Literary allusions

These are my proposed additions to Literary Allusions in Turtledove's Work.

Alexander Afanasyev

Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (Александр Николаевич Афанасьев) (23 July [O.S. 11 July] 1826 — 5 October [O.S. 23 September] 1871) was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer who published nearly 600 Russian fairy and folk tales, one of the largest collections of folklore in the world. The first edition of his collection was published in eight volumes from 1855–67, earning him the reputation as being the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm. Most of the definitive Baba Yaga legends were first transcribed by Afanasyev. Arguably the internationally best-known example is "Vasilisa the Beautiful", wherein an indentured servant (whose biography resembles both Cinderella and Hansel & Gretel at different turns) escapes from her captivity in the izbushka with the help of small magical creatures and her own cleverness and kindness. Another character from the Yaga stories is Prince Dmitri, enchanted into the form of a hedgehog, whose story has sometimes been conflated with Vasilisa's in subsequent retellings.

A large part of Laura Frankos' "Slue-Foot Sue and the Witch in the Woods" is a retelling of "Vasilisa the Beautiful," with the American adventurer Slue-foot Sue substituting for the titular servant. Sue meets Prince Dmitri, who is confirmed to be from the House of Romanov for the purpose of rehashing a well-worn Anglo-Russian pun.

Brothers Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together collected and published folklore during the 19th century. They were among the first and best-known collectors of German and European folk tales, and popularized traditional oral tale types such as "Cinderella", "The Frog Prince", "The Goose-Girl", "Hansel and Gretel", "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin", "Sleeping Beauty", and "Snow White". Some of these tales had been written down previously, by authors such as 17th-century Frenchman Charles Perrault, but the Grimm versions differ in content from Perrault. Their definitive collection, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in two volumes — the first in 1812 and the second in 1815.

In Thessalonica, set in 597, George the shoemaker wishes that there could be a spirit or fairy that would make shoes for him as he lay in bed. This is an ironic allusion to the Grimms' "The Elves and the Shoemaker," about a poor shoemaker who receives much-needed help from three young helpful elves.

Frankos' "The Great White Way" features Grimm characters Dame Gothel and The Wolf, as filtered through Stephen Sondheim's play Into the Woods.

Hugh of Flavigny

Hugh or Hugo (c. 1064 - after 1114) was a Benedictine monk and historian who served as abbot of Flavigny, France, from 1097 to 1100.

Frankos used Hugh's chronicle as a source for St. Oswald's Niche, and has her protagonist Jennet Walker consult the same work on several occasions.

Hugh the Chanter

Hugh Sottovagina (died c. 1140), often referred to as Hugh the Chanter, was a historian for York Minster during the 12th century and was probably an archdeacon during the time of his writing. He was author of the Latin text known as the History of the Church of York.

Frankos used Hugh's chronicle as a source for St. Oswald's Niche, and has her protagonist Jennet Walker consult the same work on several occasions.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and "Evangeline". He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the Fireside Poets from New England.

In The Great War: Breakthroughs, Sylvia Enos reads to her children George and Mary Jane passages from "Hiawatha."

MacAddict

MacLife (stylized as Mac|Life) is an American monthly magazine published by Future US. It focuses on the Macintosh personal computer and related products, including the iPad and iPhone. It’s sold as a print product on newsstands, and an interactive and animated app edition through the App Store.

Between September 1996 and February 2007, the magazine was known as MacAddict (ISSN 1088-548X). In Germany, a magazine of the same name but with no association is published by Falkemedia from Kiel.

In "Forty, Counting Down", Justin Kloster, a time traveler from 2018, buys a copy of MacAddict, with a complimentary CD-ROM, to set up a computer account in the "primitive" year 1999.

Edward O'Reilly

Edward Sinnott "Tex" O'Reilly (August 15, 1880 – December 9, 1946) was an American soldier, international policeman, journalist and autobiographer. Ironically, his most enduring claim to fame may be the light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek series of Pecos Bill stories (beginning in 1917), which he claimed were not his own creations, but taken from Texas folklore. No prior cultural reference for Pecos Bill and his costars has ever been found, and O'Reilly is believed by many folklorists to have created them from whole cloth as a kind of "fakelore".

