Tweet
I was somewhat amused the other day to see a book at the front of the local bookstore called "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" - about a whaler sunk by a sperm whale.
Having not come across the phrase "Heart of the Sea" before last month reading Deep Wizardry, this intrigued me and made me wonder if there was some specific, existing original source to this phrase that was already related to whales. (So, the amusement I referred to relates to the title, not the tragedy...)
The book made this answer easy to find, though, by providing (after the title page) the original quote, in context and attributed. Turns out it's from Exodus.
I wanted a little more context, and to see how it was originally phrased, so I looked up the cited section in an English/Hebrew bible that the store conveniently enough had exactly one of. And no, it's not actually related to whales (or Leviathon, etc...) it refers to the closing of the Red Sea over Pharoh's armies.
But flipping over to the original Hebrew text showed something interesting - the phrase "In the Heart of the Sea" is wordy, and doesn't do justice to what it really a rather poetic word in the original writing. My Hebrew is rather rusty, but if I had to say that full phrase verbatim, I would write: "BaLev ShehHaYam", which I think is literal and rather uninteresting. But the real text from Exodus is simply: "b'Lev-Yam", which, if I had to translate literaly to English, I would write as "to Seaheart".
Anyway, I have no idea if the wording in Deep Wizardry is even inspired by the same source, but I do find interesting the relation between what I would translate as "Seaheart" and the equivalent notion of the human wizards' "Timeheart". If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would even suggest that Ms. Duane had thought of using the term Seaheart, decided it sounded tackily similar to Timeheart, and settled on a similar phrase that, when translated back and forth against its source, turns into something more recognizably akin to Timeheart.... But, alas, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I won't suggest that :-)
Ardub
r:w)
Having not come across the phrase "Heart of the Sea" before last month reading Deep Wizardry, this intrigued me and made me wonder if there was some specific, existing original source to this phrase that was already related to whales. (So, the amusement I referred to relates to the title, not the tragedy...)
The book made this answer easy to find, though, by providing (after the title page) the original quote, in context and attributed. Turns out it's from Exodus.
I wanted a little more context, and to see how it was originally phrased, so I looked up the cited section in an English/Hebrew bible that the store conveniently enough had exactly one of. And no, it's not actually related to whales (or Leviathon, etc...) it refers to the closing of the Red Sea over Pharoh's armies.
But flipping over to the original Hebrew text showed something interesting - the phrase "In the Heart of the Sea" is wordy, and doesn't do justice to what it really a rather poetic word in the original writing. My Hebrew is rather rusty, but if I had to say that full phrase verbatim, I would write: "BaLev ShehHaYam", which I think is literal and rather uninteresting. But the real text from Exodus is simply: "b'Lev-Yam", which, if I had to translate literaly to English, I would write as "to Seaheart".
Anyway, I have no idea if the wording in Deep Wizardry is even inspired by the same source, but I do find interesting the relation between what I would translate as "Seaheart" and the equivalent notion of the human wizards' "Timeheart". If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would even suggest that Ms. Duane had thought of using the term Seaheart, decided it sounded tackily similar to Timeheart, and settled on a similar phrase that, when translated back and forth against its source, turns into something more recognizably akin to Timeheart.... But, alas, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I won't suggest that :-)
Ardub
r:w)
Comment