Lunarian music in Temerir's observatory on Lunar Farside makes Dagny Beynac think of:
"...ghosts in flight before the wind." (p. 290)
Carl Farness tells Manse Everard:
"'Wodan-Mercury-Hermes is the Wanderer because he's the god of the wind.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 390.
(Hermes might also have been identified with Hermodr.)
Carl explains further that being the god of the wind makes Wodan:
"'...the patron of travelers and traders.'" (ibid.)
(Nicholas van Rijn, Master Merchant, refers to Mercury.)
Traveling widely, Wodan learns much and therefore becomes associated with wisdom, poetry and magic. Since the dead ride on the night wind, he also becomes the conductor of the dead.
Finally, coming full circle for this post, Carl visits the Moon and views the Lunar craterscape in 2319.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And what will the Moon be like in our real 2319? Will there be cities, domed on the surface, and caverns and tunnels below that surface? Or might Luna be as terraformed as wee it becoming in "Strange Bedfellows"? I hope we live to see the beginnings of whatever it might become!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Remember we must survive an already-begun climate catastrophe on Earth before we can be confident of any future off Earth.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
True, but despair is a sin. Also, the mere effort in getting mankind off Earth, as Elon Musk hopes to, might be one of the crucial factors in mitigating that catastrophe.
Ad astra! Sean
It's perfectly possible humans will exist on the Moon (or Mars) in the 2100's and not on Earth...
Incidentally, Woden/Odin is an example of how pantheons change. Originally the supreme God of the Norse was Tyr -- Tiwaz Fader, Sky Father, the direct "descendant" of the Indo-European sky god.
Woden (Wothenjaz, originally, in proto-Germanic) started out as a minor deity, but gradually increased in importance and in the process took on more of Tyr's original attributes, just as Indra did among the easternmost Indo-Europeans.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Then all the more reason for us to hope Elon Musk manages to found his Mars colony!
That's basically how I "vaguely" thought what became Germanic paganism evolved. Probably from what Anderson said in "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and "Star of the Sea."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The Ysans have a very sophisticated understanding of their and other gods.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
No surprise. Poul Anderson was retrojecting into Ys the kind of speculations we see about Indo-European and Germanic paganism that we see in "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."
Ad astra! Sean
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