Pelerines, Baldanders, avern, Agia, thyacine, Jolenta

[avram]

Pelerines: A pelerine is an article of women’s clothing, a narrow cape. I’ve no idea how this relates to the religious order in New Sun.

Baldanders: This name apparently shows up in Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, which I think I’ve got a copy of somewhere. The name was coined by a German shoemaker named Hans Sachs, for a passage in the Odyssey describing a shape-changing being. Later used for another shape-changer by Grimmelshausen, in his The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1669). And then there’s that guy on LiveJournal.

avern: An old Latin word associated with death and the underworld. I found this on a page listing definitions for obscure words in New Sun, so I don’t need to be looking most of them up anymore.

thyacine: Severian says the draft animals pulling their fiacre avoid Agia, “dancing to one side as though she were a thyacine.” I’m guessing this is a typo for thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial native to Australia, sometimes called the “Tasmanian tiger” or “Tasmanian wolf”.

Agia: Saint Agia is the patron saint of lawsuits. Agia’s brother Agilus is also named for a saint.

Jolenta: Hungarian saint, known for good works and helping the poor. I see that she was related to Saint Hedwig, which might be a tie-in to the way Wolfe’s Jolenta was transformed for the stage, except that Hedwig and the Angry Inch post-dates the Book of the New Sun by more than a decade.

Allowin’s Necklace: A torture device in New Sun. I wasn’t able to find anything about Allowin with Google; too many people have misspelled or truncated “allowing”.

Notable line: “Ymar is dead, and such memories of his as lived on for a time in the blood of his successors are long faded.” [Page 110 of the Orb edition.] This may be the first direct hint of the nature of Autarchal succession.

And of course, Severian’s dream next to Baldanders is a premonition of their fight later.

Comments

[hissilliness.livejournal.com]

I'm coming in late, so this may be redundant, but Wolfe did a lot of your work for you in Castle of Days, which has a nice glossary of obscure words, as well as many other goodies.

Pelerine

[(Anonymous)]

Pelerine is the feminine form of pelerin, the French word for pilgrim. Pilgrim, pelerin and peregrine all have the same Latin root. See http://www.thefreedictionary.com/peregrine.