We’re now at the place in the Kingkiller Reread where we can finally start chapter one: a place for demons — I’m assuming you’ve read all of the Rothfuss canon if you read forward. As I said before, it’s quite telling that Rothfuss titled the first chapter “a place for demons.” Beyond the obvious connection with the scrael, this chapter starts to hint at why Kvothe himself (and maybe even Bast… and maybe even the wood of the Cthaeh) make this Waystone Inn a place for demons.

Further, I find the number five fascinating because, combined with Kvothe and Bast, that steady number five makes the total a steady number seven – leader and apprentice at the helm, captain and first mate.

We come to find Taborlin the Great in the first paragraph – the fifth sentence of the novel (minus the prologue, of course, which functions as a sort of leitmotif, a sort of silence before the song). His powerful artifacts are sword (again, if we assume Caesura, perhaps a sword of mercury), a key (again, if we assume the lockless boxes of Frazer, then this could actually be a sesame seed or something similar which works as the “open sesame,” the wood of the lightning tree which itself sympathetically contains lightning to open lockless boxes), a coin (perhaps a gold coin? perhaps iron?), and a candle (the sympathetic connections are obvious here). He’d been stripped of these.

And the candles burn blue.

The contrast again between the “logical” sympathist and the “intuitive” Chandrian rears its head, grammarie and glammourie, history and myth, Chronicler and Bast.

As an aside, it’s quite telling that Graham and Jake and Shep all grew up listening to Cob’s stories and ignoring his advice. This seems to me a markedly American statement, the reverse of which would be true for many honor / shame and patron / client cultures both now and in the middle ages – certainly the Athabascans I met in Alaska would know nothing of it since the authority structure of memorization and the deference of some categories of stories to others make story irrevocably intertwined with advice, for one, and for another because often the prophecy and vision of the young is counselled as quickly as the sage advice and wisdom of the old, as with the Benedictine communities in the middle ages (see the Rule of St. Benedict to understand that systemic paradigm at work). In any case, it seemed to be a funny statement to me that got a laugh but ceded believability.

Again, in the first page of the story proper, we get the word Chandrian – the seven. That’s twice if you account for the subtler seven – five guests, two hosts.

It interesting here because as there’s a parallel to Kvothe and Taborlin throughout the story, in this first little bit the Smith’s questions tell us a good deal: how did they find him and why din’t [sic] they kill him when they had the chance?

It’s also interesting that Taborlin’s locked in a high tower and emptied of his power, for Kvothe seems to be in quite the same situation.

The food sticks out to me – five bowls of stew and two loaves – because it was five fishes and two loaves that fed the multitude in the Jesus narrative. Often authors put together these working symbolic numbers – even subconsciously – to show sustinance, provision, having enough.

They also happen to add up to seven. Which is the third seven.

“The predatory efficiency of a lifetime bachelor” is a beautiful line. And it’s unfortunately a habit I myself have not shaken even after ten years with my bride (our anniversary’s next week, by the way). I tend to tear into meals with the ruthless efficiency of a glutton.

It’s also worth pointing out that though the black in blacksmith has been cut, it still cues up the color of the nigreddo (purging of body) work that will be done in book one.  Taborlin finds himself in a lockless room, surrounded by stone. Pointing first to Frazer, it’s worth noting that the Mexican harvest festival when the first fruits of the season were offered to the sun, a criminal was placed between two immense stones, balanced opposite one another, and then they fell together and crushed the man. His remains were buried and then a feast and dance followed. They called the sacrifice “the meeting of the stones.” Also in the magical control of the sun section, Frazer points out that in order to make the sun shine or hasten or stay its going down (think Joshua’s prayer of “sun stand still”) – particularly in times of drought, the New Chaledonians take a disc-shaped stone and jam a giant burning brand in it, in order to “kindle the sun that he may eat up the clouds and dry up our land so that it may produce nothing.” The Romans had the lapis manalis that they kept near the temple of Mars and dragged behind them to get rainfall. All of that to say there’s a sort of divine spark within stone that’s illustrated here by a magician trapped inside one.

