Alan Moore, Voice Of The Fire (London, 1996), Hob's Hog, 4000 BC, pp. 9-56.
Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster";
Poul Anderson, "The Forest" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1996), pp. 161-188.
"First light. Wind cold over skin, ruffle hair, whistle from gray-before-sun till stars go. Dew shiny on thorn wall, tree leaf; wet smell. Nest rustle soggy. Warm bodies, flesh smell, dry grass smell, mold-underneath smell." ("The Little Monster," p. 146)
In "The Forest," a man sometime between 16,000 and 9500 BC sees the Horned One. Anderson explains in an after-note that this is not necessarily fantasy because people do have panic attacks and this one is described from the point of view of a primitive man who would have made less distinction than we do between inner and outer.
Moore's narrator lived a mere six thousand years ago but also was of limited intelligence:
4 comments:
If it's 6000 years ago, telling lies was a standard technique -- as witness the reconstructed vocabularies from that period, which have abundant terminology for it.
The girl who is speaking to the narrator is surprised that he does not understand saying what is not so it seems that this problem is primarily with him.
He also has a limited vocabulary: bald = "no hair"; chicken = " no fly bird" etc.
He is a mixture of primitive perceptions and limited understanding.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm not quite satisfied with the examples you selected from Anderson's "The Forest" or from Moore's story. They both show us genetically modern men, not true primitives like Pithecanthropus. I thought the POV character in "The Forest" amply intelligent, despite his panic attack. I would expect the vocabulary of neolithic Modern Humans to be as sophisticated as their backgrounds allow. But I can see the example from Moore being like that because of the character being mentally "challenged" (which some prefer to use instead of "retarded").
Ad astra! Sean
Well, I only said they were prehistoric. They are from very different periods.
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