origins of weissmann/blicero

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 in his gr-companion (p. 31), weisenburger writes: "pynchon's source is grimm's 
 teutonic mythology". although this seems to be true for the name "blicero" 
 itself (and also - i posted the grimm passage early during the grgr - for the 
 werewolf ref), there is, i think, another source pynchon much earlier came 
 across. i'm talking about moby dick's notorious chapter 42, the whiteness of 
 the whale, where we read: "or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, 
 purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of central 
 europe, does 'the tall pale man' of the hartz forests, whose changeless pallor 
 unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves - why is this phantom more 
 terrible than all the whooping imps of the blocksburg?" since trp probably  
 had read this more than once when his neurons were still young and innocent, 
 the melville sentence, if not the actual origin, was at least spooking around 
 in pynchon's mind when he first modelled blicero/weissmann. 

kai frederik