During the 2008 election campaign, in which Barack Obama was running for president against John McCain, I asked who was going to win, clicked for a random article, and got one about a UFC fighter named Gray Maynard.
Gray was uselessly ambiguous, since it could refer either to the old man (McCain) or to the man who was a mixture of Black and White (Obama). Maynard, though, I thought was pretty decisive. The most famous person with that name is surely John Maynard Keynes, whose last name is pronounced "Cains," and the similarity of John M. Keynes to John McCain isn't exactly subtle. Furthermore, McCain was a "fighter" (war veteran) in a way that Obama was not.
I was wrong, of course. "Gris Notch" brought the incident back to mind. Revisiting Gray Maynard's Wikipedia page now for the first time since then, I noticed his chest tattoo:
It says "One life, roll the dice," with a pair of dice showing snake eyes. "Snake eyes, paradise."
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Another thing "Gris Notch" reminded me of was two different characters in stories written by my siblings in childhood: Gris Roslo and Deornoch Knod (pronounced "DOOR-notch Kin-NOD"), each of whom plays the same role in his respective story: that of the king for whom the wizard main character works as "king's wizard."
Regular readers have already met Deornoch Knod in the excerpt from Wooma quoted in "The pillar of blackness," which ends thus:
Then [Wooma] set off for Eankerdnosh. He was going to try for king's wizard. The king was called Deornoch Knod.
Wooma passes the tests and is presented with this certificate:
You are now officially a wizard who can be fully reliable. You are suited to be the king's wizard. This parchment says that you are Deornoch Knod's wizard. Guard this well. This is Wooma's. He is a turquoise wizard (L.L.L.L.).
Note the quads at the end. L is the Roman numeral for 50, which is the atomic number of tin.
Gris Roslo (also spelled various other ways) appears in a mysterious document known as The Zamn Fragment, which was written by my youngest sister when she was extremely young and very imperfectly literate, and then rediscovered years later, by which point no one, including the author, knew what it said. It's short, so I reproduce it here in its entirety:
gris roslo nal kingCob on zanm. zamnrefosd to com. thengris rolo Jramistnot to hret eimsee. he cam. rotlo asctzamn. "Wile yoh de mi Wtisrd""il thing adt it" the gisok zamn wit homand mimriswoocc him castti on tocasl. winthowyandr atac. tha deidt havea sro. thar ane barlewocn. tha let the gisgo wiht a pomisnot to sreip areopit the. latr zamnhe sed "ill be the wisrd"king roilo sed "good botwilrlit ymoc og ca mtssomr""I cobt ined tat war"wat hwahaw bid, yuo Noablot tha". "see" yarthole a gatrot zamnthe wirdzamn that hise
No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the whole text, but it is generally agreed that gris is a misspelling of prince and that the opening sentence is "Prince Roslo, now king, called on Zamn." In the next bolded passage, Roslo asks Zamn, "Will you be my wizard?" and Zamn replies, "I'll think about it." In the third bolded passage, Zamn says, "I'll be the wizard," and King Roslo says, "Good, but [something]." So, while most of the non-bolded text is a mystery, it's pretty well established that Zamn accepts a position as the king's wizard. It is possible that the final bolded passage even refers to a certificate similar to the one given to Wooma.
Just throwing that out there as possibly relevant to the meaning of "Gris Notch."
7 comments:
Rotl is an early Elvish word for "cave, hollow, grot," which later became rotto "tunnel, small grot." Thus, Gris Rotlo (one variant of the name) may refer to a Gray Tunnel and thus be directly related to Gris Notch, the Gray Passage.
Dor Noch would mean "land of the acorn." Knod could be related to the Elvish root KNDN, meaning "shine."
Deornoch is also potentially a play on words for Door Knock and Dior Knock, both which make sense in light of this potential Passage we are talking about.
I know the hard K is different than the noch as you pronounced as a kid, but both the way it is spelled would be with a hard K in some other languages (like how someone would pronounce the name Bach, as you know) and that is how it is also pronounced in Elvish, with Noch = Nock.
I've used the Grey Company's Passing from LOTR as an type or example, pointing to this other Pass in our future, potentially. With the Grey Company, to access the Tunnel they had to pass through what was called the "Dark Door", and gives us another example or type of this door to pass.
Dior is relevant in that play on word obviously because Dior is another name for Joseph-Ausir. It also stays with the Thingol focus and symbolism, as the name Dior was Thingol's grandson, and the name means "Successor", and was further clarified by the additional title of Eluchil, which means "Thingol's Heir".
As for Noch/ Knock, it takes me to a dream involving that word, but spelled "Noc", from January 2020 (I would also look up that word in Eldamo and see Acorn was the nearest translation, though my word was missing the H).
The dream started out with a reference to "Frost Lands". Potentially a reference to Numenor, is what I might think now given my imagination of a world covered in ice, but back then I had no idea or concept of that, so it was a bit of a mystery.
