But he does make three pointers that may be helpful in understanding the use of swans in the fourth and likely central novel of the Cormoran Strike series. “Great complexity,” indeed! As usual, Cirlot is as helpful as he is maddening I include his parenthetic number references which do not refer to pages in the Dictionary, to notes in the back of the book, or to his extensive bibliography. The relevance to this myth of the Lohengrin legend is self-evident. As Jacques de Morgan has shown in L’Humanite prehistorique, if it was the horse that pulled the Sun-god’s chariot by day, it was the swan that hauled his bark over the waters by night. Conversely the peacock/lute relationship, linked with earth/air, is possibly a representation of logical thought (50). The swan/harp relationship, corresponding to the axis water/fire, denotes melancholy and passion, self-sacrifice, and the way of tragic art and martyrdom. The swan also has a bearing upon the peacock, although the situation is reversed.
This would afford another explanation of the mysterious song of the dying swan. Now, in Schneider’s view, the swan, by virtue of its relationship with the harp and the sacrificial serpent, also pertains to the funeral-pyre, because the essential symbols of the mystic journey to the other world (apart from the death-ship) are the swan and the harp. This ambivalent significance of the swan was also well known to the alchemists, who compared it with ‘philosophical Mercury’ (57), the mystic Centre and the union of opposites, an interpretation entirely in accord with its archetypal implications (56). In sum, then, the swan always points to the complete satisfaction of a desire, the swan-song being a particular allusion to desire which brings about its own death (2). But almost all meanings are concerned with the white swan, sacred to Venus, which is why Bachelard suggests that in poetry and literature it is an image of naked woman, of chaste nudity and immaculate whiteness.īut Bachelard finds an even deeper significance: hermaphroditism, since in its movement and certainly in its long phallic neck it is masculine yet in its rounded, silky body it is feminine. The dedication of the swan to Apollo, as the god of music, arose out of the mythic belief that it would sing sweetly when on the point of death (8). Cirlot writes about the swan in his Dictionary of Symbols as a “symbol of great complexity:” Swans, as you might expect in a Rowling novel, have an alchemical meaning as well, one that we will explore after the jump. While the predominant symbolism of the story is white horses, which occur so frequently that Strike remarks on it and Billy Knight laughs about it (pp 394, 496), white swans occur often enough, not only as the story’s framing brackets but in references to individual birds on signs (see Robin’s noting and overlooking the Swan pub sign on pp 56 and 166), that we are obliged to consider their meaning beyond markers of Leda mythology in which the books are set.
Red swan novel driver#
Robin and Cormoran, great driver and former boxer, are the novel’s stand-in for Castor the horseman and Pollux the pugilist. The myth holds that Leda has twins, two sets of twins actually, with two fathers for each set Castor and Pollux are the off-spring of Leda with the swan who is Zeus and with the king of Sparta, her husband. Shaw, overlooking the Thames.” Mr Willis in that post had suggested this might be Jonny Rokeby’s home in keeping with his theory that, per Leda and the Swan/Zeus mythology, that Strike’s mysterious paternity, the pairing of his super-groupie mother with the other-worldly rock-star, explains why Rokeby remains off-stage but ever-present. (p 647)īrad Bellows told us, in a comment attached to Evan Willis’ post on the hermetic and mythological meaning of Lethal White, that “the paired swans Robin fails to notice in the final line, actually exist, on Swan House, built in 1876 by R.N.
Red swan novel windows#
Head bowed against the rain, had no attention left to spare for the magnificent mansion past which she was walking, its rain specked windows facing the great river, its front doors engraved with twin swans.
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