Jul-26-2012, 02:48 AM (UTC)
(Jul-24-2012, 02:53 PM (UTC))fool-ish Wrote: I thought the same 'thul..all to do with spoiling the wizardwood hull. Now, I'm not so sure, though that could still be a small part of it, maybe?
Possibly. I have to admit that I hadn't even considered the wizardwood issue as I'd just thought it was a 'sailor thing', though I didn't know *what* thing (being a soft landlubber as I am


Another little thing that came up in the Newsgroup within that same conversation was the subject of 'the sympathy bell' which Grag Tenira employed as a warning during The Mad Ship. Do any of you recall it? I am looking forward to taking a peak where it was mentioned but any LST reads I've done in the past, well, the fact that it was a sympathy bell just hadn't even been a blip on my radar.



I know that some of you have read Patrick Rothfuss where apparently sympathy is used as a magic item? I am speaking here of what I don't know, and merely paraphrasing a comment made by a Newsgroup member who has read him, so feel free to explain this spoiler-free, if possible!

With regards to this subject of sympathy/sympathy magic/the sympathy bell etc, this is what Robin had to say on the matter:
Quote: I think it came to me because at that time my daughter was learning to play harp. I often accompanied her to her lessons. One day her instructor pointed out that when she played a note, his harp's sound box was in sympathy making a sort of shadow sound.
But even that wasn't the first place I'd heard of that. The notion of 'sympathetic' magic is actually pretty old. The 'voodoo' doll in which a doll made with items from a person can transmit sympathetic pain to the target for example. Or the superstition that if you whistle on the deck of a ship, you can 'whistle up a storm' is a sort of like-makes-like magic. Ditto for putting a hatch cover upside down on the deck of a ship. It might make the whole ship turn over!
And 'sympathy' magic often works in our very real world. Some men get sympathetic labor pains when their wives are in labor!
I found it all extremely interesting


"I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves."