Hey friends, long time no write about the Name of the Wind, Kingkiller, etc. I’ve intended to do a Name of the Wind analysis reread (not to mention the other books) for some time now. — 

You should assume spoilers henceforth! Forthwith! This post shall take a fortnight of hours to read!

Table of Contents

• You should assume spoilers henceforth! Forthwith! This post shall take a fortnight of hours to read! 
• Note about me:
• Assumptions:
• A note on the Ptolemaic system. 
• Name of the Wind Analsis — Prologue:
• Navigate to other chapters:

Unfortunately, when I went to post on Reddit, Reddit didn’t let me do nested embedded links. And the first 7 chapters were literally 4x the length of the character limit. When I tried to post it in one giant WordPress post where every chapter was part of a TOC, again 20,000 words to the first 7 chapters plus all of the embeds really screwed it up.

Why embeds? 

Because I’ve always thought we needed a place to sort of chronologically cite potentially relevant theories as they crop up. Granted, I’m . If I miss one that’s relevant to a chapter, let me know, but my goal was to embed past reddit posts as we went along. 

I’ll include my assumptions and a note on the Ptolemaic system in every post, but I’ll make a table of contents so you can jump ahead to the text of the chapter in question. It will be a bit more stream-of-consciousness because I’m going chapter by chapter and dealing with things as they arise, but after feedback from The Last Sock, I’ll do my best to stitch some things together so that it’s not just shorthand for the handful of us that have several shared assumptions.

This will still be a bit of a dissection project, so… at some point, we’re simply taking things as they come. Because I’m assuming you have the text at hand, I’m hoping you’ll look at it as we go along, otherwise this will seem very ADD.

Perhaps it is anyways, but… well that’s the best I got.

Note about me:

Sorry it took so long to reboot this. Time’s just precious and it’s more like a bit here, a bit there situation for me. If you have a good time, subscribe to stay updated the second I release more:

If you feel like browsing around the site to related articles, I’ve interviewed well known science fiction and fantasy authors, written about scifi and fantasy, made a list of hundreds of free scifi stories on Gutenberg, and talked on panels at speculative fiction conferences offered gobs of resources to writers and creatives.

It’s kind of up to how you all use it: certainly I’m no Jo Walton.

Quick reminder for the ignorant. I’ve been in the community since 2008. I’m the one that first noticed Felurian’s meter, the one who pointed out the alchemical connections, the moon goddess connections, the Golden Bough and Baldyr’s mistletoe connections, who pointed out how old the phrase “sympathetic magic” is and where it comes from, etc.

None of that gives me authority so much as a long-term stake in our collective game. I’ve read these since the paperback came out my birthday month of 2008 while I was in undergrad.

Point is, I love these books even if I disagree with some underlying theses behind them — no one in the collective mythology school has written anything close to this and Rothfuss is doing for horror and epic fantasy what Beagle did for the fairy tale, Nabokov did for Romance and Poetry and several other genres, etc. He has this Nabokovian love of true satire, subversion, and the underlying symbolic structure (literary alchemy, particularly on the Ptolemaic universe, nested stories, capital-P Personification a la James Paxon, etc.)

In any case, the group of guys I originally read this with have gotten together in text form to reread them all slowly, which is the motivation I needed to finish. Rather than slow release, which I’ll never finish and will overwrite, I waited until I had all of Name of the Wind done so I could put it in one post with a table of contents. 

“Connor Hathaway” (pseudonym) gave me permission to directly quote his thoughts and let me interact with them as represented in our text thread. So you’ll get some of his beautiful snark along the way.

Assumptions:

I am operating under a few assumptions this time through:

1. Kvothe has hidden either his death or his name in the trunk — or something crucial to both such as the Fae itself, the moon, etc.
2. Kvothe has through pursuit of Denna ended up in some sort of sacrificial relationship with the Chandrian. 
3. Either becoming a draugr himself or a Chandrian or both and cannot die. Chronicler says when they first meet that there are rumors of a red haired Chandrian. Is it possible that Kvothe was peeled away from Kote, and Kvothe, his magical identity, is being used by Iax/Haliax as a Chandrian while Kote was left a normal human, running a tavern and trying to rejoin his separated Alar, rejoin his body with his soul/power? Or did he do it to himself? Why not both?

I’ll recycle this and the following in Ch. 16 but let’s get to the names of the Chandrian now to show some of my cards: 

A note on the Ptolemaic system.

