A few years ago, I sent to the VN-L an illustration about one of the
creation myths*. It suscitated no comments.but I still wonder wherefrom did
Nabokov extract his information about Cinderella, her shoes and the story
related to furs and squirrels. New search-tools and
extensive digitalization makes available all kinds of information
derived from rare texts and almost forgotten books [ I just learned that
squirrels and beavers (castor) are related to "The Twins", Zeus and the
Gods of lightining and thunder, in connection to Japanese Aioina, or
Finnish Aiona..]
PNIN: "Margaret Thayer ...said that when she was a child, she imagined
Cinderella's glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue tint; whereupon
Professor Pain remarked that...Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of
Russian squirrel fur — vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case
of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative
than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated,
but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel
fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade — 'from
columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows — so you see,
Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.' "
This paragraph is not only an example of the more usual verbal
derivations and metonimies but, among the general distortions, wwe
get Pnin's own transformation of "Thayer" into "Fire." In the
original "Floating World" myth, the transformation happens in reverse,
since Aioina's old sandals became living squirrels, not squirrels were
killed to produce Cinderella's "vair" shoes.
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* -The Illustrated Book of Myths: Tales & Legends of the World,
selected by Neil Philip and illustrated by Nilesh Mistry ISBN
62-279-0244-3.
In the beginning, the world was nothing but a slushy quagmire. The water
and the earth were all mixed up and there was nothing but a great swamp.
Nothing could live there. But in the six skies above and in the six
worlds below dwelled gods, demons, and animals.In the foggy and hanging skies of
the lower heavens, demons lived. In the star-bearing and high skies of the
clouds lived the lesser gods. In the skies of the most high lived Kamui
the Creator god [ ].When Kamui created the world, the devil tried to
thwart him[ ]Kamui also made many other creatures especially for the
world. The first people, the Ainu, had bodies of earth, hair of chickweed,
and spines made from sticks of willow[ ].Kamui sent Aioina, the wise
man, down from heaven to teach the Ainu how to hunt and to cook. When
Aioina returned to heaven after living among people and teaching them many
things, the gods all held their noses, crying, "What a terrible smell of human
being there is!" They sniffed and sniffed to find out where the stink was coming
from. At last they traced the smell to Aioina's clothes. The gods
sent him back to earth and refused to let him back into heaven until he left all
his clothes behind. Down in the floating world, Aioina's cast of sandals
turned into the first squirrels.
Another source:
Floating
World www.angelfire.com/.../mythology/floatworld.ht... -