In my most recent post, I mentioned that there have been some eccentric happenings in my room lately: Gilly is reading Beppe the first volume of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (Beppe really likes the parts about wolves), and Sleepyhead mysteriously ended up on one of my bookshelves. I can now offer photographic evidence.
Here you get the sort of panoramic view, loosely speaking. (You can see bits of Humphrey, Lady Faraday, and Seal in the foreground.)
I'm still not quite sure how Sleepyhead got up there, but I have vague suspicions which centre on Sir Tristan.
Here's a closer view of Gilly and Beppe:
Beppe's still in my room; the others (except Sleepyhead and Seal) have returned to the north room. He can get away with this because he's the youngest here. The other young ones are here for an education, but he's really here because he's Alfredo's son, although the plan is that he'll be educated here once he's old enough. He picks up a little here and there (it would be hard to avoid), but he's not formally a student yet, apart from his singing lessons. So he's not missing anything by being in here, and the others get a chance to breathe. Beppe is sort of hyperactive, being a puppy and all. Alfredo is going to want him back soon, though.
I would very much like to hear a wolf's take on the characterization of wolves in The Wheel of Time. Unless Robert Jordan has lots more experience of wolves that I'd guess, I'd have to assume he got all sorts of things wrong (not that I know enough myself to guess about which things, of course). Do wolves find that sort of misrepresentation amusing, or offensive?
ReplyDeleteGetting a straight answer about this from Beppe has proved to be surprisingly difficult... probably because his attention span is quintessentially puppy. You can get him started; he'll say, 'Oh, of course wolves don't have psychic bonds with people, how silly,' but then he'll go on to something like 'Did you see the part with the Plant Man! Ooooh!' and you can't get him back on track. The "how silly" suggests to me that he was more amused than anything else, but he's so young that I'm not sure how representative his reaction is.
ReplyDeleteNow Alfredo, if he were to read WoT, could no doubt produce a meticulously detailed, exquisitely coherent multi-page essay on its depiction of wolves. I'm not sure he'll agree to read The Eye of the World for this purpose, but I'll ask him.