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 14:
• Navigate to other chapters:

Note about me:

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Name of the Wind Analysis — Ch 14:

Turn your hymnals to the appropriate page and chapter. Contrast early on between storybook magic and sympathy. Is there a bifircation? Perhaps what it takes for an individual to tear down a work of fiction and what it takes for a community to build one up and create a fandom?

Summer was making itself known again. King Oak on the rise… while riding with Ben. 

It’s interesting that Ben accused them of “things I’m sure no donkey has ever willfully done,” which, I mean, maybe that’s just a quirk.

Or maybe the donkey is more than a donkey. 

“Tehlu hold and over-roll me”  — I wonder if this is directly connected to the wheel. 

Also, interesting that the winged thing hypothetically  “said something uncouth about your mother.”

It is notable that the stillness of the wind as he tries to get it all in his lungs seems to match the stillness and silence of the Waystone. It’s entirely possible that he kills not Ferule or Haliax, but Cyphus. 

His eyes were filled with “a terrible power, dispassionate and cold.”

I don’t think that’s directly connected to calling the name of the wind, myself. But rather what it takes to have all names. But maybe I’m reading too much into it. Also of not is the “thunderclap was black” — I think he passed out, but I’m unsure if that’s because he’s passing out first or because of the pressure of getting slammed with the wind in his lungs. “A leaf in lightning, I shook.” So the thunderclap that follows the shake is the blackness? 

Or actually something like a sonic boom?

It’s interesting that Ben’s silence parallels Kvothe’s. 

Ben doesn’t speak until sunset. I do think these timings are of import. Maybe not every time, but the time of day, week, month, year, eclipse seem to me to be the most import of all the sets. 

“She’s a good woman. She deserves better than lies.”

Just now? 

Or is there something else she’s been lied to about?

Why does Ben look “old and tired” when he calls the Waystones? 

Is it because he’s ancient? And he wants to know why they stop. This is curious as a ritual — “we just do” is one of those ignorance of ritual origins things that Pat seems to get giddy about. The latent truth of the worlds he builds. The epistemological assumptions he has.

Or just the passion he has for weird gnostic mysteries. 

I’m reminded of 1899 today for some reason. The TV show. Also the Matrix.

“They could be good luck.” 

Why would Waystones be good luck? 

“For the greater good” really seems bothersome on this reread that his father says it. Like really, really badly to me. 

In the evening when the sun is setting fast,
I’ll watch for you from high above
The time for your return is long since past 
But mine is ever-faithful love.

I think this is part of the Lanre song. And this part is to be sung by a woman for Lyra. The sun is Lanre and he’s setting. Dying. She’ll watch for him from the perspective of the moon (again: persons in one realm, reified heavenly bodies in another — the war split the two). The time for “your return” is not just his resuscitation (I’m rather picky you’ll find to use this term as opposed to the more common one after N.T. Wright’s seminal work against dying rising corn god collective mythologists), it’s actually deep in the night by the second line. She’s waiting for dawn and dawn is slow is coming. 

But she’s ever faithful. 

In the evening when the light is dying
My feet at last are homeward turning
The wind is through the willows sighing
Please keep the hearth fire burning.

Again, the god of sun and shadow. He’s turning home around the other side of the planet or through the underworld where the Draugar rules. Wind in the willows? The weeping willows? 

And the hearth fire. Keep it burning in the night, why?

Because all fire is one fire. 

I think this is the song of the sun and moon. 

It’s the song of how they unite to make the prince of twilight.

It’s also the song Arliden wrote of Lanre and they’re so used to practicing it, they’re not even thinking about him there. We know people have caught snippets of it before. 

I think we do in this chapter. 

Then the question comes about the greystones: they stop for tradition. Religion is another word for that: sacred rites. 

And for the record, tradition and superstition are not the same thing. There’s sympathetic magic (in the Frazerian sense), there’s mythology (which is more often than not a long story explaining etymology: basically the poetry of word origins), there’s scientific method, there’s philosophy, there’s history, and then there’s where all of these things meet in ontology that’s connected to daily life. 

