Fiction
Shakespeare appears to mention the
phenomenon in his Henry VI, Part 3, written in about 1590, when he has Edward
say, "Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?"
The poem Die Nebensonnen ("The Parhelia"), by Wilhelm Müller
from his 1823-24 cycle Winterreise, was set to music by Franz Schubert. It
begins: "Drei Sonnen sah ich am Himmel stehn..." ("Three Suns I saw in the
sky").
Jack London wrote a short story in 1905 called The Sun-Dog
Trail.
In the 1949 novel Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Mars Freedman,
Sgt. Mike Flannigan, a Canadian Mountie, explains sun dogs when they are seen by
his young
Bostonian wife for the first time. Claiming to have observed as many as
sixteen of them together in the sky at a single time, he says the Indians
believe they are "evil stars trying to kill the sun," but that they are actually
caused by atmospheric conditions, and that when they appear "ten to one there's
a blizzard by the morning."
A reference to 'parhelia' occurs in the Introduction to
Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire:
The short (166) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and
parhelia, occupies thirteen cards:
...and that
rare phenomenon
The iridule--when
beautiful and strange,
In a bright
sky above a mountain range
One
opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm...
In the fifth novel of the Aubrey–Maturin series, Desolation Island, 1978,
Patrick O'Brian writes:
"A visit to the cabin showed him the glass
lower still: sickeningly low. And back on the poop he saw that he was by no
means the only one to have noticed the mounting sea – an oddly disturbed sea, as
if moved by some not very distant force; white water too, and a strange green
colour in the curl of the waves and in the water slipping by. He glanced
north-west, and there the sun, though shining still, had a halo, with sun-dogs
on either side. Ahead, the aurora had gained in strength: streamers of an
unearthly splendour."
In her popular historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, 1982, about Richard
III of England, Sharon Kay Penman writes:
"Hastings laughed, too,
and shook his head. 'Men do make their luck, Lady Margaret, and never have I
seen that better proven than at Mortimer's Cross. For ere the battle, there
appeared a most fearsome and strange sight in the sky.' He paused. 'Three suns
did we see over us, shining full clear.'"
In a footnote it is clarified:
"Phenomenon known as a parhelion, generally caused by the formation of ice
crystals in the upper air." Two pages later, again mentioning the English king
Edward IV, she adds: "Many, she saw, flaunted streaming sun emblems to denote
her son's triumph under the triple suns at Mortimer's Cross."[12]
Sundog is the title of a 1984 novel by Jim Harrison.
The horror fiction writer Stephen King has a novella called The
Sun Dog in his 1990 collection Four Past Midnight.
Jane Gardam at the end of her 2006 novel Old Filth has the main
character, Edward Feathers, see a parhelion from the window of a plane at
sunrise on New Year's Day: "Later he looked down upon a fat carpet of clouds and
saw something he had never seen in his life before. Two suns stood side by side
in the sky. A parhelion. A formidable and ancient omen of something or other, he
forgot what.".
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