SOLAS & ORPHEUS I: YOUR NAME IS LIKE A MELODY. (THE POWER OF EPITHETS, TITLES, & NAMES.)
EPITHETS & TITLES:
VGS: Where do you see a character like Solas ending up?
Patrick Weekes: [Sighs] Musical theatre.
The above exchange is from an interview with Video Game Sophistry, where Patrick Weekes goes into detail about the creation of Solas and how we ended up with the character and romance we got. Although said in jest, I do believe Weekes honestly recognised that Solas is a character who could easily be adapted to the medium of the stage musical, due to how musicality is baked into the foundations of his story and the world of Dragon Age. In fact, Weekes compares the fantasy and romance of Solavellan to The Phantom of the Opera earlier in the interview, and anyone familiar with Phantom can see the parallels, as Solas and his arc share many tropes and archetypes in common, not just with the Phantom, but with other male characters in musicals. If I told you I was going to see a show about a Morally Conflicted Soldier, a Trickster in Disguise, a Rebel Leader, a Decadent Noble, a Mythic Legend, or a Monster Boyfriend, I’m sure several examples would jump to mind.
Solas is all of these. Layer upon layer, stitched together, and then taken apart, whenever he needs to be whatever he needs to be. And he is also, if we are borrowing the epithets from Hadestown, The King and The Poor Boy Working on a Song.
It has to be noted that Hadestown’s use of epithets is itself a nod to ancient oral poetry, particularly in the vein of Homer. In Homeric convention, important characters, settings, and objects weren’t described by adjectives, but with epithets that would change based on context. (e.g. Much-enduring Odysseus, who is another paradoxical Trickster figure in ancient myth.) The use of epithets is a signifier of the origins of Homer’s works, serving as a mnemonic device and a way to fit the scenes of the stories to dactylic hexameter, as they were first oral poems that were composed and sung in front of audiences before they were written down. However, because of our modern understanding of the English language and what the word epithet connotes to us, what Anaïs Mitchell has done by using this device in Hadestown, is turn it into something that’s closer to the definition and function of a title rather than an adjective. Hades is always “The King.” Orpheus is always “The Poor Boy Working on a Song,” or “The Poor Boy With a Gift to Give.”
Solas bears his names in a similar fashion. When introduced to us as merely Solas, he is the “Humble Apostate” (or “Unwashed Apostate Hobo,” if you have Vivienne and Dorian in your party), or the “Fade Expert”; he is nicknamed “Chuckles” by Varric and “Fade Walker” by Iron Bull. Descriptors that comment on his lowly, outsider status, beaten and betrayed in this strange new world, that endear us to him. When he again dons the badge of Fen’Harel/Dread Wolf, he is “He Who Hunts Alone,” “Lord of Tricksters,” “The Great Wolf,” “Roamer of the Beyond,” and “Bringer of Nightmares.” Bynames that, of course, evoke those given to deities in ancient cultures (e.g. Hades is also known as Plouton in Greek myth, “The Rich One.”), that make him out to be fearsome, malevolent, and unknowable beyond the legends.
When I separate Solas into these two personas and archetypes, of Solas and Fen’Harel, The King and The Poor Boy, I don’t want us to make the mistake of thinking he is someone who bifurcates himself so completely that one part of him is unrecognisable from the other. His is not a situation of one identity hiding another or two identities battling to control the fore. He is Solas and he is Fen’Harel; the way Lavellan is “The Dalish Elf” and “The Herald of Andraste.” He is simply someone who has some impressive compartmentalisation skills (displayed in a conversation he has with Sera on the tactics of the Red Jenny group), and who has a thorough experience of a line he says to Cole:
“We all have a face we want to show, and a face we do not.”
NAMES:
Perhaps the best way to convey Solas’ complexities coming together to form the whole of him, is by examining the construction of his name. How cyclical it is, beginning and ending with the letter S, as effortlessly smooth and slippery as he. The L in the middle like a delineation, a fork in the road of choices before him. O and A on either end like they’re mirrors or masks. How it’s composed of five letters, the way iambic pentameter is composed of five syllables that you must stress and unstress—like the two syllables in his name itself. And depending on which syllable you stress in your pronunciation, your voice will either rise and fall or fall and rise when you say it.
I may be giving Gaider and Weekes too much credit here, but Solas’ name is quite literally perfect for him. Change any single one of these components or his characteristics, and you will no longer have Solas but someone else in his stead.
There are layered meanings to the sound of his name, too. Solas is a homophone for Solace and Soulless in the English language. The former recalls all the times he might’ve provided solace to his friends or lover, or received it from them; and the latter recalls how he does seemingly soulless things to achieve his goals, or becomes someone who is soulless altogether if you don’t reach out to him with kindness. Angela D. Mitchell explores this wonderfully on her blog Dumped, Drunk and Dalish, along with homonyms in other languages. Among them are:
Latin: Solus
Meanings: Solitary, alone, sole, only, uninhabited.