They’re not the same thing. Arliden’s wrong. 

Like a draw stone even in our sleep
Standing stone by old road is the way
To lead you ever deeper into Fae.
Laystone as you lay in hill or dell
Greystone leads to something something ‘ell.”

I have a million questions.

Okay so a “drawstone” — made up term. I’m curious the most about this: a stone that draws us into dreams? Out of dreams? Uses dreams to travel like in Sandman? 

But here’s the real thing for me. Riffing on the ending of that poem:

• Greystone leads to storytelling spell
• Greystone leads to worlds parallel
• Greystone leads to box: a solar cell
• Greystone leads to Fae land’s storage cell
• Greystone leads to life immortal
• Greystone leads to bedbug-gross motels
• Greystone leads to moon’s favorite sperm cell
• Greystone leads to plates of tagliatelle
• Greystone leads to Elodin’s jail cell
• Greystone leads to antiparralel
• Greystone leads to shortcut: CHANTERELLE
• A SHORTCUT TO MUSHROOMS! WE DID IT TEAM

Okay what do I really think it is?

• Greystone leads to heaven and to hell.
• Greystone leads to Myr Faeriniel

Or something very similar to one of those two. Whole poem again:

Like a draw stone even in our sleep
Standing stone by old road is the way
To lead you ever deeper into Fae.
Laystone as you lay in hill or dell
Greystone leads to Mar Faeriniel. 

Realizing now that I missed a couple of notes regarding the Ben interactions from Connor Hathaway and our text dialog: 

Sympathy is implying one’s will toward convincing things that they’re connected, a reintegration of what was once broken and the quote “A bad link is full of holes” ie fae and mortal realm are so different (B makes this point often) that though they’re disintegrated, there are holes between them where one can pass through, one to another, like the energy lost during sympathy.

Sympathy, then, could be a victim of, like I wrote about a few days back, a modern interpretation and imposition of distinctions (maybe this time by the University system) on an ancient force. Similar to European post-Enlightenment attempts to rationalize and demystify, like, you know everything.

— Connor Hathaway

More like a unifying explanation of them. Whereas naming is about the given uniqueness of any given thing to an irreducible level, things that require entire stories to tell. And maybe both were unified originally in song.

Making singers a threat to both Amyr (sympathy) and Fae (namers).

Huh. Are Naming and Sympathy compatible if Naming is describing something and attributing its unique characteristics and Sympathy is convincing things of their sameness? 

— Connor Hathaway

As someone who follows Maximus the Confessor, I would say absolutely. But that’s a philosophical conversation…

Nevertheless, even for scientists that use Wikipedia, there’s a place for mesh networks like a wiki and a place for the Porphyrian tree. 

Less cheekily: everything is united insofar as THAT it is, everything is distinct insofar as WHAT it is. We extrapolate universals from the particulars, from the universal we then come back down the chain of being to understand particularities. 

Which, frankly, is kind of backwards in a way in terms of poetry. Generally ontology is where we get poetry and efficient causality is where we get the scientific method. Both philosophical claims, but one is deductive and one is inductive. 

Sort of like when a small child asks, “Why is the sky blue?” And we start rattling off stuff about the reflection of the ocean or, more accurately, the refraction of light through the atmosphere to generally make blue and sometimes make yellow. 

But the child isn’t asking _how_ is the sky blue. He’s asking why. Answering “why is the sky blue” with reflections and refractions is as good as answering “why are leaves green” with the word “chlorophyl.” Chlorophyll is the Greek word for “green leaf.” So it’s literally saying: leaves are green because of green leaf. It’s tautological nonsense that merely describes or defines a thing, but does not explain it ontology.

Rather, a child’s question is as good as asking “Whence blueness?”

To which there are only three good responses: 

• 1. I don’t know.
• 2. It IS. There’s nothing in it that ought to be or provides the cause of its own people. And blueness is therefore contingent. 
• 3. Wow.