Rock also happens to be the place where the prima materia is found, the alchemical vessel, in which the unbinding of principles in order to make a new man will happen. The sacred rock, again. The alchemists often refer to the “tumulus of rock,” the grave or sepulchre where alchemical lovers unite in the wedding.

It’s an important symbol and important trope in the series as we’ll see later with Elodin and the copper mesh as well as the lockless boxes: the liberation of the spirit from inside the stone, the power within the mundane, etc.

Taborlin tears stone and sees sky. He steps out and falls, fearing not because he knows the name of the wind as he knew the name of the stone. It’s fascinating, the way Rothfuss uses the true name philosophy, because it’s almost a personification. If I’m right about the angels/demons/fae/planets bit (a la Tehlu’s Angels and The Sound of Silence posts) – if everything in Temerant has a sort of spirit behind it – then it’s quite possible that as the seven archangels have control of different things, four of which are winds, then Cinder himself may well be the spirit of the north wind which is synonymous with death and winter’s pale. Frazer talks about people trying to tame winds, kill the spirit of the winds, and even one tribe declaring war on the South Wind which… let’s just say it doesn’t really end all that well for them.

Tolkien, in On Fairy stories, talks about this a bit – the personifications of mythology.

“The Olympians were personifications of the sun, of dawn, of night, and so on, and all the stories told about them were originally myths (allegories would have been a better word) of the greater elemental changes and processes of nature.”

Before I continue with the quote, I’d like to point out that we’re starting to read the Western Canon for the Western Canonball podcast here in Brooklyn and one of the books is CS Morrisey’s translation of Hesiod’s Theogony (click here to unlock the whole booklist and join the book clumb). Morrisey did this very terribly clever thing where he reengaged the meaning of the greek god names not by transliterating but by translating. So he’ll do something like this:

“First, Earth (Gaia) brought forth
her perfect match,
Sky (Uranus), sparkled with stars.
He would shelter her everywhere.
She would be the steadfast abode
for the blessed gods always.
Then, she brought forth the large Mountains (Ourea),
the lovely haunts of goddesses.
Indeed, Nymphs dwell throughout
the wooded mountains.
Then, she gave birth to
the unplowed expanse, the raging surge,
the Sea (Pontus). All this she did
without having sex. But then…”

So it rescues the poety of the original which had for decades only been accessible to those Greek scholars skilled enough to read without a lexicon handy and poetic enough to forget that Zeus is a proper name in order to see it as a personification.

Back to Tolkien:

“Personality can only be derived from a person. The gods may derive their colour and beauty from the high splendours of nature, but it was Man who obtained these for them, abstracted them from sun and moon and cloud; their personality they get direct form him; the shadow or flicker of divinity that is upon them they receive through him from the invisible world, the Supernatural. There is no fundamental distinction between the higher and lower mythologies. Their peoples live, if they live at all, by the same life, just as in the mortal world do kings and peasants. “

He then points to Thor, whose name is thunder, whose hammer is lightning and shows how his character that isn’t found in thunder or lightning – red beard, loud voice, violent temper, blundering strength – actually come likely from a specific farmer who loved thunder, whose voice was loud and chaotic.

Add this to the true name mythology – that of finding the names that, for instance, Adam gave to all things and “that was its name” – which we find at work in Tolkien’s own Tom Bombadil, and it’s quite possible that the naming in The Name of the Wind actually corresponds to a specific personality of the Fae.

Regardless, the wind certainly has a personality in Cob’s story.

The amulet’s interesting because here again we have a crucial element of the series right in the first few pages – magic bestowed on a mortal by the grace of a tinker:

A tinker’s debt is always paid:
Once for any simple trade.
Twice for freely given aid.
Thrice for any insult made.

Given Bast’s proclivity for repaying insult with injury, for helping double those who help him, and for trading for things straight across (not to mention the debt of answers he seems bound to owe folk who question him after certain bartering – a fickleness that mirrors both the Sphynx and Rumplestiltskin), I’d say there’s another piece of credibility not only to the personality of Fae within natural things but actually to the idea of Fae in discguise as tinkers, as some have claimed.

