"The gods themselves fought the first war that ever was." (p. 9)
- and much more. This is the omniscient narrator at work and we must accept whatever he tells us as true - within the fiction. (Within another work of fiction, it is true that the world was divided into three permanently warring superstates in 1984.)
In XI, Hadding tells his two guards how Odin traveled to Jotunheim, met Loki and hanged himself on the Tree. Since Hadding was not there, he must have heard this story from someone else and, in fact, when asked what had happened next, he replies in part:
"'The rest is merrier. Mind you, I heard it from a jotun, who may not have felt as worshipful toward the gods as he should.'" (p. 83)
And who told the jotun? Thus, in this case, the omniscient narrator tells us what Hadding claims he had heard from a probably disrespectful jotun who in turn must have heard the story from someone else. We are not obliged to accept this story as true.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
This reminds me of some of the works of Gene Wolfe. One of the themes to be found in them is the problem of the unreliable narrator. That is, we come to see that not everything a narrator said in one of Wolfe's stories was likely to be true.
But I don't know if you have ever read any of the works of Wolfe!
Sean
Sean,
No.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
It's impossible to read everything, I know! But I think Wolfe is worth reading, examples being his multi volume BOOK OF THE NEW SUN and BOOK OF THE LONG SUN. And the latter shows us a strange civilization arising on a truly massive O'Neill habitat being used as a STL generation starship.
Sean
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