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Jerry Friedman to Carolyn Kunin on coincidences
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Carolyn wrote:
> By the way, if I'm reading incorrectly, how can you (or anyone else)
> explain that G = C = K = S lead me, via J & H, to "kinbote"?
How about with an example of a parallel coincidence (combined
with venting one of my minor idees fixes)?
There are very few other novels that contain an index. The most
notable, I think, is /The Lord of the Rings/. If we follow
that clue, we find kinbote! Isildur refers to the One Ring, the
very center of the novel, as /weregild/ for his father. Tolkien,
as an Anglo-Saxon scholar, of course knew "kinbote" as another
way to say that.
We also find "dwarves" ("Karlik"--thanks, Alexey!), elves
(alfear), a versipel (Beorn, mentioned very briefly), the
extremely rare word "woodwose" (Tolkien uses only the second
element of this compound), and a lot of rhymed poetry of doubtful
quality. More thematically, we find an incognito pretender,
greed for the precious but not rightfully owned object, and a
sublime treatment of exiles' nostalgia.
I admit that I have no idea whether VN read /The Lord of the
Rings/. I do know that Edmund Wilson reviewed it very
unfavorably.
The only purpose in my coming up with a Tolkien-based
interpretation of /Pale Fire/ would be satire, but I would bet
that for every link to J&H you can come up with, one could
find a link to LOTR--or to many other books, but I don't
know them as well. So I have no trouble believing in such
coincidences.
Jerry Friedman apologizes for his second post of the day.
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> By the way, if I'm reading incorrectly, how can you (or anyone else)
> explain that G = C = K = S lead me, via J & H, to "kinbote"?
How about with an example of a parallel coincidence (combined
with venting one of my minor idees fixes)?
There are very few other novels that contain an index. The most
notable, I think, is /The Lord of the Rings/. If we follow
that clue, we find kinbote! Isildur refers to the One Ring, the
very center of the novel, as /weregild/ for his father. Tolkien,
as an Anglo-Saxon scholar, of course knew "kinbote" as another
way to say that.
We also find "dwarves" ("Karlik"--thanks, Alexey!), elves
(alfear), a versipel (Beorn, mentioned very briefly), the
extremely rare word "woodwose" (Tolkien uses only the second
element of this compound), and a lot of rhymed poetry of doubtful
quality. More thematically, we find an incognito pretender,
greed for the precious but not rightfully owned object, and a
sublime treatment of exiles' nostalgia.
I admit that I have no idea whether VN read /The Lord of the
Rings/. I do know that Edmund Wilson reviewed it very
unfavorably.
The only purpose in my coming up with a Tolkien-based
interpretation of /Pale Fire/ would be satire, but I would bet
that for every link to J&H you can come up with, one could
find a link to LOTR--or to many other books, but I don't
know them as well. So I have no trouble believing in such
coincidences.
Jerry Friedman apologizes for his second post of the day.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm