. And when mentioning Haven backfires, Kvothe is “back in Tarbean” and begs.
Then Auri comes back and they sit and feast. When she asks Elodin what’s in the cinnas fruit he brought her he answers “as if he’d expected the question.” He says the fruit contains early morning sunshine. And Kvothe realises that Elodin knows Auri and relaxes. They share the food. And Kvothe calls Auri by name, and Elodin hears and asks, and she says it is her name. “Kvothe gave it to me. Isn’t it marvellous?” Elodin says it’s a lovely name and it suits her, and she says “It is like having a flower in my heart.” Then she gives Elodin a serious look. “If your name is getting too heavy you should have Kvothe give you a new one.” And Elodin looks sanely at Kvothe.
Then Kvothe sings, and he and Elodin leave together. Elodin says he’s known him for years. (And how old is she supposed to be?) “We barely speak a dozen words on a good day.” And then Kvothe needs Elodin to promise him. Elodin asks “Or else?” and Kvothe gets a flash of plum and thinks about murdering him with the knife or the edge of the building. But he says “Or else I’ll do something stupid beyond mortal ken and both of us will end up the worse for it,” which is pretty good self awareness for Kvothe! Maybe he’s growing up. Elodin says it’s a remarkably honest threat.
Then Elodin swears “On my mother’s milk, on my name and my power, by the ever-moving moon.” Interesting set of things, and the moon again.
Kvothe tries to get Elodin to give Auri shoes and clothes. And he asks “Why Auri?” and Kvothe misunderstands and answers “Why are you choosing to look out for Auri?” when in fact he is being asked “Why did you choose that name?” He says it means “sunny” but he can’t recall in what language. And Elodin invites him to join his class on Naming—I think because of all these things, because of Naming Auri—she and Elodin know what it means even if Kvothe doesn’t—and because of caring about her and because of his honest threat.
And Elodin tells him to read Teccam’s Underlying Principles, which is a book with a fascinating title. Kvothe explains he’s still banned from thje Archives. Elodin marches him across the roof to Lorren’s bedroom window and demands his reinstatement and gets it. Lorren was going to ban him for a year and a day—and Elodin says this is very traditional, making two traditional fairytale things in this chapter. Elodin says that he Lorren catches Kvothe “larking around” again he can cut off his thumbs. Considering how Kvothe values his hands—and he’s wringing them two seconds later. He’s horrified, but Elodin says it will be fine if he doesn’t break the rules. So there we are then.
Then Kvothe signs up for courses—observation, physiognomy and physic in the Medica, Ferrous and Cupric metallurgy in the Fishery, Adept Sympathy and Elodin’s course called “Introduction to not being a stupid jackass.” I guess Ambrose won’t be welcome then…
The most interesting course title there is Ferrous and Cupric—iron and copper, eh?
Chapter 12 is “The Sleeping Mind”
Kvothe wakes up excited about the Naming class—real Taborlin the Great magic! But he goes to work at the Fishery and is intercepted by Kilvin, who wants to find out about a girl who has shown up able to describe but not name Kvothe and with a charm. I didn’t immediately think of Nina either, so it’s not surprising that Kvothe didn’t. He assures Kilvin that he’s not risking doing anything so stupid as selling fraudulent charms and assums it’s Ambrose trying to get him into trouble.
Elodin’s class—there are seven of them, three female, which is really high percentage of women for the University. “Our names shape us and we shape our names in turn” and then how complex names are, and the concept of the sleeping mind. He demonstrates by trying to get them to calculate where a stone will fall when tossed, which they can’t, and then brings in an eight year old boy who catches it without any problem. I’m not sure this is an example of doing something subconsciously so much as bodies being faster at some problems than minds, but never mind.
Then he makes a list of books and tells them to read one of them.
Chapter 13 is “The Hunt”
Fairly clear title for once. Kvothe does exactly what Elodin wants and spends a lot of time in the Archives looking for books and reading some of them.
He waited two dayd for the ledgers to be updated this time and he’s nervous. This is why he notices:
The words “Vorfelen Rhinata Morie” chiselled into the stone above the massive stone doors.
He asks Willem what they mean, and Willem says:
“The desire for knowledge shapes a man,” he said, “Or something like that.”
We discussed this before, and the wonderful Shalter suggested that the “something like that” might be “With knowledge, a man can Shape.” I very much lean towards this interpretation, because of “or something like that.” It could also mean “For people desiring knowledge of Shaping.”
In the ledger, somebody has written “Ruh bastard” next to Kvothe’s name. Kvothe smiles and says that’s correct… owning the label, but it’s still a horrible thing. Seems petty for Ambrose, but then Ambrose is petty, and it’s known that he has access to the ledger.
He goes in and acts amazed, but he also is amazed. “It smelled of secrets.” Wil gives him essentially the same explanation that Fela gave him about how hard it is to find things. And he learns a lot about the Archives. But when he shows up for the next class, Elodin doesn’t and there’s nothing but the word “Discuss” written on the blackboard.
Elodin has told them he’s training their sleeping minds, but Kvothe really doesn’t get it.
Chapter 14 is “The Hidden City”
Kvothe says the Archives are like a city. He acknowledges that the hunt has taught him how it works.
There’s a description of Archives. It makes me jealous. I mean, my library is cool, but not actually literally magical. There is a Scriptorium with scrivs toiling over making copies, so we do not in fact have printing yet. I suppose it makes sense for this to be inside the Archives, but you’d think it would benefit from natural light.
There’s a map in the acquisitions office.
one entire wall of the office was nothing but a huge map with cities and roads marked in such detail that it looked like a snarled loom. The map was covered in a layer of clear alchemical laquer and there were notes written at various points in red grease pencil, detailing rumours of desirable books and the last known positions of the various acquisitions teams.
Why didn’t we get this map in WMF? This isn’t a map with a drawing of a little tinker and major cities left out, this is a map with masses of detail. On the other hand, maybe we don’t want the position of every second hand bookshop in the Four Corners. (I’m imagining a world map in which Hay-on-Wye is portrayed as a huge metropolis and New York is shown smaller than Portland, Oregon.)
The “city” of the Archives has “bad neighbourhoods” where the system has broken down, and there Kvothe searches for the Chandrian and doesn’t find much—fairy tales and “thin threads of fact” that he knows already.
He states as fact that they killed his troupe because of the song and the Trebon wedding party because of the vase, as reasons why he doesn’t tell anyone what he’s doing or ask for help.
He dismisses a lot of what he does find as whimsy, but whimsy is never whimsy!
Where did the Chandrian live? In clouds. In dreams. In a castle made of candy. What were their signs? Thunder. The darkening of the moon. One story even mentioned rainbows.
There’s thunder when he sees Cinder later. And the darkening of the moon seems really really significant now. As for rainbows, well, maybe it’s a red herring but I for one will be prepared to be suspicious. The only thing that seems obviously dumb is the candy castle
And there’s a book called the Book of Secrets written like a bestiary about fairytale creatures:
The Chandrian move from place to place
But they never leave a trace
They hold their secrets very tight
But they never scratch and they never bite.
They never fight and they never cuss
In fact they are quite nice to us
They come and go in the blink of an eye
Like a bright bolt of lightning out of the sky.
Lightning linking with thunder? And is “they never cuss” possibly linked to “a sharp word, not for swearing”? Kvothe finds this nothing but annoying pap, and it’s certainly horrible poetry—let me say again how much I admire Rothfuss’s ability to write awful poetry, because it really isn’t easy. But there might be information in it, if nothing but how they come and go in a blink of an eye without leaving a trace, which we know is true. As for “quite nice to us,” well, Cinder was being nice to the bandits, maybe? It could be a point of view. We know they do fight, or at least the troupe were dead and so were the wedding guests. We don’t know about biting and scratching.
I wonder again about the “soft blanket of his sleep.” I wonder if they actually want Kvothe alive for something? For the kingkilling devastation he has caused? For something that advances the end of the world and the destruction that can be Haliax’s only peace? This is one of the places I see the possibility of eucatastrophe—if he realises that his actions have been following their plan and therefore has hidden in Kote so he can’t make anything worse. Because there’s a possibility for redemption and victory there, in the frame anyway.
Anyway, Kvothe, never one to give up, learns from this that the rest of the world really doesn’t believe in the Chandrian. He doesn’t think about how D immediately did, though, in Trebon.
He settles into the term, classes, playing at Ankers, going wild in the Archives now he can, reading. And so he doesn’t go to Imre for a while, and when he does, D is gone. Of course she is.
Chapter 15 is “Interesting Fact”
Elodin demands that the students tell him interesting facts. This is clearly part of the same lesson as learning the Archives—read widely and in all directions. Kvothe still isn’t getting it. He wants to win.
We get a number of weird facts, and one of them stands out, that Yllish knots are a written language and it’s older than the other written languages. And when this is dismissed, we get another, that there’s a type of dog in Sceria that gives birth through a vestigial penis. I think this is evidence that mammalian reproduction in this world is not the same as it is in our world and that therefore the Adem man-mother theory might be real.
Fela’s fact, which wins, is that people born blind couldn’t tell an object was round by looking at it. This is clearly the kind of thing Elodin wants, the kind of mind-expanding world re-examining thing. Kvothe’s fact is that the Adem have a secret art called Lethani which makes them fierce warriors, and he doesn’t know what it is because it’s secret. Elodin says this doesn’t count because he doesn’t know what it is. The really cool thing is that if he did know what it was he’d be doing so much better in the class. (Rothfuss is also so sharp he should watch out he doesn’t cut himself.)
Then Elodin chases milkweed fluff around the room until he falls and cuts himself, as a demonstration of learning the name of the wind. Kvothe isn’t learning anything.
So, is Elodin mad? He seems to me to be trying hard to help them open up their sleeping minds to the possibility of naming. But he’s also… a bit odd. But maybe having your sleeping mind up close does that to you. Geography doesn’t drive you mad, doing Sympathy makes you do odd things because of Alar and believing more than one thing at once, and Naming takes your mind sideways where you can’t always get it back.
After class Kvothe goes to Imre and looks for D, and finds her after he’s given up and is on his way home… and she’s with Ambrose. And this is another Interesting Fact and one that’s so distressing to Kvothe that it overshadows everything.
Chapter 16 is “Unspoken Fear”
Kvothe unsurprisingly falls into a dark mood. He assumes they both know about their separate relationships with him:
Was Ambrose doing this purely out of spite? How had it happened? What was Denna thinking?
And he tries to console himself in the Archives. He has seen Denna with lots of men and it has not upset him, but this really really does.
He finds a mention of the Chandrian in A Quainte Compendium of Folk Belief. The book is specifically compared to Mating Habits of the Common Draccus, calling out to the frame, but in contrast this is just an attempt to list them by region, not to prove or disprove them. And it was written two hundred years ago by an amateur historian in Vintas. Four chapters on demons, three on faeries, one of them all about Felurian, lots about lots of other things, and half a page on the Chandrian, mostly saying that although everyone knows the rhyme, “if you talk of them they come for you.”
They appear and commit diverse violence for no clear reason.
There are signs which herald their Arrival, but there is no clear agreement as to these. Blue flame is the common, but I have also heard of wine going sour, blindness, crops withering, unseasonable storms, miscarriage and the sun going dark in the sky.
Unseasonable storms? (Don’t bring thunder.)
And we’ll start next time from Chapter 17, where we’re back in the frame.
Last week’s comments
Lots of great comments on alchemy and sygaldry, in which Lurking Canadian plays Kilvin to such good effect that henceforward the fate of the Department of Imaginary Sygaldry is in their hands. Welcome E’lir!
Artful Magpie points out that Teccam wrote the Theophany which means “appearance of God.” Isn’t that interesting! And there is much more interesting speculation on many subjects.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently Among Others, and if you liked this post you will like it. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
And when this is dismissed, we get another, that there’s a type of dog in Sceria that gives birth through a vestigial penis. I think this is evidence that mammalian reproduction in this world is not the same as it is in our world and that therefore the Adem man-mother theory might be real.
I hate to disappoint, but they are, in fact, describing a Spotted Hyena. The females (and I am not making this up) have a hypertrophied clitoris which makes an individual’s first birth quite difficult.
Just an observation:
“In fact they are quite nice to us” is the only line anywhere in the books (except for Denna’s song) that have anything positive to say about the Chandrian. Make you wonder about where Denna got her info.
It’s interesting that the names of the Chandrian seem to be one way to attract their attention. “Chandrian” itself doesn’t. You think that more people would have stories about them (without naming names). I guess it might come down to not taking any chances by mentioning anything about them. Maybe the Amyr are the ones supressing stories about the Chandrian as well as stories about themselves.
I thought that Kvothe’s comment that the salmon had a “a harp instead of a heart” was maybe a bit of a telltale subconscious slip on his part. We had just seen Denna practicing on her harp …
It did seem fairly clear that it is this episode that wins Kvothe his chance to study with Elodin.
