jmtorres: image of a white ipod with an unbitten apple logo from Diane Duane's Young Wizards novels, text "I want a WizPod" (young wizards)
jmtorres ([personal profile] jmtorres) wrote2011-10-16 11:11 pm

this small, small world we live in

I just pm'd [personal profile] dduane, author of a number of books that had a formative effect during my childhood, because hey, she commented on my journal once, it's not unreasonable to think she might answer a question for me.

Sometimes I feel like the internet draws the constellations in closer around us, the better to reach up and touch.

ETA: I appear to have just lost an hour researching medieval Welsh literature, because I wanted to see the full context of the quote "I have been a word in a book" from the beginning of So You Want To Be A Wizard, which is cited as being from the Song of Taliesin in The Black Book of Caermarthen. I, I eventually found the full piece, the lovely poem The Battle of the Trees, which is quite portentous title given the *flaaaaail* history of everything in the Wizards 'verse, but also not in the Black Book of Carmarthen, it's in the Book of Taliesin, which as far as I can tell is a separate book entirely and currently dated to about two centuries later. But it's also in part a preservation copy of earlier work? But I can't find the poem at all in the 1906 translation of the Black Book of Carmarthen, although I understand that's incomplete. Does anyone know more about this than me? Because right now it looks to me like So You Want To Be A Wizard misattributed and I.

Well, the plot of that book hinges on a misprint, that all books have them, even the book in which everything in the universe is written down, so, I'm guessing if it is a misattribution and not me failing at internet researching Welsh literature in my free time, that it's intentional, but I just. Flail. I don't even know. *hands*

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting