Jerry Friedman:..."Surnia ulula is the scientific name of the Northern Hawk-Owl, which can be called sirin in Russian, as Nabokov said in Strong Opinions..Here's a post by Matt Roth about another possible owl in Pale Fire. https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0704&L=nabokv-l&P=3763270&E=0&B=--%3D__PartBF98C6F2.0__%3D&T=text%2Fhtml
 
Jansy Mello: After your information regarding the Surnia ulula" link to Sirin, I began to wonder if the ululating winds and tempests didn't represent an an authorial intervention (Nabokov/Sirin as some kind of Zeus or Thor ). 
 
Matt Roth's well-researched posting about "hurley house",  Sir Walter Scott's allusion to Shakespeare*, ghosts and their branchings in Pale Fire,. convinced me of the importance of waiting for more disclosures on these fascinating issues They reveal, in part, VN's modus operandi!
 
 
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* The allusion is from Hamlet 1.4.53, where Hamlet asks his father's ghost what it means that he "Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature...."  This exchange leads to the conversation which ends in "gins to pale his ineffectual fire."  Moreover, the imagery of the passage resonates with the Timon passage from which "Pale Fire" gets its name..
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