Kvothe and the other students do seem a bit thick in catching on to what Elodin is trying to teach them. Not unbelievably thick, just obtuse.
I loved the description of the archives. It reminded me of my own ventures into the University library when I went off to college. Quite awe inspiring comparred to the small town library I had used to that point. As Jo said, the U library wasn’t even magical. Very nice.
The castle made of candy might not even be ridiculous. Candy might just be denoting sweetness. What else is sweet–denner resin. Maybe the Chandrian are involved with denner in some fashion.
It was somewhat amusing that when Kvothe was asked for interesting facts he mentioned the lethani. When Elodin asked for another fact, Kvothe is thinking that all he can think of is the Chandrian and “uninteresting” fairy tales. I’ll bet that if Kvothe had told what he knows of the Chandrian (his encounter with Haliax&co in specific) then Elodin would have been very interested indeed.
Danggit herewiss13 beat me to it! Random anatomy of hyenas. Ugh, terrible to consider!
The other amusing thing about Elodin’s method is that while none of the students are catching on, his methods seem to be producing results. There are all expanding their knowledge of the archives. Branching out and so expanding their thinking. Also, the obstinate ones are dropping out.
Hyenas? Really?
I had no idea. (I’m closer to “Ewww” than “Wow”.)
Elodin & the stone throw lesson amusingly reminded me of Castor & Pollux’s introduction to catching fly balls in Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones.”
But, it is a good example of the non-conscious neural processing that goes on without the conscious mind being at all aware. There is a lot of fascinating research neuralcognitive emerging right now in this area.
Hmmm. I could have sworn I saw a reference to printed book. It was when Kvothe was in the Mael’s (sp?) employ.
* * *
Yeah, hyenas, really. The ancients thought they were hermaphrodites. One of Aesop’s expurgated fables has a hyena saying to a partner “what you do to me today I’ll do to you tomorrow.”
* * *
The map thing: He’s just playing with us.
@6) Yeah, let’s just say that hyenas take “female dominance” a whole lot more seriously than most species.
Nothing fantastic to contribute today, but a few random thoughts..
Yeah, the hyena thing – ow!
The dark of the moon – I have so many things running through my head – Pink Floyd, darkness is when you choose to do evil things or even just secret things, a moonless night is a thing to fear, gods and goddesses and third hidden faces that you pray will never will be turned to you.
I do agree that there is definite madness to the method and method to the madness of Elodin’s teachings and we do see later how people really learn to think not only sideways to reality but in directions that don’t even seem to have names.
Speaking of names, I don’t think we have actually seen what Auri means, have we? And I really do wonder how old she is since Elodin knows her and if that has anything to do with the moon and weird out of time periods and things like that.
Could “Ruh bastard” be more than a taunt by Ambrose? Given all of our speculation about Kvothe’s paternity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_hyena
The spotted hyena female has a pseudo-penis, which is really an enlaregd clitoris. Copulation and birth take place through the pseudo-penis. Although hyenas are not really closely related to dogs; their canine appearance is likely due to convergant evolution.
You know it occurs to me that I don’t remember if the Chandrian are pictured actually performing violence. Does anyone else recall? I think Kvothe comes upon them surrounded by the dead troupe, but did he see them being killed? And does Cinder actually attack when commanding the bandits? The slaughter at Trebon was also unwitnessed wasn’t it? Could it be that the Chandrian need to act through others? It would explain why someone like Cinder would lead bandits.
I’d hate it if it were true, but are the Chandrian not really the bad guys? If the Amir are really out there spinning the stories surrounding themselves and teh Chandrian, this kind of frame job would be possible.
“Auri knows he’s a Lackless.”
I know there is an obvious connection between the rhyme Kvothe gets in trouble for repeating and Taborlin’s tools, but there is no evidence that Taborlin was a Lackless, is there? I wonder if this is more of a focus on Kvothe paralleling Taborlin than anything else. The rhyme doesn’t mention anything about a coin. A ring, yes, but not a coin (and she has given him a ring). She certainly seems to be covering her bases (add to it her reference to the Ciradae).
It is all connected, somehow. Remember what the Cthae told Kvothe, about sticking with the Maer and he would lead him to their door (or something like that). Stone door? Four-plate Door? Or maybe the Lackless Door. We are talking about the Maer, and he has just married the only Lady Lackless (which means his children would be Lackless heirs with Kvothe – cousins, actually).
What if the Lackless family is somehow connected to the Amyr, then? We know that the original Amyr weren’t “human”, so they may have been Fae. If so, the Lackless family may have some sort of unique door on their lands, and it is probably a muted shade somewhere between black and white and made of stone and…
I actually had a teacher in high school whom I am reminded of by Elodin. The class he taught was Eastern Religion and he was very unpredictable in his teaching methods! He used to take us outside on walking meditations in the middle of class. We’d walk single file all around the school, eyes downcast, silent. Once, he took us on a “field trip” down the hill from school to the local independent mini-mart/cafe, Clausen’s. When we got there, he had taped up a sign over the Clausen’s sign so it read “ClauZEN” and he told us to go inside and look around and experience the zen of shopping. Our final project was to explain one or more of the religions we’d studied. One kid literally brought in a milkweed pod, opened it up, tossed the fluff into the air, and said, “Zen.” He got an A.
So I actually don’t find Elodin’s teaching techniques all that odd, to be honest! What he’s trying to impart is just as unexplainable as Zen (or the Lethani, which is basically identical to the Tao as far as I’m concerned!) and can only be learned by experiencing it, just as you can only predict the ball’s path by catching it.
Also, as a librarian, I would KILL to get into the Archives and wander about!!
@7) I remember the first demo my College physics professor ever did. He threw an eraser in the air and had us clap when it hit the floor. Then he threw it so that it hit the floor out of sight behind a desk. We still all clapped in unison, thus proving that our sleeping minds understood falling bodies perfectly well and it was just a matter of integrating the math with the physics our minds already understand perfectly.
“You know it occurs to me that I don’t remember if the Chandrian are pictured actually performing violence. Does anyone else recall?”
Nope, never. Never once do we see a Chandrian kill a member of the troupe or the wedding party, or admit to having done so. Cinder certainly seems malicious and possibly murderous, but we have never seen him actually kill anyone.
Here is where we really get too see a lot more of Elodin. Who is likely my favourite character. We also learn more, and what we learn draws an odd parralel to Ks life, or at least his learning. Elodin was the youngest to gain entry to the uni, he has innate ability, he has traveled to Ademre (K recognises his hands moving as in hand talk; he at the very least lived within their culture, but could also have learned Lethani and fighting as did K) and he is accepting and Knowledgeable of Faen.
Of course Elodin has been further than K, he clearly knows more than K. But what of kote? Where Elodin went mad (his stay in Haven) maybe Kvothe went sane, cut of/hid the source of danger to his mind?
Also I found it interesting that one of the things Elodin swore by was ‘mother’s milk’. I dont believe we have ever scene this phrase elsewhere, implying that it isnt merely a cuss. It does imply famile love, or bond. After seeing Auri. Is is possible that she is his mother?
Sorry double post.
It’s interesting to me (although it’s likely not significant) that Rothfus uses Ferrous and Cupric. Many metals can form compounds using different two different oxidation states. One of the ways of naming them is to take a latin root (e.g., ferr- and cupr-) and tack on -ous for the lower one and -ic for the upper one. It so happens that iron’s common oxidation states are +2 (ferrous) and +3 (ferric) and copper’s are +1 (cuprous) and +2 (cupric). Oxygen is almost always -2, so ferric oxide is Fe2O3 and ferrous oxide is FeO while cupric oxide is CuO and cuprous oxide is Cu2O. This is somewhat hard to remember and is incomplete, so it’s more common nowadays to refer to ferric oxide as iron (III) oxide.
It’s interesting to me that ferrous and cupric are both the +2 oxidation state (pure metals are in the 0 oxidation state). I seem to remember that for iron ferric is more common (common rust is Fe2O3), and I seem to recall that cupric is the more common copper oxide (CuO) too. For non-chemistry applications (i.e., referring to the metals generally for the purposes of discussing alloys), you’d refer to them as ferrous and cuprous.
Like I said, this is probably beyond the scope, but the comment triggered my “Hey, those words mean very specific things in that context” trigger.
@20 Nice.
@13 I’ve considered something similar for a long time. At least, I think Lanre (Haliax) might not be bad, even if the other Chandrian are. This would make Denna’s version of history more acurate than Kvothe’s (certainly less biased). If Skarpi is an Amyr (which seems really likely), then he would definitely try to sway Kvothe to his way of thinking.
Also, I definitely think the Cthae is the “enemy” spoken of during the creation war (or someone that controls it). We are told that seven were poisoned and that only one didn’t betray his city (not sure who this is – could somehow be Lanre).
So? Who protects the worlds from the Cthae’s poison? The Sithe. Who do the Chandrian fear? The Sithe. We haven’t been told anything about the Sithe other than their occupation – guarding the Cthae’s tree and killing those who come into contact with it. Like Kvothe (another parallel between him and a mythical / legendary figure) and the Chandrian.
Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking.
Long time lurker, first time poster. I look forward to these re-reads and the comments every week.
Has anyone made mention of the fact that the name “Auri” is also part of “Laurian” (K’s mother). It builds on some comments last week talking about how Auri loves and takes care of K (especially when she visits him in his room after the plumbob incident). Some connection there?
Quxan–that is interesting.
Was reading this reread and I got to the bottom and wondered aloud, “why are there only 20 comments?” I’ve caught up! Just read for the first time NW and WMF earlier this month and loved them.
Something that has been bothering me since I finished them and because I know we’re months away from this part of the book, but do we know why Caduceus was trying to poison the Maer? It seems like such a blatant loose end, and not even the kind that is like, “you’ll find out in book 3!” Bugging me.
Great job on these, by the way, wonderful to glean all this insight. I barely made any of these connections and it has me rethinking everyone’s positions on Denna, Ash, Kingkiller, etc. Great stuff.
@20 very cool, thank you
@22 very cool — I had not seen that connection before
This is why I love these rereads so much!
So, yeah, the Hyena thing turns out to be real, but interestingly enough, so does Fela’s “thing”. Saw a presentation about it at a Vision Science Conference a few years ago. Here’s a recent article on it:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/04/formerly-blind-children-shed-lig.html
A group of Scientists in India is actually going around doing more or less exactly what she describes. There are children who cannot see due to cataracts, despite the fact that modern medicine can cure this. They just don’t have access to this medicine. So, they go out, find these kids, cure them, and have them play a few “games” before and after the surgery.
Weird, but true! =)
Regarding actual violence done by the Chandrian… I agree that there is a possibly significant lack of direct confirmation of attacks/murders actually performed [I]by[/I] the Seven.
[I]However[/I], Pat did have Bast specifically say that the Ctheah never lies – it is absolutely truthful and absolutely malignant. That’s a hell of a statement to have a character put out there and then later go back on. My interpretation is that while the facts chosen and the presentation of the Ctheah’s statements are maliciously chosen, this means that none of the words themselves can be false.
And the Ctheah specifically tells Kvothe that Cinder tortured his parents one by one (and that his other held up much better than his father). I don’t see us being able to get around this. This is solid evidence for me that at least one of the Chandrian is a murderer. Justification for said murders (something similar to “the greater good”?) is still technically possible.
(Sorry I can’t provide specific details, don’t have my book on me).
@20 goodben – excellent. It’s references like this that make me wonder if there’s something significant in the level of ‘real’ chemical knowledge described by Kvothe, or whether this is just very nice world-building. In addition to my comment about emitters last time round, I’ve just noticed a reference to cadmium in chapter 23, which wasn’t used for much until the 20th century and is surprising in the book unless the Fishery has a sideline in orange paint. On another tangent, I wonder if something like a nickel aluminide would explain the robustness and apparent longevity of the Adem swords.
Just for reference purposes, the quote Dominiquex references is:
“What can you tell me about the Chandrian?” [Kvothe] asked.
“Since you ask so sweetly, Cinder is the one you want. Remember him? White hair? Dark eyes? Did things to your mother, you know. Terrible. She held up well though. Laurian was always a trouper, if you’ll pardon the expression. Much better than your father, with all his begging and blubbering.”
{ Kvothe remembers his dead parents, asks “Why?”}
“Why?” the Cthaeh echoed. “What a good question. I know so many whys. Why did they do such nasty things to your poor family? Why, because they wanted to, and because they could, and because they had a reason. Why did they leave you alive? Why, because they were sloppy, and because you were lucky, and because something scared them away.”
Now, it seems to me that the Cthaeh phrased all of that rather carefully. He says that Cinder is the one Kvothe wants and describes him. Then, without ANY names or pronouns attached, says, “Did things to your mother, you know.” The Cthaeh rather carefully did NOT say “CINDER did things to your mother.” The combination of “Cinder is the one you want” with “did things” implies that “Cinder did things” but doesn’t actually specify it. And in the second paragraph, never once does the Cthaeh say, “The Chandrian did nasty things to your family because they could. The Chandrian left you alive because you were lucky.” No, he just says “they.” The exact “they” he means is, again, implied to be the Chandrian, but never specified to be them.