The dream then shifted to a list that was shown to me. There was something like names running down two columns, side by side, and I believe there was some reason why names were in one column vs. the other. Next to the names in one column was a word: "Noc".
I got the idea that I should say this word. It was a strange sensation, but I had this sense of some kind of power to it, which I actually started to feel as I started to say the word. But before I could get it out of my mouth, I experienced something like electrocution, and froze my mouth where I couldn't speak. I woke up to find this was happening to me in real life, and was struck with some bolt of energy so hard that it threw me across the bed, and left me paralyzed for a short time.
My friends at the University of Minnesota would use this episode, and other events, to explore the possibility that much of 2019 and 2020 was the result of brain seizures I would experience while I slept. So they ran a bunch of tests on my brain but couldn't find anything conclusive.
Back to your "Deor", apparently this is also a version of the word Deer.
By the way, that is pretty awesome that Zamn's story was preserved. That was fun to "read".
In thinking more on "Knod", and is pronunciation of Kin-Nod, I wonder if just using that alternative spelling gives us a pretty straightforward Elvish word? Kin-Nod (I guess could be written as K'nod), gives us "Certain amount/ number to count".
The reason that struck me as perhaps relevant was the direct association between "Paths" and counting numbers.
I had some 2021 words I mentioned a few times on my blog that would map to this, in which I guessed that Tom B. was speaking to the Stone Couriers (who could your Background Brethren). On March 18, I had:
"to be gathered, to be counted"
Followed by this on March 22:
"Designated as the paths which Asenath wrought".
This would later gel into the conception of the symbolic 144 number, in that the number to be gathered home were known and would be counted to ensure everyone was accounted for, and they would take these "paths" that Asenath made. There would later words in 2022 that brought up the 144 and the subset of 96, and what seemed mention of the responsibility of "Jah ni" (I think short for that GAEL name you and I brought up in different forms of Jah ni hah or Jah ho e oop) to assist in their return. Here is how that played out:
Jah ni sola gross determino ascertain to come back
Stone - there is so much hurray about Jesus Christ
Pas gar 96
Given the association of Asenath with Dior as well, tying this Deornoch Knod in with this notion of Knod meaning Kin-Nod, and referring to the act of counting the number required to take this path would make sense. Further, in this case, Doernoch Knod may actually be meant to represent Dior-Joseph, the King. Ultimately, the 144 roll up to Joseph, I think.
The counting aspect gets interesting given your dream yesterday of the numbers and the spreadsheet. Your job was to ensure the list of numbers you had on your end was the same that somebody else had in some other place, likely very far away (as alluded to by the faint radio voice). Getting the accuracy right apparently was pretty critical... on Earth as it is in Heaven? Also, the count tied or concluded directly with the notion of the this Grey Pass or Gris Notch, linking the idea of a counted and verified number taking a path.
Perhaps reliably keeping and validating those numbers was symbolic of the role of the King's Wizard.
If Prince Roslo is a version of Deornoch Knod, I think the name further ties Joseph to the character. Just as we see Dior in Deor, we have a reference to both Red, Rose, and the Sea in Roslo, not just in Elvish but in our languages as well (Ros was a word that apparently gave Tolkien some problems that he couldn't quite sort out, if I remember right, and it has similar distribution of definitions as if you combined Latin and Old Norse, I believe).
But, also of interest, "Lo", particularly when attached to a word like it is in Roslo, can be a variation of the word which means "Dream" (Olo/ Olos/ Lore). I've aligned Joseph with Lorien-Irmo from Tolkien's Ainur, and he was the God of Dreams.
So, with Prince Roslo, you can have a name that means something like the Red Prince of Dreams, if I worked that out correctly.
With your Wikimancy answer, it's worth considering the UFC itself, a company running mixed martial arts events. In that election (as with many others, I'd say) vote manipulation was probably in play on both sides, making things rather mixed up or grey.
It's also interesting that Maynard was called "The Bully". An associate of mine has often called Oboma a thug, a close synonym of bully. (I don't know much about McCain but Oboma's always been a Soros puppet. The "Hawaiian" man's country of birth will be a major element in a downfall currently developing.)
Heh, Wooma the turquoise (blue-green) wizard. And the Zamn Fragment is... something else. My head about hurts trying to read it, although I giggled at "good bot", a phrase I've seen posted in Reddit threads when automated accounts do their "jobs" particularly well.
I thought of the UFC context, too. Someone like Gray Maynard "fights," but the fight is for entertainment, he doesn't intend to to any real damage to his assigned opponent, and many of his opponents are likely friends rather than enemies in real life. Obama and McCain, while assigned to the roles of opponents, were in fact working for the same "company," and if McCain had won the election instead of Obama it wouldn't have made the slightest difference.
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