Telling too that Kvothe’s first spoken words in the book are poetry.

And that he’d never interjected, which is another way of saying “silence.” And when the awkward silence follows his words, he gets really embarrassed. But we’ve addressed that in the sound of silence post.

It’s curious that the Tinker seems to trade the amulet not for the value of the coins but for their metallurgic diversity – iron, copper, silver. It’s called “black as a winter night and cold as ice to touch” which is a double reference to winter’s pale again, the death of the north wind. The thing makes him safe from demons – the second time that’s mentioned in the chapter. The third time associates the Chandrian with demons.

Jake calls them the first SIX people to refuse Tehlu’s choice of the path. So the question is where did the seventh come from? Again, as I’ve said before, I tend to thing the seventh is Tehlu himself (though that seems contradictory to Jake’s account, it seems feasible given the rest of the data), the eighth being Lady Luna (the moon or Diana) and the first to be sacrificed for the changing of power.

Cob says as much, making the mystery the obvious question that the books intend to answer:

1. Where do they come from?
2. Where do they go after they’ve done their bloody deeds?
3. Are they men that sold their souls?
4. Demons?
5. Spirits?
6. Their signs?

There’s no reason why the answer to the first two can’t end up with a sort of “all of the above” answer for the last four, especially with the whole “difference between a demon and a dog” reference.

Then we have the interplay of grey shirt, black scrael, red blood, queueing up the imagery nigreddo work again.

I find it fascinating how true Rothfuss plays the death of Nelly the horse: as if a child has died. Coming from an agrarian community, I can say that I’ve seen this kind of thing: the way farmers will rally and chase out the boy who tips a cow because it dislodges the cow’s liver and kills it, creating an economic disaster for a family overnight from some foolish prank. That emotion gets it – and that seems to be the biggest tool in Rothfuss’ toolbox: communicating the emotion that craftsman feel in their trade, whether relief worker or banker or tinker or musician. He taps into the poetry of the craftsmanship and therefore the emotion and can get away with all manner of sins.

It’s a great trick and one you never really tire of watching him perform: that I feel for the death of this horse seven pages in tells me that this guy knows what he’s doing.

In the midst of the awkward silence with some people grieving for Carter’s loss and other people rebuking him for his idiocy, Kvothe steps “nimbly” and gets his medicine out. He shines best in these moments when no one else knows what to do or to say, “wrapping it around himself” as the prologue says.

It’s interesting that the scrael’s described both as black as slate and like stone – very likely is slate or obsidian or something similar. Again, black stone queues up the nigreddo work. “Silence filled the room like a cold sweat.”

And Kvothe worries about how far they made it and they all react to him very starkly for the words he spoke into silence. Enough that it seems Jake speaks pretty close to the truth when he says, “Blackened body of God.” This image comes from the alchemists who wanted to communicate that the matter of the philosopher’s stone is still corrupt, still unclean prior to being washed and restored in the albedo: it’s the “activated darkness” as Lindy calls it, “something that must be experienced consciously before renovation and integration can take place.” The alchemist Melchior said the union of brimstone and quicksilver manifested as a “mighty Ethiopian, burned, calcined, discoloured, altogether dead and lifeless. He asks to be buried, to be sprinkled with his own moisture and slowly calcined till he shall arise in glowing form from the fierce fire… Because of the bath of rebirth he takes a new name which the philosophers call the natural sulphur and their son.” So it’s another way of saying a shift in identity has happened or is about to happen.

The curse “blackened body of God” also happens to be the description of a bonfire sacrifice for a priest king.

Kvothe mentions seeing a trader on the road that Cob claims tried to stiff him for salt that was way too expensive and now it seems they have a shortage. Paracelsus added that third element of salt to the alchemical great work salt, which gave him a tripartite understanding of the nature of existence: mercury (the spirit), sulfur (the soul or mind, the binding compound and tertium quid), and salt (the body). It kind of diverges from traditional alchemical meditation because salt kind of keeps the matter together by giving it fixity and firmness. George Wither in A Sudden Flash said that the ideal is to get a “civil trinity made up in a blessed unity” of the three elements.