If you were thousands of years old, more malicious than the human mind can grasp, bound to utter honesty, and extremely fond of effing with people’s heads, I think you’d have a few tricks up your sleeve for very carefully implying untruth while at the same time being scrupulously honest…
Thanks for the quotes ArtfulMagpie!
There do seem to be some possibly significant gaps there that my brain had filled in (perhaps as Pat/the Ctheah expected it to).
However, I’m still not entirely convinced. It’d be dicey for am author to go there I think – not for the Ctheah, it’s totally possible for it to pull such a verbal sucker punch, but might be foul play on the part of an author. Would need to call for review. ;) By your anaylsis, “White hair?” and “Dark eyes?” wouldn’t refer to Cinder either. The speech pattern is highly conversational – “Did things to your mother” is not a complete sentence or independent thought. Linguistically, it’s hanging on something. We recognize this via punctuation in written speech, but verbally? (the way it was delivered to Kvothe)? It’s dicey to definitively say that it’s not linked to the previous statement “Cinder is the one you want.” Punctuation in written speech generally signifies separate thoughts that have to be somewhat independent (a complete sentence); but in spoken English we derive such interpretations from context. I’m not entirely convinced that those spoken question marks fairly differentiate stand-alone thoughts. It seems to me that without those thoughts being connected, the statement descends into gibberish – what does make sense anymore? But then again the ambiguity is obviously there. Obviously the potential for deliberate misdirection rather than conversational tone is there. But hey, that’s what fan theories and comments are for! ;)
Oh, yes. I agree that it may well be a stretch to interpret the Cthaeh’s comments as anything other than the obvious: “Cinder did terrible things to your mother and the Chandrian are the ones who killed everyone but left you alive because you were lucky.” But the potential is there, at least! PR could still turn our assumptions and beliefs right on their collective heads!
((I could easily fill in the potential “gaps” between individual statements in what the Cthaeh said, too. “Cinder is the one you want {because he can help you get your revenge.} {Those bad guys} did things to your mother, you know.”))
Present-day Kvothe and Bast still seem to think the Chandrian are evil. Bast in WMF chapter 129: “There are things every Fae child knows. It’s not good to speak such things aloud. Not ever.”
And Chronicler: “Does that mean they might come here?” So Kvothe has not defeated them yet.
Random thought: Kvothe bloodies his hand a lot. Auri washes him up in the Underthing and he cuts himself on purpose on that tree in the Ademre. Connection with thre Amyr and their bloody hands?
It will be interesting to see if Taborlin has some significant connection to the Lackless family. (I’m assuming that if he does, we’ll find out in DT.)
Key, coin and candle are (as noted @14) known Taborlin links, although whether Kvothe thinks of Auri’s gifts in that context is unproven, IIRC. Of those, the only one that has a direct, obvious connection to Lackless is the candle, and I’m not sure this particular candle is likely to be related to the Lackless puzzle. Somehow it doesn’t fit quite as well as the other items do, so I still have hope that the Lackless candle will come along early in DT, before the Lackless resolution. (According to my theory, a key is also a Lackless item, but it could not be the key Auri gives him; likewise, the ring Auri gives him can’t be the ring from the rhyme.)
Does anyone have a complete list of the things Auri has given Kvothe? It seems like an interesting subject for review, but I don’t have access to the books ATM.
ArtfulMagpie @15 – Did you go to the same school as PR? I mean… milkweed pods? Were you in the same class? ;)
also @29 – Who knew the Ctheah was an Aes Sedai? Maybe there’s a Portal Stone from Randland to Fae.
E’lir! Woo hoo! Thanks, Jo.
I am impressed that so many people got the point of Naming class. I could tell that Kvothe was being deliberately obtuse and resisting, but whereas I think I got the idea of Naming, I could see no method to Elodin’s madness. When we get there, somebody will have to explain how Fela learned the name of stone.
The candy castle could be a metaphor or some such about a denner resin drug cartel empire they run or something, lol. I highly doubt it, but you thought it was obviously dumb so I felt like being the devils advocate
EDIT: Damn I should’ve read the comments first, # 3 mentioned this forever ago lol
ArtfulMagpie @15 – Did you go to the same school as PR? I mean… milkweed pods? Were you in the same class? ;)
Not that I know of! But I actually giggled aloud when the milkweed thing happened, having fond recollections of my crazy Zen teacher, ha!
also @29 – Who knew the Ctheah was an Aes Sedai? Maybe there’s a Portal Stone from Randland to Fae.
You mean a WAYstone, right? ;-)
Quick addition to the discussion of Elodin’s milkweed demonstration.
In my view, Elodin was demonstrating that direct attempts to learn a Name are futile. One must both work hard to learn it and not try to learn or use it at the same time. Elodin could not catch a milkweed seed when he tried. Only when he was exhausted and resting did one float into his mouth. Though without the work of catching them, he would not have been laying on the ground and able to do so. We see the truth of this later with Kvothe and the name of the wind. He is focussed exhaustively on it throughout the books, but he can only know and use it consciously after he has stopped trying and started observing the way the world moves as a consequence of wind. Elodin is attempting to teach non-dualist thinking that seems essentially equivalent to Zen practices.
“Auri knows he’s a Lackless.” But what kind of knowing is it? When I read that sentence, I experience it as Auri coming to a rational conclusion, very much like Devi. But in truth, Auri embodies the sleeping mind, more so than Elodin. She would know this somewhat the same way K knew she was Auri.
Also, “mind-expanding world re-examining thing” reminds me of the “how many spades” question. There are three possible answers: 8, meaning eight total cards; none, meaning eight cards don’t add up to a shovel; and that the question does not contain enough information to answer it, because it does not say how many spades are pictured on each individual card.
Firstly, honoured as I am to be raised E’lir last week I have to confess I cheated on the tests by comparing answers with my wife. So, before the horns I humbly ask that my e’lir status be extended to both of us annd I’ll pay the extra fees as my punishment.
Secondly @8 you may still need a Scriptorum in an age of printed works as a large part of the work of any Scriptorum was copying out those older texts that were becoming illegible through the ravages of time. Even if they were to then be printed you would presumably need a pristine hand-copied version first to set the type from.
Someone else who noticed the use of cinnas fruit? Felurian speaks of them as an insult in some part of the Fae. And Elodin bring them as a gift to Auri. Any connection?
I´ve been meaning to post the last two weeks while re-reading the book, but what do you know, I still can´t put it down once I´ve started reading it. I´ll get back to the first chapters soon though and I follow the comments here.
What I don´t understand is – why do you figure Auri knows Kvothe is a Lackless? Because of the candle she gives him?
Something on the Chteah: I wouldn´t trust his pointing at the Chandrian and especially Cinder at all. The Chteah even gives us a motive why he sets Kvothe snapping at Cinders heels: “Maybe he did me a wrong turn once.” or something like this. (just wondering how Cinder could accomplish that if the Chteah is omniscient.)
And we know he is misleading Kvothe about his mother. He says Laurian was always the trouper, which is true. But his mother wasn´t always Laurian.
Another theory about the Chandrian´s plan: Bast told Kvothe the Sithe would kill everyone who talked to the Chteah, even the crows that picked at the corpse of someone who talked to it. They can´t kill Lanre/Haliax though. Haliax has realized he was tricked by the Chteah (he said to Selitos he was betrayed). Lanre probably went to the Chteah to get a flower to cure Lyra and talked to it and something went wrong. Possibly Haliax wants to erase every memory and mention of himself in order to fight the Chteahs influence. That would even fit the “Cinder once did me a wrong turn” – if the Chandrian are actively fighting the Chteah´s influence.
@37 John
cool, that goes so much farther. I just interpreted the milkweed scene in the way that Elodin tries to teach him that he can´t force the issue, some things happen accidentially. You know, as long as he tried to catch the seeds he even chased them away, but once he gave up one seed accidentially swept into his mouth and made him choke (Elodin probably even orchestraded the wind to that purpose ;-), which is actually the same lesson over and over, like telling Kvothe to stop grabbing at his tits.
@24
but do we know why Caduceus was trying to poison the Maer? It seems like such a blatant loose end, and not even the kind that is like, “you’ll find out in book 3!” Bugging me.
Caudicus mentions that he spent the summer with Baron Jakis – so he could tell some gossip for Kvothes book. Since Caudicus already had an important position in Alveron´s court Baron Jakis could have promised him title and lands if he helped him become the next Maer.
Although there is a flaw to the theory: Alveron has been sick off and on for years. But then again, maybe Kvothe took care of the effects of the lead poisoning and the denner/ophalum addiction but he´s still sick and there will be another bad phase for him later? An actual sickness on Alveron´s part makes poisoning him less suspicious.
@41 maybe Kvothe took care of the effects of the lead poisoning
LEAD! I’d forgotten how he was poisoned. This is what I’m thinking: The Cthaeh tells Kvothe that the Maer can lead him to the Amyr and that Kvothe will understand the joke later. It is a pun of course, on the ord “lead”. Caudicus is an Amyr. And, for the Gandalf effect, was it ever revealed what happened to his body? Or perhaps Caudicus was in the Amyr’s service. But this has to be the link.
The “ferrous & cupric metallurgy” bit here is reminiscent of the semiconductor terminology used in artificing (doping metals, etc) and presence of radioactives in alchemy discussed last week. The real question is, is this all just world building sketching in plausible details of what a developing techo-magical engineering might be like, or does any of it have broader implications for the main action of the plot? By that I mean, does any of the detailed mechanics of sygaldry or alchemy have relevance to K’s overall trajectory and the frame story in the same way that alar and name-changing do?
Mostly I tend to lean toward the former interpretation, that much of this is just world building drawing on Pat’s own years as a student reading widely. The ionization state of iron is not going to suddenly be something on which a plot element turns, and Kvothe’s thieves lamp would have got him in just as much trouble with Kilvin for its functionality regardless of what process Pat invented to describe how Kvothe made it. In other words, the magic equivalent of technobabble from Trek: plausible sounding details that enable the rest of the plot to move forward without the specific words being critical.
But of course, with Pat we can’t be certain. :-) As I’ve been typing this I’ve been second guessing myself, thinking of all the things that Pat has hidden in plain sight so masterfully, and wondering if cadmium or tungsten or Fe2O3 will matter more than we now realize…
Another thing, following up on last week’s discussion (which I must admit I’ve only just read this morning; last week was crazy for me with work stuff at NASA). Re: why is artificing not more widespread? I agree this is a troubling proposition from a coherent worldbuilding perspective. By all rights, the University ought to be absolutely rolling in money from selling its magical inventions all over the world, from magic fridges and unbreakable glass to sympathy lamps and Kvothe’s “bloodless” to sygaldry telecoms and projection weapons and automated industrial power.
It is ridiculously easy to come up with great ideas using what we’ve seen so far. Use sympathy to bind two large wooden beams, use one of them as the axle of a waterwheel in a river, and the other will spin too – voila, wireless power transmission, a technology we’re still struggling with in the real world. Last week, several people suggested sympathy telegraphs with bells, but that’s making things hard on yourself: make two identical rubber membranes stretched on frames. Air vibrations hitting one will make the other vibrate. Voila, phones. Or mass produce them and invent broadcast radio. “Live from Imre, it’s Who’s Got Talent at the Eolian!” Make a bunch of barometers and wind vanes, install them all over the place, and bind them to indicator dials on a central panel. Then forecast the weather. That ought to be worth a pretty penny in an agrarian society. And that’s not even mentioning the Medica yet.
Even in superstitios Vint, the Maer shouldn’t just have one arcane working for him. He should have a building full of ’em, or several buildings. We know that the world’s rich and powerful send their kids to study at the University; presumably many of the current ruling class may well have studied there themselves. And the University has been turning out graduates for centuries, most of whom do not appear to stick around town afterwards So why is this magic/technology not more widespread? Why is someone as capable as Ben (a Namer, mind you! And clearly an adept at sympathy from all he taught Kvothe) why is he wandering the world selling trinkets out of a wagon in small towns, rather than setting himself up as an Edison in Atur or Tinue?
@41
That makes sense about Baron Jakis bribing Caduceus with title, such a very subtle hint… I kind of dismissed the thought of a Jakis being king because they were so far off (+10 replacements), but I suppose with enough time and careful effort, there might not be many standing in their way.
Can we assume that if the Maer has a child that he/she would be another one to knock off?
On a side note, Wetlander, your state is bizarre. Happy “Stay Away from Seattle Day” to all.
Rob
I can’t remember if this has been mentioned at any point in the re-read but it has been nagging at me: The grouping of “threes”. I started really noticing it with the exchange of gifts between Auri and Kvothe. Always three.