The Ptolemaic system is important because it will ground our understanding of the mythos, which touches everything, and hopefully help us parse through the Creation War. I thought about this when Haliax calls Cinder’s name. I’ve said for some time that Kingkiller is a riff on the old golden bough idea by Frazier (with some of Paxon’s personification thrown in) coupled with the old alchemical, Ptolemaic system (more the celestial bodies than the chemicals, though chemicals play a huge role: as above, so below). The personification of celestial bodies marks this work and so it would make sense to have both represented.

I don’t know precisely how it plays out. But it’s clear to me that somehow celestial bodies between the human realm and the Fae realm differ and, generally, have names and histories and personalities.

What we don’t know is the actual mechanics of this personification (external soul like These Dark Materials? A previous union of body and soul that’s now bifurcated in some Cartesian way between Fae and Humanity? something else entirely?) but we do know that the person of things and the things of persons seem divided between realms in mutually divergent ways, soul and body. A body in the fae with a soul in the human realm operates, generally, in one way. A body in the human realm with a soul in the fae generally, it seems, operates another. Starlight, for instance, can be stitching in the fae (if that’s a mortal soul, that kind of makes sense), where as the fixed stars do not (invoking Chesterton here) “topple and tumble.”

So take, for instance, the moon, I’m assuming that people know about Jax – Iax who stole the moon. And also this seems to be rather disturbing because the moon now pulls the night shift between realms. When you consider Lyra had certain moon-like powers, Denna is called basically Diana at every turn, Felurian takes over the sex goddess abuse expected of the goddess of the moon, and Auri is called a moon-fae. It seems in this case that Lyra’s full personality has fractured, likely through sexual abuse considering that’s perhaps the most major theme of the story. (Even Kvothe is sexually abused in Tarbean).

We do know that the moon was split, we do know that she shifts her time between worlds, and we do know that this seems to have happened more than once in some capacity. That plus the neopagan overlay, and it starts to get clear to me what’s going on.

I unrolled the paper further. There was a second man, or rather the shape of a man in a great hooded robe. Inside the cowl of the robe was nothing but blackness. Over his head were three moons, a full moon, a half moon, and one that was just a crescent. Next to him were two candles. One was yellow with a bright orange flame. The other candle sat underneath his outstretched hand: it was grey with a black flame, and the space around it was smudged and darkened.Or, if you will, a waxing crescent, full, and waning gibbous. Or if you’re late antiquity, crescent, half, and full. Or if you’re OG, it’s crescent, full, and dark moon.

Or, if you will, a waxing crescent, full, and waning gibbous (modern). Or if you’re late antiquity, crescent, half, and full. Or if you’re OG, it’s crescent, full, and dark moon.

“In some ways, it began when I heard her singing. Her voice twinning, mixing with my own. Her voice was like a portrait of her soul: wild as a fire, sharp as shattered glass, sweet and clean as clover.”

Assume her soul is broken in three split personalities.

Denna is wild as fire. Felurian is sharp as shattered glass. Auri is sweet and clean as clover. Auri is what it’s like for a boy to love. A child. Denna is what it’s like for a teen to love, a “first love” kind of love. Felurian is what it’s like for a tenured husband to love. A lover proper. Or, if you will, a waxing crescent, full, and waning gibbous. Or if you’re late antiquity, crescent, half, and full. Or if you’re OG, it’s crescent, full, and dark moon. 

More specifically, you’ll notice when there’s, for instance, “a piece of moon” or “a crescent moon” in the human realm, he can’t find Denna. He can, however, find Auri. You’ll notice when there’s a half moon or a waxing moon, he can find Denna, but not Auri. And on a full moon, he meets Felurian.

Now it’s different in the Fae, of course. It’s all messed up, I think. If it’s a sliver in the Fae, I think that means Denna’s out in the human realm. If it’s half in fae or waxing, I think Auri’s out. If it’s full in Fae + Felurian’s there?

Well that’s a night with no moon.

And I think that’s when the realm of the dead comes out.

The “threefold goddess” of Wiccan thought.

In any case, you start to wonder about the personhood — the souls — of other celestial bodies. The Chandrian, in this case, who govern the souls of their realm (and the realm of the dead). And how they might manifest as actual people in the human realm.

I think generally this is just assumed by some of us, but spelling it out light that might help folks along who don’t think in poetry. In one place, a person may be a person. In another, an object. It’s a transition from personification — “Death’s knocking at your door” — to reification — “see his dead body.”

• Fae Personification (Chandrian) –> human reification (7 fixed stars)
• Human personification (Kvothe) –> Fae reification (“what does your flickering portend”)

Hopefully that clears up a little bit.

