BtZ42: Woutan rides high.

rich richard.romeo at gmail.com
Mon May 30 10:19:10 CDT 2016


i'm sure you're all familiar with Franz von Stuck's painting The Wild
Chase. wotan and his mad army indeed

On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 5:26 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Laura writes:
> "They hunt the sky like Wuotan and his mad army." Wuotan and his wild hunt
> signifying death to those who see it (a folkloric concept most recently
> ripped off by Game of Thrones, in the form of the White Walkers). After the
> obscurities of the Kenosha Kid, this is a little heavy-handed, no?"
>
> I've always, again without fully examining, thought this might have come
> from Wagner maybe thru Nietzsche. We seem to know P has read and used some
> Nietzsche,* The Birth of Tragedy *at least.
> But we also know from elsewhere that he does like the old Black Forest
> Deep Germany of folk tales, etc. so he surely went there in his reading.
>
> I have no idea whether Woutan usages were more common when GR was written,
> hence maybe a heavy-handed cliche and just accept it as a fanboy. I have
> always felt it more fun to simply ingest and right on compared to the
> obscurities of the Kenosha Kid section, a frustrating section without real
> help and thought.
>
>
> After writing the above, It occurred to check out book citations of
> Woutan, Wotan in Google Books:
> Another fascinating look at such things. Woutan was HUGE (because Wagner,
> I'm sayin"?) in books over a hundred to 150 years ago THEN went down thru
> and to the sixties---and had a rise again!
>
> https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Woutan%2C+Wotan&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CWotan%3B%2Cc0
>
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