Then I started looking back over the books and found numerous examples. Way too many to mention, but the obvious: the story is framed in three days; Silence in three parts- hollow silence, Sullen silence, Patient cutflower sound; Demons fear three things- cold iron, clean fire, and the holy name of God; Chest was sealed three times- lock of iron, a lock of copper, and a lock that could not be seen; three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man; Kvothe spent three years in Tarbean after the death of his troupe; the townsfolk in the bar reminisced that three years ago no one would have even thought of locking their doors at night, let alone barring them (which also leads me to believe Kvothe has been Kote for three years now); and when providing Bast with a story to mislead the man in the bar that recognized him: “Took an arrow in the knee on my way through the Eld three summers ago” and then he asks Bast to hear him three times. I will admit I have a digital copy of the book, but after my interest was piqued, seaching for “three” brought up so many instances that I was shocked. And most of these examples are just from NW.
@29: I think it’s very interesting that the Ctheah essentially deflects Kvothe’s questions. He rarely answers the question asked, preferring instead to abuse Kvothe’s reactions (especially when he moves to Denna somewhat out-of-the-blue).
@37: That is what I got out of the demonstration as well.
One big complaint. Again, bad math.
Uresh, who is represented as having “talent with numbers” and a “full El’The,” presents an incorrect application of infinity.
Dividing a finite number an infinite number of times (I assume by another finite number, since division by infinity results in something meaningless) doesn’t result in a “non-infinitely small” piece, it results in zero. It’s a limit problem, since any number you can conceive of that is “non-infinitely small” can always be divided again (infinitely).
But this is an approximation, which is why I can’t equally say that all numbers equal 0 (since each piece is approximately equal to 0). Adding up an infinite number of small pieces, each of which is the result of infinite division of a finite number, results in the finite number.
The closest concept that I can think of that Rothfuss could be alluding to is the idea of countable/uncountable infinity, but it’s not very close.
Also, what the hell is a “Lenatti” accent? And where is “Sceria”? I think our map does not cover the actual four corners of civilization.
And I don’t think spiders can breath underwater. Though there is a spider (the diving bell spider) that traps an air bubble on its back to provide itself with oxygen.
@40 On the cinnas fruit.
Kvothe learns from Felurian that giving *just one* cinnas fruit as a present is an insult. And Auri does seem taken aback when Elodin finds a cinnas fruit in his pocket to give her, but accepts it later, maybe when she realizes it wasn’t meant that way?
Hmm. So we know that Elodin recognized Kvothe’s shadow cloak thing (shaed, was it?) which means he is at least passingly familiar with things Fae. Perhaps he KNOWS that giving one cinnas fruit is considered an insult and he is testing Auri? If she reacts negatively, he will know that either A) she is Fae, or B) she has been to/is familiar with Fae. He may well be trying to unravel the mystery of Auri in his normal subtle way…
@47 And if I rcall correctly, when Sim needs to tell under-the-influence-of-Plum Kvothe something he really needs to know, he says “I tell you three times.” And of, couse, there are three things a wise man fears…
@48 Regarding the four corners, the Cthaeh says: “You’d have to leave your precious corners far behind before you found someone who might take you seriously. You wouldn’t have a hope until you made it to the Stormwal.”
The corners are not the entire world because Stormwal is on the outside. It’s probably a continent.
In NW during the draccus encounter, when Kvothe is mixing the denner resin balls he said:
“That brings us up to twentyone,” … “A good number. Three sevens.”
“Nothing wrong with having luck on your side,” Denna agreed.
Makes me think PR repeats these numbers and inserts them every chance he gets to represent luck. And the friendship between Kvothe, Sim and Wil are three, although that is probably just coincidence.
@44) The one major difference between Sygaldry/Artificing and realworld technology is efficiency. I can’t recall the exact phrasing from the first book, but I think the power curve for magic-at-a-distance increases exponentially (or very nearly so). Which is why you need to ring a huge temple bell here in order to make a little bell tinkle several miles away. If you bind two rubber membranes together, the first one will be more than twice as tough to vibrate (the same way binding one coin to another makes it more than twice as heavy (first coin’s mass + second coin + transference loss). Transference loss increases over distance by a _lot_. There are ways around such things, but Rothian infrastructure is always going to be a little more unwieldy…even if it doesn’t require as many fiddly bits (because of magic bindings rather than physical connectors).
@44/54: Just like the wealthy and powerful are patrons to musicians and the arts, I would think they would all be interested in sponsoring the brightest students (not just their own children) thru the University in order to have the arcanists work for them upon graduation.
And with the arcanists’ potential use of mommets against others, there would probably be a network of spies (or even a black market) whose sole purpose is to gather personal affects or hair of their enemies. Unscrupulous wealthy and powerful nobles could even use this against each other.
@56) I think the lack of any visible evidence for such a network of Arcanist patronage and/or more extensive black-market arcanery speaks volumes to the strength, reach, focus and long-term planning of the Arcanum. They don’t want this stuff getting a wider distribution and they really _mean_ it. I’m trying to think of another technological monopoly that _didn’t_ metastatize into an economic empire. And fear of witchcraft can’t explain it because while it’s not widespread, it’s certainly not underground either. Some inns have _refridgerators_ for crying out loud! You don’t create major appliances if you are afraid of the Inquisition. The question is why they aren’t making _more_ appliances? Is it just the lack of a marketing department or some other subtle & deliberate strategy…
Given our arcanery brainstorming, this is a clear case of the dog that didn’t bark. And isn’t it curious?
herewiss13@57:Yes, I agree there does seem to be a sort of deliberate plan going on with the limiting of “arcanery.” And, yes it is very curious.
@44 You can’t really use sympathy as a telephone due to slippage. It seems it’s hard to make sympathy work over any distance. I think sygaldry must experience similar issues, otherwise it probably would have already been done.
Herelle @41 – I don’t think Alveron’s previous illness is a stopper in your scenario; I think it provided a convenient means. Someone with Caudicus’s skill, on the lookout to do murder, should be quick to see and grasp the opportunity. “Oh look, he’s been sick. I can make him all better. Oh, look, he’s sick again (because I slipped him a mickey). I’ll treat him again (and now I’ll slip a slow poison into his “medicine” to make it look like the illness was simply too much for my skills, mwahahahaha). I’m such a trustworthy physician, you betcha.”
Trollfot @42 – I hope you were joking. In case you weren’t, I have to say that’s stretching pretty far. Lead the metal and lead the verb are pronounced differently in English (or at least in American English), and wouldn’t likely even be spelled the same in any other language. I understand the need to shrug off translation issues when composing poetry or telling jokes, because if you tried to make everything sound like it was translated you’d either go crazy or have a joke-free book with bad poetry. (And I do NOT envy those whose job it is to translate this to other languages! What a mind-bending job that would be.) However, I think this is stretching wordplay beyond the accepted suspension-of-disbelief levels.
RobM @46 – Bizarre? Washington?
…
…
You have no idea.
Some thoughts on “Vorfelen Rhinata Morie”
“…The desire for knowledge shapes a man – or something like that.”
Later in WMF when Felurian explains the history of Naming to K, she doesn’t refer specifically to “namers” and “shapers” but rather to “knowers” and shapers. Both groups are effectively “Namers” but the former were those “who walked with their eyes open” and “knew all the deep names of things;” the latter were “those who saw a thing and thought of changing it. they thought in terms of mastery.”
In the context of the text relating to the Four-Plate Door, perhaps knowledge is better translated as “Knowing” alongside, and contrasted with, “Shaping.”
Now, I have no idea what the grammar and syntax of this language might be or if these words even constitute a fully grammatical sentence in the way Wil’s rough translation suggests; nevertheless, the likelihood is that the meanings at least of Knowing, Shaping and Desire could well be present in the message the text gives.
Shalter suggests “With knowledge, a man can Shape” and Jo, while leaning in this direction, also suggests “For people desiring knowledge of Shaping.”
I’m inclined to take this one step further and suggest that the words may simply be “Knowing – Shaping – Desire” perhaps in general reference to the Shapers and their thoughts of mastery but perhaps specifically in relation to Jax and the stolen Moon. Is this a general warning; a simple admonition to the students in the archives; or could it be a very specifiic warning of what lies behind the, um, Doors of Stone…? “Knowing, he desired Shaping” or perhaps “Knowing shaped his Desire” — or maybe the rules of this ancient tongue allow this to be a play on words that says both?
At a slight tangent to this, Felurian doesn’t directly equate “Knowers” = good and “Shapers” = bad, but she does imply that eventually, whatever beauty they might have wrought initially, some Shapers eventually over-reached themselves and had to be reigned in – thus sparking the Creation War. This much we already know but I wonder where the “contemporary” Namers from K’s time sit on the spectrum from Knowing through benign Shaping to desiring Mastery…?
[Edit for typos and clarity]
@54, 59: Yeah, I thought about slippage while I was writing my post at 44. But it doesn’t seem to me like that’s an insurmountable problem so much as an engineering task to be solved. What was Kilvin’s line about his emergency heat-eater which startled Kvothe with its great size? Something like “Quickly, yes, but easily, no”? One can do much with sufficient preparation. And moreover, clearly (even explicitly) there are levels of advanced sygaldry and sympathy we have yet to see.
I mean, consider the fact that the average internal combustion engine has an energy efficiency of around 18%! And it requires a globe-spanning logistics system to haul around a toxic, flammable substance obtained at great expense in countries which mostly trouble us. But that hasn’t stopped such engines from becoming omnipresent. Meanwhile, (if you are reading this in the US), there is a 68% chance that the screen on which you read my words is powered by the combustion of either a messy black rock whose dust can destroy your lungs or else an invisible toxic explosive gas, and a 20% chance it instead requires the destruction of the very essence of matter itself, a process that emits invisible rays that poison everything around them and kill anyone nearby. (Interesting fact!)
So, compared with that, sympathetic inefficiency seems like an incredibly benign problem to have. Kvothe’s already shown us the solution many times: you just need a bigger energy source and you’re set. You can turn a tiny lodestone into a humongous magnet, set a fire at a great distance, or what have you, as long as you have a heat source to draw on. Heat loss into frail human bodies is irrelevant, since the description of making the Bloodless confirms that sygaldry enables machines of iron and steel to make and break sympathetic links. I see no reason why sufficient energy input from heat could not be used to make sympathetic links work at arbitrarily large distances. Yes, you would probably need a widespread system of gigantic fires continually fed combustibles to supply the necessary motive power.
But this is precisely what we do in the real world. Somewhere, right now, a turbine is spinning in superheated steam above a great flame, gnawing ceaselessly day and night as a vast swarm of servants scurry about the globe to feed its insatiable appetite so that you may read these words from afar or speak to distant loved ones. Nations pour out gold and blood onto desert sands and throw away lives down deepest caves, burn down whole forests and flood river valleys that once were home to millions, all in the name of feeding those flames. Adepts labor cleverly to reduce inefficiencies as much as possible through ever more intricate patterns scrawled in copper and silicon, inventions from the University doubling your gas mileage and letting your cell phone hold its charge a little bit longer. And the most foresighted of those adepts dream of harnessing the greatest fire of all, ever circling overhead, by stealing right from the sky its power, or harnessing it through its stepchild, the ever-restless softly blowing Wind.
@62 I don’t have much to add to this conversation, but wow, Stargazer, that last paragraph was beautiful.
Grinning at StarGazer on #62. Lovely lines you write, and a nice line of thought. (Though continue in that vein, and you’ll be rewriting Rothfuss in the style of Stross— an odd pastiche).
If slippage is “just an engineering problem”, perhaps what the Arcanium fears is that someone will make a sympathetic link with the sun.
Frank.
It seems to me that Elodin’s lesson with the twenty books was that book-learning is useless. The whole episode – including his absence from the lecture and the dismissive ‘discuss’ – smacks of contempt for this kind of knowledge. The very fact that the assignment lit K.’s fire and gave him something to sink his teeth into is reason enough to believe that there is nothing within the assignment itself that Elodin valued and wanted to pass on. If this is right, then Elodin reinstated him into the Archives so that he could tell him that the Archives was useless; that is VERY Elodinesque.
In my faith community there is a younger guy that got his hands on a book called Systematic Theology and thinks that it’s the answer to everything. He thinks that knowing things about God is the same as knowing God. I’ve been trying to get him to see how empty this is, and my approach has been to get him to tie ropes with his eyes closed, to read Sherlock Holmes, and things like that. He was continually angry with me, told me I didn’t know how to teach (I’m a music professor), and said I was just ‘too weird’.
But sometimes the antidote is not the magic plant you’re sent to fetch, but the walk in the forest you have to take to get the (useless) plant. ‘What makes you think I’m not teaching you?’ With Kvothe, Elodin’s main purpose is to show him that he doesn’t know what he thinks he knows, and that he can’t know anything the way he thinks he can know anything. A know-it-all will admit there are things they don’t know. But they think they have what they need to eventually know it. What they don’t get is this: you don’t know what you don’t know (so stop trying to teach yourself).