Now concerning that Ptolemaic system, it features the alchemical wedding of the sun and moon (sulfur and quicksilver, sometimes) with the participation of the other five of the system: Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. I’m hoping to convince a literary alchemy scholar to read this soon (he’s currently busy) because he’s better at this stuff than I am, but I wanted to point to this poem: 

Cyphus bears the blue flame.
Stercus is in thrall of iron.
Ferule chill and dark of eye.
Usnea lives in nothing but decay.
Grey Dalcenti never speaks.
Pale Alenta brings the blight.
Last there is the lord of the seven:
Hated. Hopeless. Sleepless. Sane.
Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame.

• Haliax bears a striking resemblance to ἡλιακος — the greek word for “of the sun.” The sun hides all over this book that’s otherwise obsessed with the elements. That’s telling, to me at least. Again, sun and shade to the same degree that the moon is quicksilver and shadow: king and queen of the living as much as the realm of the dead, corn gods, Pluto, those sorts of things. Life, death, love. That means his main metal is gold. 

• Ferule is the word for “rod,” the tool in the sun’s hands. What rod? The rod of war. This is Mars, the iron fist.

• Stercus is a Latin word for dung. This is Saturn. The fertilizer god. Lead is the element here. 

• Usnea is a kind of moss, a lichen, that’s also called “old man’s beard.” We could go on a wild tangent here with that and compare this to Leshy. But no, it’s simpler — a word scramble: Eanus. Venus. Who is sometimes connected with undertakers through Venus Libitina and therefore lives in nothing but decay. I keep kicking this around and I think this saves more “faces” with a simpler explanation: there’s a little known version of Venus called Venus Barbata (the bearded Venus) that, when writing of the Saturnalia, Macrobius said was basically a cross dressing old man in a beard. That Venus mixed male and female was pretty late in the ancient world, but a thing. One of the double-sexed — and since the hermaphrodite is pretty crucial for esoteric alchemy, it makes sense here. Copper is the element. 

• Dalcenti is a soft mutation of talcen tŷ, a Welsh phrasing meaning gable-end. Gable crosses are common on germanic and Saxon houses, partly to protect from the wind, but also to invoke the divine twins — the sons of Zeus — Castor and Pollux. They can also be two sides of Jupiter. Twin cities, anyone? Also the element is tin.

• Cyphus also happens to be another name for the capital of Thessaly, the site of Mount Oeta and Mount Olympus, where the battle of the titans and olympians happened. The earlier name, however, was Aeolus: the kingdom of the man who kept the names of the wind. That makes this rather Mercurial and also quicksilver. Hermes, interestingly enough, could come from the primitive form of “one cairn,” a human made pile of stones to mark a burial ground.

• Alenta brings the blight is a reference to things that kill crops. The harvest diety and moon diety is Artemis / Diana. The moon. And normal silver is her element.

The reason I think this is because of the nature of books like The Witch Must Die by Sheldon Cashdon and The Golden Bough by Frazier. Rothfuss is, generally, writing as a subversive (even Nabokovian) postmodern collective mythologist. He seems to be saying, “Yes, there’s a monomyth: a dark one run by a demon that leads to death.” It’s an epic horror series, not fantasy, in the same way that Princess Whiffle is a horror picture book, not a children’s picture book.

I’ll be reading The Witch Must Die by Sheldon Cashdon a the end of the NOTW reread and sharing some notes there — I’ll share it in a separate post from this once I get through my notes. Why? Because Pat cited it as a direct influence.

But I can tell you the gist of Frazier now. Frazier (who has long since been debunked by many people alongside Wells by many folks including Chesterton’s Everlasting Man), sort of cribbed a bunch of native stories and basically tried to ramrod into them a one-to-one parallel with the narrative of Jesus AND THEN ramrod those into a one-to-one parallel with the temple of Diana. 

It’s a mess scientifically and philosophically.

But what’s interesting about the book is that it’s wonderful fodder for a story. And I think Kingkiller is that story: a story about the cycles of springtime, harvest, the days of the week, and the months of the year. 

The cycle, fundamentally, is this:

There’s a secret grove for the temple of the moon goddess and an immortal king, solider, prophet, and priest guards her grove. She is his beloved, he her lover. And he will be immortal. 

The only way to have her is to kill her priest, her king, her love. 

And so every priest who serves her, the moment they have sacrificed the previous priest and gained his powers, are now themselves waiting to die. 

That dying can happen in two ways. 

The first is through the ritual sacrifice of the bonfires, annually, where he’s burned in effigy.

The second is through mortal combat, hand-to-hand.

