Kevin's Watch

I’ve been interested to read a number of the threads posted relatively recently and I have noticed that more and more people on the board are touching on issues that I think will require more of a macro view of SRDs “universe”: at least from a speculative standpoint. There is smoke so there is probably fire.

Wayfriend has done some quite brilliant analysis of this from the internal perspective, looking at events, facts etc as have been contained in the annuls thus far, but I wonder what the view might be from outside. I think if I were SRD I would want to have some picture (by now) of what the external universe/cosmos the Land occupies looks like. Is the land just another picture in the creator’s gallery, a subsystem of the real world or another dimension?

Wayfriend has offered up some juicy morsels of analysis as to how the cosmos of the Land is formed, the creation processes or myths and some aspects of how particular characters ie, Foul and the Elohim fit into that mythos (condensing all that work into one sentence is not meant to be either trite of dismissive, on the contrary I was blown away with its depth and scope).

However, there must be something beyond and if the last chronicle goes the way some threads have suggested, there will need to be a map/myth/story of what lies beyond. What is on the other side of the arch that Foul wants to reach or return to and why? What did the Elohim get cut off from when they were “trapped” inside the Land’s cosmos and why do they not want the arch broken and thus their freedom from the Land?.

Wayfriend has suggested we may be led towards some “sympathy for the Devil” based upon things said by SRD, but to achieve that I believe there will be a need for a greater context. Where is Foul from, prior to being trapped. What was his background: is despite something that has resulted from being trapped or is the trap a consequence of his despite? What is his true relationship to the Creator?

I quite like the analogy presented by HLT of the Balloon in the room, but was Foul in the room before the balloon was blown up, were the Elohim (the children of the creator), downstairs watching the cartoons? Who else was in the room and how many balloons are there? Is the room in the real world or another world/cosmos/balloon?

Whilst my tone may border on the flippant, I do think these are questions that may be important in the way the last Chronicles develops, especially as some have mooted there is to be a final destruction/desecration and/or rebirth.

Inside a greater universe the proper context of themes can be explored more fully, is there a pantheon based upon a Christian Trinity, or a Norse myth (Rainbows, Serpents, Gods of Mischief and One Trees)? Perhaps there is a mixture much like the creation myths from the perspectives of Giants, Lords and Elohim.

Of course this is entirely conjecture but I guess I’m trying to speculate or at least lay the ground open for speculation about the footprints, shadows and consequential assumptions that can be gleaned from what we do know…take Wayfriend’s work and speculate beyond.

Again, well done Wayfriend on the remarkably well thought out and presented “Cosmologies” thread.

Your point about if the Elohim are the Creator's children then why wouldn't they watch the Arch destroyed so they could return home is a good one!
But are we sure that they are in fact the Creators children?
According to the devouring Worm myth, earthpower came about as the stars transformed / percolated THROUGH the Worm.
This seems to me to indicate that they are a synthesis of the Worm and the stars and not something that could survive the arousing of the Worm or the destruction of the Arch.
So it would seem to be in the best interest of the Elohim to keep the Arch in place to maintain their very existance.

You're quite possibly right HLT but where I'm trying to go with this is beyond what we know so far through the books, to what is implied by what we might describe as "the known facts", or at least the conclusions drawn from analysis by Wayfriend, yourself and others.

One implication is this:

We have the "real world" and we have "the Land". The creator, Lord Foul and the Elohim (we suspect) are not natives of the "real world"; the Creator is outside of "the Land" and Foul and the Elohim are also not natives of the Land, so we can assume that there must be at least one more plane.

Given the above what is that world like? Is it populated or an Olympus/Valhalla type of place populated only by deities?

Here's another:

There has been some discussion that SRD has speculated that theLand with its relatively rich and abundant Earthpower is quite different from other parts of the same world(?). Is the Land a place within a place? Is the land a continent on a World or just a big flat plane mimicking tides, seasons, day/night etc. as a real planet around a real sun would?