The twenty books assignment was like trying to get the milkweed by trying to get the milkweed.
If this is right, then it may shed light on the Vorfelen Rhinata Morie business. It might mean something that Elodin would disagree with. The ‘with knowledge a man can shape’ suggestion, for instance.
Interesting facts: have you tried to come with one? They’re impossible to come with. You have to stumble upon them. One’s sense of the absurd has to suddenly go choonk in the course of everyday experience, passively separating a certain class of facts from others. This exercise is about a way of being and not about a hunt for knowledge. This is why K is crap at it. In a sense it’s a kind of listening. I’m sure Elodin sees K. like Iax, who tore at the knot with his teeth.
Fela wins because her fact is less obviously ‘interesting’ – like the vestigial penis – and less contrived – like the infinity business. You really just have to be paying attention to the wonder of the mind to see what she saw.
@66, 67
This really appeals to me. I like it. And it makes me wonder- Kvothe has been told by everyone that he is extremely clever, and has always had a propensity for books and learning, but at the same time he readily admits that he has his greatest achievements when he isn’t thinking things through all the way and just acts. What would it have been like if he would have played to those strengths and, say, brought his lute to Interesting Fact and made some claim that a person who really knows how to use a lute could make the people feel anything s/he wanted
without the use of Emotional Allomancywith just the lute? Kvothe has a massive repository of interesting facts, he just doesn’t recognize them for what they are.Consequently, this whole thing is about integrating sleeping and concious minds into a wholely new third thing. Which plays into the “game of threes” mentioned above also- Kvothe has two sections to himself throughout the first two books- the University K and the Imre K. They bleed back and forth a little bit, but he tries to really keep them separated- practicing the lute only at night, on the rooftops, etc. But it is interesting to note that when these two sides of him come in contact amazing things happen: his interactions with Auri for one, his first calling of the wind against Ambrose, etc.
Judging by what we know from the Framestory, K probably successfully learns the lessons Elodin is trying to teach him (he begins toward the end of WMF, but hopefully we see more onscreen in D3) and integrates these disparate parts into a complete whole- which then does something dastardly/disruptive/amazing/worldchanging, which causes him to consiously disassociate them again.
@56/57 and others talking about Ben:
This is an interesting questions- why isn’t there more arcane-ness out there causing trouble/helping the world?
I think the answer is probably found in the person of Ben and what he was doing.
When I think about the university and its interaction, there are a few things that jump out at me from what we’ve been told-
1- There is work for those involved in the apprentice type factions of the university- i.e. artificers can hang out and work, making a living constructing things, scrivs can join the find all the books in the world/take care of the archives, math people (and I assume logic people) can hang around and teach, etc. But this work is always tied back to the University. What if there is something for the namers?
2- Ben, who is a namer and graduate of the University, is traveling the world, doing seemingly mundane things to make a living.
3- We are told that there is a University within the University, and we know, because of the Framestory, and the truths that K tells in the narrative that this smaller University is both more prestigious, more powerful and knows more about the Reality of the world than the other disciplines do. We also know that sometimes the smaller University can be at odds with the rules/regulations of the greater University, but the smaller will win out: K calls the name of the wind in anger, gets expelled from the ‘normal’ University, but is promoted, redesignated, and become privy to greater secrets/knowledge because of the ‘smaller’ university.
All in all, I think this would suggest that Ben and others like him travel the world as Namers to help keep the world clear of those who would be mischievious as well as keeping the rest of the world free of the painful and destructive knowledge of the Reality of the world. Their job is to keep the University knowledge commensurate with the stated objectives/goals of the Greater University (non-mischevious, helpful ‘magic’), as well as to keep the secrets of the Smaller University safe from meddlers who could potentially restart the full-scale Creation war again.
greyhood @66 – I wouldn’t say that Elodin considers book-learning “useless” per se, or that he was trying to teach his students that it’s useless. I think his point was more that some things, like Naming, can’t be fully learned from books. It’s a little like your young friend: while knowing things about God is not the same as knowing God, the fact remains that knowing the truth about God is vitally important to knowing Him rightly. There is great value in systematic theology, particularly for a certain kind of mind; there is also danger in thinking that it is enough in and of itself. I would say that while “book-learning” is inadequate to the full task in either case, it is still needful to the task – in both cases. Kvothe’s problem is that he hasn’t yet got past the notion that all the answers are in books; he needs to realize that while the books contain much needful information, and there is great value in it, there are also (especially in his case) a great many things he needs to learn in other ways. Which, of course, he proceeds to begin to do in this book, when he has to leave the University for a term.
sillyslovene @68 – Your username is very misleading, you know. If you continue with these insightful comments, we’re going to have to call shenanigans. :) Seriously, I like your thoughts on Ben and his potential role as protector of secrets and innocence (i.e., general ignorance of the destructive potentials of the Reality dealt with by the Smaller University). If there are a set of graduates of the SU whose task it is to roam the world in a convenient guise and keep tabs on the use and abuse of Arcanum magics, it would not only explain his presence “out there”, it would also explain the lack of certain other things “out there”. Graduates of the GU would know that some things are permitted, and others aren’t, and anyone with unlawful leanings might be reminded that the University has a very long arm.
:O
I think Elodin was teaching a number of lessons with the book list. First, there’s finding your way around the archives–that lesson was probably primarily for Kvothe but the others may not have ever had to really look hard for something either. Next, there’s the double lesson that even when you find things in books what you find may not necessarily be useful–that one was for everyone. Then there was the very important lesson at the end–Discuss. They all missed that one. A very useful discussion could have been had there on just what was going on with the class and that assignment.
Thanks for the kind words @63, 64. What can I say, sometimes the muse is generous. (Though, as an aside on writing: Note that a fair chunk of that last paragraph is in iambic pentameter, or something not too dissimilar. That’s a trick I learned from Rothfuss, the power of a little verse dropped into the midst of prose.)
You know Clarke’s Law, I’m sure: “Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But the converse should also hold: Every sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Reliable, robust, affordable, improvable. But actually I think the most important corollary of Clarke’s Law today is this: We all get to be wizards. :-) I’ll take my iPad over any “Mirror, mirror on the wall”, and ever-burning lamps look pale when city lights glow ’round us all.
@66 – I completely disagree that Elodin’s point was that book learning is unimportant. As others have said, more likely his goal was to teach the same Zen-like lesson as with the milkweed pod. Seek, and ye shall not find, but instead be always present in the moment and open to unexpected chances. shalter nails it @71: they all completely botched the “Discuss” part of that lesson.
Speaking as a librarian here, and a librarian in a world where there are a handful of well-defined cataloging systems and the chaos on the shelves is a bit more contained than the chaos in the Archives…part of Elodin’s lesson about finding the books could well be plain old serendipity. Every book lover knows the joy of going to the shelf for one particular thing and stumbling across something unexpectedly wonderful…imagine how much more wonderful the serendipitous finds would be in the insane chaos of the Archives…! Seek and ye shall find….but not always what you thought you were looking for! Being open to possibility. That’s the lesson of the Archives. Or one of them!
I wonder if Elodin knows Auri from before she got broken in whatever way she is now. Any evidence one way or the other?
And since we’re wondering, do you think Devi knew Auri? Later in this book, leading up to the attack on Ambrose’s rooms, we learn that Devi knew all the other women at the university at the same time as her. Might Auri have been such? Could make for remarkable fireworks if Kvothe ever does give in and bring Devi down into Auri’s world.
@69 WetlanderNW
Thanks, that means a lot coming from you. The really weird thing is that I’m not Slovene either…
As a continuation of the thought, this could play into the whole University as Amyr institution- keeping Reality underwraps for the greater good of not rekindling a ‘hot’ Creation war again (instead of the kind of ‘cold’ war going on between Amyr, Chandrian, etc)- not to suggest that all those in Ben’s position would be Amyr, but some of them (if that is in fact what they are doing) might be wearing multiple hats: university secret police (pun intended) and Amyr…
@74- I kinda got the feeling last time I did a reread that he didn’t know her, that he was trying to get to know her/figure out who she was. Don’t remember what I based that on, so take it for what its worth (books lent out to brother…can’t check)
Lovely discussion above about the wisdom behind Elodin’s pedagogy. I’ll note in passing this is one of those moments when PR’s treatment of Kvothe’s oddly materialist worldview became terribly frustrating; it was I think immediately obvious, even from the end of NW when Elodin unforgettably shouted “Blue!” at the sky, what his approach to Naming was and the implications that approach had for the discipline as a whole, yet somehow the all-skilled Kvothe found it impenetrable. I get that we’re supposed to read that as much as a lesson on Kvothe as anything, and from a dramaturgical point of view it let PR depict many more scenes with Elodin than if Kvothe had simply gotten it straight off (and I agree with A Fox that Elodin is one of the truly rewarding characters of the saga so far), but I at least still found it terribly irritating that Kvothe continued to be so implacably obtuse.
On the question of distance sympathy: I think Stargazer (and dittoz to the praise for your rhapsody on the energy industry there) is underestimating the physical problems involved in the magic here. Kvothe’s discussion of the inefficiency of links over a distance in NW was I think expressly intended to answer all the questions about action-at-a-distance in the Four Corners; the loss of energy is just too high for it to be worthwhile given the limits on energy production which a medieval-level society faces, and that should end this line of inquiry. If they had access to petroleum or nuclear energy, well then who knows what sympathy might be able to do; when the best they can do for sustained energy production is a big fire, I think it’s asking a bit much to expect a continent-wide network of sympathetic bells or whatever. PR thought a ton about this, be mindful, and did his best to explain it when it was important.
On the odd absence of arcanistry away from the University: I think we’re underestimating the dread most people have for arcanists. Consider not just superstitious Vint but also the episode with Ben at the opening of NW; people are scared of these powers and don’t want their work around. Part of it is the Church, certainly – which though weak in Imre presumably because of its deep involvement with unholy arcane powers and general cultural sophistication – but part of it is just bone-deep superstition. It’s worth pausing to consider that the whole world was apparently destroyed (or at least seriously altered) at some point in the distant past by people wielding greater-than-normal powers, and deep memories of that must remain; consider analogously the varying levels of fear people in The Wheel of Time feel for the Aes Sedai in the wake of a similar long-ago cataclysm. The arcanists keep their heads down, and people in general run them out of town when they show up; it’s not hard to understand in consequence why there aren’t refrigerators everywhere. We don’t have to assume yet another immense global conspiracy to explain it.
ArtfulMagpie’s parsing of the Cthaeh’s comments was great. Hard to say whether we’re supposed to read into the absence of specific subjects in its statements; that might have been PR’s subtlety or it might be going too far. What does seem glaringly significant in those quotations is that the Cthaeh never says the Chandrian killed Kvothe’s parents. “Did thing” which were “terrible” and “nasty”, but how many ways are there to read those comments without them having to mean actual torture and murder? And that seems purposeful and important, right?
I love the re-read for many reasons but especially when people smarter than me unpack the scientific and technical elements of the world. I do think these elements of the story are more worldbuilding than plot, but the richness they impart is wonderful.
And yes to all those at the top of the thread who trot out the theory that’s been ripening throughout the re-read that we don’t know nearly enough to be confident that the Chandrian are the villains. I have an increasingly strong suspicion that all the murders which conceal the secrets of the Chandrian may be committed by entities charged with preventing humans from learning anything that might aid the Chandrian in escaping from their punishment, in the same way the Sithe are supposed to keep anyone from talking to the Cthaeh. “In fact they are quite nice to us”?! That can’t be a throwaway line. We’ll see though.
@62 Stargazer: I’ve been too busy this week to really participate in the discussion (though I would desperately have loved to) but I just had to stop by and say “Nice!!!” to this!
Also, thanks to all the lovely people above in the re-read who brought out the fine details of chemistry which have vanished from my mind in the decade and a half since I was a sincere student of these crafts! Also thanks (I think?) to those who brought up the spotted hyena (yikes! I am definitely on the ewww side there)
(Ah, well, now that I’m here…might as well continue for a bit!)
Arcanists – one problem is that people are blindly, superstitiously suspicious of them in most places far from the University.
Also, it might make economic sense to keep the supply of miracles low – if they become too commonplace, such items might not command even the price of making them, let alone a profit (note that Kilvin’s suggested price for the ArrowCatch was over 3 times what was eventually decided upon, which means at the very least such “luxury” sygaldry usually commands a 200% profit margin.)
