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cygna_himeI cycled back around to HP again -- which is to say, I finally got through the first Slytherin common room scene in Disturbingly Epic Nextgen Doomfic, which was wearing on me, so now I think I know a little more about Albus and a fair bit more about some of the other Slytherin boys, including one seventh-year who has sprung fully-formed into existence (his name is Yonec MacDougal). And that's always nice. Rose is up next, where I expect to learn less about her, because I already feel I know rather a lot, and more about other relatives and sundry Gryffindors. And then, as so often happens, I got distracted by my reams of Founders!headcanon, because it is medieval and I like medieval. So I thought I should write some down.
1. Salazar is an Anglicism, or possibly, technically, a Spanishism, for an Arabic name which no one on those benighted isles could pronounce. It got run together and shortened, rather like Saladin, only one can mostly blame Godric (Rowena could pronounce it, and Helga couldn't much but tried anyway with middling results).
2. There was quite a language barrier, at first: Helga didn't speak Latin, and Salazar didn't speak anything then spoken in the British Isles but Latin (he eventually learned to approximate some of the vulgar tongues, but there were rather a lot), and Godric preferred French (or rather, what was then spoken in some places that would eventually become more or less French as she is known), and Rowena could read anything you put in front of her but had heard comparatively little pronounced...They got past it, one way or another, eventually.
3. Rowena was educated in a convent, as one was, at least if one was female and not exceedingly noble. She did not, however, take the veil. She learned from old texts copied and recopied, and from what one knew if one knew herbalists and midwives.
4. Helga was a nobody, a witch of Norse extraction who learned what she knew from the other women, the way they always had learned things.
5. Godric was nobility, one part old Saxon to one part Norman (his mother named him), and what he learned was in a more hole-and-corner way than the others. He was "li chevaliers pruz et vallianz", as one said, or wrote, at the time. (I think I've got that right...it's only been a few weeks of class.)
6. Salazar was a Moor, a Muslim from Spain, a merchant and a scholar. He studied in one of the great centers of learning of the world at that time. He never stopped finding Britain/Albion/Bretagne/what have you backwater and barbaric.
7. Rowena married young. Her husband went on crusade and was gone for years before they heard he was not coming back; this left her free to manage their small holdings and go traveling. Her second husband was a wizard content with small talent and taking care of her lands.
8. Salazar had two wives, Fatima the younger and Ayesha the elder, whom he had left back home without great sorrow to take care of things in his absence. Eventually, they came looking for him.
9. Godric had two sons and a daughter by the time he was twenty-six, before Hogwarts was a gleam in his eye.
10. The basilisk was hardly a secret. That would be silly. Besides, Salazar trusted his friends as he trusted no one else in his life. He trusted them enough to admit to a good son and daughter of the Church (and to Helga) that he spoke with the tongue of the serpent. We would not understand now, but that could have been his death sentence.
11. The context of their argument has been forgotten by wizardkind, never well-versed in history -- or ignored, because the paradigm no longer fits. The argument in 1180 was not the argument in 1980; the argument as Voldemort phrased it would have made no sense to any of them, not just because he was made entirely of wrong but also because that was not the world they lived in.
12. You would argue for isolation too, if you were a Muslim parselmouth in the age of holy wars.
13. Hang JKR's dates; Henry II had all the interesting stuff, *and* was followed by Richard the Never Set Foot In England For More Than a Month Total In His Life, *and* by John Lackland the Poor Fellow, *and* was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, *and*...well! It's just a much more interesting and well-established period, historically, to set things in. It's not like she thought about the period at all.
14. You would argue against isolation too, if it took you twenty-five years of your life to learn for sure that you weren't the only one.
15. It's never as simple as people would like to make it sound. Arguments between friends don't force them apart; arguments between schools of thought, between groups of adherents more or less muddled in their thinking, are what threaten to destroy schools of the other kind, until the only way to fix the problem is to take its source away, even if the source was never the problem.
