The Arimaspian Legacy

The Arimaspian Legacy (1987)

Publication(s)

  • First publication
    • Winter Solstice chapbook from Cheap Street, 1987
  • Wolfe collection(s)

Wolfe's comments from the Introduction to Starwater Strains

Nick Gevers pointed out that "The Arimaspian Legacy" should ahve been in Innocents Aboard. He's right. It, too, was a Cheap Street greeting card.

Summary

David "Arimaspian," an astronomer and book collector, discovers a book containing the secrets of life encoded in sunspots.

Analysis

  • From http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prae/ho_10.230.1.htm:
    The scene depicted is the myth of the Arimaspians, who were believed to have been one-eyed horsemen inhabiting a land beyond the Black Sea. The Arimaspians were involved in a perpetual struggle against griffins over gold, guarded by these fantastic animals. In the mid-seventh century B.C., Aristeas of Proconnesos wrote the Arimaspeia, a poem narrating his travels in eastern Europe. Later ancient writers, like Aeschylus and Herodotus, drew their knowledge of the Arimaspian myth from this poem.
  • The story opens with a quote about the Arimaspians from Herotodus, and ends with a quote about them from Milton's Paradise Lost. In the latter, the Devil is compared to a griffin pursuing a theiving Arimaspian.
  • From Wikipedia entry on the Scythian languages: '..Herodotus explains the name of the mythical one-eyed tribe Arimaspoi as a compound of the Scythian words arima, meaning "one", and spu, meaning "eye."'
  • David seems to have learned more than man was meant to know, and he is punished by falling to earth when the dawn sunlight strikes him. Griffins are known in mythology as guardians of the divine and associated with the sun. A griffin pulled Apollo's chariot across the sky. It also pulled the chariot of Nemesis.
  • The story Slow Children at Play is a sequel to this one, with the same narrator.
  • Sources of quotes
  • Meanings of names
  • References to other works
  • Theories about what happens under the surface, what the narrator isn't telling us, who the narrator is and when and why s/he is telling the story, what the whole thing "means," etc.
    If there are multiple or competing theories, each one should be given a name with a three-bang (!!!) header; if the page begins to get out-of-hand from the size of these, as could happen in a few cases, they should be shuffled off to their own page(s).
  • Etc.

Unresolved Questions

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