"'You have worn yourself out for us,' Hathawulf said to him at the end of his last stay in the hall." (p. 442)
His last stay: Hathawulf will see the Wanderer only twice more, only once in this hall and not to stay overnight.
Hathawulf continues:
"'If you are of the Anses, they are not tireless.'
"'No,' sighed the Wanderer. 'They too shall perish in the wreck of the world.'" (ibid.)
Carl knows that this is not literally true but it fits the facts, nevertheless.
Hathawulf asks:
"'But that is far off in time, surely?'
"'World after world has gone down in ruin ere now, my son, and will in the years and thousands of years to come. I have done for you what I was able.'" (p. 443)
Worlds end all the time. In the Inn of the Worlds' End, Chiron the Centaur says:
"...we will be safe in this place. The tavern itself cannot be harmed; that is the way of things. It is being continually created; after all, worlds are ending all the time."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 146, panel 2
A cosmic truth and yet another Anderson-Gaiman parallel.
3 comments:
Perhaps the salience of the "Weird of the World/Götterdämmerung" in Germanic mythology is actually a result of this time-traveller's presence -- he mentions it often, and as far as those talking to him are concerned, he is literally a God and should know...
Carl has a lot to answer for.
Well, he's a scholar of Germanic linguistics and oral literature. I'd say it's inevitable that he'll quote stuff and use tropes and kennings from what he's studied -- and may very well be introducing the very things he later read as a student!
It's a pre-literate culture, after all -- no written scripture to maintain a given narrative. So things Carl said -- or said he liked, as the God of Poetry, no less! -- would have more impact, be more likely to be remembered and to spread and be incorporated into the body of story and poetry and song.
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