16. He was never happy, all the rest of his life, living in the country he loved for their sakes yet had never really belonged to and never could, unable to go back to the only place he had ever loved for fear of destroying it. Letters and visits were not enough, not when he had had every hour of every day.
17. There is, or was then, an ideal of love in which the lovers could lie side by side naked and never touch, a love without carnal desire. Between some of them, this love was as close to attained as it has ever been. (Between Godric and Salazar, less so. But then, it was after a time inconceivable that there could be a bond they did not share.) It was strange, for a man like Godric to look at a woman like Rowena, beautiful and noble and wise, and be willing to defy the world to spare her the slightest pain, and yet not ever desire her. Strange, but the only way it could have been, for the four of them to work together.
18. The Chamber of Secrets as Harry saw it was built long, long after the Founders -- or did you think it attached itself to the very modern plumbing? What Harry saw was some 18th- or 19th-century pureblood supremacist's idea of Slytherin's stronghold, someone who only saw the basilisk as a weapon, someone who may have given orders to snakes but never spoke with them.
19. The Secrets have always been plural for a reason. The basilisk, whose name is Pythia by the way, not that anyone's asked in centuries, wasn't the half of it, or the quarter. The Chamber was the sanctum sanctorum, the one remnant of the Founders that has never been distorted because it was never found (well, until 2022 or so, but that's another story), their foundation of the Foundation.
20. There are gravestones there, for husbands and wives and children, and for Helga, and for Rowena, and one double grave for Salazar and Godric, who were parted for fifty years and will never be parted again.
1. Salazar is an Anglicism, or possibly, technically, a Spanishism, for an Arabic name which no one on those benighted isles could pronounce. It got run together and shortened, rather like Saladin, only one can mostly blame Godric (Rowena could pronounce it, and Helga couldn't much but tried anyway with middling results).
2. There was quite a language barrier, at first: Helga didn't speak Latin, and Salazar didn't speak anything then spoken in the British Isles but Latin (he eventually learned to approximate some of the vulgar tongues, but there were rather a lot), and Godric preferred French (or rather, what was then spoken in some places that would eventually become more or less French as she is known), and Rowena could read anything you put in front of her but had heard comparatively little pronounced...They got past it, one way or another, eventually.
3. Rowena was educated in a convent, as one was, at least if one was female and not exceedingly noble. She did not, however, take the veil. She learned from old texts copied and recopied, and from what one knew if one knew herbalists and midwives.
4. Helga was a nobody, a witch of Norse extraction who learned what she knew from the other women, the way they always had learned things.
5. Godric was nobility, one part old Saxon to one part Norman (his mother named him), and what he learned was in a more hole-and-corner way than the others. He was "li chevaliers pruz et vallianz", as one said, or wrote, at the time. (I think I've got that right...it's only been a few weeks of class.)
6. Salazar was a Moor, a Muslim from Spain, a merchant and a scholar. He studied in one of the great centers of learning of the world at that time. He never stopped finding Britain/Albion/Bretagne/what have you backwater and barbaric.
7. Rowena married young. Her husband went on crusade and was gone for years before they heard he was not coming back; this left her free to manage their small holdings and go traveling. Her second husband was a wizard content with small talent and taking care of her lands.
8. Salazar had two wives, Fatima the younger and Ayesha the elder, whom he had left back home without great sorrow to take care of things in his absence. Eventually, they came looking for him.
9. Godric had two sons and a daughter by the time he was twenty-six, before Hogwarts was a gleam in his eye.
10. The basilisk was hardly a secret. That would be silly. Besides, Salazar trusted his friends as he trusted no one else in his life. He trusted them enough to admit to a good son and daughter of the Church (and to Helga) that he spoke with the tongue of the serpent. We would not understand now, but that could have been his death sentence.
11. The context of their argument has been forgotten by wizardkind, never well-versed in history -- or ignored, because the paradigm no longer fits. The argument in 1180 was not the argument in 1980; the argument as Voldemort phrased it would have made no sense to any of them, not just because he was made entirely of wrong but also because that was not the world they lived in.