Personally, I don’t think that Rothfuss is taking that tack. For one, normally the spirit (or mercury) is the foil and bonding compound for most of the middle ages. For another, salt typically just cues up the albedo stage of which this book is not.

So the negation of salt is simply another instance of the purging for the sake of the conscious experience before renovation and integration take place.

Kvothe’s struggle to lie well is kind of funny to watch this time through, how he fumbles for explanations in spite of himself.

The thing has no eyes, no mouth, no discernible nourishment, body like stone with those lucky cracks on it from where the horse fell.

The Scrael is called “grey inside like a mushroom” which makes it sound like a fungus and sort of amplifies the infection talk that we saw when he thought the mountains would hold it back. Then the word demon comes out again and they react as if these things belong out there in stories: demons, heroes, kings, angels, Taborlin, Tehlu, and the absurdity of your childhood friend stomping one of these things to death on the backroad of your hometown.

The hint here, of course, is that this is exactly what has happened with the presence of this innkeeper: the inn is a place for demons even though the town is not. Kvothe seems irritated that the holy name of God gets included in the taboo list of things the demons fear. Rothfuss agnosticism comes out here again and it plays deference to Frazer’s misunderstanding of taboo.

Frazer seems to think that men create gods in their own image, which is true – this certainly happens as with the personification bit in Tolkien – but that doesn’t really explain the taboo. Frazer says that because, for instance, an Ethiopian would make his god black with a flat nose, therefore he thinks he needs to protect the name of his god in order to protect his true name. He seems to think that the power of the god resided in his true name in an “almost physical sense” that could be surgically extracted and then transferred to himself.

In a narrative sense, that’s pretty awesome: to think that one namer could, in theory, cannibalize another and get their powers sort of like Skylar in Heroes who eats the brains of other heroes. Or of those who make themselves Gods by having control of gods as you might control a rabid dog by knowing its name and earning its trust or some such. Essentially possessing the true name was thought in paganism to possess the very being of a god or a man or anything and could make a slave of a god. This is carried on even in the fairy stories like Rumplestiltskin or in the idea that if you know the name of a city, you can ask it to fall and it will, so the Romans and Assyrians would protect the names of their patron saints and deities. The Jews of the Ten Commandments, however, inverted this: they never thought that they would have control of God or that – like Voldemort – he’d smite them other than in some of the mysticism and superstition which later followed. Rather the third commandment – to not use the name of God in vain – along with the second (no idols) and fourth (keep the sabbath) simply defined and preserved the first which is, cleanly stated, the idea of One God who donates his being to every contingent thing as Socrates and Vendantic Buddhism and Islam and large swaths of Hinduism (Hindu monotheism) and Judeo-Christianity all agree. Even the pagans of the middle ages were monotheists, properly speaking, and they’d replace, for instance, “soul” with “nous” but it sprung from that same well of one god donating his being to every contingent thing. This is important because the second command, the injunction against idols, says that though God donates his being and manifests as matter, matter is not God. How could it be since matter is made and not eternal? And the third command says that though God is spirit, not all spiritual invocations are true or beautiful or good. All of this is summed up in the fourth command which redefines the identity of the people of Moses not by what they do – whether in fashioning the world into gods (workaholism, idolatry, etc) or by fashioning the spiritual realm into personal power (hypocrisy, invocational magic,divination, etc) – but rather by who they are: beings of consciousness who experience bliss as they meditate on the Consciousness behind Being.

All of that to say, I agree with Kvothe’s scoffing, but not for the same reasons. Kvothe scoffs at Graham because Graham’s taboo won’t work. I scoff because both Graham and Kvothe miss the point of name taboos because they’re both firmly in the tradition of Frazer, who didn’t know what he was talking about.

The long fingers and the deference to the smith’s prentice’s trade is a nice touch.

