The Name of the Wind: Chapter 1 (Part II)

Chapter One: A Place for Demons (Part II)

In which Galatea suspects sexism and gets cranky over conlangs.

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Previously, in The Name of the Wind, a bunch of small-town folk exchanged small-town stories in a small-town bar until one of them turned up bloodied to hell and carrying the corpse of a giant demon spider.  It was almost as exciting as it sounds.

The next section is dialogue-free and quite well-written.  After the townsfolk have left to deal with the scrael, with Kote's help, he returns to the inn and finishes cleaning up.  He thinks about the stars, he polishes bottles, he scrubs the floor, and overall it's a quiet, atmospheric break after the action of the last section.  In fact, aside from an aside about Kote's chosen name - which we've already discussed so I'm skipping it - the only bit worth sporking is this:

At the end of an hour’s work, the water in his bucket was still clean enough for a lady to wash her hands in.

Ladies And Gentlemen: 1

These books have a women problem.  It won't become obvious for a while, because until we're well into the narrative proper the book is a total sausage-fest, so there just aren't enough women to fuck them up properly.  For now, trust me when I say that specifying that a "lady" could wash her hands in the mop water, rather than anyone with half a sense of hygiene, is a tiny symptom of what will become a Big Problem.

We also get this:

As he turned the bottles in his long, graceful hands the familiar motion eased a few tired lines from his face, making him seem younger, certainly not yet thirty. Not even near thirty. Young for an innkeeper. Young for a man with so many tired lines remaining on his face.

I Have An Interrogative: 5

The conceit here is that, to all outward appearances, Kvothe is a world-weary fellow somewhere around early middle age in the framing narrative.  More than occasionally, Rothfuss will point out that he sometimes looks much younger than people assume him to be, but the impression given is still that many long and difficult years have passed since the events of the narrative proper - enough time for their weight to bend Kvothe into someone old-before-his-time and to twist his story into the realm of pure legend.

It doesn't work.  But we'll get to that.

Kvothe goes up to his room - described as austere with effectively minimal prose - and is visited by a "dark and charming" man named Bast, who calls Kvothe "Reshi".

I Have An Interrogative: 6

My guess is that "Reshi" means "teacher" and is a bastardisation of "rishi", which is a name for a Hindu sage, but we never find out for certain.  Unlike "Blackened body of God" from earlier in the chapter, this is a clumsy worldbuilding detail: Kvothe and Bast very clearly have a student/teacher relationship, and so it's easy to deduce that "Reshi" either means "teacher" or is some kind of honorific.  Instead, we get this:

Reshi was another of the innkeeper’s names, a nickname almost.

You don't say.

Maybe we'll find out in book 3 that "Reshi" means something crucially important and subtle, and that sentence will be retroactively justified.  Honestly, I doubt it; I think this is just Rothfuss assuming our hands need holding.  Either way, justifying the name invites questions about it that really don't need to be asked right now.

Bast and Kvothe banter, and we get a taste of what Rothfuss thinks witty repartee between friends looks like:

“Today, master, I learned why great lovers have better eyesight than great scholars.”

“And why is that, Bast?” Kote asked, amusement touching the edges of his voice.

[...]

“Well Reshi, all the rich books are found inside where the light is bad. But lovely girls tend to be out in the sunshine and therefore much easier to study without risk of injuring one’s eyes.”

Ladies And Gentlemen: 2

Bast is a shameless Casanova, and I wouldn't mind it as a character trait except that his life has two things in it: Kvothe and boning.  I'm not sure he ever actually refers to a woman by her name: it's always someone's wife or daughter, or a "lovely girl" - and Kvothe encourages him.  I actually quite like Bast as a character, but his incessant womanising is a really sour note to an otherwise likeable character, made worse when we find out that this fantasy society as a whole gets very regressive about women and sex.  What's just fun and games to Bast could easily be ruining his conquests' chances at good marriages and decent lives.

Kvothe tells Bast about the scrael, and Bast is appropriately horrified.  Actually, so am I.

Remember I mentioned a "weird appropriative thing" Rothfuss does when it comes to making stuff up for the Kingkiller-verse?  It's problematic with the tinkers, and it turns out it's equally problematic with the scrael/scraeling (it's called both over the course of the chapter).  In the real world, "skraeling" is an archaic term for the native people of North America and Greenland, coined by the Norse during their conquest.  Unsurprisingly, given the whole "conquest" thing, relationships between the Norse invaders and the proto-Inuit they called "skraeling" were kind of on the bloody side, making "skraeling" pretty much the Norse equivalent of "redskin".  And naming a fictional unstoppable evil force after a real indigenous group who were slaughtered when their land was violently claimed by conquerors?  Not cool, Rothfuss.

