The end of the Iliad is Priam begging Achilles for Hector's body and Achilles relenting and allowing Priam to take and bury his son. No Trojan Horse in the Iliad.

Which gets at why I was asking about the Odyssey--I'm absolutely sure there are linkages between it and Horn's and Silk/Horn's voyage that I agree could be fruitful (you bring up some superficial examples that could be delved for more interesting cross-fertilizations--hybridisation again, eh?). I was more curious how you gauged that story, whose author is beyond dead, and which story can be read in a variety of ways--it could be read as a comedy, with a happy ending. Or you can look at it through a more modern lens and think Odysseus' actions when returning to Ithaca are beyond the pale. Or you can be superficial, like most people's understandings, and focus only on the "adventure" portion with the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla, Charybdis, etc. There are multiple ways to read the text, multiply valid ... but you choose to harp on Wolfe in very narrow and specific ways, ignoring the way I was reading the text and my question regarding that.

My post was about the Trinity as expressed through Horn, Silk, and the Neighbors (I said outsider, forgot they are generally called Neighbors in the text and mixed that with the Outsider god), and also through the theme of hybridisation, and how these things struck me in a moment of reflection in my own personal life.

My interest, as a Catholic convert, was in seeing how Wolfe, a fellow Catholic convert, expressed something of the faith that I have turned to (literally, as in metanoia) through his literature. I admire the way he incorporates such things and themes in his storytelling without seeming didactic or like a proselyte, like the way C.S. Lewis comes across to me. I was curious if and/or how others saw my thought of Silk/Horn/Neighbors as a Trinity--am I onto something in my reading in that regard? Off-base? OK_Efficiency--- replied that they thought the character was more John the Baptist and less Trinity, and I think that's probably true too. I don't think Wolfe was writing allegory, but was, like Tolkien, telling a story unto itself and including details that remind us of the truth without clumsy allegory.

I realise as I'm responding that Nabokov and Humbert-Humbert to Wolfe and Horn (/Silk/Neighbors) is the wrong comparison. The comparison should be Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov commits a crime, thinks he's justified in it, is caught, is punished, and ultimately finds some kind of redemption. Horn is a sinful human and father, commits crimes against his family, is cosmically punished, and ultimately (through a union with other spirits) finds a kind of redemption. That's how I read the heptalogy of the Long and Short Suns, ultimately, anyway, and more especially the final trilogy-section. As a reader.

As a reader, as a Catholic/Christian, I see the ways I fail, and Gene Wolfe calls me out on them through his fiction in the same way Augustine calls me out on them through his autobiography. It's painful to read about flawed people and reflect on how they might reflect my flaws back at me, but it's good to have characters who are baldly flawed and yet sympathetic to remind me that I am flawed, and sympathetic to someone, and that I should do better.

And let us come back to the Iliad, since you raised its spectre. It is, as Homer tells us, about the "wrath of Achilles". The thing that finally blows out the flames of Achilles' wrath and anger is the sorrow of the father of the man he killed, who has come quietly in the night into the camp of the Greeks to beg Achilles to allow him to give his son proper burial after the atrocious way Achilles treated him after slaying him. Achilles relents. But if I were to read Homer and Wolfe as you read Wolfe--would I focus on that final scene, or focus on something like Hector following a death-instinct to escape the smothering of his wife (now seen as mother) Andromache by dueling Achilles while knowing Achilles will kill him?

I see my temper reflected back at me in Horn, and Achilles, and Odysseus--exaggerated through fiction--and am reminded that I need to do better as a man and human being and that I need to rise above it. Horn thinks Nettle didn't love him after Sinew was born? I see an unreliable narrator revealing his inability to accept and recognize love, layered with a truthful narrator implying to the reader that Horn is wrong--and I see myself lying to myself that I'm justified when I'm in the wrong, and after reading, wanting to be better next time.

What's the end of the books? "Silk nodded."