12. You would argue for isolation too, if you were a Muslim parselmouth in the age of holy wars.
13. Hang JKR's dates; Henry II had all the interesting stuff, *and* was followed by Richard the Never Set Foot In England For More Than a Month Total In His Life, *and* by John Lackland the Poor Fellow, *and* was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, *and*...well! It's just a much more interesting and well-established period, historically, to set things in. It's not like she thought about the period at all.
14. You would argue against isolation too, if it took you twenty-five years of your life to learn for sure that you weren't the only one.
15. It's never as simple as people would like to make it sound. Arguments between friends don't force them apart; arguments between schools of thought, between groups of adherents more or less muddled in their thinking, are what threaten to destroy schools of the other kind, until the only way to fix the problem is to take its source away, even if the source was never the problem.
16. He was never happy, all the rest of his life, living in the country he loved for their sakes yet had never really belonged to and never could, unable to go back to the only place he had ever loved for fear of destroying it. Letters and visits were not enough, not when he had had every hour of every day.
17. There is, or was then, an ideal of love in which the lovers could lie side by side naked and never touch, a love without carnal desire. Between some of them, this love was as close to attained as it has ever been. (Between Godric and Salazar, less so. But then, it was after a time inconceivable that there could be a bond they did not share.) It was strange, for a man like Godric to look at a woman like Rowena, beautiful and noble and wise, and be willing to defy the world to spare her the slightest pain, and yet not ever desire her. Strange, but the only way it could have been, for the four of them to work together.
18. The Chamber of Secrets as Harry saw it was built long, long after the Founders -- or did you think it attached itself to the very modern plumbing? What Harry saw was some 18th- or 19th-century pureblood supremacist's idea of Slytherin's stronghold, someone who only saw the basilisk as a weapon, someone who may have given orders to snakes but never spoke with them.
19. The Secrets have always been plural for a reason. The basilisk, whose name is Pythia by the way, not that anyone's asked in centuries, wasn't the half of it, or the quarter. The Chamber was the sanctum sanctorum, the one remnant of the Founders that has never been distorted because it was never found (well, until 2022 or so, but that's another story), their foundation of the Foundation.
20. There are gravestones there, for husbands and wives and children, and for Helga, and for Rowena, and one double grave for Salazar and Godric, who were parted for fifty years and will never be parted again.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 01:20 am (UTC)Jus' sayin'.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 08:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 02:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 08:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 03:04 am (UTC)I take it you're pretty well versed in medieval history?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 09:24 am (UTC)I'm a stealth medievalist, mostly in literature but one can hardly help getting some history in around the edges. I'm pretty solid, comparatively speaking, on the 1100s political and social situation, and I've got a fair bit of general background. But I'm never quite sure how much other people know about this kind of thing. Rather little, it seems. It makes it very hard to read Founder!fic, because I know my Founder!fic is going to be anachronistic by default, but not *that* anachronistic.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 07:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 09:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 05:40 pm (UTC)This is not going to be an epic, do you understand me? I am limiting myself to one epic per fandom, so any Founders-related epicity would have to wait until after the Epic Nextgen of Doom. ...Maybe some shared-universe oneshots. Maybe.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 02:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 09:24 pm (UTC)Oh, hell yes.
I can totally believe all of this, and am glad that JKR never quite tackled it at all, because she'd have ignored all of the historicisms.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 11:35 pm (UTC)Now I'm going to have to read your fic, since I came here by way of
Anybody who thinks that period of history was boring has never seen 'Lion in Winter'.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 03:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 03:39 am (UTC)Heh. Probably not out of question in a magical castle with moving stairs, but I like your explanation better.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-13 09:29 pm (UTC)Oh, man... I am BOOK. MARKING this! :D
Last winter I spent a ridiculously enjoyable few days trying to figure out how Hogwarts was built and mapping it out in my head, but somehow I never thought much about the founders themselves. These are entirely delightful.
*adds to personal canon*
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-15 10:21 pm (UTC)You would argue for isolation too, if you were a Muslim parselmouth in the age of holy wars.
Never thought of it like this before but YES. Totally canon for me now.