In fairness, I doubt Rothfuss knew all the baggage behind the word "skraeling".  I didn't - I came across it by accident researching this post.  And I do get that coming up with good made-up words when human language is already so ridiculously vast and complex is hard.  I was once in charge of naming a fictional landmass for a D&D campaign, and when my brain reached for a collection of syllables that sounded pleasing but appropriately non-English, I came up with "Samovar".  I deserved every joke I got for that name, including the part where the group's cartographer drew us a map in the shape of an actual samovar.  Because it was a D&D campaign and a samovar is an inanimate object, it didn't really matter and was ultimately all good fun.

In Rothfuss' case, he should have looked the damn thing up.  This isn't close to the only time Rothfuss reaches for a fantasy word and comes up with something wildly inappropriate, and every single instance is a shining example of why, when you're making shit up for your epic fantasy series, you reach for the nearest dictionary/encyclopaedia/search engine and make sure you aren't about to call your world-ending demonic force "Menominee".

And so, riding in on the back of a giant demon spider, we get a giant demon of a count:

Mother Tongue: 1

This is for every time Rothfuss fucks up his conlang.  It's gonna get ugly, folks.

Kvothe instructs Bast on what to say if anyone should notice that the innkeeper is a surprisingly dab hand at stitching up demon wounds, and we find out that Kvothe was present at the scrael's disposal to make sure that it was burned/buried/destroyed in the right way.  They reiterate how awful the scrael is and Bast points out that there will almost certainly be more of them.  Kvothe makes a poor joke about wishing he'd kept the thing to drum up more business at the inn, but at least he acknowledges that it's a poor joke.  As with fairly large sections of this chapter, it's actually pretty decent writing.

Then Kvothe suggests that Bast must be bored in such a small town, and Bast says there are plenty of wives and daughters to amuse him.

Ladies And Gentlemen: 3

It's the phrasing of it that bothers me, both in that Bast has to describe women in terms of the men they're attached to, and in that the daughters are probably quite young and the wives are, y'know, wives.  These are not women Bast should be pursuing, and Kvothe certainly shouldn't be nodding along and smiling.

Kvothe hints that there's about to be a roaring trade in iron, and tells Bast he might want to get out of town.  We don't know enough about Bast yet to feel one way or the other about the reveal that he's a demon - or non-human at least - but it's well handled: the reveal comes as part of a conversation that feels natural and well-worn, with Kvothe playfully attempting to "banish" Bast in a couple of clunky conlangs.

Mother Tongue: 3

One for each.  They could be worse, but they don't sound like much, and they don't sound much different to one another either.  They also fail a basic conlang test: can someone with a fair academic knowledge of how languages are constructed (I volunteer as tribute!) get a sense of grammar and meaning from in-story usage?

“Tehus antausa eha!”

In this case, my guess - from context and construction - is that it means something like "Demon, I send you forth!", but the actual grammar of it is kind of knotty.  I'm guessing that "antausa" is the verb that agrees with the pronoun "eha" for the first person imperative "I send" or "I banish", with "tehus" either a 2nd person accusative or vocative for "demon" (as in, "demon-that-is-you") or just the much simpler "you".  Alternatively, "tehus" is just the vocative of "demon", with "antausa eha" being "I banish you" instead of just "I banish".

It parses okay, if a bit clumsy, but the point is this: human beings are pretty hardwired for language and linguistic rules, so one of the basic tenets of successful conlang is that it has to have rules, and pretty complex-but-consistent ones at that.  Just like fantasy universes, fantasy languages that aren't internally consistent stick out to readers, even if the readers don't immediately recognise why.

“Aroi te denna-leyan!”

I can guess from later usage that "te" in this second conlang means "you", but this sentence is still pretty hard to parse, even knowing the rough "Begone, demon!" meaning.  Is "aroi" "I banish"?  What is "denna-leyan"?  Is it a compound word meaning "demon" or is it "demon-something"?