Unrelated to this week’s discussion – I just noticed that when Kvothe meets Bredon, the latter tells him that he is no longer involved in
the game of thronespolitical manoeuvrings “I have simpler tastes now. I travel. I enjoy wines and conversation with interesting people. I’ve even been learning how to dance.”And the next time Kvothe talks to Denna about her patron she says
“He’s a surprisingly good dancer. I think I can say that without betraying anything. He’s quite graceful,”. I wasn’t really in the “Bredon as mysterious patron” camp before but now I wonder…he travels (to Trebon, perhaps?) and has conversations with interesting people (Denna? and if so, interesting to whom?). And he dances. Truly, a beautiful game, if so!
(Also, this has been irritating me for a long time – Count Threpe’s first name is Denn. Any relation to Denna? or Denner? Not very likely but given that few names here seem to be random….)
~lakesidey
@@@@@ Stargazer – yes, thanks for that poetic look at our crazy energy system.
@@@@@ lakesidey – I’ve also run ahead with my own re-read, and I’m completely convinced that Bredon is Master Ash. Beyond what you mention, when Denna suddenly disappears and throws Kvothe’s transmuted courtship of Meluan Lackless (for the Maer) into a tailspin, his situation is worsened by the fact that Bredon is also gone travelling somewhere. Another coincidence.
Speaking generally, now that I’ve gotten concerned about Kvothe’s hands, I can see that he’s worrying about them all the time! Anytime his hands or anyone else’s hands are threatened, he is fretting and stressing. Elodin volunteers that Loren can cut off Kvothe’s thumbs, and he is horrified. Later, the Maer orders Dagon to cut off Caudicus’ thumbs and Kvothe says “I found the thought of crippling the man’s hands more horrifying than killing him outright.”
@@@@@ Jnai – thanks so much to the link about testing childrens’ perceptions immediately after restoring their vision. Fascinating!
I think one of Pat’s over-arching themes is the power of story. We are a story-telling species, and the stories we tell ourselves are more important than many of us realize. Much of what we think of as memory is really stories we tell ourselves of our experience. As such, they are more subject to influence and error than you might think.
I couldn’t find the article about the fickleness of memory that I wanted to share, but this one, about the serious issues that arise when you rely on “eye witness” testimony in criminal cases, gives some of the pertinent statistics. Basically, eye witnesses are frequently wrong, but eye witness testimony is incredibly convincing to a jury. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/23bar.html?_r=1
Another thing I find striking is that just about any loss of consciousness (as in anesthesia, or extreme drunkeness) is accompanied by a retrograde amnesia. In other words, you don’t remember your last few minutes of being awake. I would posit that in the absence of any opportunity to tell yourself what happened, the experiences are lost to memory. No story, no memory.
Earlier today my 8 yr old tried to tell me how she remembered our dog Mocha knocking her over as a baby. Never mind that folks don’t usually remember anything from when they were 5 months old–Mocha is the gentlest soul imaginable (despite frightening half the people he meets because he is a large dark long-haired German Shepherd).
She has constructed a false memory from a holiday picture. I had dressed her up in a holiday outfit and set her up next to Mocha, gamely wearing a Santa hat. She tipped over all on her own, and he was concernedly sniffing her when I snapped the photo. (It’s a cute picture because she is still smiling despite having her head on the carpet and her left leg up in the air.)
Anyway, to bring this back to Kvothe, I do think that something is seriously wrong in the frame story, not just with his hand (or hands) but I wonder how much of his problem is secondary to him losing his original story of himself. It is possible that telling his story to Chronicler will be as curative as Bast hopes (although I’m not sure I believe that).
@61 Aesculapius
Some thoughts on “Vorfelen Rhinata Morie”
“…The desire for knowledge shapes a man – or something like that.”
I just read the Ademre part again and stumbled over “Rhinata”. The Adem call the Chandrian “Rhinta” (being more and less than men). Rhinata looks / sounds very similar. But I don´t have any idea why the masters would have some sort of credo mentioning the Chandrian above the doors to the Archives, though.
Something else: If we assume the Chandrian were part of the Creation War and namely siding with the Shapers who made Fae, then I wonder why Felurian threatened Kvothe when he tried to ask her about the Seven. Also Bast was very agitated when Kvothe recited the rhyme with the true names of the Seven that he learned from Shehyn. The Chandrian seem to be feared in both worlds, the fae and the mortal world.
A couple of days ago I read on another board some people complaining about Kvothe being a typical Mary Sue (I had to look that up, just like Bechdel- Scene, hey I´m actually learning a lot here, plus it being so much fun). Well, Kvothe has many talents, but I think, in this re-read we have already established a lot of his faults. At first glance he really is a bit much (best musician since Illien, best sympathist of his age, brain like Einstein) but when you look closer he is not as good as Devi, not any good with numbers (no Einstein after all) and Alchemy, lacks social grace and so on. What really makes him unique is his music and his clever resourcefulness. In his story Kvothe actually deconstructs his own myth. What do you think?
Herelle@79: I think we talked about this some somewhere else, but yes, the resemblance between Rhinta and Rhinata is quite interesting. In Adem, Rhinta means something like less than a man in a bad sort of way. So, the Rhinata is probably the part of the phrase that refers to the “man” part of the phrase. What the extra “a” (and possibly divergent language) add to that portion isn’t something we know, but it does at least seem to add ominous tones to the phrase–or something like that.
(By the way, thanks Jo for the wonderful–I smiled all day.)
I read a question in the comments of this reread regarding a time disparity with regard to Chronicler attending the University after K but wsiting the Draccus book prior to K’s arrival at the University.
My solution is to reference what one of the Masters says to K during his first admissions exam, ” The University is for furthering one’s education not starting it.” Maybe Chronicler was a renowned historian and author prior to attending the University.
Herelle @79: yes, that’s been mentioned in a previous discussion, although I don’t recall which – sorry! I agree, given that *everything* in these books seems to be intermeshed and all seemingly little things apparenrly carry some sort of significance then I’m sure that the apparent similarity of the two words is not coincidental.
It seems likely that the Ademric “Rhinta” implies both power (more than a man) and some degree of loss of humanity (less than a man); the nearest impression I got was something akin to “the undead” as applied to vampires and other powerful supernatural beings – although in this context it clealy applies specifically to the Chandrian and marks them out in Ademric legend as far more than just “bogey-men.” Shehyn also says that her story of the Rhinta is old, as old as Ademre itself – perhaps giving credence to the Adem as a cultural group that split-off from midstream society either just after or even during the Creation War. It has also struck ms that there is no coincidence that the Adem are very careful with their language and with the use of names, as well as their use of gesture to augment (and perhaps deliberately minimise) their spoken communications. Could this be the last vestiges of a culture with a deep memory of the power of words and names from an ancient time and one in which such things are generally avoided and used only with great care? I wonder if the significance of music to the Adem also has its roots in this: K has clearly managed to access his sleeping mind and perform the equivalent of Naming or Knowing through music so it seems likely that this must have been done before.
With regards to the “Namers vs. Shapers” aspect of the Creation War, Felurian makes it very clear that there were positive aspects to the original Shapers and that not all they did was bad; they manipulated the world to create the wonders of the Faen Realm and much of it was beautiful and amazing. It seems much less clear cut than Fae and Shapers on one side and Mortals and Namers on the other – indeed, these classifications would seem to be not yet relevant during or preceding the time of the Creation Wat.
The implication seems to be that the original inhabitants of the Realm (which clearly includes Felurian) were among the people that existed before the separation of the faen and mortal worlds. Whether they chose to stay or were forced (by circumstance or by arms) to remain in the Fae is less clear. Since the separationof the two worlds what was once one has become two different peoples, living in worlds where different rules of nature apply
Much has also been speculated regarding the possible continuation of the Order Amyr and which characters may or may not be secret members. Linking this backmto the paragraphs above, I’m especially struck by Felurian’s comment that there were no human Amyr and that the “bright knights” of the Aturan Empire and the Tehlin Church that K was looking for were more like “children dressing in their parents clothes.”
We are continuing to think of the Amyr as an on-going secret “anti-Chandrian” organisation because that’s where much of K’s narrative has tended to lead us. I’m less convinced; I suspect that their are two entirely *separate* groups referred to as Amyr: Skarpi’s second tale may not be entirely reliable but the first, ancient group would be Selitos and his small group of Ruach followers dedicated to hunting down Lanre / Haliax and the rest of the Chandrian – and they certainly seem to have espoused the principle of doing what was necessary in the name of the “greater good” (preventing the purpose of the Chandrian). Are these Amyr immortal or out of normal time like the Chandrian? Were *these* the Amyr that Haliax was referring to when he puts Cinder in his place in NW? The second group are the church knights of the Aturan Empire; these strike me as having similar qualities to the crusader Knights Templar – first lauded by the church then deemed heretics and stripped of all power and position. In the same way, the historical truth has become mixed up with myth, legend and conspiracy theories. It certainly seems likely that the later Tehlin knights were a real part of the history of the Four Corners – but were they anything other than a pale reflection of the true Amyr, using the traditional symbols and a legendary credo to underpin a rather more mundane role within the Aturan Empire, without the supernatural / magical role of the originals? The alternative is that they genuinely *were* the true successors to Selitos’ original Amyr and managed to preserve their ancient knowledge and purpose from the time of the Creation War – and aligning themselves as a faction within the Tehlin Church merely suited their purposes but ultimately led to them being branded heretics.
As a final group of thoughts, when Skarpi refers to Tehlu and the others being created as “angels” he speaks of them “singing songs of power” – are these the Singers that Haliax refers to, alongside the Amyr…?
Connected to this is the description of “Ordal, the youngest of them all who had never seen a thing die… her golden hair bright with ribbon” — Auri…?
@68 – I really like your idea of the University/Imre split of Kvothe. (Reminded me of the Fall of the House of Usher.) learning vs. Music, knowledge Vs. intuition, waking Vs. Sleeping minds.
Tying this in to @82. Is it possible that the shapers were musicians? (singers?) while the namers were speakers? Maybe naming has something to do with poetry. Music vs. poetry is a running thing. Kvothe’s contempt of poetry may be similar to the shapers’ contempt of naming – like they were shaper wannabes. This might shed some light on poet-killer. (The caesura itself may indicate that naming somehow got cracked in half?)
So maybe Kvothe advanced with his music and ended up doing some serious shaping, which is why he had to lose the music side of himself. Aw, this is just a ramble.
Incidentally, it seems like a bit of contrivance that Felurian refused to speak about the creation war and the Chandrian, since she could after all have just told him everything from firsthand experience.
And in my earlier post I did mean that Elodin was trying trying to tell K. that the archives were useless *for naming*, not for other kinds of knowledge like histories and sciences etc. His approach to naming was not using words about things, but merely pointing to the thing itself and saying ‘blue!’ as was mentioned. Direct experience. (Thank you to wetlandernw for your comments on knowing God rightly. I do still think that a compendium of systematic knowledge can be very misleading about what it actually offers, especially in its form rather than its content. There is another big Book someone could read and just go ‘blue!’.)
@80 – what if Rhinta (a form of rhinata – man) is something like man-ish, or humanoid. (or oliphaunt.) You’re probably right that rhinata corresponds to man, but that does kill the beautiful idea that the skin dancer looked at K. and said – you’re the shaper?
Another idea – instead of ‘knowledge shapes a man’ what if it is ‘with knowledge you can shape humanity’. Humanity may justify the extra syllable. This would also tie into the creation war, where it seems the Ruach split into far and humans.
Page 455 in The Name of The Wind has a specific reference to a print shop. It’s when Kvothe writes his “apology” for Ambrose. He has 100 copies made. Busy rereading notw and it popped up…
@82 Aesculapius
Sorry, I didn´t remember “Rhinta” being discussed.
I believe what you said about the Adem being aware of Shaping – when Magwyn observed Kvothe in order to give him a name she told him to speak something. He said something like “My pleasure, respected SHAPER OF NAMES.” Magwyn then asked Shehyn if he was mocking her.
There is another concept about Fae that that popped into my head. Maybe by shaping Fae the shapers kind of pulled most of the ancient magic into the Fae realm, maybe even the magic side/aspect of people, kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll living in the Four Corners while his other half exists in the Fae. We are always told that magic can only change energy, not create or destroy it. I suspect even calling the name of the wind means if the wind comes at the call its absence somewhere else has some effect on other places too. Maybe everyone in the real world has some counterpart in Fae.
Oh crikey, don’t apologise! I just thought that you might be interested in seeing what others with similar thoughts had written – but I couldn’t remember in which thread it was discussed!
Nice catch on the Magwyn naming episode; I’m sure that people like her hold a veritable goldmine of information in traditional folklore. It’s very interesting that the Ctheah clearly tells K that no-one within the Four Corners will take him seriously and that he wouldn’t have a hope until he made it to the Stormwal – which effectively seems to mean the Adem! Certainly Magwyn and Shehyn seem to take him seriously.
Given the the reaction to K’s comment, what he says about Magwyn’s eyes reminding him of Elodin and the suggestion that she might initially have been startled by what she saw in K, I’m inclined to assume that Magwyn is a true Namer – from a different tradition to Elodin, perhaps, but a Namer nonetheless. On the other hand, there’s evidence that Elodin himself has spent time with the Adem so perhaps he also learned from the same tradition as Magwyn…?
