The Life of Scrooge

[Geir.Hasnes@DELAB.SINTEF.no]

Hello Don!

I was told two days ago by my friend Even Flood that this newsgroup exists
and am of course eager to join. Why havent anyone told me before?

Would be real fun to meet. The people of Hjemmet are a little sheltering
sometimes - quite understandable when you think that you shall be promoting
the stories. The last time we could have met, I was called just a few hours
after I had cancelled my flight and could not reorder it.

You will possibly have heard my questions before, but lets start with:

The young Scrooge apparently meets that guy, the professor from the south,
was it Rhett Butler?, who had been to Plain Awful and found square eggs, on
a train in the Midwest. How could that happen? Barks let him die just
shortly after he had come out of the fog, and the eggs was brought to Cuzco
by someone else.Apparently, the professor never returned to the US.

In my opinion it is quite all right to make a broader mythology out of the
scattered remarks in Barkses stories, but sometimes I feel people take
Scrooge et co. too seriously. Scrooge never intended "three cubic acres of
money" to be anything else than a pun, and then people start calculating
the size of such an amount. And can we be sure when he tells where he
bought his top hat, that he tells the truth, or is he just an old man
simply overstating, just as old people usually do - they tend to tell the
truth in accordance with how they would like to see the truth.

Two important developments in the life of the ducks. 

1. John Nichols has shown in his brilliant essay of which I cant remember
the name, in the Barks Collector, that Scrooge developed from being an
angry old miser to a more jolly old miser after having met Goldie again.
Something happened in U$ 2 which made it impossible for Scrooge to be as
hard as earlier. Have you read that essay, and do you think this theory is
correct? I can of course transmit the essay to you if you havent got it.
Will you take care of this in your development of the Scrooge mythos.
Remember that he was alone without relatives for many years, and that it
took years to soften him afterwards.

2. One of those few brilliant Swedes - Dick Harrison I think, have in
NAFS-kuriren written about the English ancestry of Gladstone Gander, and
how his forefathers surely must have been English aristocracy who owned
factories in Scotland where the McDuck-people worked (toiled?). From this
stem the conflict between Gladstone and Donald. Do you know of his writings
about this?

Just as a start.

Geir Hasnes.