Cultural Allusions
Some of the imagery in the book is inspired by Tarot art. For example, when Ganelon ties the golden-haired youth by one ankle to a tree branch, this mimics the Tarot card "The Hanged Man". The wheel that Corwin dreams about is inspired by the Tarot card "Wheel of Fortune".
In addition to being a character in French medieval literature, Ganelon is also the name of the main character in The Dark World by Henry Kuttner — one of the chronicles' main inspirations.
The poem about Avalon that Corwin quotes to Ganelon alludes to both Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion") as well as to a classic nursery rhyme ("How many miles to Babylon? Threescore miles and ten").
Read more about this topic: The Guns Of Avalon
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)