Under a blue sun

 

Not easily with both hands could a man, such as mortals now are, hold it, were he never so young and strong, but Aias lifted it on high and hurled it, and he shattered the four-horned helmet, and crushed together all the bones of the head of Epicles; and he fell like a diver from the high wall, and his spirit left his bones.

-- Iliad, Book 12

And the sun was blue

-- The Grateful Dead, "Scarlet Begonias"

Now there's a word for this. It starts with an i. That word is insanity.

-- Andre Marrou

I've been thinking lately about green suns and red suns and such, and I got to thinking about Athas, the world of the Dark Sun campaign setting in Dungeons & Dragons, about which I read a great deal in my teens. In the distant past, Athas had enjoyed a Blue Age, when the sun was blue and water was plentiful. Later, some terrible magic turned the sun yellow, ushering in the Green Age -- to be followed by the Red Age, when some magic even more terrible had turned it a deep crimson.

Something about that Blue Age, with its blue sun, captured my imagination, and I had a sudden vivid fantasy in which I saw Telamonian Ajax lifting his great boulder on high and smashing in the head of Epicles -- and the sun was blue.

Have you ever noticed that nothing -- absolutely nothing -- in Homer is ever described as green or blue? You can check. Those colors didn't exist in the Homeric world. Homer's "wine-dark sea" seems bizarre to us moderns, for whom wine is red and the sea is blue. Under a blue sun, though, the sea would not look any bluer than anything else, and "red" -- reflecting less blue light than any other visible color -- would be a close cousin to "dark."

As for the preternatural strength of Ajax and the others, it is simply the Superman Effect. Kal-El, born under the red sun of Krypton, becomes super under the yellow sun of earth; so it stands to reason that we, a yellow-sun species, would be super under a blue sun. This also explains why so many of the Hindu gods have blue skin -- in the light of the blue sun, men were virtually gods.

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Am I seriously suggesting that the Sun used to be blue, or that blue light would somehow give people supernatural strength? Of course not, but when such things come to me, I record them nonetheless.