If it does NOT mimick then what is the Sun? Part of the creators Creation?

What then is the corruptable moon?

Yes this is a Fantasy novel, but if we are to be taken along a path perhaps some of these questions should be posed even if not answered...or perhaps Tolkein just spoilt us!

finn wrote:You're quite possibly right HLT but where I'm trying to go with this is beyond what we know so far through the books, to what is implied by what we might describe as "the known facts", or at least the conclusions drawn from analysis by Wayfriend, yourself and others.

Continue, I love to hear other's ideas and predictions too!

finn wrote: We have the "real world" and we have "the Land". The creator, Lord Foul and the Elohim (we suspect) are not natives of the "real world"; the Creator is outside of "the Land" and Foul and the Elohim are also not natives of the Land, so we can assume that there must be at least one more plane.

What does it mean if the Creator is outside the Land and yet can interact with TC?
Why are the conditions of this reality(or plane) so different that he can do this?
Is he not the Creator of our reality as well?
Is the Land-verse just some pocket reality that he created on a whim that somehow is beyond his ability to fix or recreate?

finn wrote: There has been some discussion that SRD has speculated that the Land with its relatively rich and abundant Earthpower is quite different from other parts of the same world(?). Is the Land a place within a place? Is the land a continent on a World or just a big flat plane mimicking tides, seasons, day/night etc. as a real planet around a real sun would?

If it does NOT mimick then what is the Sun? Part of the creators Creation?

What then is the corruptable moon?[/quote]

To me it's a round earth like planet with the Land being a natural focal point for Earthpower.
The Giants would know the curvature best since they sail around on it all the time.
Though technically it's anyone's guess since SRD hasn't told us.
But the moon was never corrupted though.
Wasn't it just "filtered" red and green?
Much like the Sunbane didn't actually alter the sun itself.

finn wrote:Yes this is a Fantasy novel, but if we are to be taken along a path perhaps some of these questions should be posed even if not answered...or perhaps Tolkein just spoilt us!

Tolkien did spoil me in this regard.
I want it all!
I want every scribble the SRD did released after the series is over.
But the man throws his stuff away!!
We'll never never know the details that might interest us but he feels doesn't add to the story.
He seems to think that he's just writing a story.
Doesn't realized that it's so much more than just a story now?

High Lord Tolkien wrote:

finn wrote: We have the "real world" and we have "the Land". The creator, Lord Foul and the Elohim (we suspect) are not natives of the "real world"; the Creator is outside of "the Land" and Foul and the Elohim are also not natives of the Land, so we can assume that there must be at least one more plane.

What does it mean if the Creator is outside the Land and yet can interact with TC?
Why are the conditions of this reality(or plane) so different that he can do this?
Is he not the Creator of our reality as well?
Is the Land-verse just some pocket reality that he created on a whim that somehow is beyond his ability to fix or recreate?

Given how the Creator speaks of Covenant's world at the end of the FC, and that he is able to manifest freely and use his influence in the real world (i.e. to cure Covenant's allergic reaction) whereas he cannot do anything in the Land's world, I think it's safe to say the Creator is not the same being who created Covenant's world. And it is also safe to say that he is not just a human being whose imagination "created" the Land's world in which Covenant was summoned: the Creator is something else, as evidentiated by his "test" on Linden at the beginning of the SC, his ability to reach Covenant through the void between worlds, and to "choose" Covenant for the first summoning. So, he must come from somewhere else.
For some reason, I picture this "otherwhere" as an empty, endless midnight void, where the Creator and Foul once existed as disincarnate, maybe even shapeless entities. Creation, in this theory, was not just the molding of chaos into order, but the actual creation of physical matter where none was before; the Arch of Time, according to this interpretation, would be a "dome" that protects the Land's world from the hostile environment of the endless void. Similar in some fashion to the way our ozone layer protects us from UV rays, except that in that case, the Arch not only prevents the void from touching the Land, but also "stabilizes" the Land's world so that it doesn't spontaneously evaporate back into the void. The various Laws are then natural extensions of the Arch of Time - additional "anchors" that prevent the Land's world from evaporating. As I discussed elsewhere, this "dome keeps the Creator from interfering with the Land's world, though: since he's still in the endless void and the Arch of Time is between the void and the Land's world, reaching for that world would require for the Creator to break or open the "dome", allowing the void to enter and the Land's world to evaporate.
Again, according to this theory, when Foul was cast into the Land's world he was constrained by the Land's world's laws, and forced into human semblances; we know, though, that he is not human in any sense of the word and therefore his physical body could be considered akin to the prison garb you get when you're sent to jail. The Creator instead took on human form in the real world because it would allow him to both test his candidates and approach them without undue interference - it's much easier to approach, encourage and evaluate a candidate when you look like a beggar than when you're a disembodied entity.