Scottish Gaelic (derived from the old Irish "Solus" or "light"): Solas
Meaning: Light.
Old French: Solaz, Sollas, Soulas
Meanings: Joy, pleasure, enjoyment.
She also explores the Latin root of ‘Sol’:
Lone, alone, solitary, lonely, desolate, dismal, gloomy
The sun (also can refer to the Sun in a personified sense)
A source of comfort, calmness, soothing
"To be accustomed" (as found in such words as: insolent, obsolescent, sullen)
These are all such apt descriptors for various facets of his personality and story, it shows the amount of thought and care given to him in the writing process. And of course, there are the Elven meanings: ‘Pride’ or ‘to stand tall.’
Because of the level of thought involved, I wondered how far back Gaider chose his name and decided it would mean ‘Pride’ in Elven, and how that might’ve informed Weekes’ writing of his character. @maythedreadwolftakeyou, @felassan and @lesbianarcana (my heroes!) helped me out and did some top-notch digging.
The first instance we have of the word Solas was found in a codex acquired from Dragon Age II’s Black Emporium, which was released on March 8, 2011. After that, it appears with its Elven meaning and on a map in World of Thedas Volume 1, released on April 30, 2013.
Since we have an enormous amount of foreshadowing for him by way of Shartan in Dragon Age: Origins and Merrill in Dragon Age II, I think it’s safe to say the first concepts of what Solas would mean and who the character who would wear the name would become began as far back as DAO. (Note: I believe Gaider or another Bioware dev confirmed this on social media, but I couldn’t find the post anywhere. If it crops up and you see it, please let me know. I’ll amend the post and credit you.)
In any case, the power of names is yet another running theme that links the storytelling of the ancients, Hadestown, and DA:I. Orpheus pays attention to the composition of Eurydice’s name, and remarks on how it’s “like a melody,” and his arrival in Hadestown reminds her of it when she’s been stripped of it and has forgotten who she used to be. Solas tells Abelas he hopes that he finds a new name after he leaves the guard of the Vir Abelasan, because it means Sorrow. The Qunari in Tevinter Night’s Genitivi Dies in the End have a special interest in finding out what they believe to be Solas’ “true name,” so they can then “track [him] back through the best and worst of [himself]”; “find flaws”; “exploit weaknesses”; “know what [he] failed to be.”
To be named is to be given an identity, personality, and, in most cases, personhood. To be named yourself and to be able to name others is power. Whether that comes as the name you’re privately called, your title, or your epithet.
OF A GOD & MAN — SEEING SOLAS THROUGH THE MIRROR OF HADESTOWN: INTRODUCTION.
When talking about the song Why We Build The Wall and the inspiration behind it, Anaïs Mitchell has described the imagery of the wall itself as “archetypal,” “mythic,” and an “effective idea when people are feeling vulnerable.” Her descriptions, I think, show us how well she understands not just the tragedy of the Orpheus myth and Greek Mythology, but what storytelling, at its heart, is: The exploration of tried and true struggles and archetypes that were and are so fundamental to human life that the ancients built whole mythologies to understand them, to wrestle with them, to use them to teach, and to comfort themselves and their loved ones, that’s carried on to the people of today.
Storytelling at its heart—emotionally compelling storytelling, especially—is reflection and recognition of these things. It’s a feedback loop between life and art, history and present, audience and author, the individual person and our communities. And so, inevitably, we’ll find patterns and parallels woven in through every work there is, because of the interconnectedness of society and its ideas.
Enter Hadestown and Solas of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Two admittedly unlikely places to find uncanny parallels in, however inevitable.
Upon first glance, there is nothing that should connect these two stories, beyond that they were written to be tragedies and based on pre-existing myths (Orpheus from Greek Mythology and Loki from Norse Mythology, respectively.) One is a concept album turned Broadway musical, the other is a character who was created for an RPG franchise. But the similarities are, like the imagery of the wall and the whole of their stories, archetypal. Cyclical, even.
Aside from the characters themselves, we see this in the use of common imagery and motifs both works employ to communicate their ideas to audiences. In DA:I, Solas likens the Fade to “a state of nature, like the wind” and a “fast flowing river [that can] drown careless children, [or] can also carry a merchant's goods or grind a millers flour.” The wind in Hadestown is associated with the Fates themselves—the three goddesses who hold and spin the destinies of gods and men, thus who are fittingly used in the musical as a paradoxical metaphor for the characters’ own thoughts and the adversities outside of their control. The rivers are sung of by the goddesses as a mirror to the way the world works:
Why the struggle, why the strain? / Why make trouble, why make scenes? / Why go against the grain, why swim upstream? / It ain't, it ain't, it ain't no use / You're bound, you're bound, you're bound to lose / What's done, what's done, what's done is done / That's the way the river runs.
