See What The Goddess Said.
Everard hypothesizes:
"'...with Heidhim talking to her, over and over, full of male revengefulness - in terms of her culture, it would make sense. She was appointed to bring about the destruction of Rome.'" (15, p. 599)
Thus, if Everard is right, Heidhin would have reinforced that original "Slay the Romans...," which he had shouted in the presence of the goddess.
Veleda sees Janne Floris' timecycle as:
"...the bull of Frae, cast in iron, and on it rode the goddess who had claimed it from him." (17, p. 611)
See Tiw's Beast.
I have reread this story innumerable times but never before noticed how the timecycle is incorporated into the myth.
In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," the turning point is the moment when the Wanderer appears and betrays his followers. In "Star of the Sea," it is when Heidhin kills himself to free Veleda from her oath never to make peace with Rome. The next mythical passage is about peace, not conflict.
10 comments:
Poul's being very realistic here. When people see a completely unaccustomed object, they tend to interpret it in terms of pre-existing patterns. Seeing someone riding on something that moves, they'd see a mythological iron bull or skeletal horse -- really see that, probably.
I'm reminded of something that happened in Uganda in the 1880's. The Anglican mission there had a carpenter and he built a simple two-wheel oxcart. The Buganda, the people of the area, already kept animals and they also made quite good roads, though for foot traffic.
They believed that firearms (which they'd experienced for about a generation) were supernatural, and that explanation satisfied them; they weren't really curious about it.
But when they saw the oxcart, it created a complete sensation -- because they -didn't- think it was supernatural; they took one look and realized exactly what it was, how it worked, that they could make and use this themselves, and that it had enormous advantages.
Wheels are like money. They enable other things to happen.
I read somewhere that the first audience who were shown a short animated cartoon of a dinosaur did not know what they had seen and some might have thought that it was a real animal.
Early cinema audiences were affected more strongly than we are today by the most elaborate CGI. There were instances of panic as people thought vehicles on the screen were really going to hit them.
It was comparable to the visceral impact of virtual reality, only more so, because the whole concept of realistic moving images was so new, and there were no comparable previous experiences.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
We see something very similar at the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, which reads like the prophet struggling to describe things he had no satisfactory way of describing. In fact, Anderson suggested in one of his books that Ezekiel might well have been trying to describe UFOs!
Ada astra! Sean
CS Lewis wrote that Ezekiel's vision read a bit like a description of a dynamo.
Kaor, Paul!
That one is new to me! And I would expect non human aliens hypothetically visiting Earth to have generators. Was this in Lewis' essay "Religion and Rocketry"?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
No, I think in REFLECTIONS ON THE PSALMS, although I know Ezekiel did not write Psalms. Maybe it was in LETTERS TO MALCOLM... I am not sure.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Noted. Understood!
Ad astra! Sean
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