He’s notoriously difficult to kill, so you have to use something like the mistletoe in the Balder story: the tree struck by lightning that itself contains some of the lightning. If you take that into the grove and touch the priest with it, he’ll collapse in a dead heap because the branch contains the lightning. 

It’s that, more or less. Rather than distract us too much, I’ll just put the full Frazier quote at the end of the reread for the super interested and get us into the chapters now. Just know, that’s the assumption I’m flirting with for all of my read-throughs: the story is about discovering the true mythos of the world that covered up by warring metanarratives and all the key players are the same two sides of warring demiurges — angels / demons / fae / mael / first humans / shapers / knowers, etc. There are the seven and the one and the betrayals that lead to the bonfire. 

That’s it. 

My buddies reading along with me are looking for:

1. Clues on the frame narrative. Is he a reliable narrator recounting his life’s ups and downs as it happened as he’s said, or has he drawn Bast and Chronicler to him in an attempt at “a beautiful game” like Bredon talks to him about in Wise Mans Fear. Has he already engaged Cinder and the Chandrian or is this his attempt to create the confrontation he’s sought. 
2. Denna has pretty clearly tried, and according to his own story maybe have already succeeded in manipulating his actions through written magic, through Yllish story knots in her hair and in her letters. Maybe he’s trying to use it in the grand scale with Chronicler. I think there is a time where Chronicler’s ink runs out so K gives him some? I think the transcription shorthand is literally just written story knots: Chronicler never admits to inventing it, Kvothe (likely) is lying about how much he knew in advance. I also believe her hair makes story knots, other knots do this, including roah wood. 
3. Are K and D following the same narrative pattern, K from an insiders perspective where he has received the magical training he’s sought for his ends from Ben, the university, Elodin, Felurian, the Adem, the Amyr that he’s run into and hasn’t noticed, etc. D having to go by less structured and more manipulative means to gain the magical knowledge she needs for her ends: sex work, patronage likely to Cinder, etc. and how their stories are mirrors of each other, ie K might be to D what D is to K.

I’ll anonymize their texts and thinking and incorporate them into my own, but assume that a lot of this also comes from reading partners.

Name of the Wind Analsis — Prologue:

Again, please have the text at hand and flip to the appropriate chapter in your hymnal, so to speak. On reading the first page again, I’m reminded with the three silences that:

1. Caesar’s name  means “to cut” from the striking ceremony of Juno February goatskins, the man who was cut down from the crowd. 
2. To cease is to stop, like a stilled wind.
3. And a cut in music, a silence, is a caesura

The name of his sword?

Saicere.

I’m a caesarian baby, not that you’d know,
it’s just when I leave a house, I go out through the window.

— Stephen Wright

A silence of three parts, with three books look to compare with epilogue and WMF. What silence is this book standing in for? 

Or is it the name of silence? 

Or is silence the name of copper? 

Is searching for the name of copper like searching for the nameless abyss? 

It is something like naming death? 

Death itself is an open doorway
by inKingkillerChronicle

Say, a Draugr?

The inhabitant of a cairn?

Which is a word for a horn? 

The kind of horn wielded by the blower of the carnyx?

That horn weilded by the god Cernunnos?

The horned god of neopaganism equal to the Great Goddess as well as St. Ciaran of Saigir? 

These are the kinds of questions my mind hops around when weighing the various parts of this book.

Felling, the day mentioned in this chapter that starts Book One, has strong correlation with the mistletoe/lightning tree/killing balder thing: the tree that holds the lightning, the golden bough. The whole Guy Fawkes/burning man/Tehlu service: torch a scapegoat on the day of burning. Again, it’s Felling. They start the story, however, on Reaving. Day Two (Wise Man’s Fear) would be Cendling. Day Three (Doors of Stone) would be Mourning. Here’s the calendar (“the calling of the times of the moon”) for the days of the week again:

#	English[2]	Portuguese[3]	Spanish
1	Luten	Luten
2	Shuden	Shuden
3	Theden	Theden	Zeden
4	Feochen	Feochen
5	Orden	Orden
6	Hepten	Haeten	Hepten
7	Chaen/Caenin	Chaen	Chaen
8	Felling	Dia-da-sega	Abatida
9	Reaving	Dia-do-saque	Captura
10	Cendling	Dia-da-pira	Prendido
11	Mourning	Dia-do-luto	Duelo

In Spanish, the last four are “harvest day” and “looting day” and “pyre day” and “day of morning” respectively. In Portuguese, it’s “the crash,” “the capture,” “arrested,” and “duel.” 

This lends credence to what I’ve been saying all along, more or less. The first seven days are named for the Chandrian. The last for are for the consequences of the Chandrian through the enemy of the Chandrian, Selitos. 