And they’re also described by Orpheus as one of nature’s resources willing to provide for him and Eurydice once his song is complete, what deafens Hades, blinds Persephone, and, of course, as the barrier of the River Styx in Hadestown below.
Similarly, the concepts of melodies and songs are used to frame important devices in both Hadestown and Dragon Age. Orpheus’ continuous labour on “a song to fix what’s wrong” is a driving force for his character and the musical’s plot. Lyrium and the Veil in the Dragon Age mythos is said to emit a song or a frequency. When asked about the magic of the Ancient Elves, Solas describes the spells that take years to cast as “an unending symphony.” Even in trying to comfort Solas himself, Cole describes his wounds as such in this exchange:
Cole: You are quiet, Solas.
Solas: Unless I have something to say, yes.
Cole: No, inside. I don't hear your hurt as much. Your song is softer, subtler, not silent but still.
The notions of musicality are effective, as with the leitmotifs of the rivers and the wind. By invoking them, writers can call to mind the feeling of being tugged along by currents and tides, of rhythms and beats as natural to us as breathing, and pull us to connection with the worlds and characters they’ve created. That Patrick Weekes and the Dragon Age team recognised and leaned into this, is clever.
The formats of how these worlds and characters are presented to us also lend to the link between the two works. In the opening and penultimate numbers of the show, Hermes and the Chorus sing, “It’s an old song / And we’re gonna sing it again,” referencing that they are retelling the myth of Orpheus as well as beginning their specific interpretation anew.
Like a retelling, a soundtrack, and a musical, the very form of an RPG encourages me to go back to the beginning and play it again, and to rediscover and interact with it differently every time. I may know the major themes and pieces of the narrative, but I can revisit it and find new gems to examine that I might have missed before, or reread lines and see another interpretation layered upon them.
And on a beautifully meta level, the act of beginning a story again also relates to Solas in how he visits and relives memories in the Fade, reenacted by the spirits who’ve observed the scenes. There, he is an audience member, like us, watching retellings of legends long past.
So, while it’s surprising to see so many parallels between Solas, the world of Dragon Age, and Hadestown, it really shouldn’t be. The bricks laid for the foundation of their stories are ancient, made new.
It’s my hope that in writing this meta series, I’ll be able to use the parallels and character types of Hadestown to illuminate facets of Solas’ character, how he converses with the world he lives in, and vice versa. I’m going to be pulling from all three albums and their portrayals of the characters, and the related Greek myths. The series will be divided into three main parts and their own subsections: Solas and Orpheus, Solas and Hades, and Solavellan. The posts will mostly be composed like essays, like this one, but there will likely be shorter posts and observations too.
Sorry for going through your entire solavellan tag in a day, but your meta gives me life and I'm emotional over the idiots u g h and also, thank you for the hadestown parallels, bc I am hurt haha. Which verses do you think best fit lavellan?
hahaha don’t worry about it. i’m flattered, and if i didn’t want to have people suffer with me, i wouldn’t be posting so much about this awful, awful ship. c:
i think it’s hard for me to answer which verses best fit lavellan, bc everyone’s lavellan, and their relationships with solas and the world around them, is so different. in general, hermes’ introduction of eurydice in any way the wind blows is the most applicable to the basic framework of lavellan’s background as a dalish elf. but aside from that, it’s quite subjective. a more ruthless lavellan may sing, “you would do anything / just to fill your belly full of food / find a bed that you could fall into,” but a lavellan who’s softer and who’s lived her life in relative safety and shelter might not. a lavellan who’s really torn up about the breakup with solas would relate to almost the entirety of flowers, if not the entire song, but a lavellan who moves on quickly would only relate to the lines “dreams are sweet, until they're not / men are kind, until they aren't / flowers bloom, until they rot, and fall apart.” eurydice’s broadway verse in wait for me ii and the last verse and outro from the concept album’s if it’s true fits a lavellan who wants to see the best in people, and who will ultimately redeem solas, but not one who doesn’t and has vowed to destroy him. it all depends on who your lavellan is, really.
if i was asked about my own lavellan, eludysia, i’d say most of eurydice’s, persephone’s, and orpheus’ verses apply to her, since she was heavily inspired by the play and its various soundtracks.
solas LITERALLY has a line where he says, “that is what the world could be without the veil, for better or worse,” (or something along those lines) when you ask him about the veil in haven. throughout dai, he’s learning to not just see the world as it was or could be, but like orpheus, how the world is. he has a fundamental disconnect in his worldview because of that one missing piece. how the world is. in this essay i will--
orpheus and solas and their damn “i need to finish this song and make this broken world whole again” attitudes pushing them to extremes that leave the love of their lives out in the cold ASFJKFSAFHSADFS
every time my hadestown x solavellan gifs make their way around tumblr i grin like an idiot inside. like.........
yeah. y’all get it too. y’all see the parallels too. hades, orpheus and solas would die for persephone, eurydice and lavellan, and we’re celebrating and mourning that together. it’s so good. i love it.
