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September 4, 2008

"The Hero from Elsewhere"

As a young adult, I read a novel/story called "The Hero from Elsewhere." While in many regards it was a 'typical' fantasy novel about a boy who goes to this mysterious other land and becomes its hero, it was atypical in that he was a math-geek and wrote a poem about math, which I remember to this day.
One and one is always two,
Each alone, here's me, there's you
The mathematics of the heart,
Add together, what's apart?
The sum of being friends is done,
And proves that one and one makes one.
And, with that poem, the white stone and black stone that the two protagonists have merge, and merge the boy and the other person into one super-human hero who is able to fight the antagonist (Fenris the wolf?) who is trying to destroy.... something. The world maybe.

Today I spent more time than you would expect trying to find the title of the story. It took me a somewhat fortuitous set of search criteria to find a Yahoo! Answers entry that happened to have the poem in question and the title of the story in it to find the title.

From there, I have searched the Library of Congress site, Amazon.com, eBay, Wikipedia, the internet in general, and a few other sources trying to find if this story is still published, who the author is, anything beyond the poem and the title all to no avail.

It is surprising to me that I can have a title, a general plot, and specific words from the poem and still not be able to find any additional information on this story. Makes you wonder about those shows like Criminal Minds where they ask the computer person to make a search for something and, tap, tap, tap, she finds the exact thing/person they are searching for, doesn't it?

My personal quest continues. At least now I have the title.

ADDENDUM (11/12/2012)
As you can see from the comments, the story is actually "The Hero from Otherwhere" by Jay Williams. According to this article in the NY Times, the story is being moved forward for a possible movie adaptation. 

1 comment:

  1. As far as I can tell it's definitely out of print, but I did find it available for you on a site I've used a couple times.

    http://www.alibris.com/search/books/qwork/2881439/used/The%20Hero%20from%20Otherwhere

    Amazon also has a couple used ones available. I think you're getting tripped up in the title. It's actually The Hero from Otherwhere by Jay Williams.

    A little altavista goes a long way when Google fails to meet needs! :)

    HTH

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