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:
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Ch 9:
- Navigate to other chapters:
Note about me:
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Name of the Wind Analysis — Ch 9:
Before we get further, I want to make an amendment to my Ptolemaic system. It was bothering me that alchemically, the metals weren’t lining up with the Chandrian planets.
I think I got Ferule and Cyphus backwards. Here’s why:
Ferule means “rod,” but we’re talking about a character who is the name of iron and potentially the source of a lot of the chilling and the rest. I assumed this was the Caduceus, but that’s because of another pet theory. Meanwhile, Cyphus is another name for Thessaly. Which, under the older name, was the kingdom of Aeolus, the keeper of the names of the wind. Much more mercurial, that. Plus Mars is the rod wielder, the warrior of the Sun.
So yeah, I think Ferule is the Mars analogue (iron) and Cyphus is the Mercury / wind analogue (quicksilver). Cyphus being Mercury makes him wielder of the healing rod the Caduceus of the Hermetic arts. Making him Caduceus. Which complicates the thing with the Maer. Because maybe, after all, he isn’t poisoning him. We’ll get there. But yes, I assume Caduceus is one of the seven.
Turn your hymnal (assuming, once again, we’re singing the Song of Fire and Thunder) to the appropriate page and chapter. First thing that sticks out to me is that Abenthy has Apollo-level wisdom. “Twinkling eyes” like a star. His hair literally orbits his head. His eyebrows are burned off “in the course of his alchemical pursuits.” Aside from blood and burning hair, how does this not scream “The Sun” to everyone else?
I think that he “never exercised his wit at the expense of others” says more about him than anything. Again, Alpha and Beta are his donkeys. A and B for A-B-C.
He would sing. Many sun gods are also gods of music and, if Abenthy is Haliax and Haliax is Lanre of the Lute, then it would make sense here to have a man whose “bright, reckless tenor… wandering off, looking for notes in the wrong places.” Wandering off looking for notes in the wrong places seems precisely the follow of the singer, Lanre.
That there’s no conceit in him probably just means it was literally burned out of him. Or maybe he’s just a good old man and I have no idea what I’m talking about. Also entirely possible.
“Tablorlin the Great went [to the University] to learn the names of all things.” Do we have any indication either way that this gets explored again?
The closest we might get, outside of Elodin’s play at Taborlin in WMF — his playing through the story — is this potentially double entendre:
“It was only then that I realized my life had taken a step in a new direction. Up until now, I had been playing at being a young Taborlin. I had spun lies around myself, pretending to be a storybook hero.”
This paragraph could be read with a lexical ambiguity as if “playing at being a young Taborlin” means spinning lies around yourself. That Taborlin made up his story too. In which case, Taborlin isn’t his real name.
It’s interesting that he straight up says that here. My money is still on Elodin is Taborlin.
And I want to take a second to say that the reason we’re constantly doing this is because (1) Kvothe has met these beings twice, so we’re supposed to be guessing at this mystery and (2) clearly he’s met multiple immortals in this story. Not just one or two.
I want to write a personal note here, one of the reasons these books so deeply resonated with me. I felt this with HP during the sorting hat thing, but so much more in this chapter when it originally came out.
See I grew up extremely poor. Not as poor as some, but certainly trailer park (with dad) and in a ramshackle house on one block where coons would sneak in the house at night through the floor (with mom). Both had mold problems that couldn’t get fixed, etc. Both parents had / have a hard time admitting this because their parents worked their asses off to be upper middle class. It didn’t translate to us, especially with the divorce and ’87 crash (the year I was born) that wiped out what little savings and stock dad had accumulated including early Wal-Mart shares.
Add this to basic things the rural poor never see. For instance, my friends in NYC have a really hard time conceiving of the fact that none of my family had any internet until like 2004. And still, generally didn’t, until way late. So I didn’t personally have an internet connection until college. My grandpa, again for comparison with the city (this was in my novel Bell Hammers) had an outhouse until the seventies. Compare that with the indoor plumbing in the early 1900’s you see in NYC in Godfather II.
So I grew up poor. I was the only person in living memory in my family (still am) to get a bachelor’s degree, let alone at BtH with friends graduating with PhDs from Cambridge, Oxford, Boston College, Edinburgh, etc.
Know that when I say I went from the 25,000 square miles in Southern Illinois with only one bookstore, and a Barnes and Noble at that, an area serving 1.3 million people, that I didn’t even know how many books had been written — you must understand when I went to the small private college I went to, I realized that (1) more people had written more books than I had ever realized and (2) specifically upon my chosen field, subject, and person.
I wept.
I wept when I saw such a large library.
For like a long, long time. I just stood in that entryway to a multiple story library and wept.
