Eathel: Book Allusions

Allusions not tied to a specific chapter or segment.

The wish, perhaps even the need, to glamorize violence and romanticize warrior has been part of human psychology since the dawn of civilization. The oldest cave painting in the world is an ancient mural, discovered on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, in 2017. Daubed in red pigment on limestone walls, a cartoonish scene shows human like figures with spears attacking wild boar and buffalo. It is at least 40,000 years old: at the time it was painted, Homo sapiens still shared the earth with Neanderthals and at the end of the most recent Ice Age lay two dozen millennia in the future. Yet one glance at the image shows us that a straight thematic line runs from the prehistoric humans who discovered the cave in Sulawesi to the themes of war stories from The Iliad to Saving Private Ryan. The compulsion to process brutality is the oldest theme in art.

– Dan Jones on Roland and Arthur.

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“You die, I die,” said Serixiphina.

“I die, you die,” said Eathel

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“You’ll see, he’ll set the world alight yet.”

– William de Tancarville, Chamberlain of Normandy
   on his cousin, William Marshal

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	Experience, next to thee I owe,
But guide; not following thee, I had remained
in ignorance, thou open'st wisdom's way,
And given access, though secret she retire.
And I perhaps am secret; heaven is high,
High and remote to see from thense district
Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps
May have diverted from continued watch
Our great forbidder, safe with all his spies
About him.

– John Milton. Paradise Lost, Book IX, starting line 780.

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At the age of seven he could
Already grasp and did understand
Different tongues and courteousness
So his father the Marshall did
Take him and did then entrust 
Tristan to a wise man, he sent
Them to foreign lands to learn of
Foreign tongues and to begin
To study these in books intensively

Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan and Isolde, verses 2057-2065¹

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	Not a soul	
But felt a fever of the mad, and play’d
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the King’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
Was the first man that leap’d; cried, “Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.”

The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. William Shakespeare (emphasis added)

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Thou Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful which he himself hath not imagined.

– J. R. R. Tolkien
   The Silmarillion

Notes

1. Gottfried von Strassburg and Ulrich von Türheim. Tristan and Isolde. Ca. 1215–1250. Manuscript. Bavarian State Library. Illuminated Manuscripts from Europe. Accessed March 11, 2025. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.18407.