HTL wrote:

finn wrote: There has been some discussion that SRD has speculated that the Land with its relatively rich and abundant Earthpower is quite different from other parts of the same world(?). Is the Land a place within a place? Is the land a continent on a World or just a big flat plane mimicking tides, seasons, day/night etc. as a real planet around a real sun would?

If it does NOT mimick then what is the Sun? Part of the creators Creation?

What then is the corruptable moon?

To me it's a round earth like planet with the Land being a natural focal point for Earthpower.
The Giants would know the curvature best since they sail around on it all the time.
Though technically it's anyone's guess since SRD hasn't told us.
But the moon was never corrupted though.
Wasn't it just "filtered" red and green?
Much like the Sunbane didn't actually alter the sun itself. [/quote]

Well, we don't know whether the moon was actually corrupted or only filtered red: the Staff of Law had a fundamental relationship with natural laws, and the Illearth Stone did not draw upon Earthpower, so it is conceivable that the Illearth Stone's power was not constrained to the Land's world (like the Sunbane - being a corruption of Earthpower - was instead). I picture the Land's world as a "normal", spherical world of which the Land is the "beating heart", so to speak; this world has a moon orbiting around it, and perhaps the sun orbits around it as well (we're not constrained by any astronomical principles here). You could even picture the Land's world similarly to how our world was pictured in the Renaissance, surrounded by "shells", one of which included the Sun, another the moon, and the outermost one had the stars "stuck" into its inner surface.

I've been thinking that perhaps if Lord Foul was once the dark side of the Creator, we now have a totally good Creator incapable of feeling hate or despair while the Despiser is wholly without positive emotions. I think that if the Creator has thrown away every part of himself that wasn't nice and pretty, he would have ended up much weaker than he was originally because a big part of his soul was imprisoned away. Also, the imprisoned part seems to be the one with the ambition and the drive to succeed.

Thus the central historical fact in the backstory would be about the bad consequences of self-loathing. Funny how that thing keeps coming up.

SRD has hinted something about the "real world" not being real in the sense that the Land is real. Perhaps the Earth is the only true world and the "real world" and the others like it are only its shadows (think Amber), or weak creations made by a divided Creator. Perhaps there is a limited amount of wild magic in existence, and while it can be reused there is enough to only form one really good universe at a time. Perhaps Covenant's world was specifically created to provide a savior for the Land.

Thanks Xar....

.....a formless void is something similar to what I saw in my minds eye too at first but the logic of what has been defined now says no. I'd guess that there must be some connection between the Creator, Foul and the Elohim (at least, this list could well be longer and include the worm and possibly others) and I think thats probably too many for a formless void.

In the biblical creation story, God created the heavens and the earth, but later it appeared that he may have been in "heaven" whilst he was creating the heavens and the earth, ie the heavens were the skies, moon sun stars etc, not the place where good souls go to after death.

