The Arimaspian Legacy

Publication(s)

Wolfe's comments from the Introduction to Starwater Strains

Nick Gevers pointed out that "The Arimaspian Legacy" should have 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 thieving 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.
  • A friend of Wolfe's, David Taylor, provided inspiration for the character David in The Arimaspian Legacy. In a Q and A style interview posted on Fantastic Metropolis, Wolfe made the following comment. "Of course I have ten thousand memories connected with books. How about being introduced to Dickens by my friend David Taylor, who had been reading Pickwick and talked like Mr. Jingle when he described the book? David has been dead for more than 40 years, but you will find him as David Arimaspian in my story “The Arimaspian Legacy."
  • The story Slow Children at Play is a sequel to this one, with the same narrator.

Unresolved Questions

  • What is the resolution that the narrator makes every year "at about this time"? To find the English copy David made of the book?
  • If so, why at this time of year? It seems to be around Christmas, the time of the winter solstice. That would give him the longest sunless period to search for the book without fear of the griffins. It also fits with the final quote about "Christmas would be a good time for everybody."

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