“He had taken a new name for most of the usual reasons” meaning witness protection, hiding, getting a new start, reinventing yourself, flair for the dramatic (think: Ladybird), and avoiding one’s own reputation. “And for a few unusual (reasons) as well, not the least of which was the fact that names were important to him,” meaning his old name’s important, his new name’s important, and if “take” is to be taken literally, the person from whom he took the name is important. Something weird has happened with his name, as we all assume.

“Night with no moon” shows up here at the start which is, I’ll remind you, one of the things wise men fear. Wise Men Fear it because the moon is in the Fae on nights like that and, assuming that the moon is a lady whom the Chandrian protect (or hunt) then a night with no moon would bode ill for their presence as well. It’s interesting because here at the start Kvothe knows the stories and the names of the stars and the moon. He knew them all – that’s an INCREDIBLY powerful statement for a namer, and it’s said almost offhanded. But it’s so powerful. So powerful, in fact, that it might be on the status of a deity: if the road to the town literally leads nowhere, then someone out there could be right that Kote/Kvothe is literally inventing the world as he goes along and none of it is spoken into existence until he speaks it so. Alternatively, of course, he could have taken the lead of the Chandrian and therefore King of the Wood (the Fae) and therefore holds dominion the stars.

A night with no moon, of course, is also pitch black so that leans into the nigreddo blackwork as well.

I’m curious about the detail about how after an hour’s work of washing, the bucket was still clean enough for a lady to wash her hands in. Sigaldry? Naming? Knowing? Kvothe’s just an OCD dude who cleans so often that the place wasn’t dirty to begin with?

And why would he have stopped himself from humming had he caught himself? On the one hand, there’s the god of silence thing. On the other, there’s the idea that things manifest when he speaks. Of course, he could just be a jaded old soul who stops himself from having much fun.

“Black stone” fireplace again. Nigreddo. As is that dark chest, another sort of vessel for the work.

The contrast of lovers and scholars again emphasizes that music and poetry, myth and history, Bast and Chronicler dichotomy that Kvothe hopes to reconcile: the tension between the narratives the rich write and the stories the poor tell.

“Celum Tinture” — the book Bast is supposed to be studying — is a combination of two principles the alchemists would work with. In the History of Magic and Experimental Science, the section on Lullian Alchemy talks about tincture representing the process of fermentation and “celum” is the world for sky. He’s studying a book on the fermentation of sky. Which is funny because Bast is talking about spending more time outside and Kvothe tells Bast that he hopes the girl was like “a warm wind in the shade.”

The whole “there’s never only one scraeling” thing adds to the fungus metaphor: like spores on the wind.

And again regarding the body of the scrael: “He took it to the priest who did all the right things for all the wrong reasons.” Practicality – a sort of utilitarian pragmatism – rules out in the overall philosophy of this world, which does a serious disservice to metaphysics, even the implied metaphysics of this particular world. But he wrote what he wrote…

The rowan wood reference cues up the bit of Frazer that talks about those who build up a burning pile, kindled it and, danced three times “southways” around it. The “bone-fires” or bonfires as we call them in the midwest counteract the machinations and spells of witches by burning rowan and woodbine. They put the rowan over the doors of cattle houses and sometimes spread the ashes around in order to use it in a similar way that the Jews used the blood of the passover lamb on the doorframes of their houses. They also chanted about burning witches and some lept over the bonfires in order to, according to Frazer, ensure plentiful harvest by protecting the land from sorcery.

I’ll point out again that it’s felling night at this part in the story which has an obvious piece to play in the Tehlu mythos, but the felling of the tree for the sake of the bonfire and sacrificing the priest is pretty important – particularly because more and more fires are kindled throughout the books and here at the start of the nigreddo we should expect the kindling to start. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kvothe was literally burned at the stake by the end.