And I immediately went down into the first floor, checked out a stupid number of books, and memorized a poem. A poem I’m going to recite here more for my own archival purposes than anything in case I ever forget it in some dementia fever or something:
Truth shall prevail though men abhor
Its resonating light
And wage exterminating war
And put all foes to flight
Though trampled under foot of man
Truth from the dust shall spring
And by the press, the lip, the pen
In tones of thunder ring:
BEWARE, BEWARE ye who resist
The light that beams around
Lets ere ye look through Error’s mist:
Truth strike you to the ground
It also, as it turns out, is a bit of a Kingkiller poem. I then started the Brother’s Karamazov in the midst of a 21-credit-hour semester and went on my internship a year later with the newly printed Name of the Wind in hand.
You know what Karamazov quote stuck out to me?
That was also a bit Kingkiller in its disposition?
These young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices. And to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study if only to multiply tenfold the cause and the truth they’ve set before them as their goal: such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anywhoodle.
I get Kvothe’s reaction to “more books than you can count.” That’s supposed to be a medieval thing, supposed to make us as shocked as everyone smoking in Mad Men does. But for me, it’s actually kind of personal. For me, it’s still true that most of society is functioning illiterate even if they can read either due to (1) lack of access to key texts or (2) inability to properly do exegesis and hermeneutics of texts using logic, grammar, literary context, historical context, word studies, etc.
We do get a mention on p. 67 that “not all traveling performers are Edema Ruh,” so though in Book Two we get — as Connor Hathaway, my reading partner, is always quick to point out — a rough “no real Scotsman” argument, we still get a confirmation here that not all troupers are Ruh.
So it’s dicey.
He pulls out his guilder:
Gilthe. And Kvothe. People have danced around this in various posts, but I think considering things like this:
I do wonder if the real hierarchy is something like:
- E’lir — Seer
- Re’lar — Speaker
- El’the — Listener
- Gil’the — Namer
- Rhin’the — Shaper
- Si’the — Singer
- Kvo’the — Knower
I say “something like” because I’m unsure how they connect properly. Clearly a “re’lar” can be one without having a name, though Elodin sponsors Kvothe. But getting there with one name doesn’t seem to be the same thing as being a “Namer.”
Anyways, it does seem that the hierarchy of the Arcanum is only the outer edges of the magical hierarchy, if it can be properly called that.
Knacks, by the way, may well be E’lir in another way. Of course, knacks are also kind of demon signs, Chandrian signs, they burned folk with those signs.
Why demon signs?
Because, well, they are. They’re E’lir by another route, the route of the fae. It’s the entry into fairy magic, it seems to me.
The guy that Abenthy knows had a knack for plants? For starters “staup” sounds like “Stapes.” That aside, the sort of person who is great at growing things is a person of the sun. This is someone Abenthy grew up with.
And Kvothe’s reaction?
“Did they burn him?” I asked with the morbid curiosity of the young.
“What? No, of course not. I’m not that old.” He scowled at me in mock severity. “There was a drought and he got run out of town. His poor mother was heartbroken.”
Why mock severity? Because he’s not that old and is projecting as if he’s offended at the suggestion that he is? Or because he’s not that serious about getting burned?
Sounds autobiographical to me. Also, the guy with the green thumb got run out of town after a drought? So he got run out of town because his knack was ineffectual? Or was he blamed for the drought? The only way that could happen is if his green thumb was heat based. What if the same sun that helped things grow singed it all?
Mother?
Tends to be a word for the moon too. The mother of all. Especially if her heart is literally broken into three parts.
Maybe I’m seeing things. But coupled with the ABC stuff…
Remind me: how’s the Maer at gardening?
Alveron made no gesture for me to seat myself, so I remained standing. I guessed he was testing my manners. “I hope you do not mind our meeting outside. Have you seen the gardens yet?” “I haven’t had the opportunity, your grace.” I’d been trapped in my damned rooms until he had sent for me. “You must allow me to show you around.” He took hold of a polished walking stick that rested against the shade tree. “I’ve always found that taking some air is good for whatever troubles a body, though others disagree.”
…We began to walk, and our conversation lulled as we listened to the sound of water splashing in the fountains and birds singing in the hedges. Occasionally the Maer would point out a particular piece of statuary and tell which of his ancestors had commissioned it, made it, or (he spoke of these in a quieter, apologetic tone) plundered it from foreign lands in times of war. We walked about the gardens for the better part of an hour. Alveron’s weight on my arm gradually lessened and soon he was using me more for balance than support. We passed several gentlefolk who bowed or nodded to the Maer. After they were out of earshot he would mention who they were, how they ranked…”
And later:
“We finally came to rest in the center of some thick bushes. There was a convenient hollow where we both had room to crouch. Thanks to the work of the gardeners there was no undergrowth to speak of, no dry leaves or twigs to crackle or snap under our hands and knees. In fact, the grass in this sheltered place was thick and soft as any lawn.”
Particularly interesting considering Abenthy is a brewer. Ale… ph. Also the All-Father Odin, old one-eye, was the god of brewing.
“Abenthy started to call me Red and I called him Ben, first in retaliation, then in friendship.”
First in retaliation, then in friendship.
“Through it all Ben continued to teach me mental exercises that I was half convinced he constructed out of sheer meanness.”
Are we certain it’s not?
A note on geometric progressions: I do wonder if the significant numbers in this book add up to one. Any takers?
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
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