Three Times

[stoutfellow]

"What I say three times is true."

I've always associated that line with Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. (Actually, I've always associated it with my one-time teacher Saunders MacLane, who used it as a mnemonic for one of the peculiar features of Heyting logic; but I'm pretty sure he got it from Carroll.) But I'm reading Jim Butcher's Summer Knight, which at one point suggests that it originates in a piece of fairy-lore, to the effect that if one of the fae says the same thing three times, it must either be telling the truth or do whatever it can to make it the truth. Does anyone know whether Butcher is making this up or quoting some actual legendry?

Comments

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

"Say it three times" goes back in human history AT LEAST as far as ancient Sumeria. Anything of import was said three times in succession in three different ways. And anything regarding gods or anything spoken to or by someone much higher in the social hierarchy was *automatically* something of import.

I cannot IMAGINE how incredibly dull royal courts must have been, with everyone saying everything three times.

(That's one of the biggest contributors to making ancient Sumerian myth a tough slog to have to read. Other than the whole "dead language in a dead script" thing....)

I can easily see that concept spreading to/through Europe along with wheat-based agriculture, and mutating over time/distance until it's a "Fae thing" by the time it reaches Britain. But that's just me, with a baseless ad hoc 'explanation'. I have no idea if these things are truly connected.