I fully admit that I'm being very nit-picky about two of the easiest conlang sentences to parse in the whole book.  And if there weren't both of then in such quick succession I might even find one or the other fairly decent brief linguistic samples.  Taken together, however, they grate: they're built too differently to be related, but they sound too similar to be otherwise.  One conlang "Demon, get thee gone!" would have been an effective introduction to the idea of some linguistic diversity in this universe; both of them raise far too many questions that I don't want to be asking at this point in the story.

I Have An Interrogative: 7

Kvothe also tries to distract Bast by telling him to go bother someone's daughter.

Ladies And Gentlemen: 4

Bast finally leaves, and Kvothe spends some time significantly not staring at the big wooden chest by his bed, before giving up and staring significantly at it.  It's made of an exceptionally valuable wood, and it has three locks, only two of which are visible and made of materials mere mortals can understand.  In the course of this description, we get a fragment and a dangling modifier, introducing a count I may choose to cut later just because it's annoying.

Alert The Editor: 2

Effectively proofing a book the size of a cinder block might just be an impossible task.  Rothfuss admits quite candidly on his blog that he's not a natural speller or grammarian, and I don't know how many rounds of editing this thing went through before it reached its current form, so I'm genuinely loath to come out and say Rothfuss' editor was asleep on the job.  That doesn't change the fact that there are some appallingly basic mistakes in here, from constant comma splices to straight-up typos.  Like I said, I might cut this count; more likely I'll just keep a tally and only draw attention to mistakes that are particularly awful for some reason.

Speaking of which, there are three more fragments and a missing comma before the end of the chapter.

Alert The Editor: 5

And a repeated phrase that shouldn't be.

Repetition(epetition): 4

We're back at the Waystone the next night, and people are avoiding talking about the scrael by talking about the war:

The Penitent King was having a difficult time with the rebels in Resavek.

The who in the what now?

I Have An Interrogative: 8

This is seriously a really weird way to refer to a monarch, and it comes with zero details.  Given that we're in the Kingkiller Chronicle, enough information to get a sense of who the king is and how he got to be that way would actually be really useful.

We never find out, by the way.  I can only assume that book 3 will have a fuck-ton of information about the king[s] in power over the course of the book, because the first two have practically zip: the monarchy exists, but it has barely anything to do with the story being told.

They talk about the last time a trader came through, complaining about the price of his goods.  The prices don't make a whole lot of sense, but since we're talking about theoretically massive inflation this is one point where they don't have to.

We also get a piece of information that I honestly missed the first time around, which is that a span - the most common unit of time over the course of the books - is eleven days.

I Have An Interrogative: 8

First, let's take care of the obvious: a "span" is a unit of measurement in the real world, but it's a measurement of distance - specifically the distance between a person's thumb and little finger.  Forcing a word that means one thing to mean another similar-but-different thing is just confusing.

Mother Tongue: 3

Second...why, Rothfuss, why?  The seven-day week is universally understood - in fact, the seven-day week is such a fundamental part of most systems of time that it's been around for over 2500 years and quite possibly evolved separately in multiple different cultures.  No one's really sure why, but the best guess is that it just makes a certain natural sense: a lunar month is around 28 days, and four weeks of seven days each fit quite neatly into the lunar cycle.  And it's not like Rothfuss is inventing a calendrical system from whole cloth: he uses years with recognisable seasons and months that we'll find out later are roughly lunar.  For some reason, Rothfuss just wants his weeks - the unit of time measurement that is most standard in the real world - to be all high-fantasy-ish.  It's confusing, it's unnecessary, and it pisses me off.

Anyway, it's been two span (ugh) since the last trader came through, and everyone's using talking about that to avoid talking about the scrael, because scrael only exist in stories.

Is This The Real Life: 2

And that is the end of that.  Honestly, as much as some of the details irked me, this whole chapter wasn't too bad.  Too long and with far too much information only half-delivered, but not too bad.

It's worth pointing out here that this is comfortably one of the longest chapters in the book.  I'll get into why I think this is a bit later, when we move out of the framing narrative, but from here the chapters do get much shorter.  There'll still be a fair amount to unpack chapter-by-chapter, but there won't be so much damn stuff.

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Counts:

 

NaNoPadMo: 5

Face The Music: 1

Simile Soup: 11

Repetition(epetition): 4

Title Drop: 1

Tinker, tailor: 1

I Have An Interrogative: 8

Is This The Real Life: 2

I Can Science: 2

Ladies And Gentlemen: 4 

Mother Tongue: 3

Alert The Editor: 5