For the first time, Kvothe shows his morbid sense of humor with the idea of keeping the body of the demon and selling tickets to see it. (I’m reminded of the Marquez story about the old man with enormous wings). Kvothe tells Bast he’s joking but we can see from the follow up that he’s not – which shows, as I mentioned before, that Kvothe isn’t beyond hanging onto the body parts of demons, angels, gods, and fae. As I said, I still think the wood of the Ctheah is in the inn.

The blacksmith will be making cold iron in response to the demon, which might prompt Bast to leave, but the interesting thing is that Bast can’t leave because he would have no one else to teach him, which again shows that Kvothe has taken on a role of authority within the Fae in some way.

The series of mock exorcisms done to banish the glamoury of Bast is funny if matter’s the only thing that exists in the world. But then again, that kind of undercuts the very metaphysics of the book: including the presence of Bast himself, so it’s very jarring, potentially hypocritical, and definitely only aware of one of the targets of the joke, that of ineffectual exorcisms done to a real demon who is the real friend of this Kvothe. The other target, of course, being the book itself: it’s the sort of straw man you set up that ends up beating you up.

Plus I can tell for as much as he’s researched about crafts and history and whatnot, he hasn’t spent a ton of time around Africans who perform exorcisms, regardless of his opinion of them in terms of veracity or accessibility or what have you.

The fireplace is made of the same black rock as the one downstairs, implying a sympathetic bond between the two, there in the center of the room. His avoidance of the chest is described both as the avoidance of an ex-lover at a formal dinner and an old enemy in a crowded pub: perhaps because it came from both.

The roah wood we’ve covered, but I’ll mention again that I think this comes from the Cthaeh, which is why it’s so expensive. The citrus tree like the lightning tree, at least according to Frazer, contains the very lightning within. The iron lock keeps out the fae. The copper lock keeps out namers. The unseen lock? Likely the stolen name or the sympathetic bond that requires Kvothe’s death or something like an open sesame, to keep out knowers.

Begs the question: what’s so precious that you need to keep out men, fae, and gods?

Longing and regret. Longing for her. Regret that he got her. Both show up when he sees the chest. It’s interesting too how much he sighs without knowing it.

The penitent king’s having trouble with rebels, there’s likely a third tax coming, then talk of the way economy affects farmers: again Rothfuss nails the whole crop rotation and the way people talk about various crops in an agrarian town.

And man the imagery of the phrase “the word ‘demon’ was being spoken, but it was with smiles half-hidden behind raised hands” is the kind of humanity in a line of prose that I long to write with my own work (even though it copulates over the copula, as my friend Dr. Jordan Wood might say).

“This was not a place for demons” shows that Bast and Kvothe aren’t welcome there on an ontological level that cannot be reconciled.

The sale of cold iron in the town nods to Mars, whose dominion and influence in the alchemical great work prompts bloodsport and suicide and martyrdom depending on how the people receive his tides. A good man may sacrifice himself for another. A bad man may commit suicide or kill off tons of people. An oppressed man may throw his life away in suicide or martyrdom for an unworthy cause or in accepting the challenge of a worthless duel. If this were Harry Potter, Rowling might say “Mars is Bright Tonight” as did Dante in Inferno.  I elucidated on this in the article back in 2009 in the Harry Potter for Nerds piece with John Granger. For all the faults with that piece, I still think the gist of it – that the influence of Mars to kick off the nigreddo and begin the descent to bloodloss (whether sacrificed or taken or offered) was accurate. We get it here in respect to the town and the scrael and, mindful of Frazer who seems to think the superstition of iron came when bad fortune was attributed to the arrival of new technology in a given society. That could be.

Or the obvious is possible: that iron is literally not natural in the sense of the typical order, for we take it out of the deep and use it to strike at the high and it gets in the way of sea and stock and stone. Frazer points to Lithuanians who eat a little bit of iron in order to render the spirit in the corn harmless.

Whatever the case, it ended up pretty firm in the fae mythology and bodes not so great for the town which ends on a grim note.

You know, The Reaper.

Stay tuned for chapter two.

