Sourcery - Страница 51

8

In Norse mythology, the “Twilight of the Gods” refers to Ragnarok, the final conflict at the end of times between the gods and their enemies (amongst which are the Ice Giants).

9

“Annus mirabilis” translates to “year of wonder”. “Anus mirabilis” does not.

Brewer mentions that the year of wonder in question is actually known to be 1666, “memorable for the great fire of London and the successes of our arms over the Dutch.”

10

Napoleon, to his troops just before the Battle of the Pyramids: “From the summit of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you”.

11

A sideways pun (via ‘veterinary’) on the name of the famous de Medici family, who were the enlightened rulers of Renaissance Florence.

During one of those interminable “which actor should play which Discworld character if there was a movie?” discussions, Terry gave some insight in how he himself visualises the Patrician:

“I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I’ve always pictured the Patrician as looking like the father in Beetlejuice — the man also played the Emperor of Austria in Amadeus. And maybe slightly like the head bad guy in Die Hard.”

The actors Terry is thinking of are Jeffrey Jones and Alan Rickman, respectively.

12

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Stewards of Gondor also sat on a chair on the steps below the real throne, awaiting the return of the king. The prophecy in that case also included a magic sword, although Tolkien neglects to make any mention of a strawberry-shaped birthmark.

Other occurrences of the legend can be found in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time epic fantasy series, in Raymond E. Feist’s Prince of the Blood, and in David Eddings’ Belgariad quintet.

This is undoubtedly one of those cases where everybody is drawing on a much older idea. Legends about kings, swords and birthmarks are of course legion, although I must admit that so far I haven’t been able to actually find an occurrence of the ‘chair below the real throne’ concept outside of contemporary fiction.

13

A reference to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, leader of SPECTRE and arch enemy of James Bond

14

The word ‘Sator’ refers to a famous magic square (magic square, get it?) dating back to the times of the spread of Christianity in Europe. ‘Sator’ means sower or farmer. The complete square is:

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

This square is palindromic in all directions. The sentence you get reads: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas, which means, more or less: “The sower [i.e. God] in his field controls the workings of his tools [i.e. us]”. Some correspondents questioned the correctness of this translation, so if anyone has a good reference to something else I’d love to hear it.

The magic Sator square also has the property that it can be ‘unfolded’ into two “A PATER NOSTER O” strings that form a cross with the ‘N’ as a pivot element (sorry, proper graphics will have to wait until a future edition of the APF). The ‘A’ and the ‘O’ stand for alpha and omega.

15

Punning on ‘souk’, meaning a Middle Eastern marketplace; and the verb ‘soak’, meaning to charge (and get) exorbitant prices.

16

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan:

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girded round

17

‘Sherbet’ is a cooling Oriental fruit drink (also a frozen dessert) as well as a fizzy sweet powder children eat as a sweet, and which comes in a cardboard tube with a liquorice ‘straw’ at the top. To get to the sherbet you bite off the end of the liquorice and suck through it.

18

Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:

It was a miracle of rare device
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

19

Ok, lessee: Creosote parodies the proverbially rich Croesus (king of Lidya — which lies in what is now Turkey — in the 6th century BC), ‘Serif’ is a typographical term which also puns on ‘caliph’, and ‘Al Khali’ is pronounced ‘alkali’ (just covering all the bases here, as my original source put it), but probably refers to the Rub’ al Khali desert in Arabia.

Creosote itself is actually the name for an oily liquid mixture of organic chemicals, resulting as a by-product from the industrial burning of coal or wood.

20

The English word “assassins” was originally used to denote a group of fanatical Ismailis (a Shi’ite Muslim sect) who, between 1094 and 1273, worked for the creation of a new Fatimid caliphate, murdering prominent individuals. They murdered prominent individuals; hence, “assassin” in English came to mean a politically motivated murderer.

The name derives from the Arabic “hashashin” — Marco Polo and other European chroniclers claimed that the Assassins used hashish to stimulate their fearless acts. For example, Brewer writes:

“Assassins. A band of Carmathians, collected by Hassa, subah of Nishapour, called the Old Man of the Mountains, because he made Mount Lebanon his stronghold. This band was the terror of the world for two centuries, when it was put down by Sultan Bibaris. The assassins indulged in haschisch (bang), an intoxicating drink, and from this liquor received their name.”

For more information, see also the Hawkwind song ‘Hassan I Sabbah’ on their album Quark, Strangeness and Charm.

21

Creosote’s poetry is mostly based on Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaïyat of Omar Khayyam. The poem parodied on this page goes:

A book of verses underneath the bough
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou

22

Kubla Khan:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills.

23

Because John the Baptist ate those, according to Matthew 3:4 (also Mark 1:6): “And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.”

In order to avoid confusion it should perhaps be pointed out that the locusts in question are the seeds of honey locust trees, also known as carob and (from this story, of course) St John’s Bread.

24

Kubla Khan:

It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played.

25

This, and Creosote’s further compliments to Conina (“your hair is like a flock of goats that graze upon the side of Mount Gebra”, “your breasts are like the jewelled melons in the fabled gardens of dawn”, etc.) are all very similar to the compliments in the Biblical ‘Song of Solomon’:

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair;
thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks:
thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.
Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury,
whereon there hang a thousand bucklers,
all shields of mighty men.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins,
which feed among the lilies.

I did an electronic search across the entire King James bible for “jewelled melons”, but those appear to be an invention of Creosote’s. Fine by me — I was already slightly shocked to find out that “thy hair is as a flock of goats” was a genuine Biblical compliment and not something Terry had made up.

26

The Rubaïyat:

Awake! for morning in the bowl of night
Hath flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

27

A falling apple supposedly helped Newton discover the Law of Gravity, a boiling kettle helped Watt revolutionise the steam engine, and Archimedes, according to legend, discovered the principles of fluid displacement while taking a bath.

28

No connection to the original Croesus here, but rather to the Alhambra, the palace of the Emirs of Granada in 15th century Spain. As Terry says:

“Incidentally, the Seriph’s palace, the Rhoxie, is indeed a ‘resonance’ with the Alhambra — a famous Moorish palace which became a synonym for an impressive building, and later became a common cinema name as in Odeon and, yes, Roxy.”

29

“Nijel the Destroyer” may be a suitably heroic-looking name, but ‘Nijel’ is of course pronounced as ‘Nigel’, a name that is traditionally associated with wimpy rather than with heroic males.

I am told that among school-age Australians, Nigel is in fact slang for someone with no friends.

30

Someone, somewhere, hasn’t heard of the “How many does it take to change a light-bulb?”-jokes this is a reference to. This annotation is for him/her.

31

Captain Marvel, an American comic book character was able to transform himself into his superhero alter-ego by saying the magic word ‘Shazam’.