Flight of the Heron read-along: Part I chapters 5-6

[regshoe]

What is right and what is wrang, a short sword and a lang, a weak arm and a strang for to draw...

Welcome back to the read-along! This week's chapters are getting a bit more serious, historically and for our characters...

Next week we'll read the first two chapters of Part II.

Comments

[regshoe]

Hehehe, I love the colourful epithets :D My classical knowledge is not good enough to speculate about the significance of Achilles, although him being half of a very well-known m/m couple does seem suggestive.

I get the impression that it was the usual thing to wear outer clothes for a long time and change your underclothes more often (i.e. shirts, although I don't know how many changes of shirt Keith would actually have got here). And yes, wigs are essential fashion item for the eighteenth-century gentleman!

Do you think Ewen deliberately gave Keith the opportunity to escape? I thought his reaction at the end was genuine (Keith's theory that Ewen's military naivety accounts for him forgetting seems plausible).

[tei]

Heh, as convenient as it would be to cast Keith as Patroclus, it doesn't really make much sense with what I've read so far-- assuming this will all end in tears, which seems like a very reasonable assumption even from my viewpoint of having read only these chapter, I suppose Hector, if anyone-- a fated foe, "the gods have lured me to my destruction!" etc.?

OK, the shirt functioning as underwear makes the theft of a clean shirt make more sense!

I ASSUMED that was what happened when it all worked out so very nicely for Keith but I stopped at the end of this chapter and haven't read anything beyond that might show Ewan's private reaction, so maybe I was wrong! It made sense to me that he was upset about the money, since Allison already speculated to herself privately that Kieth offering Ewan money would be a great insult, and Kieth failed to specify in his letter that the money was his best guess at the value of the stolen clothes.

So maybe Ewan really did have no idea that was going to happen! In which case *cackles* I hope he's SO MAD the next time they meet.

[tei]

sjdffsdjhfsdj sorry for spelling Keith's name multiple times within a single comment, but I might as well just state now that I have never remembered how to spell any words containing an i and an e in some sort of sequence and don't expect to be able to at this late date so the remainder of my FotH comments will likely be more of the same

[regshoe]

I suppose Hector, if anyone-- a fated foe, "the gods have lured me to my destruction!" etc.?

Sounds good :D Hmm, 'Hector' is an interesting name—it turns up in Scotland because it's used as the Anglicised form of the Gaelic name Eachann (at least one Hector/Eachann appears in FotH, in fact), but Eachann is not etymologically related to the Greek Hector at all.

Ah, I see. Yeah, I also don't think that Ewen would be dishonest like that, especially in front of Lochiel (though that's based on stuff about their relationship from later on in the book, so we shall see...).

Haha, no worries about the spelling—'Keith' is actually one of the words that breaks the (otherwise reasonably consistent) 'I before E except after C, when the IE sounds like E' rule. I don't know what etymology is responsible for that...!