Re: Tin Inn & Apple Lane revisited

From: Julian Lord <jlord_at_free.fr>
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 09:41:32 +0100

Hi Jane,

Hmmmm ...

Not a Glorantha Digest subscriber perchance ... ?

& not necessarily v. receptive to / impressed by suggestions to "take it to the GD" ?

I'll CC this message to the GD anyway ...

> To be fair, I was asking at least four interrelated
> questions at once.
>
> 1) What was the meaning of Tin at the time Apple Lane
> was written?
> 2) What is the meaning in the New (HW/HQ) Glorantha?

Which are GD-type questions, of course ... :-/

Quick esoterical answer : it's the _blue_ Sky metal, suggesting that it has the following possible origins :

1. Sky contaminated by Water. This is probably the answer that makes most sense from the esoterical POV for several reasons. It's ability to alloy with copper to produce bronze, a new metal, sounds like a Water Rune power of blending to me.
2. I might speculate that tin is itself an alloy of gold and quicksilver. The Heortlings may have some ancient & v. obscure myth of Dayzatar and Tar-Helera ? The colour of tin is in their opinion a result of Heler's invasion of the Sky, anyway.
3. And then there's the ES info that it's simply Dayzatar's metal, which can HARDLY be discounted, despite the suspicious blue colour.

> 3) What was the intention of the writers: why did they
> pick Tin?

Obviously, for the alliteration, & no other good reason ...

... which doesn't mean that no retroactive "intention" can be found ... :-)

> 4) How can we use any of the above to make up a reason
> for a Tin Roof that makes Apple Lane make sense and
> "fit"?

Is it necessarily a good idea to have Apple Lane making "sense" ? I'm a little unconvinced.

Sure, I'd be happy to know something about it's ecology, to wit how in hell could this place possibly survive ?

There just HAS to be a tin mine on the tula, of course, suggesting (to me) a conjunction of Water, Earth, and Sky (hmmm ... big juicy golden apples ... sounds good to me !), so suggesting that Apple Lane is an old Golden Age community that somehow survived.

I'd guess it was inhabited by nonhumans after the dragonkill.

As a mad EWF-ey suggestion, could it possibly be an ancient "city" of the Gold Wheel Dancers ?

> And I still think the results I got are such that with
> a little insane imagination (pass the mead, but not
> the magic mushrooms)

... the magic apples / apple pie / cider / applejack / calvados / apple brandy / apple pancakes (cooked in a tin pan) /... ?

:-)

> we could quite easily have Apple
> Lane as a centre of EWF weirdness

In GD mode, I'd guess that Apple Lane has been a weird place since the end of the Green Age, because that's what Glorantha's magical ecology would suggest, a priori.

Less esoterically, I'd prefer even the EWF finding the place weird ... ;-)

> being used by
> Tarkalor to help him win hand of the the Feathered
> Horse Queen. Except that we're still being promised a
> novel about Tarkalor, and I'd hate to spoil it.

I think the suggestion may be a little too prosaic from the Apple Lane weirdness POV. Nothing wrong with it otherwise, and I must admit that I *do* like the idea that all Kings of Dragon Pass MUST go and do something suitably weird in Apple Lane ...

:-)

cheers,

Julian Lord

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