"The Problem Of The Raven King And Jonathan Strange." (JSMN) G
Title: The Problem Of The Raven King And Jonathan Strange. (On Archive Of Our Own)
Author:
lannamichaels
Fandom: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Rating: G
Summary: "It is John Uskglass's magic that we do" if so, I want a refund.
LarissaShanberg: Kevin, nope.
I know everyone says this is real, but I refuse to believe this isn't some absurd hoax.
Are we SURE the practical magicians haven't figured out time travel? I wouldn't put it past \@QuentinAllen to slide this into the 12th century just to give me a heart attack.
KevinJohnson: What, you also don't believe Catherine of Winchester wrote to William Lanchester that the King was all aflutter because he'd done a spell to reveal his True Name and it said it was Jonathan Strange Jr?
Yeah. I'm gonna go find Quentin and do unspeakable things to his self-esteem.
QuentinAllen: Guys!
Stop complaining about me! I didn't find it! The Starecross team did! It was all above board and I had nothing at all to do with it.
I'm sure "Jonathan Strange" was some kind of 12th century joke that none of us have ever heard, and it's only that Strange's family had it in their ancestral memory that THE Jonathan Strange got the name.
QuentinAllen: Uh.
Friends, Romans, magicians
The Starecross team did a formal spell using that name as the Raven King's name, so now we're all fucked, because it worked.
Keep an office open for me, currently running for my life from angry academics.
LarissaShanberg: Motherfuck
KevinJohnson: Quentin, what the precise fuck is going on.
QuentinAllen: I didn't do anything! I just watched!
AbbyCarrahan: Well, we do have surviving documentation from those who knew Jonathan Strange that remarked that he looked like the Raven King, although no one ever explained how they knew that.
Unfortunately, this still explains nothing.
LarissaShanberg: Where is Jonathan Strange these days anyway? Last sighting was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean twenty years ago, was it? Someone should tell him that he owes child support.
KathrynVane: Don't worry. No one reputable is claiming that Jonathan Strange is the Raven King's dad.
LeonardoTullis: And isn't it more likely to be the other way around? Strange's mom has a discreet affair with someone who tells her his name is Jonathan, she names her son after him, boom, both name and resemblance solved.
LarissaShanberg: This explains nothing about how the Raven King got that name in the first place.
RyanKwasnik: Finally, the contingent that scream that John Uskglass Sr was never the Raven King's father can -- having been proven right -- finally shut up
KevinJohnson: No, they're not gonna shut up. Remember the second part of their argument is "and so he's not actually the King of Northern England". Because if his pretext for the conquest was wrong, something something flying unicycles wearing bathrobes.
KathrynVane: They have a kernel of a good point in their follow-up question of "then so who IS he, if he's not the son of some Norman dude". And the answer is, apparently, "he's Jonathan Strange, Junior". Whatever THAT ends up meaning.
LeonardoTullis: It means his dad was some dude named Jonathan Strange #helpful
KathrynVane: Does it, though? What were the rules regarding senior/junior back in the late 11th century? Did it have to be the dad, could it have been an uncle or a cousin or a friend?
LarissaShanberg: I don't know, but I bet you, we're gonna find out.
AbbyCarrahan: We also don't know the year. Based on sightings of him as a child, he spent at least 10 years of his development in Oberon's court in Faerie. What that corresponded to in England is anyone's guess. The Aureates sure didn't know, or if they did, kept it a very close secret.
The only thing I'd bet on at this point is that the Raven King is 1) human, and 2) there is no second point.
LarissaShanberg: 2) that his name is Jonathan Strange, Junior, apparently.
How am I supposed to get over that, I ask you. How am I supposed to get over that.
KathrynVane: IDK, Larissa. Let me know if you figure it out.
SamEary: Please stop blowing up my phone and distracting me while I'm trying to keep my grad students from drunk-dialing the Raven King.
KevinJohnson: I think you need to let life be the teacher on that, Sam. After one of them succeeds, the rest of them will learn not to touch the hot stove.
Hey \@QuentinAllen, what spell did Starecross pick for their attempt?
QuentinAllen: \@KevinJohnson the Childermass vision spell, on the theory that if it misfired and got us Jonathan Strange instead, we could ask him where he dropped off his latest manuscript. Meitner cut the spell once he realized it had actually worked and then Waggert threw the basin on the floor and ran out of the room along with the rest of us.
