- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Actually, all the lines are taken from pieces of literature. The last line is from a T.S. Elliot Poem called The Hollow Men.
"This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but with a wimper."
'Gods and Demons', as well as 'defied' can be seen in Ishtar and Izdubar
""Ye gods or demons, I within your glade Of horrors, have unwilling come to seek ... And Anu's fury thus I have defied; This all my troubles caused, ..."
The sword/shield part is taken from many parts of the Bible.
"Happy are you, O Israel!
Who is like you, a people saved by the LORD,
the shield of your help,
and the sword of your triumph! De 33:29"
Do not be afraid Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward”
(Genesis 15:1b).
There are about a million other references to god being a shield and sword. I could post them all but blah.
I tried to do research for the past/future quote, but the internet is suddenly cludded with too much halo 3 speculation to find anything quickly, but for curiosities sake i'll look around more in depth.
So what do all these mean?
The Hollow Men is a poem about facing death and solitude, and watching the halo 3 trailer certainly makes you feel that MC is alone and his character can relate to the poem.
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html
read it. its hard to avoid similarities between the poem and trailer.
"This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star."
the text of gods/demons can be found here
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/iai/iai42.htm
Im really interested in seeing what the people who know everything about the books can find about the relations between the poems mentioned and the halo universe. i feel that cortanas speech is being widely overlooked. if you guys remember the days before halo 2 came out, there was soo much literary reference to the bible and other literature, and it surprises me that people arent trying to find meaning to cortanas words when they are so blatenly trying to provoke thought.
Get to crackin, guys. tell the world what this means. THERE HAS TO BE A MUCH DEEPER MEANING TO CORTANAS WORDS.
(edit)
another thing i just noticed. in the last line of the Cortana letters, cortana says something along the lines of (remember, the letters were released 7 years ago) that "your friend the poet got it wrong, THIS is the way the world ends" and in halo 3 info section, the last line is
"The Master Chief's AI companion Cortana is still trapped in the clutches of the Gravemind - a horrifying Flood intelligence, and a civil war is raging in the heart of the Covenant. This is how the world ends..."
bahHUMBUG.
[Edited on 5/13/2006]