the wombatcave

First impressions, despoilerized. ( Read more... )

Apropos of nothing in particular-- well, maybe reminded by commentary on the new HP:OotP trailer-- until the HP movies started to come out, I had a vague but persistent notion that all of the references to Hermione's troublesome hair meant that she had partial African ancestry. (She would've been in good company with the British royal family.)

Still playing with HTML columns/colors because they're fun. This is largely based on bad_penny's original comparison between DS14 and Tanith Lee's story "A Lynx With Lions". The latter has been reprinted several times in its own right, but afaik its first appearance was as pp132-161 in Lee's book Cyrion, NYC: Daw 1982, so I'm using the pagination from there.

Mostly what I've done is color-code the different sections and type in enough additional material from Lee to show how the original scene flowed together before being recycled, aside from the underlying plot device. Some of the overlaps are relatively piecemeal but still describe the same specific action with many of the same specific words. I can't decide whether it's overly persnickety to mark all of the individual small bits of shared vocabulary, vs. the entire lines that frame them.( Read more... )

Well, now that DS14 (and probably the rest of the Trilogy) has vanished from Schnoogle as well as Google caches, I can finally stop semi-compulsively trying to track down bits of Tanith Lee in that chapter. (There may well've been more Tanith elsewhere. One chapter was quite enough to work on.)

Pretty good timing, actually-- Kyouken 5.1 just arrived yesterday, so hopefully I can start on the raw transcription within the next few days. Maybe. We'll see. (Vexed muttering that Kyouken 5.2 was out of stock... guess I'll have to find another source and re-order.)

Endnote from DS6: "5) Lycanthe [sic]: The concept comes from Tanith Lee's Lycanthia, in which Lycanthes are symbols scratched in snow to keep werewolves away. I have retained the crossed-X shape."

More bibliographical info: Lycanthia, or The Children of Wolves, NYC: Daw, 1981. ( Read more... )

I'm having one of my periodic eyerolls at some of the stuff at the Harry Potter Lexicon. Their contributors often display a great deal of hard work and creative thinking, but sometimes they don't get the proportions right. One particular bit that's lodged under my skin for ages is the persistence of their claim that Ginny Weasley's full first name (Ginevra) is an Italianate version of "Guinevere". It isn't. This isn't to say that JK Rowling might have thought it was-- I have no idea whether they've asked her, though they may well have the access to've done so-- but even if she did, it still isn't. Or at least Hanks and Hodges don't think so, instead describing it as the Italian form of "Genevieve" (namesake examplar, the patron saint of Paris, a nun who rallied her fellow Franks to resist the invading Huns; speculatively traced to Celtic roots meaning "woman" and "tribe/people"?). Of course, during the brief interval just now when I couldn't locate my copy of Hanks and Hodges to double-check my memory, I ended up checking my old paperback of Dunkling/Gosling instead, which does support the origin from "Guinevere", and through it (presumably) to the various Findabhair/Gwynhwyfar tangle of etymologies and Kewpie-heroines. Bah.

Of course, now that I've just imploded my intro, onward to snippiness about their listings of freshly dug-up twigs from the Black family tree. ( Read more... )

JK Rowling meets TS Eliot; parody ensues.