Sorry, I’m getting way ahead of the re-read now. I’ll stop and wait until the appropriate time to share those thoughts!
I very much like your idea that the shaping of the Faen Realm may have created an imbalance in the distribution of ancient and primeval magics and powers between there and the mortal world. That would explain many things!
I have a question, if what is said about the Chandrian is true, “Blue flame is the common, but I have also heard of wine going sour, blindness, crops withering, unseasonable storms, miscarriage and the sun going dark in the sky.” Crops aren’t doing so well around the Waystone Inn.
Also, in the beginning of the book (on pg. 4 of my book) Bast is testing some drinks and chanting when, “He twisted out the cork, took a speculative sip, then made a sour face and shuddered.” Has the wine gone sour?
I was wondering if Chronicler is not the only one who has figured out K’s location? How close are the Chandrian? Could that be another reason why he is waiting to die?
The whole Chandrian/Amyr thing is really something that tugs at the hidden part of this trilogy. All information regarding them has been passed on via Kvothe who has concluded (without a lot of evidence) that the Amyr are the good guys and the Chandrian are the bad guys. He found the Chandrian at his camp after it was devastated and Cinder harrassed him, but Haliax brought him back into line. Why would someone hell bent on that kind of devastation hold his minion back (and he is under Haliax’s control).This brings into question the Amyr who were founded with the desire to stop the Chandrian at all costs with the underlying desire for revenge burning in at least two of them. All are Ruach from before the creation war so therefore not human and led be Selitos. Over time revenge turns sour and bitter and twists the minds of those seeking it, so it’s entirely plausible that the Amyr have fallen from the purpose they once sought. The other question is what is the purpose of the Chandrian. No evidence of killing though plenty of circumstantial evidence in the killing of Kvothe’s troupe and the burnt house. The little rhyme which Kvothe dismisses as well as Denna’s song are only two serious pieces of evidence to the contrary of Skarpi’s story.
Seeing as the only semi-solid pieces of information we have are Kvothe’s first hand experience and Skarpi’s story seemingly pointing the bad finger at the Chandrian, with the Rhyme and Denna’s song as the counter to that we really have no solid information either way. No violence was seen at the hands of the Chandrian. No evidence they actually destroyed that farmsted in Trebon despite the signs of the Chandrian which can easily be just rumour spread to discredit them. It’s just too much speculation and folklore to draw any real conclusion.
That Cinder was leading the bandits who were stealing money from the Maer means barely anything other than a few tax collecters getting whacked (not exactly the most uncommon occurence).
For me there has to be an underlying manipulation going on, whether it’s by Amyr or whomever, with Kvothe’s life. He’s being directed and pushed all over the place on the whim of a force he doesn’t comprehend or even truly feel. The more he learns about the sleeping mind though, the more he seems to actually see rather than miss, except his obliviousness to his obsession with Denna.
Onto something else I feel I need to address (apologies if it’s been mentioned before as I’m new to the re-read!).
Kvothe’s use of insults is odd and totally out of character (as has already been observed), however if you compare them to Bast’s they are so alike it’s pretty scary. The difference is that Kvothe is clearly not intending to go through with them while Bast means every one of his. To me this alone links Kvothe to being at least half-fae when accompanied by his change in eye colour depending on stress/mood. Seeing as there is no evidence that his father is his biological father and his mother is definitely a Lackless we can easily see him being raised by them but having a different biological father. I know most are already convinced of this idea, I just thought I’d lay it out as I saw it. The other telling trait is his speed of learning, similar to Elodin he’s very quick, but he lacks the wisdom and lateral thinking of an adult but that doesn’t explain is inability to have social grace. For a start he’s a trouper so he should be able to at least see and imitate social grace, yet it’s an alien concept to him just like the concept of home and sending letters back to friends. However this is again mirrored in Bast’s attitudes, with the exception that Bast has no comprehension of restraint or tact, hence his comments about his kind not always making good/right decisions. Kvothe has his human side to temper this making him a very compassionate fellow, despite his obvious disregard for rules or cages. To me this explains how his apparent insensitivity to certain things is possible.
Also hello everyone!
@88
“You keep thumbing your nose at folk,” she said. “I swear I’ve never met a man who has your knack for lack of social grace.”
I thought that was interesting given what it means to have a knack in this world.
89. TrixX
“You keep thumbing your nose at folk,” she said. “I swear I’ve never met a man who has your knack for lack of social grace.”
I thought that was interesting given what it means to have a knack in this world.
@88 Crops aren’t doing so well around the Waystone Inn.
I think that is just the impression the books give. We hear from people in Newarre that the crops are fine. We’re told that they would even be able to deal with the “three-bleeder” year, except for those that didn’t plant beans (like Crazy Martin), and those losing sheep (to demons?).
On Blue Flames. We are told that Cinder causes the blue flames, but there were no blue flames at the bandits fort (large bonfire – not blue). The Cthae tells Kvothe that Cinder has had a long time to learn how to hide his sign(s). I find this very interesting.
The ‘type of dog in Sceria that gives birth through a vestigial penis’ is a hyena. They give birth through vestigial penises. I know I’m late to the boat, but I thought this might be worth mentioning.
Oh, hey, y’all remember when I linked to a t-shirt design Woot might make of the moon being stolen?
Well, they made it, and it’s probably only available for 4 more days! Check it out!
@92
Thanks! I often find it hard to piece together these hints. Thanks for the help. It’s such a great book and has so many layers. It can be easy for me to dismiss something that ends up being really important. And I never noticed the large bonfire that wasn’t blue. Awesome that you noticed that.
Hey has anyone thought it odd that Tehlu has come to be considered the Supreme Being when he is not even the main player in the creation war? And relatively soon after the fact as well. I think this has something to do with the the whole who-is-actually-the-good-guy problem we are trying to peer into.
Okay, so has anyone thought about the book that Kvothe COULDN’T find? The one that Elodin wasn’t sure was in the Archives?
“En Temerant Voistra”?
For some reason I thought that it was significant that no one found it.
Regarding Elodin’s teaching style and the milkweed pod, I think he’s doing his usual and teaching on multiple levels at once. I found it interesting that nobody mentioned what I thought the more obvious lesson was: by flailing around the classroom he was creating disturbances in the air and the floating seeds allowed everyone to “see” the winds in the room. We know that he likes to “watch” the wind in the House of the Wind and when Kvothe spends enough time watching how the sword tree moves in the wind, he is able to call the name of the wind again.
What the Ctheah definitely does not say is that Cinder killed either of Kvothe’s parents. That’s a considerably larger hole than the lack of pronouns. If the Chandrian were scared away, where were the people that scared them, and what did they bring to the party?
On the idea of using some kind of sygaldry for long range of communication;
The largest problem for this to work would be if the increase in slippage isn’t linear which seems to be the case given that I think I remember some admission question being ” the insurmountable distance … for a sympathy binding of iron” or something.
However Kvothe has a problem with the term thinking of the dowsing compass that apparently works over some large distances, the trefoil compass if it works thru sygaldry comes to mind too.
I think that slippage is dependent on both the distance and the quality of the link. imagine the leaky pipe analogy, if I want 1 bucket of water in the other end of my pipe that’s 1m long lets say I need to pour 2 buckets in the my end, if the pipe is 2m the slippage in the last meter is still one bucket but the slippage might be 2 buckets in the first meter which totals to 3 times the slippage for the 1m pipe.
This amounts quickly but it’s still just a question of available energy, and off course amounting slippage in the objects.
So we want to write a letter from in one place and have it written somewhere else at the same time.
As previously stated by others we can’t just keep increasing the energy input but we can increase it quite a bit if we are willing to pay for it. To solve this we set up relay stations with a receiver bound to a transmitter.
Howeverit’snotpractical to have raging bonfires burning day round for every few miles neither is iteconomical. This can be solved by storing potential energy in mechanical form and to further increase the efficiency we can collect the heat energy from the surroundings this we can do all year long as shown partly by the iceless that seems to work without any input energy effectively counteracting entropy ( that’s how I understood it anyway), and by Kvothe’s first lesson in sympathy in WMF where they draw heat from a block of ice.
But we do perhaps want to have the ability to charge the energy storage with a bonfire if the need arises.
This might cost a good deal of money but it’s relatively low maintenance.
I can think of several reasons that a king for example would want to send messages fast and the best way I can think of doing this the mundane way is to have some sort of post station where a messenger can switch horses and eventually to another messenger.
This requires a lot of good horses and just as many trustworthy men which isn’t cheap and then there’s bad whether and bandits and what not.
So I think that it’s really a long term investment especially considering the speed of the messages and the fact that it’s possible to arrange to let others use it for coin when it’s not under heavy use.
Be my guest to tear it apart if you whish to. =)
@@@@@ 42.
I’ve posted similarly at the tag end of previous threads. Someday I’ll actually catch up with the ongoing reviews. Kote is speaking Aturan. Presumably the Cthaeh and Kvote were speaking Aturan. It’s highly unlikely that lead the metal and lead the verb are the same word or even pun in Aturan. (and on a meta-textual note surely PR has some pity on the people translating his book into Japanese.)
The non-language specific joke is the literal versus figurative senses of “lead you to their door.”
48. gbrell
Careful. He could also be alluding to non-standard analysis, but I still don’t see how to make sense of the actual quote. It does look like somewhat attempting math factoids and screwing up. Why not just cut an apple into five immeasurable pieces?
A few things I wanted to contribute while still catching up with this brilliant re-read:
1 – We have a world where certain bright/trained people have the power to change reality at will, given certain parameters (knowing the names of things, having the proper tools (power supply, sympathetic links, sygaldric links, naming knowledge, etc), having the will….)
PR mentions people telling themselves their own story in their head constantly – being defined by their self-image and self-identity. This could be ‘really’ impacting Kote as innkeeper but may be distance-powered (i.e. he fights the scrael outside – away from the inn – but fails miserably fighting skin-dancer, and thugs, in the inn…….)
The Chandrian fear Sithe/Singers/Amyr – Sithe appears to be a Chthaeh security force of some sort. The Amyr (historically and currently) are another security force, but what if the ‘Singers’ are really ‘just’ singers. There is the Edema Ruh who know all the songs/stories/plays in the world (but don’t seem to think much of poetry….) and there is also the tribe whose leadership are ‘singers’. Perhaps a persons power, ability, and identity is primarily a function of self-identity *until* you get famous. Then it is a mix of self-identity, ‘reputation’ – which Kvothe manipulates and redesigns at various points, and ‘legends’. Where ‘legends’ are a mix of the plays, faerie-tales, songs, poems, religions, and other pop-cultural beliefs common across humankind (and/or fae-kind – but they may be excepted from this – indeterminate). Thus – enforcing/redefining your PR with gratuitious violence, death&destruction – which the Amyr and/or Chandrian are famous for – becomes very important to people of great power and legacy……
2 – the ‘I tell you three times/I hear you three times’ is definitely a Heinlein-ism – and very likely derives from WWII Radio usage meaning ‘this is important – did you understand *clearly/completely* with the reply meaning heard/understood/completely’ Heinlein characters tended to use this as a phrase that told a computer artificial intelligence to save, erase, or change-program etc. I think PR is using it here simply to reinforce the care they were taking to ensure they were on the same page – to remind Kvothe that while his moral compass was compromised, that these things were important.
3 – As far as Elodin’s left hand/right hand – Left hand is for namers – would right hand be for ‘knowers’ or ‘shapers’. I think naming is based on knowing – or maybe shaping is based on naming but ‘knowing’ is a whole different level of naming? And that would be a right-hand-ring instead of a left-hand ring?
4 – As far the infinity maguffin – I’m betting it is purely that PR is not a mathematician, I’m betting that much like Kvothe, while brilliant at words, history, language, and all manner of learnings, the higher maths and harder sciences were never something he studied, and thus an oversimplified wordplay on infinity is just that. I doubt it has story significance or is meant to put the characters in bad light.
wickedkinetic @103 – Well, given that PR started college with a chemical engineering major, he had to have some background in math, chemistry and physics. All things considered, there’s a fair chance he never bothered with Advanced Mathematics at a graduate level, but… he couldn’t be too clueless about “infinity” concepts. Personally, I think he put it in just to see if anyone would catch it. Alternatively, the concept itself may turn out to have an in-story significance – I wouldn’t put that past him either.
“Then Auri comes back and they sit and feast. When she asks Elodin what’s
in the cinnas fruit he brought her he answers “as if he’d expected the
question.”
theres a part in WMF where kvothe is with felerian, learning some of the different customs of the fae, where he learns that to at least one type of faen, the gift of a single cinnas fruit is a deadly insult.
I know i’m a bit late on this but I only started reading the re-read on TOR when PR put up the interview on his blog.
