[Dragaera] *slaps head about Tukko* *AGYAR SPOILERS*

[Jerry Friedman]

--- On Wed, 10/15/08, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, Jerry Friedman wrote:
...
> > --- On Tue, 10/14/08, Philip Hart
> <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > ...
> >> On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, Alexx Kay wrote:
> >>
> >>> There is little-to-no textev on this.  I
> *suspect* that 'vampire' and
> >>> 'undead' are both rather poor translations
> >> into English of Dragaeran
> >>> concepts that have no exact analogues in our
> culture.
> >>
> >>
> >> I had been wondering whether perhaps there was one
> >> term, which the
> >> Translator had chosen to render as
> >> "vampire" in the earlier-appearing
> >> Texts but then switched to "undead" except for
> >> Sethra to be consistent.
> >> Maybe there are as you say two terms, and both
> >> have about the same
> >> meaning but one is popular and the other
> >> technical.  Vlad in early
> >> Narratives uses the former, as does Savn.  Paarfi
> >> I suspect uses the latter exclusively.
> >
> > I hope you don't mind if I repeat this quotation
> > from
> > /Athyra/, Chapter 6, which I think clearly indicates
> > that there are two different words and that vampires
> > are a subset of the undead (as far as Vlad knows).
> 
> I wrote "had been wondering" with your find in
> mind.

Sorry, I didn't get that "had been" implied you had
stopped, and moved on to another possibility.

> But I'm not sure the below is as strong as you argue.
> 
> >
> > "Moreover, he is undead himself, which proves
> > that he
> > is a skilled necromancer, if I hadn't known it
> > before."
> >
> > "Undead?  You want me to believe His Lordship is
> > a vampire?"
> >
> > "A vampire?  Hmmm.  Maybe.  Do you know of any
> > cases of mysterious death, blood drained, all that?"
> 
> Imagine that there are folktales about vampires, stories
> that Fenarians and Teckla (and even Jhereg) tell around
> campfires. But those tales are untrue, or at best
> distortions of the truth
> about undead.  Vlad knows Loraan is undead; he wants Savn
> to get over the "his Lordship" business; so when S
> asks the above V doesn't say, "No, that's just a myth",
> he asks S a logical 
> followup.  V's esp. respectfully since he himself had
> believed in vampires as of _Taltos_.

I hadn't considered that you might mean not only that
"vampire" was a popular word, but that it also carried
erroneous implications.

Given your scenario, Vlad's behavior seems very strange.
He finds out that Savn believes the undead are "vampires",
meaning some kind of blood-drinker.  The point he needs
to make is that Savn should accept that Loraan is
undead even though the region isn't littered with
exsanguinated corpses.  So why does he bring up the
idea at all?  Why not just say, "Could be, but there
are other sorts of undead"?  And then go straight into
the bit about Sethra not needing much blood.

Asking about blood-drained bodies suggests to me that
Vlad is hoping there might be evidence of a vampire
around, which would strengthen his case.

Anyway, I admit that the passage I cited wasn't as
convincing as I thought (except that there are two
different words).  But it seems to me there's a
simple story.  Sethra was alive, and ten or twenty
thousand years ago she died and returned as an
undead blood-drinker.  It's not stated clearly
enough to hold Steve to (there's no such thing),
but it makes sense of everything.

Jerry Friedman