Brian Boyd to Barrie Akin: “Great find, Barrie, and a perfect example of the “straw and fluff” VN said he gathered for his novels. Perhaps just a grace note, but a very graceful one, and perhaps more.”
Jansy Mello to B.Akin: “… I agree with you, some of the apparent coincidences are not purely accidental…(“Earle Rounald”, “Count Ottar”, Alexander Pope). Such accretions, it seems to me, are not really “blind alleys” but part of the weave, components of the very texture of Pale Fire, as details to be caressed…”

Jansy Mello: I selected these lines about Barrie Akin’s new find and Boyd’s comments concerning VN’s indication of Torfaeus, because I’d been recently exploring Nabokov’s various references to the word “texture” in PF and in ADA.  In my opinion, more than the “straw and fluff”* mentioned by Brian, the inclusion of certain references is part of a weave or belong to its underside. They add to the texture (the historical connection brought up by Priscilla Meyer) when “texture” is used as “textile” and, as expected in VN, with the word’s other meanings equally attached to it.

I also think that Brian  departed from a different work by Torfaeus (“the Alexander Pope who translated the Icelander Torfaeus's on the Orkneys”) than the one selected by Priscilla Meyer (“Of his many works,… perhaps the most important is his History of Vinland”) and, coincidence or not, both are important additions to the “texture” of PF. I find it hard to reach a single interpretation, meaning or truth in any of VN’s works, although I hesitate to call them “open works” (they tend to infinite regress, no?)

“Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one’s attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.” …(CK foreword, Pale Fire)

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* Alvin Toffler’s Playboy (1964) interview: Nabokov: All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.” Cf. also: “Ada, the Bog and the Garden: or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat:Sources and Places in Ada.” by B.Boyd.