Noble and Most Ancient: The Black Family Tapestry

[terri_testing]

Let’s think about the Black Family Tree for a moment-not the data in the possibly non-canonical display of Phineas’s branch that was created by JKR for a charity auction, but the hanging itself, that Sirius showed off to Harry, with commentary.  What does canon say, and what can we deduce, about the Black Family Tapestry?

It’s not a prepossessing

Comments

[josephinestone]

I like the idea of her being the one to performed the forgery.

As much as culture changes from generation to generation, it has never made sense to me that somehow everyone in all the pureblood families who were sorted into Slytherin never had a culture change from the Dark Ages. OR even disagreements? It's just not realistic. That's why I love when people write histories of the Malfoy's were their such and such famous ancestor believed the opposite of what they did in the books, but was shunned for it in their society at the time just like the modern Malfoys are. Or when they have a famous one that was shunned for their progressiveness, BUT by HP's modern standards that one was just as racist. It just seems more true to life to me.

Walburga

[terri_testing]

In fact, if it was Walburga who altered an existing family tree, just adding the caption and motto, she might not have thought of it as forgery--and certainly not as inserting falsified information or implications. Just as correcting the inexplicable omission of the family motto and a properly appreciative caption!

Because of course that long, tangled line of her ancestors were all Pure.... why else would the Tree have been created? And of course anyone unworthy would have been blasted off--if no one was, it's because in the Good Olde Days no family member behaved so badly as the youth of today....

If it was done around the time the Blacks purchased 12 Grimmauld Place, I think it was as part of a deliberate and conscious fraud.

And there may have been a number of families whitewashing their pasts sometime after the WW started Seclusion--rewriting family history so that not only were they magical back X years, but they were only-magical back that far.

[vermouth1991]

("auncyen"? Pardon my bluntness but is that even a word

Auncyen

[terri_testing]

Yes, that is the problem with an alphabetic written language rather than an--isn't the term ideographic?--one. Pronunciation changes over 700 years (and dialects come and go), and so spelling changes with it. The dropping of final e's when we dropped the final syllable on many words, as when Chaucer's "soote" turned into our "sweet". Not to mention the vowel changes. Conversely, at some point, spelling became standardized ("knight") enshining a particular dialect's spelling variant as the standard against which any other looks ignorant.... As to "auncyen", you probably would also have found "ancyen," "auncien," "ancien," etc. But apparently the final "t" appeared on the word ca. the 15th century to regularize it to noun/adjective word pairs like patience/patient, tolerance/tolerant. It's an adjective, so it should have a t, so one was added

Re: Auncyen

[seductivedark]

(Noble and Most Ancient-gah! Who starts a family tree that way?)That may be why it was added later, by Walburga or someone else. Of course the original wouldn't have such a thing at the beginning, unless the Blacks were pretentious even then

Re: Auncyen

[jana_ch]

Twelve Grimmauld Place is clearly the home of the city branch of the Blacks. The elder branch would have kept the estate in the country (you’re not a noble house without land!) and a secondary house for use in the London “season,” while the younger branch moved to the city permanently. That means until the Cygnus Blacks daughtered out, the Orion Blacks were a cadet branch. If Sirius and Regulus hadn’t died childless, one of them would have inherited the country estate and become the main branch of the family. There may be an actual medieval hanging showing the Black family tree back at the manor house on the country estate, and the younger son who moved to London in the nineteenth century created his own replica, with suitably modernized spelling.

[sunnyskywalker]

You know, I had assumed the "tapestry"/embroidered hanging magically updated its spelling as well as adding names to itself... but one doesn't update family mottoes, does one? The whole point is that they're so authentically old (or in Latin) that you have to teach the kids the translation.

And yes, who starts a family tree by calling it "ancient" and then doesn't add any ancestors? If "ancient" were on the heading when the thing was new back in 1295 or whenever, there would be ancestors at least back to, oh, 1066 or so, if not earlier. So someone altered it, or it wasn't made until at least a century or two later. Or both.

Another curiosity, which we can't resolve given the alteration(s) over the years: where did they acquire the surname Black in the first place? Is it from the French blanc (and is that medieval Norman French or did they have a variant)? Or is it from an English branch of the ancestral tree? There's Old English blœc (black) and blac (pale) as possibilities, and even a guy named Wulfric the Black/Wulfrigus Niger

[oryx_leucoryx]

Question: Is there a place where one can view the 'entire' 'tapestry'? The movie version, I presume?

[vermouth1991]

Don't quote me on this, but it's possible for Warner Bros. to have released it as a gigantic wallpaper either online or in print. I know that New Lines printed a full-scale map of Middle-earth (movie style, the one you got a glimpse of in the first movie), my brother bought one of those for me in Ottawa.

[vermouth1991]

"Another curiosity, which we can't resolve given the alteration(s) over the years: where did they acquire the surname Black in the first place? Is it from the French blanc (and is that medieval Norman French or did they have a variant)? Or is it from an English branch of the ancestral tree? There's Old English blœc (black) and blac (pale) as possibilities, and even a guy named Wulfric the Black/Wulfrigus Niger around 980 to claim as an ancestor of a noble thane who won the heart of a beautiful Norman duke's daughter. But none of them are on the family tree..."

~*~

Isn't Blanc the French for "White", though?