"Mountain Man Thorkild stopped a couple of meters from the Peregrines and bent his queued head as if it pained him. 'Greeting and welcome,' he said. The wind shrilled under his words and blew them across the barren flag-stones. 'The Arkulan awaits you.'" (CHAPTER IX, p. 76)
Thorkild is a barbarian chief whose welcome is insincere so of course the wind is shrill, the flag-stones are barren and the shrill wind blows the words away. Pathetic Fallacy, especially involving the wind, is as integral to Poul Anderson's prose as are his punctuation and grammar.
When Sean looks out of the space boat late in the day:
"The wind was low and cold; beneath the castle, roofs and towers were black against the sky." (CHAPTER X, p. 85)
Uninviting! Unsurprisingly, he concludes:
"'It's too late to go out now...'" (ibid.)
Earlier, in CHAPTER VIII, Sean sang a song in which wild winds blow, figuratively speaking of course, between the stars. The wind is omnipresent in Poul Anderson's multiverse.
Sean's song includes the phrase, "The star ways..." (p. 66) Thus, Anderson's Star Ways, re-entitled The Peregrine, was, like Heinlein's The Green Hills of Earth, a volume of a future history named after a song in it. And Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire is a future history volume named after a poem in it.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think that original title, STAR WAYS, a bit weak, making me think the new title, THE PEREGRINE, a bit better.
Ad astra! Sean
Incidentally, humans could not be -literally- assimilated by aliens; because they're not interfertile.
Incidentally(2), cultures which practice 'seclusion' (aka 'imprisonment') of women do so essentially because of a paranoid suspicion about paternity.(*)
(As the ancient saying goes, motherhood is a fact and paternity a matter of opinion. Before DNA testing, at least.)
That wouldn't apply between humans and non-human aliens, no matter how humanoid in appearance.
As Larry Niven, you'd be about as likely to have offspring with a cabbage as with the product of an alien ecology.
(*) other factors like social prestige come into it, but that's the foundation.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And one result of that kind of paranoia in societies which practiced "seclusion" of women was the use of eunuchs, to guard the harems. Eunuchs came to be used for other purposes as well, such as for staffing civil services or as advisers to rulers. The idea being that, owning all they had to the State or their masters, they would be esp. loyal to them.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in Byzantium, eunuch officials favored their nephews!
Nepotism.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, that too has happened! A classic example being how the Orphanotrophos John the Eunuch (director of Imperial charities) introduced his nephew to the middle aged Empress Zoe, who became so besotted with him that she placed him on the throne as Michael IV (r. 1034-41). We see all three of these persons in Anderson's THE GOLDEN HORN, Vol. 1 of THE LAST VIKING.
Ad astra! Sean
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