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[bookelfe]

Part of the idea in doing an Epic Diana Wynne Jones Roundup was to get a little bit of my DWJ love out of my system so I could talk about other things!

That, uh, kind of backfired, as what it mostly ended up doing was made me want to reread a whole bunch of DWJ books I hadn't read in a while. THIS WAS IN NO WAY A PREDICTABLE OUTCOME shut up.

Comments

[kattahj]

I recently re-read Eight Days of Luke too, and it really is awesome. I particularly love cranky Astrid, for some reason. :-) I think the only thing that irks me about that book is that Mr. Chew has two hands. (While with The Game I was all "What have you done to my Mercury?" May be a tad too attached to classical gods, me.)

[bookelfe]

Astrid is so awesome! I mean, I am ridiculously attached to DWJ's cranky ladies anyways (Awful! Helen! Hildy!) but I especially liked Astrid because you could see so clearly how she gets to be the way she is.

Ah, but! In the little note at the end, DWJ points out that you only ever see one of Mr. Chew's hands mentioned at one time! Uh, I would not have noticed that at all if she had not pointed it out. But I think she is trying to imply that one of his hands is illusory, like Wednesday's other eye?

(Hee! I was a little that way in The Game, too. Well, half that, and half cracking up at 'Mercer', since I know someone who's been writing a contemporary Mercury using just that name!)

[kattahj]

Huh. My edition doesn't seem to have a note at the end. What else does it say?

[bookelfe]

*goes to check*

Okay, so officially it's an Afterword, and it pretty much spells out all the mythology in the story. About Tew, it says: "The main thing that is known is that Tew has lost (or will lose - time is strange where gods are concerned) his arm trying to chain the monstrous wolf Fenri. Alert readers will have noticed that David's attention is generally just fixed on one of Mr. Chew's arms. Gods are good at hiding their attributes." Then it has the Wedding/Woden section, which gives the general background and points out that "he used to ride an eight-legged white horse, which naturally appears nowadays as a white car, driven by one of his daughters, the Valkyries." She doesn't say much on Thor and the Freys, just that Thor was god of thunder and a popular god and Frey and Freya were gods of sex and fertility

[kattahj]

Okay, then, I grudgingly accept her explanation. *g* (And is Tew the Anglicized name for Tyr? Oh boy, I thought I'd gotten used to all the weird spelling differences, but that one was new to me.)