So if God was in or of the void and then made the heavens he presumeably made the angels and other denizens of "heaven" afterwards, so in parallel did the creator create Foul and the Elohim? It could be why the Elohim are referred to as his children; could Foul be the prodigal son?

How old is the land and how long would be in "man years" ie in the real world, would it be the age of the Creator? Is his life span the span of the land?

What are looking at inplanes and dimensions, clearly TC and Linden (and I presume Hile Troy) are stil corporeal in the real world whilst in the land so how does that work?

Questions, Questions, Questions...

No answers but just trying to get the creative energies fired up.

finn wrote:Thanks Xar....

.....a formless void is something similar to what I saw in my minds eye too at first but the logic of what has been defined now says no. I'd guess that there must be some connection between the Creator, Foul and the Elohim (at least, this list could well be longer and include the worm and possibly others) and I think thats probably too many for a formless void.

Not necessarily. First of all, the Elohim are not independent beings: they were created by the Creator - whether you believe them to be the stars or Earthpower incarnate - and so they wouldn't count as "original denizens" of the void. At most, we could presume that the Void contained the Creator, Foul, and the Worm. Three cosmological, uncreated entities could readily exist in a void - and of course, if Foul and/or the Worm were created by the Creator (perhaps, as Nerdanel said, by the act of the Creator casting out his negative emotions), the situation is even simpler. In any case, any religious cosmogony starts with either void or chaos; and if there were something else than void or chaos outside the Land's Earth, we would merely move the question to the next level - i.e. who created the "outside"?

finn wrote: In the biblical creation story, God created the heavens and the earth, but later it appeared that he may have been in "heaven" whilst he was creating the heavens and the earth, ie the heavens were the skies, moon sun stars etc, not the place where good souls go to after death.

So if God was in or of the void and then made the heavens he presumeably made the angels and other denizens of "heaven" afterwards, so in parallel did the creator create Foul and the Elohim? It could be why the Elohim are referred to as his children; could Foul be the prodigal son?

Well, Foul is completely different from the Elohim in nature, stature and substance. So I can't see him as a "brother" to the Elohim at all. To me, either Foul is on par with the Creator and therefore not a created being, or (at most) he's a "cast-off" part of the Creator himself. After all, the Elohim do not suffer any of the constraints Foul suffers, and similarly they are not protected by the Law as he is. So there must be a difference between him and them.

finn wrote:How old is the land and how long would be in "man years" ie in the real world, would it be the age of the Creator? Is his life span the span of the land?

That's a very good question. Let's see: if 10 years on the real world are about 3.500 years in the Land, we could presume that it likely was at least 20 "real world" years old - that would be roughly Berek's time, or maybe a bit before that - but surely the Land is older than that, given that it had a civilization long before that. So we should assume at least another 10 years, which would likely mean that, by now, the Land's world is at least 50 "real world" years old. Of course, this is a rough calculation.
Interestingly, 50 years are well within a human being's life span (and curiously, as I think it was once noted, it's also the age Covenant would have had at the beginning of Runes, had he not died).

finn wrote:What are looking at inplanes and dimensions, clearly TC and Linden (and I presume Hile Troy) are stil corporeal in the real world whilst in the land so how does that work?

Well, let's see... In D&D, for example, when you summon something, you don't summon its actual physical body: the physical body of the creature remains where it is, but you summon its spirit and clothe it in a "surrogate body". This would be a very interesting - and possibly likely - explanation.

Xar wrote:

finn wrote:What are looking at inplanes and dimensions, clearly TC and Linden (and I presume Hile Troy) are stil corporeal in the real world whilst in the land so how does that work?

Well, let's see... In D&D, for example, when you summon something, you don't summon its actual physical body: the physical body of the creature remains where it is, but you summon its spirit and clothe it in a "surrogate body". This would be a very interesting - and possibly likely - explanation.

That makes sense. That whole "being in two places at once" has always bothered me, and I've wondered if it was evidence that the Land wasn't actually real...

--A