To refresh your memory:

I have three theses I’m playing with here, juggling if you will. They share similarities, but I need to summarize all three:

Thesis One (dialog with Frazer):

Kvothe has bound himself by blood-oath to protect the Kingkiller equivalent of the temple of Diana of the Wood (the moon) making him King of the Wood (the sun). In order to do this, he has killed the priest-king responsible for protecting her temple, making the former priest a human sacrifice, and has now taken that priest’s place. The priest-king was a chandrian — a singer-maker and the demon of death (or silence or winter’s pale). Kvothe has now become the nightmare, the god of death (or silence or sun or winter) who must be sacrificed. He has stored his death (or life or soul) in a lockless box or mistletoe or something similar involving a special type of wood (potentially roah). He is waiting to die because inevitably someone will come to claim him who is stronger or craftier than he is. They will kill him as a human (or inhumane) sacrifice and take his place as priest-king. It’s quite possible that this will be his second — and final — death. Or perhaps more.

In short, people often compare Rothfuss to Harry Potter.

But they’ve got the wrong orphan who went to magic school to learn all the secret magic and become the prophesied chosen one.

It’s not an adult version of Harry’s story.

It’s a story from the perspective of Voldemort.

Or worse.

Or Thesis Two (dialog with Campbell):

Kvothe’s story is bullshit to the same degree that a Draccus is not actually a dragon. He has some swordplay abilities and is helping fight off things, but his entire life is built around lying — compulsively — and trying to deal with the consequences of those lies. Some are good stories. Some are bad. This, in a way, gives him a sort of reverse Hero’s Journey, a Hero’s Journey about Heroes’ Journeys, in which he starts in a zone of the unfamiliar as a bard on the road, enters the familiar as an innkeeper, and will return as a bard on the road again. The whole “waiting to die” bit is either a metaphor for how he feels without someone to bullshit or is what he does for himself: he wants to be able to tell the story about how he died in some spectacular way, any old way, that enthralls the listener.

Or Thesis Three (dialog with the idea of storytelling per se meaning Frazer, Campbell, and others):

Or both of the above are true. He’s both the midsummer (or solstice) sacrifice and a bullshitter. This story is a spell in which he’s recharging his life batteries something like a leech as the God of Silence and therefore still a nightmare but a particular kind. Without an audience, his life force drains. With one, he has the energy he needs to sustain the ever-burning flame at the temple of Diana and keep his death in check or die again and be resown. This assumes that what he does is tell stories and therefore he’s a storyteller per se — story incarnate and the selah in between tales, god of silence and winter’s pale. Per Gerard Manly Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

And per Oscar Wilde:

For he that lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

Funny enough, Wilde was talking about the executioner in that poem — the guy who cries out in mourning because he’s never quite sure what sort of lives the guys he’s killing lived. Kvothe is coming alive not because he’s only telling his story as man, but because he’s starting to think about the lives of the other men there who will invariably either be the means of his death or human sacrifices themselves or perhaps both as the stories he tells connect to their life force and therefore hide away his death, sympathetically.

He’s waiting to die himself by waiting for someone bigger and better to beat him. He’s waiting to die in the sense that without story, he’s stuck in silence hoping to have a story to tell in which he dies another death for the entertainment of others. Or he’s the kind of god that thrives off of silencing dissent and alternate histories. He’s waiting to die because as a man once, he knows what it’s like to live and knowing the life of Chronicler — for instance — actually gives him sorrow over the fact that he has to kill him.

And he’s waiting to die — potentially — because he has lived so many times and must be perpetually sacrificed every year. Meaning that he’s both immortal and going to die.

Ultimately, this could mean that the thing he bound his death to his biography per se (or his biographer), which means that every time he tells it, he dies and is reborn just like a cut flower: he’s planted and comes back. The last time he did it, he came back as Kote (we’ll deal with that name soon enough). He thrives in silence, but invariably someone will come and ask him to tell it again and he waits to die again.

Those three theses are the general options by my count, or some variation on those themes. For obvious reasons, I hope the real story is the third one, but at this point anything’s going to be great. Or perhaps emotionally devastating, but that’s Mr. Rothfuss’ job.