I’ve just noticed a few things about the moon/chandrian in this 5 chapter summary that also relate to something in NW.
In one of the books Kvothe finds it states one sign of the Chandrian is the “sun going dark in the sky”.
In another book it states a sign is “the darkening of the moon”.
And then referring back to the description of Haliax on the vase in Ch.81 NW that:
“There was a mirror by his feet and there was a bunch of moons over him. You know, full moon, half moon, silver moon”.
All of these signs can be correct of one phenomenon.
Eclipses.
It could be that in the last piece of evidence the “full, half, silver” moon are actually depicting what can be seen of the sun when the moon is in front of it. i.e. each stage of the eclipse.
This could also be why the images are within a mirror. As all geeks know you are not meant to look at an eclipse directly or you could go blind.. Maybe it is some kind of ‘eclipse’ mirror.
So.!
Is it possible that a sign of Haliax’ coming is an Eclipse?
If so, could the moon be in kahoots with Haliax?
Kushluk: Welcome over here. That’s a very interesting question. And the mirror, yes, that does fit. And dimming the sun.
Have we seen anything about eclipses anywhere at all? How would eclipses work if the moon is in another world half the time, or half the moon is in another world all the time, or however it works? I can’t remember any reference to eclipses. But they’d be bound to be significant.
It could be Haliax’s sign, or one of them, or it could have some other connection.
(This makes me wish I was doing more posts so I could pull this up where it would get more attention.)
@Kushluk:Good questions. Eclipses and how they work in 4Cland and how they fit with the cosmogony would be a very interesting topic.
We are lacking quite a bit of info about how celestial dynamics work in the 4C. Does the 4C world orbit its sun or does the sun orbit the 4C?
Given the focus on the moon, there is remarkably little talk about anything exceptional going on with the sun.
@Jo:If eclipses work anything like they do here, then it would seem like the effects of eclipses would be reduced directly by the percentage of time the moon was spending in Fae. Since the part of the moon that is in Fae would not be available to block any sunlight, then an eclipse would look quite different than here. A half moon would only block half of the sun even if it should have been a full eclipse. Interesting.
@92 – Cinder’s sign is not blue flames, his sign is having black eyes.
Hey, -we- have mammals that give birth through a vestigial penis, so no wacky theories on reproduction are required. Cheetahs have been so selected for speed that the females have high testosterone, which builds muscle. As a result, the females develop a vestigial penis. Biology is weird.
“In fact they are quite nice to us”. I interperet this is misdirection on the part of the Chandrian. They seem very keen to keep all mention of themselves out of the world, so would probably also be keen to keep FALSE information OUT of the world. Another theory I have relating to this and Denna’s song is that the Amyr want to keep information on the Chandrian secret, in order to protect people from them. The Chandrian can track those who use their names. Difficult to stop people using the names, easier to prevent people from knowing them in the first place.
I don’t understand why Kvothe has to go to Devi to borrow less than 5 Talents when he has a 20 Talent lute as collateral. Can anyone think of any explanations other than the author wanting more Devi in the story?
I think auri is princess Ariel mentioned in the frame story by kote. He says “I can tell you the truth about princess Ariel.” it is mentioned that auri treats dinner as if she is sitting with kings. She sets the “table” and has courtly manners. It would also explains how she has knowledge of the amyr and why she won’t wear secondhand clothes. I think elodin knows who she really is and is more surprised by the fact that he got so close to her calling name than the possibility that auri is close to the true name of the sun or something along those lines.
@61 Has anyone mentionted the similarity between the Rhinata in “Vorfelen Rhinata Morie” on the doors to the Archives to the Adem word for the Chandrian (Rhinta I think) ?
Well, for anyone keeping track, the end of Slow Regard lines up with chapter 11. Thanks to this detailed reread for making it easy to search for it, since I don’t have a PDF version of the book.
WhiteWizard42@115
Well, for anyone keeping track, the end of Slow Regard lines up with chapter 11. Thanks to this detailed reread for making it easy to search for it, since I don’t have a PDF version of the book.
If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I’m doing one for TSRoST at The Larkin Ledgers. Some of the commenters have worked out a pretty detailed timeline comparison.
@97 TylerCalvin
“Okay, so has anyone thought about the book that Kvothe COULDN’T find? The one that Elodin wasn’t sure was in the Archives?
“En Temerant Voistra”?
For some reason I thought that it was significant that no one found it.”
In The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Temerant is revealed to be the name of the world where The Four Corners is located. We could perhaps theorise that “en” is equivalent to “in”, as in French and Spanish for example, (although there is no linguistic basis for this in Kingkiller that I know of; just a guess). So “En Temerant Voistra” could mean “something in Temerant”. Very little information can be gleaned from this though, other than that the students would know the book was about Temerant! As Voistra is capitalised, it could be the name of a person or country, although there are examples of languages in which all nouns/words are capitalised, such as Vorfelan Rhinata Morie. Perhaps it’s just to reinforce that Elodin was assigning completely random books that he hadn’t read and didn’t know if were even in the Archives, or even existed at all.
As I was reading Jo’s summary of this section, one thing Auri said suddenly took on a significance I hadn’t considered. As so often happens with Rothfuss, it’s the little things that may mean more than they seem.
She says about her name: “Kvothe gave it to me. Isn’t it marvelous?” “It is like having a flower in my heart.”
Wait . . . a flower? Maybe there are other flowers, but what if there’s a connection between this flower and the “cut flower sound of someone waiting to die”? On some other thread (too lazy to go back and hunt it down) someone suggested that maybe K has killed Auri and that is what has sent him into Kote-mode. We all hope not, but nevertheless if Auri were dead, *she* could be the cut flower, not Kvothe.
Another thought that occurred to me, a less morbid one, I’m happy to say, is regarding Ben, and his purpose as a traveling Arcanist. Why couldn’t he have been a kind of giller too, wandering as he did in order to be exposed to many, many people, looking for those talented enough to be “kept out of trouble” by being sent to the University. A lot of comments discussed him, but I don’t remember this idea exactly being postulated. Doesn’t it seem as if it’s soon after he talks with Laurien and Arliden and gains their agreement about sending Kvothe to the University, that he leaves? I know it may be just part of a conspiracy to get him out of the way, but maybe it’s that he has found a new candidate, and therefore needs to move on.
Wow! Stargazer @62: Let me belatedly add my note of admiration and enjoyment of your creative description of our world’s technology.
And I must acknowledge Wet@69: once again you’ve managed to thoughtfully distill truth and dispense it gently. Good to “see you,” friend…even though you probably won’t see me!
@40. Kakao
@49. suzannef
There is an additional cinnas fruit reference: Right before Kvothe goes up to meet Auri, and Elodin stumbles upon them, Kvothe was at Devi’s to get a loan. Devi’s room “smelled pleasantly of cinnas fruit and honey.” Is there a connection between that and Elodin telling Auri, “I’m afraid I’ve only brought you a cinnas fruit” (P. 105) when Auri asked Elodin what he brought to share at the meal? I also wonder at the phrasing Elodin uses. If he were truly caught unaware running into Kvothe and Auri would he not have said something like, “All I happen to have with me is a cinnas fruit.” Instead of saying “I’ve only brought you . . . “ why would he have “brought her” anything if he did not know this meal would occur. Or did he know? And why the cinnas fruit? Does this have a connection to the cinnas smell at Devi’s or the “facts” about the Fae that Kvothe learns from Felurian – “the gift of a single cinnas fruit is considered a terrible insult if given to one of the Beladari?” (p 657)
@118. s’rEDIT
I also found it interesting that Kvothe’s response to Elodin’s hearing an “Or else” is to say, “I need you to promise me. Or else I will probably do something stupid beyond all mortal ken. And both of us will end up the worse for it.” Does Elodin somehow betray Auri and Kvothe’s reaction causes her death, something “stupid beyond all mortal ken. And both of us will end up the worse for it.”
‘Mora, looks like I had forgotten to subscribe to this thread!
Two really interesting suggestions there. Was Elodin visiting Devi for some reason? Did he give Devi a Cinnas fruit or perhaps she gave him one?
And yes, your idea would certainly account for K feeling betrayed and “looking like he killed an angel.”
I have a wild hunch that Auri is Elodin’s daughter… and maybe Felurian is her mother.
Unless I’m mistaken, somewhere in the maze of comments for all the books and the hidden thread, this is a possibility that has been discussed.
I know the party’s over as it were, but I had a flash of inspiration reading these posts. If anyone has ever read The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle also by Pat, the princess lives in a candy castle, and there’s language evocative of the KKC in the books (picture books for adults) “dark moon”, “old stone bridge” etc. I don’t know what to make of it, but it doesn’t seem accidental especially when Kvothe finds an association between the Chandrian and candy castles in WMF.
Huh. For whatever reason, I have nothing to add here. So I am posting the equivalent to *nothing* just to leave a record that I was back again. :-)
EDIT: *waves* to Aesculapius and Kade’sSwordElanor!
Very late to the party. On Elodin’s lesson I liked that other people caught on to the fact that he couldn’t catch the seed when he tried and flailed around hurting himself. Eldoin points out that this lesson was what Kvothe wanted. The second part of this lesson is that it directly foreshadowed what Kvothe goes through when searching for D immediately afterwards. He goes looking for D but doesn’t find her, and when he’s not expecting he see’s her with Ambrose. Kvothe gets hurt and angry and storms off. The mirroring of events is present in a way that reminds me of a David Lynch film.
@Dore: If all of this is not discussed in this thread (which I’m not going to reread at the moment) then it is discussed among other threads: both the author’s device and, in-story, what is going on with Elodin.
I am in another reread of the series and came across one part I always kinda liked but suddenly started seeing a whole new meaning to some things.
I’m Chapter 11 of WMF Kvothe is meeting Auri after finishing admissions when Elodin unexpectdly comes across them, shares a meal with them, finds out that Kvothe gave her the name Auri and afterwards invites him to the class he didn’t want him in beforehand.
As most of the fansbase, I believe, I always linked this to him seeing the talent in Kvothe, probably linking Auri to Princess Ariel and how their names are so similar indicating Kvothes ability in naming, and with it deciding to bring him in to the class. And with that all is right in the world.
And while I think this is still most likely what happened, I got this sudden feeling thar something wasn’t quite what it initially seemed. First of all, rereading nth time it got pretty obvious thar Elodin never really doubted that Kvothe was talented, a few chapters before this happened, after they set Hemme’s clothes on fire, Elodin asks why Kvothe thinks that he isn’t already trying to teach him, eventhough Kvothe isn’t trying to learn. And through most of their encounters I get the feeling that the master is actually trying to teach him in a sort of roundabout way. More glaring on his belief in Kvothe’s skill os that most of the negative things he says about him is that he is too clever, and similar things.
Sure, the way he behaves around Auri may have shown a more patient and cautious side of Kvothe, a side that honestly he doesn’t show in many other aspects of his life, and that may be the reason for him to accepting him in the class and starting to teach him in a more direct manner, or as direct as studying naming under Elodin can be.
But as a finished this chapter a thought came over me. Nowhere in it was any mention or reference of Elodin being proud or impressed by Kvothe, something I would expect if the situation was as I previously believed. Quite on the contrary, most of the times that he is described he is said as serious, thoughtful, scowling, expression in shadows and so on. So why would he change his approach then?
Well, most of his warnings before to Kvothe was about how dangerous it could be and if things went south Kvothe couldn’t just count on Elodin to save him. What if suddenly not teaching him became more dangerous?
Let’s think a little about Auri. About how much she changed since Kvothe started meeting her. She never used to go out when there was any moon, or any light (don’t quite remember exactly) but it was quite clear she just didn’t adventure much in the outside world. Well, a few chapters before this one of my favorites passages happens when Kvothe is sobbing in bed after feeling the taste of plump and remembering his parents and Auri appeared on his window at Anker’s. Auri came to his window, after walking quite a distance in the outside, and I’m pretty sure there was mention of moonlight. That would never happen before, that don’t even sound quite like the girl we were first introduced. Yes, that may be character growth, it most likely is, but what if it isn’t?
When Elodin gets confused when Kvothe calls her Auri, she explains that it’s her name and that Kvothe gave it to her. Let’s remember one fundamental thing about naming, naming is about discovering the true name that something has, you understand it so completely that you can call it by what it truly is. When you are naming you don’t give something a name, you call it by a name that it already has, the name was theirs already you are merely speaking it. What Auri describes seems more akin to shaping, you give something a new name, you change it fundamentally. And Auri’s next sentence seemed to reinforce it to me, she tells Elodin that if his name becomes to heavy for him he should ask Kvothe to give him a new one. Again, implying to let him change his name.
So, what if Elodin wasn’t impressed by Kvothe but just suddenly saw how much harm he could make if left unattended?
As I said before, this all may be nothing but my delirious mind reading too much into something, but was a point of view that had never occurred me before and I got the urge to share with more people and get their opinions.