If I’m right that Kvothe took over as the new priest of Diana and name of the Sun and Shade, then it follows that Bast took over for Cinder as Mercury. Or “Prince of Twilight”

So what I’m looking for with Bast is commerce, messages, divination, travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery, thieves, Caudicus, male genitals on a block, rooster, tortoise, winged sandals, a petasos, goats, the number four, incense. 

Anyways, back to Kvothe’s mom: he says a drawstone is an old name for laden-stones. Star-iron (magnets) that draw all other iron toward themselves. She saw one in a curiosity shop in Peleresin. 

Several things here. 

• 1. The poem says “like a drawstone even in our sleep” — greystones draw us into fae. 
• 2. The corollary is that star-iron draws us into the realm of men. 
• 3. Meaning, possibly, there’s such a thing as faux north in this world. 
• 4. King Holly would then be of the star-iron. King Oak of the Greystone. Grandfather Iron would draw them to the realm of men in the service of Great-Grandfather Sun, who draws all to the fae.

All of that aside, what’s a curiosity cabinet? 

They were the precursors to museums owned by incredibly wealthy people. Folks that are as rich as a king of Vint. Also called wonder-rooms (Wunderkammer) — encyclopedic collections of rare and expensive objects. 

Kind of funny because a cabinet can be a wardrobe. So it’s an easy riff for him here on an old, old fantasy story. 

They showed rank, etc. 

But Peleresin. 

A pele or peel is a small tower. Watchtowers with fire. A tower house. Some, known as a vicar’s pele, housed the local vicar. By an Act of the Parliament of England in 1455, each of these towers was required to have an iron basket on its summit and a smoke or fire signal, for day or night use, ready at hand. Apart from their primary purpose as a warning system, these towers were also the homes of the lairds and landlords of the area, who dwelt in them with their families and retainers, while their followers lived in simple huts outside the walls. The towers also provided a refuge so that, when cross-border raiding parties arrived, the whole population of a village could take to the tower and wait for the marauders to depart.

And resin is an old, old, old Greek word for that sap coming from a pine tree. 

Tree and tower. 

By the way, for the extremely curious, there’s a place called Holly Tower in Hovenweep National Monument:

It was built around 1200 in the United States. As it has something parallel to a thing that’s always inspired me in my home state, I don’t want to go far into it. 

But castles built in 1200 AD in the United States by natives seems, to me, to be exactly the kind of shit that would keep a young Rothfuss up at night with inspiration. 

Hovenweep, for the record, means “having lifted weeping.”

Detour, yes, but Old Man Holly talks exactly about this:

“New holly spread and stretched and wrapped the tower. New holly grew and opened groves of leaves against the sky. She sang until no tower could be seen, and that was good.

“The Lady stood beside Old Holly, smiling. They looked out at their new-grown holly grove, and it was good.”

The tower and the tree merge in the origin story. 

I’ll get into Old Holly fully at some point, but wherever this place is, I think it’s directly connected to the tree of the Cthaeh and the Amyr. 

Telling that They went there as a couple. 

Telling that it was curiousity shop. A wonder room. 

Telling that they saw a loden stone there. Star iron. 

And the man hates poetry. 

And she doesn’t. 

She actually calls him an elitist. 

What Ben’s trying to teach him is of how his folly is Lanre’s folly. Why that story? Why that of all stories? 

“Lanre was a prince. Or a king.” 

Kingkiller? Does he actually kill the undead Lanre?

“He sold his soul for power, but then something went wrong and afterward I think he went crazy or he couldn’t even sleep again—”

That’s all Draugar talk, again. 

Then Ben gets defensive and says “he didn’t sell his soul.”

Ben tries to say three things. One is sympathy (which could kill Kvothe). One is naming the wind (which could kill Kvothe). But the third? 

Perhaps it’s Lanre’s folly?

Looking for the realm of the dead? 

Navigate to other chapters:

I’ll put this at the end of each chapter so we can actually navigate the text. Because this is getting unwieldy — we’re going to eventually have dozens of links — I’m going to just link to the category from here on out: