Modifications and a warning from the talesman himself.
Yesterday’s chapter instalment of The Magic Key had a line that bothered me the more I thought on it. Hans is said to remember the remark he made to his Father, that ‘Six wins all tricks.’
No such line exists in the manuscript as Bardelys had given it to us. The closest to this line comes in an exchange between Hans and Father in the little attic room, early on the Dreadful Night:
Father: ‘One and seven make eight, and eight is late.’
Hans: ‘Eight is great, you mean.’
I asked Bardelys about this, and he confessed that he has been reading these posts and criticisms of mine, and it has inspired him to give another look over the old tale. That is when he found he made a mistake in these lines, he said.
For various reasons, Bardelys told me, he wished his tale to begin on Summer’s Eve (which is the eve of Hans’s birthday), and that this should be a night of a New Moon. At the same time, Bardelys had given much thought to how old his young hero ought to be, and settled on 18 as a fitting age.
And yet Bardelys had also found himself bound that Hans should have been born on a certain year.
When Bardelys consulted a calendar, he found that the only year that suited all his requirements was 1773 – and yet this broke his wish to make his hero 18. Instead, Hans would only have been 15 on Summer’s Day 1773.
Bardelys was faced with a choice: alter the calendar (after all, who would know? who would care?) or change Hans to 15. Bardelys chose to make his hero younger.
This then invalidated the exchange quoted above. Instead, Bardelys tells us, the exchange with Father really went as follows:
Father: ‘One and five make six, and six is hard to fix.’
Hans: ‘Six will win all tricks, you mean.’
Bardelys also has made other changes, he tells me. But he withholds them as yet.
On another note, I have presented today a Foreword to Part Two of The Magic Key which I negelected to include in the posts in its proper place. Bardelys tells me this Foreword will be included in the event that he publishes each part of the tale as a separate volume, slim though such volumes should be. In the event of an omnibus single volume, on the other hand, Forewords to each part would be suppressed.
(Composed on keyboard Monday, November 17, 2008)