Assuming, as I haveg, that these books are (among other things) love letters to etymology, these are possible connections:

Luten is a noun form of the Norwegian for Lye, typically made with wood ashes, or Cinders (again, Mercury, which we’ll get to). Shuden is a Romanji of 終電, Japanese for “last train of the day.” Theden is a Dutch word for “people” or “tribe” or “community.” Feochen is a feo, a fairy. Orden is land that protrudes into water. Hepten is another word for seven, on day six, but heptane’s also combustable and adhesive remover and heptene is a lubricant, a catalyst, a surfactant (helpful for an author that spent a good deal of time as a chemist). A Chaen is mandarin for a theater or a tea plantation, especially nested theater like in Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Those all could easily be other names for the seven. Cinders, Last Train, Tribe, Moon Fae, Peninsula (or Isthmus), Seven (or combustable), Seven (or theater). Of course the real trick is that when you’re talking the Ptolemaic system, you cover much of human experience, so it’s not a matter of whether one name or meaning fits but whether all seven do as a unit, sort of like a sudoku puzzle. If one’s hanging, it doesn’t work. It’s the wrong configuration.

But we have 11 days.

So how does that work?

Well after the Chandrian, we have some pretty straightforward English words mixed with the Portuguese and Spanish. Let’s assume the first seven are either counting the Chandrian (demons/angels/fae) or naming them. Whatever Haliax did, it resulted in his death — his harvest, his crash. His Felling. Having been risen by Lyra the Moon, he stole her away. This resulted in the burning of Haliax and Cinder both—

Haliax stole the moon and he’s using Cinder/Tehlu as a sympathy source
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—mourning of him, and starting the cycle over again. 

Or, alternatively, the burning of Aleph (also known as Lanre) by Jax to become Haliax. 

Lanre changed his true name?
byu/Mrmarmoset225 inkkcwhiteboard

Or potentially:

Comment
byu/milbader from discussion
inkkcwhiteboard

The shadow stealing the blinding powers of the sun and merging them into one. Kind of like 𒀭𒌓 — Utu or Shamash — who, by seeing everything in the day, became judge of the underworld. Then again, perhaps that’s Selitos, depending on how that all shakes down.

After the burning day comes ashes, the last way out for the people of the fae to move out into the waters. Surface tension was decreased by means of a theater, a little tea parlor if you will, to contain the fae. The personifications made their stars and then Haliax (whether the role or the person) wanted a piece of the moon. Was killed for it and so forth.

Alternatively, the names could just correspond with the ptolemaic system we will talk about later. Ash (Mercury), Last train (Saturn), People (Jupiter), Fairy (Moon), Land in water (Venus), Hepten (Ares), Chaen (Haliax) — or something like that. 

My biggest concern, though, is that pace of the end of the week. 

Let’s assume that Haliax (also known as Encanis) was burned for his behavior with the moon. Let’s say by Cinder, Tehlu, and it burned them both and Haliax used it to move the moon.

Could that form for us this religious-pagan-naming-sympathetic-Amyr-Chandrian cycle that the entire world is bound up within? 

A sort of time-bound rhythm that defines every system, structure, institution?

This is the assumption of collective mythologists and we know this is a collective mythology story: that seasons, days, orbits, tides govern everything, all our rituals, sciences, everything. If personified as demiurges, then all the more.

What does this mean for Kvothe? The man who named Felurian?

For the man who talks so often of burning hair and surrounds himself with fireproof organic metalwood? 

If today — the day of the Prologue — is felling. And tomorrow — the day of Wise Man’s Fear — the day of stealing — of looting or, in Latin, rapere to… ahem… “snatch” away a woman, Lady Moon — then on the third day he will be burned in effigy. Or duel with the current suitor.

Curiously enough, effigy is the word for “likeness” or “statue.”

Kote. 

The likeness of Kvothe. 

In Alchemist terms, they call such a likeness a homunculus, which is worth looking up. The story of Tehlu’s theophany seems to be exactly this: sort of a transdiagetic metalepsis of a mimetic self into a different layer of mythological diagetic narration. Of Tehlu into Menda, who is Cinder. In fact, it may be that the appearance of all the Chandrian in the human world do so by a homunculus.

And if we have a homunculus at play, the question we should be asking is how many lives had to be sacrificed in order to create him?

Navigate to other chapters:

I’ll put this at the end of each chapter so we can actually navigate the text

• Name of the Wind Analysis — Prologue
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 1
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 2
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 3
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 4
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 5
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 6
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 7
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 8
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 9
• Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 10