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Re: Unliving
Posted By: SiliconDream =PN= (as3-2-0.HIP.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: 9/15/2001 at 4:51 p.m.
In Response To: Unliving (griefmop)
: How many textual references are there to 'unliving'? Are
: we sure there's even a coherent pattern of use for
: this term? It may well be that people (both characters
: in the story and authors of the text) use the terms
: indiscriminantly.
: If it's not a technical term, a term of art of what have
: you, it may well not be used systematically. We can
: play the definitions game with a lot of common words
: in any language.
It's used twice. Wights are in the state of "unlife," according to a flavor, and the Watcher once went searching for the "Dream of Unlife."
It's hardly a common word in English either, of course.
: Is there any real reason to think that 'unliving' has its
: own meaning? Is there any evidence that it means other
: than 'undead'? (Beyond the appearance within the two
: words of the strings of characters l-i-v-i-n-g and
: d-e-a-d which in other circumstances represent words
: that are commonly taken as antonyms, but yet do not
: mutually apply to everything, the one or the other.)
: I'm asking for something somebody says that makes this
: look like a viable course of enquiry.
Well, it's a word used in Myth. So we wanna know what it means. :-) Given that it's used only twice, to describe Wights and as something the world's greatest necromancer once searched for (whether or not he found it), it seems to me that it's probably synonymous with "undeath" in the Myth context. Possibly its restriction to flavor texts suggests that it's a more scholarly or poetic term, whereas down-to-earth sources like the narrator and the manual prefer "undeath."
: I'm not even clear on what's at stake in this debate.
Basically, before Welly pointed out the Wight ref, we knew only that the Watcher searched for the Dream of Unlife. GURPS said that he probably never found it, and this made sense to some people (like me) who a) were working off a potential Gilgamesh reference and b) thought it unlikely that the minor necromancers were employing a Dream. Hence it seemed possible that Unlife, the product of this Dream, was different from ordinary Undeath. Maybe it was sentient Undeath, maybe it was something more exotic.
Somewhat complicating this was the fact that I was personally defining "Unlife" to mean sentient Undeath, simply as a matter of convenience and not to prove any arguments. Figured I could do that without confusing the issue, since I didn't know of any creatures actually described as "Unliving."
Since the debate at this point was so far removed from solid evidence, it all went out the window after the Wight flavor came up. Whether or not the Dream of Unlife is the fundamental necromantic spell, it seems clear that Unlife is simply a rare synonym for Undeath.
--SiliconDream
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