Re: The Fall of Whitewall

From: Roger <r.f.mccarthy_at_YwC81XV2gugUPE_IJUq-77xqzVj11nwCX7X-BwYSF4NQmEmTaEcsvOvIm12kodS>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:40:57 +0000

On the Fimbulwinter not being registered in KoS other than by Minaryth Blue's 'Ashart dies of heat' (IIRC) this can be explained by the event being so well-known that nobody has to refer directly to it in documents written by and for people who had lived through it.

The analogy would be someone from London leaving a note saying 'September 19th 1940: Jennie killed by bomb'.

A Londoner who'd lived through 1940 would not need to be told 'it was a German bomb dropped in the Blitz, just after the Battle of Britain, during the Second World War' as he would automatically know all this context just from the date.

Leslie Alcock in Arthur's Britain makes a similar point about Gildas's de Excidio mentioning the Battle of Badon as happening 44 years before but that the book never mentions Arthur who is supposed to have won the battle and been a hugely important figure during Gildas's lifetime.

Alcock comes up with the analogy of Victorian clergyman writing a sermon in 1859 and mentioning in passing the battle of Waterloo - which he would hardly have to point out to the audience had been fought against the French and won by the Duke of Wellington who was subsequently Prime Minister as in 1859 all this context would have all been immediately invoked by the word 'Waterloo'.

(I personally am an Arthur sceptic so don't buy this myself, but it is a good analogy).

Having the Fimbulwinter missing from the Composite History of Dragon Pass is slightly more troubling as that is meant to be a synoptic history - but it is hardly the only gaping hole in CHoDP (what really happened to Kallyr is an equivalent one).

I think what Greg actually was doing with KoS was to make a very post-modern point about there being no true narratives and what documents choose not to say being as important as what they do say.

So if the CHoDP is intended to be a document compiled after Argrath's conquest of Tarsh and other formerly Lunar lands and to express a new ideology of reconciliation and rebuilding, one would hardly expect the authors to dwell overmuch on atrocities in which the kings new subjects probably had a major part.