Guys, guess what I just realized?

Kvothe is the Half-Blood Prince!

 

Well, I suppose their had to be one in some universe that wasn't a greasy twat...

 

The fact that we have already been shown an example of magical singing, when Kvothe was lured into the Fae, and that the other two groups are those of actual power suggests that the Singers are as well.

Additionally, since both the Sidthe and the Amyr are both Fae in origin, the Singers probably are too.

 

I was reading some 'interview' with Patrick when I came across this:

Holy shit. This sounds awful.. He said it would take a year to release tWMF after Name was done, right?

(Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000661941)

 

DAmmit. I almost wish he were a type-A personality so he would pound these books out fast, but then I guess I probably wouldn't like his narrative voice as much. :/

 

How do we know this? As far as I knew, the Amyr were basically a group of angels led by Tehlu or Selitos, aimed at killing Lanre. No where in Skarpi's story is the fae mentioned.


And there were some other little things - Ambrose's father went from 16th in line to 13th in line, still quite a ways off. And those three were on the same boat, in an area under Jakis control. Not likely to happen again anytime soon.

Just a thought on Kvothe's loss of magic - I can get how he might have lost belief enough to not have an Alar, and fell out of practice with fighting, but has he lost his powers in Naming as well? I can't remember it being explicitly stated, but has he lost those powers as well?

EDIT: And the 'Singers', wasn't there a place called the Tahlenwald, where the leaders were not warriors but singers, who used song to heal, and make trees dance. Sounds like if anyone would be known as Singers it would be them. Maybe they have more power than the rest of them realize. Reference p322 of ebook version.

 

It's already happened. There's a throwaway line towards the end of WMF somewhere that mentions that a Vintish prince got killed in a duel or something. So he's moved up four places. And I'd like to reiterate that this has happened in a very short time. Kvothe enters the University at fifteen, and when he first meets the Maer he's a month past his sixteenth birthday. After that he spends about a month in Severon and another month hunting bandits in the Eld. So in the year and three months Kvothe's known Ambrose four people between him and the throne have died.

EDIT: Quote from book:

I agree the Singers have to be a specific group, it's capitalized.

It appears that at least in Atur and Ceald the Tahl aren't known, because when Kvothe mentions them to Sim and Wilem they laugh the idea away. Later on though, when he's discussing STIs with Penthe, she says if she ever got infected she'd make a trip to the Tahl to get cured, even if it took years. So that implies that the Tahl have some actual healing ability. I'm inclined to believe it's magical in nature, because judging from Kvothe's reactions to their care, the Adem seem to have physicians of at least the same caliber as the Medica. Penthe also mentions going over the mountains to the Tahl, and that means they're even more out there than the Adem. According to the map in the books, going over the mountains to the west of Adem is Modeg. Westward is off the map.

 

Felurian. She in fact did not know there were/are human Amyr.

 

They weren't Fae though. Skarpi's story specifically mentions they were humans that became Amyr. Felurian simply knew about another group of supernatural beings; that doesn't make them Fae.

 

From the story of Iax and the names banded around as the people who were his contemporaries, it seems to me that the Amyr pre-date the separation of the world into two parts. It may not make sense to ask if the Amyr are Fae, because the distinction between Fae and human may not have existed when they were created.

 

Perhaps Kvothe changed his name, and in doing so, lost his powers. This is just what the last scene with Elodin suggests to me.

 

I really like the notion that Kvothe's Name is in his box.

 

Wow, that would brilliant...either way I hope it is something significant or cool after all the foreshadowing/mystery building.

 

Great, you've gone and jinxed it: Now it'll turn out to be his lute, or a pair of Denna's underwear, or something else ridiculous.

But in all seriousness, what ever in in Kvothe's chest is nearly guaranteed to be something ridiculously powerful. Something that he himself felt should be locked away, since he made the box, or else something he was tricked into putting inside.

So he dearly wants whatever is in the box back. Three was a number of power in the old faerie tales, and this series seems to have kept to that idea. Iron has significance as a large weakness of fae creatures. I have no idea why Rothfuss used copper, though it seems to have some significance in the series (the four-plate door was made of copper, if I'm remembering right).

I just passed through another forum called 'Rothfussians' looking for a description of the four-plate door to verify that, and one of the posters made a comment I felt was worth mentioning here:

 

Heres how that conversation takes place, if anyone is interested:

 

In NotW, when Haliax mentions the singers it is not capitalized. That seems to have been taken over by the forums. The actual quote is:

That would be the only thing that might give credence to the theory that "the singers" mentioned are just those folk who gather lore, including the reasoning, names and weaknesses of the Chandrian. But to list them with other powers like the Amyr and Sithe makes everyone expect more.

 

True enough, but it's not like the book is typo-free. Just pointing out the possibility.

 

Has that Twilight craze of putting "Team" before everything caught on so badly?

 

Oof. Perhaps it has, inasmuch as I didn't know it had any Tweelight associations, and was just looking for a shorthand for "the people on X's side" and found Team X waiting for me. I'm not that thrilled with it either: I'm not on Team Team. I tried it once and I inhaled but it wasn't for me.

On the [Ss]ingers: whether it's capitalized in the text or not, I don't think the capitalization constitutes useful evidence. At the extreme level of remove, you could say that Haliax's mentioning them is (The Chronicler's transcript of (Kvothe's oral recounting of (Haliax's speech))). Capitalization can have no meaningful place there except through the intervention of the actual author, PR.

If it were always capitalized, it could just be a setup for a realization "oh, these aren't The Singers, they're just singers"; or if it were never capitalized, "oh, these aren't just any singers, they're the Order Of The Singers". Certainly there are other typos in the books, but it seems likely that the ambiguity about Singers is intentional. Young-Kvothe doesn't know their exact nature, and Storyteller-Kvothe may know but is holding it back for dramatic effect.

I agree with earlier criticism of my earlier post: that strongly-magical singing is a dumb idea. If they are lowercase singers, it would be just that the Seven want information about their existence kept a secret, and songs have been demonstrated to be a very effective and nearly lossless way of conveying information.

It does seem like the Amyr's secrecy is somehow bound up with the Chandrian's secrecy. Two sides of the same coin.

 

Personally I think that it's almost certainly his lute in the box, but music is so much of who Kvothe is/was that figuratively music makes up a great deal of his name. Every time he is prevented from playing in NotW and WMF it seems that he loses a bit of himself until his music is returned.

Obviously he couldn't continue playing after going into hiding since it would be an almost dead giveaway.