Weird Amber DRPG thing, well, actually a weird Amber novel thing, that I figured out today, and have never seen posted anywhere.
**SPOILERS for some novels from the 1970s**
**Also: WARNING if you're a "young earth creationist", something I'm going to say below might offend you.**
I have a theory on why the character of Dworkin in the Amber novels is at one point given the name "Dworkin Barimen", without any explanation. It's weird that Dworkin has this random last name, given that all the other major characters he's related to don't have last names at all. Nowhere in Zelazny's novels or short stories have I seen anything that explains this, or even points it out, but it's something that has often bounced through my head as being weird.
But first, other theories/explanations I've seen for this name:
1. House Barimen is sometimes trotted out by fans and GMs as a Great House of the Courts of Chaos. But that's not in the books anywhere. I just did a search on the text of all 10 novels, and "Barimen" appears exactly once, and in that paragraph we are told that Dworkin Barimen was an artist, priest, wizard or psychiatrist that Oberon hired from some Shadow, not Chaos. That paragraph is obviously intentionally misleading, but when the character eventually shows up in the plot, we're never told by Zelazny there's a House Barimen. Corwin and most of his siblings seem to be pretty ignorant that the Great Houses of Chaos are even a thing.
2. The other obvious explanation that does get thrown around is that "Barimen" is an Anagram of "In Amber". Roger Zelazny liked wordplay and clever nods, so maybe it's intended as an Easter Egg. If so, I'd say this egg is really more of a Red Herring. I mean, Dworkin's not from or in Amber, so much as Amber is in him. We eventually learn his origin lies in Chaos, not Amber (even if there's no evidence for a Great House by that name). Where this falls short is that it doesn't explain why the name is not used by anyone else in the series. If it means roughly "of Amber", why doesn't Oberon, King of Amber, use it? Why don't most of Corwin's generation act like that's a family name, nor do they know Dworkin's relation to their lineage? It's weird. (Also, just as a sidenote: I suspect concealing a revealing anagram in your name is not the sort of thing that will work out so well when the people you're hiding your mysteries from have lifespans measured in millenia.)
3. There's also apparently a magic artifact in a Philip Jose Farmer series called "the Horn of Shambarimen" but I've never read those Farmer books, so I don't know if it's an intentional reference, or even which came first and which might be referencing the other.
Speaking of which came first, I was watching a youtube video today that debunked some horrible "young earth creationist" ideas. One of those ideas was for something called a "Baramin". Coined by blending the hebrew words for "created" ("bara") and "kind" ("min"), a baramin is a term they use to denote the groupings of creatures that God bid Noah to put in his ark. As in: the ark didn't need to have 2 lions, and 2 tigers, and 2 cheetahs, and 2 pumas, and 2 leopards, and 2 lynxes, and 2 housecats etc, because obviously there's no way to fit 2 of every species on earth in a boat that's only 300 cubits long. So instead the kind in "2 of every kind" has to mean something other than species, if you're a biblical-literalist who doesn't accept the scientific consensus on evolution, but are still aware that there are many millions of species on earth today and that a cubit is not very big.
The neat little trick of interpretation of the words "2 of each kind" means the ark could instead just have 2 of the ur-example of cats, and somehow, magically* without evolution existing, those two cats were the archetype (now called a "baramin") from whose pairing all the extant species are produced, again somehow magically without evolution*. The video really tore the concept up and pointed out how silly and scientifically useless the Baramin concept was, and how all the scientific data supports speciation by way of evolution over time. I agree. Really not my area of expertise, being just a guy who watched one rather critical video on the topic of baramins, but I'm sure someone will stumble across this post and try to fight me over it in the comments section. Have fun with that.
*: I will grant you that what I'm presenting is almost certainly a straw-man of what actual biblical literalists and creationists believe. I do that because I'm not here to argue politics or religion, I'm here to acknowledge that an obscure term relating to Noah's Ark and religious philosophy is absolutely the sort of thing that Zelazny would love to allude to when writing the Amber books.
Roger Zelazny loved mythological references. There's a ton of them in the Amber novels. There's a magical king named Oberon. A murderous brother named Caine. A magic tree named Yig and a thoughtful crow named Hugi. Those are obvious, but sometimes Roger's a good bit subtler. Here's an example: in his ride to the apocalypse, Corwin is visited by a jackal and two birds (one made of blood and screeching like a bird of prey as it approaches, and the other the aforementioned talking crow). These 3 animals following him are a loose but definitely intentional riff on the "beasts of battle" trope from Old Norse and Old English poetry (Beowulf, etc). In such works, soldiers headed to war would be followed by a wolf, an eagle, and a raven: three animals that feed upon the bodies of the dead strewn about a battlefield, thereby foretelling the grim scene these men are headed into. If you see 3 such animals in close succession, that's Ye Olde Narrator warning you that things are about to get real. (Or, at least that's my understanding: I am not nearly as well-read as Zelazny was.)
But despite all that Mythological riffing, there's really no Flood Myth to be found in the Amber books. There's storms that seem apocalyptic, sure, but no flooding, no boat-building, and they don't deluge for prophetically-long times. Which is kind of weird, given how much hay mythologists and conspiracy theorists alike make about the commonality of Flood Myths in nearly every culture. That motif should be Zelazny's bread and butter.
Not only are obscure religious and mythological references scattered all though out the Amber books, but the dialogues of Corwin's hellride to the end of the universe are packed full of Freshman Philosophy topics. The core concept of Amber casting Shadows is a cheeky riff on Plato's cave.
So the idea that he might have chosen to slide in a subtle Easter Egg nod to a controversial stance on scientific and philosophical issues, which comes with a built-in connection to Noah's Ark, well, let's just say it just seems very Roger to me.
Which is why I think it's possible that Dworkin Barimen might be an intentional nod to the baramin concept in young earth creationism. Zelazny, being well-read and quite thinky, may have stumbled across the term -- it was coined in a creationist book from the 1940s, so the timeline works. If so "Barimen" is not only an anagram of "In Amber", it's also a homophone for a word that refers to creationist concepts. Zelazny did like his word play.
Dworkin created the universe, and is the ancestor of every character in the books -- except the Unicorn, which according to jewish folklore (and Shel Silverstein) didn't get onto Noah's Ark. (Why didn't the Unicorn get on the Ark? Because it ran off with a fellow Ur-example, the First Man. I started typing that as a joke, but on reflection, that may well be the crazy idea that inspired Roger Z in the first place, for all I know.)
All of which means Dworkin Barimen may well be a title, something akin to "Dworkin the Progenitor" or "Dworkin the Archetype", rather than a family name. In which case, this title only belongs to Dworkin, not his descendants.
At least, that's the crazy nonsense I'll be going with the next time I start up a new Amber DRPG campaign.
Side note: Wow, I went nearly a year without posting on this blog. 2023 was hella busy, and sometimes kinda awful. More on that some other post, perhaps?
