Lance Schaubert

I addressed the prologue elsewhere, so we’ll start with Chapter One:

“It was felling…”

Stop.

When ripped from mommy-context’s grasp, this creates double entendre, piggybacking on what came before. We could say, “A man waiting to die was felling.” Lumberjacks fell trees, but a felling is the amount of wood they fell in a given season. If double entendre, then he used “fell” verbally – to chop down. “The broken tree” is one meaning of the Ademic Maedre, Kvothe’s other name.

“It was felling night…” could mean “nightfall,” glancing backward to the heavy-handed Nigreddo prologue. By “heavy-handed” I mean both references of night, both mentions of darkness, both tributes to autumn and other words like hollow, trouble, heavy, sullen, rough, black stone hearth, mahogany, oh and all four mentions of death: autumn’s ending, cut-flower, dead fire and the explicit “man who is waiting to die.”

But we receive the intro in ALL CAPS leaving mere context clues for upfront meaning.

“IT WAS FELLING NIGHT and the usual crowd had gathered at the Waystone Inn.”

Sounds like a normal day of the week: “it was Thursday night and the usual…” A few years passed since most read Name o/t Wind, so here’s the days of the span:

1. Luten
2. Shuden
3. Theden
4. Feochen
5. Orden
6. Hepten
7. Chaen
8. Felling
9. Reaving
10. Cendling
11. Mourning

The Goodreads thread on the days of the span notes that a lot of these come from the religious mythology of the world – the span for days where Tehlu pursues Encanis. From Trapis’ mouth:

Encanis was now hard pressed and bent his whole thought on escape. But on the eighth day Tehlu did not pause to sleep or eat. And thus it was that at the end of Felling Tehlu caught Encanis. He leaped on the demon and struck him with his forge hammer. Encanis fell like a stone, but Tehlu’s hammer shattered and lay in the dust of the road.

Felling was so named for the felling of the demon (and maybe even the hammer fall or that night fell when Tehlu caught Encanis). We now have nightfall, felling trees or felling demons. What’s sawdust and cosmic warfare to do with alchemy?

The truncated tree symbolizes the dismemberment phase of the Nigreddo dissolution. Translation: if you hear something yell “TIMBER!” in the book, it might point to someone getting his arms chopped off – the symbol of turning solid things liquid. Kvothe has a hard exterior. We meet a jaded, tired, world-wary Kvothe that must break free of his body and release his spirit. Solve et coagula from the Greek manuscript Maria Prophetissa became one of the great sayings of their alchemists: dissolve and coagulate. In other words, give the spirit a body and the body a spirit. Let man become unlike beasts (soulless and hardened) and unlike demons (bodiless and ethereal), but instead become human. Kvothe’s hard. He needs a wake up call, a good swift kick in the… trunk, the truncated tree trunk – parallel to lopping off his arms and legs.

Mylius’s Bascilica Philosophical shows the felling of a huge tree by an axe. Splendor Solis by Trismosin has two images of the truncated tree alongside its fifth treatise. Often in these texts, the dissolving of the philosopher’s stone (the vessel or protagonist) looks like a rotting oak, a “broken tree.” Consistent with the pattern of torture found early on in alchemy books, the fallen tree joins a growing list of symbols of brokenness and shattering during the black work. These include chopping off the paws of the lion, eviscerating the bird and tormenting Mercurius.

The tree, however, most often looks like the philosophical tree. Representing the whole opus alchemicum, the philosophical tree often sprouts the growth of gold and matures the philosopher’s stone (the protagonist). Growth and substance go with the tree as it develops the raw stuff into the good stuff – common lead into holy gold.

Types of trees include a tiny plant, ancient oaks, world trees, the arbor inversia, Atlanta fugiens, the tree growing inside earth’s crust, the tree of sun and moon (second most popular), and of course the cross on which Jesus died – cursed be anyone who hangs on a tree.

Whatever the case, that we start on Felling night of all nights shows them there demons’re needin’ stilled, dross needs purged and a hard exterior needs softened. Bloodshed and lamentation will soon arrive and there’s s good chance the philosopher’s stone, the protagonist vessel named Kvothe, will have scars before we’re through…

PS> Read the disclaimer before you chop down the trees in my yard.

Sources: Lyndy Abraham‘s truncated tree, philosophical tree, dissolution, and Nigreddo entries.

m