Frankos' "Slue-Foot Sue and the Witch in the Woods" depicts O'Reilly's characters Pecos Bill, Slue-foot Sue, Rat the snake, and Widow Maker the horse, who are all from the earliest published Bill stories. It also depicts Bean Hole the cook, who was created either by O'Reilly or James Cloyd Bowman, who took over Pecos Bill writing duty after O'Reilly moved on to other matters. Because of the checkered, haphazard publishing protocols of the magazines in which Bill appeared, the chronology of first appearances and correct credits can sometimes be difficult to determine.

Philogelos

Philogelos (Φιλόγελως, "Love of Laughter" or "The Laughter-Lover") is the oldest existing collection of jokes. The collection is written in Greek, and the language used indicates that it may have been written in the fourth century AD. It is attributed to Hierocles and Philagrius, about whom little is known. Because the celebration of a thousand years of Rome is mentioned in joke 62, the collection perhaps dates from after that event in 248 AD. Although it is the oldest existing collection of jokes, it is known that it was not the oldest collection, because Athenaeus wrote that Philip II of Macedon paid for a social club in Athens to write down its members' jokes, and at the beginning of the second century BC, Plautus twice has a character mentioning books of jokes. The collection contains 265 jokes categorized into subjects such as teachers and scholars, and eggheads and fools.

In Gunpowder Empire, the Solters family study The Laughter-Lover for jokes to endear themselves to the populace of Polisso. While the jokes are old a stale by the standards of the home timeline, they are a thrill in Agrippan Rome.

Pindar

Pindaros (Πίνδαρος, c. 518 – 438 BC) was a lyric poet from Thebes, Greece. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable." Pindar was the first Greek poet to reflect on the nature of poetry and on the poet's role. His poetry illustrates the beliefs and values of Archaic Greece at the dawn of the classical period.

In Thessalonica, Pindar's Second Pythian Ode to Hiero, which includes a story about the creation of centaurs, is regarded as an especially sacred hymn by that species.

Erwin Schrodinger

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as Schrodinger or Schroedinger, was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian-Irish physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theory: the Schrödinger equation provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He was an author of copious non-fiction pieces, and is most famous in popular culture for Schrodinger's cat, an essay first published in 1935. In the proposed scenario, a cat is in a locked steel chamber, and its life or death depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. According to Schrödinger, the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics. However, since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real. Physicists often use the way each interpretation deals with Schrödinger's cat as a way of illustrating and comparing the particular features, strengths, and weaknesses of each interpretation.

In The War That Came Early: Last Orders, Anastas Mouradian explains to Isa Mogamedov about the nature of the war's sheer unpredictability, by describing a feline scenario which is clearly Schrodinger's thesis, but omits the name. Mouradian becomes known around the squad for "Mouradian's cat," causing him to come to blows with Vladimir Ostrogorsky over "Mouradian's pussy".

William Sherman

In addition to his direct appearances and historical references in Turtledove's work, General William Sherman's way with words is acknowledged in The War Between the Provinces: Marching Through Peachtree. Passages from Sherman's 1864 letter, which dictated the terms of total war to the Mayor of Atlanta, are used verbatim in General Hesmucet's declaration to the Burgomaster of Marthasville, in a fantasy analog of this historical event.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

"De tre bukkene Bruse", usually rendered in English as the The "Three Billy Goats Gruff", is a Norwegian fairy tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in their Norske Folkeeventyr, first published between 1841 and 1844, and translated in 1859. It has an "eat-me-when-I'm-fatter" plot (Aarne-Thompson type 122E). The heroes of the tale are three male goats who need to outsmart a ravenous troll to cross the bridge to their feeding ground.

In Every Inch a King, Otto of Schlepsig outsmarts a Shqipetari troll with the tactic he learned from a story about goats.

William of Malmesbury

William of Malmesbury (Willelmus Malmesbiriensis, c. 1095 – c. 1143) was the foremost of the 12th-century England, ranked among the most talented English historians since Bede. Modern historian C. Warren Hollister described him as "a gifted historical scholar and an omnivorous reader, impressively well versed in the literature of classical, patristic, and earlier medieval times as well as in the writings of his own contemporaries. Indeed William may well have been the most learned man in 12th-century Western Europe."

Frankos used William's chronicle as a source for St. Oswald's Niche, and has her protagonist Jennet Walker consult the same work on several occasions.