Also known as the Divorce or the Mommy And Daddy Are Going To Live Apart.
2. Voyage of the Fox Rider is also a tale which takes place before the Great War of the Ban, hence, the Rûpt are free to roam about in daylight as well as night, although it is told that they prefer to do their deeds in the dark of night rather than in the light of day.
To clarify: this story takes place after The Dragonstone but before everything else in the series.
3. This tale was reconstructed from the fragments of one of the logs of the Elvenship Eroean. I have in several places filled in the gaps with notes from other references, but in the main the tale is true to its source.
... in other words, he's going to pretend that this all actually happened in the far distant past. Which was a little cloying when Tolkien did it, but is torturous when it's in this series.
4. As I did in The Eye of the Hunter, I have used transliterated archaic Greek to represent the magical language of the Black Mages. But in the case of all other Mages, I have used Latin.
I wonder what the Greeks did to piss off McKiernan.
I'm also not sure why he's using real languages for the mages. He's made up pretend languages for everybody else, so why do the mages ALONE get transliteration? Why not have the Elves speak Welsh? Or the Dwarves speak German?
And before you ask: no, this is not influenced by the Latin-based spells of Harry Potter. This came out four years before that.
5. There are many instances where in the press of the moment, the Pysks, Dwarves, Men, Mages, Elves, and others spoke in their native tongues; yet to avoid burdensome translations, where necessary I have rendered their words in Pellarion, the Common Tongue of Mithgar.
Also known as ENGLISH.
Yeah, in these fantasy stories, there's always this one language that everybody speaks, no matter where they're from or how old they are. So presumably that is what these people speak to people who aren't the same species as them.
And I'm not sure why Pellarion is the Common Tongue... but the political and theological aspects of Mithgar confuse the hell out of me.
However, some words and phrases do not lend themselves to translation, and these I’ve left unchanged or, in special cases, I have enclosed in angle brackets a substitute term which gives the “flavor” of the word (i.e., <power>, <fire>, and the like).
So why doesn't he use the word "magic"? Seriously, that is what those bracket words usually mean.
Additionally, other words may look to be in error, but indeed are correct—e.g., DelfLord is but a single word, though a capital L nestles among its letters.
McKiernan... that is what hyphens are for.
Also note that swivelled, traveller, and several other similar words are written in the Pendwyrian form of Pellarion and are not misspelled.
So Pendwyr is Great Britain. Thanks.
6. The Elven language of Sylva is rather archaic and formal. To capture this flavor, I have properly used thee and thou, hast, doth, and the like; however, in the interest of readability, I have tried to do so in a minimal fashion, eliminating some of the more archaic terms.
Okay... not sure how an independent language that doesn't seem to be related to any others could be "archaic"... and usually a language isn't formal, the WAY it's used is (such as Japan's honorifics). But I'll bite.
I could buy this if the Elves were only talking to each other this way, so the archaic flavor was just in Sylva. But look at this quote from later in the book: “Ah, but were there no dream, chieran, then I would not have met thee, at least not this soon.”
Clearly he's speaking English... sorry, "Common," because then "chieran" would be translated as "lover." And it's confirmed that the woman he's speaking to doesn't know any Sylva. At all. So why do the Elves speak COMMON in an archaic formal way with thees and thous?
8. For the curious, the w in Rwn takes on the sound of uu (w is after all a double-u), which in turn can be said to sound like oo (as in spoon). Hence, Rwn is not pronounced Renn, but instead is pronounced Roon, or Rune.
Is this a Mage language thing? Wait, it can't be, because they only speak Greek and Latin... so where did the name come from? WHY AM I SO CONFUSED?
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