ZAGibbon: You are all cowards. We should pester the Raven King until he's annoyed enough to come back to Newcastle or appoint a new seneschal, there's entire rooms filled up with paperwork waiting for him to sign.
RyanKwasnik: Are you volunteering?
ZAGibbon: No. Make Sam's grad students do it.
SamEary: I just got told very earnestly that since the Raven King made magic accessible to everyone in England, that it would only be in the true spirit of gratitude to let them do a summoning spell.
This is going to end poorly.
RyanKwasnik: Remind the kids that S&N did a summoning spell back in the day and all they got was their entire library turned into ravens and then they had to reshelve ALL THE BOOKS.
KathrynVane: The horror, the horror.
RyanKwasnik: And that could have been Strange getting off easily, on account of him being the Raven King's son/dad/mysterious other relative. The King didn't have to turn the books back. The library could just have flown away forever.
AbbyCarrahan: The thought alone of Jonathan Strange, of all people, being closely related to the Raven King gives me the most pounding headache. Two magicians shall appear in England, the first shall fear me, the second shares a Y-chromosome with me. Egads.
ZAGibbon: Abby, you've done some work on Thomas of Dundale, what's your ballpark on the Raven King's birth year? I know you're going to say "no one will ever know", but...
AbbyCarrahan: No one will ever know. :P
Since he ended up in Oberon's court, he honestly could have been there since Merlin was kicking around. It's not like it's hard to find instances of children aging less than a year in Faerie while the human world experiences a century. With most abductions, we have a record of when they left. But there's always been so much of an aura of mystery about the Raven King's life. All those stories about him being abandoned in the woods before even being named and somehow finding his way into Faerie and then getting stories of John Uskglass (Sr) and the unavenged Norman family... none of that was ever anything that could be tied directly to the man who came out of Faerie in the winter of 1110.
For all we know, Dundale was the one who identified this random kid in Faerie as being John Uskglass Jr, and so that's who we can blame for it all ;)
Dundale had been gone for 14 calendar years by the time he came back and those who had known him could still recognize him clearly and easily, so it's not unlikely that Thomas had aged much less than 14 years while in captivity. What does that mean for years and the Raven King? No one will ever know.
I think the only place we'll have any luck is with the people trying to figure out the absolute earliest you could have had a kid get named Jonathan Strange Junior by his parents. And if that date is after 1096, we're back to the time travel theory.
CordiaCharnoski: I'm just gonna go ahead and assume there was time travel until proven otherwise. No one's been able to definitively place the Raven King in England before 1110. Has anyone bothered to try to find him after?
In other words, Jonathan Strange has yet to be off the hook for child support.
LarissaShanberg: Argh. Sure, why not. It's not like we've got good constructions of time in Faerie. We can't use the moon phases or the position of the earth to the sun. We can't measure it, therefore it doesn't exist, therefore the Raven King hasn't been born yet.
CordiaCharnoski: The best we've got here is studies of hair length changes. But there's a spell for that.
LarissaShanberg: I hate magic.
WillGrandmont: Same.
AbbyCarrahan: It's true: no one hates magic more than magicians.
LarissaShanberg: I want to go back to the good old days when being a theoretical magician meant I never had to wonder about causality and if next year, the baby name fad will be naming kids Jonathan Strange Junior and if one of those kids ends up being the Raven King and Jonathan Strange had nothing to do with this at all. I want the good old days when I could hate the Raven King in peace, along with all of my fellows, as we studiously excluded from our society anyone who wasn't exactly like me, so I never had to consider outside perspectives, like does a famous magician who has spent centuries wandering in an invisible house have a kid he never told anyone about, but named after himself.
I hate that it's a legitimate question of if Jonathan Yes Him Strange knocked up someone in Faerie, had the kid actually be born in Oberon's court, time decide to go backwards because it was an alternate Tuesday and the kid walked past a rippling pond, and then Thomas of Dundale shows and says "you look like you're related to someone who got killed", and then the last millennium happened, but Jonathan Strange only ended up in Faerie in the first place because he was wandering the King's Roads, looking for vestiges of the Raven King. And then causing him to exist. This is horrible, I want to go back to the Strange vs Norrell flame wars. I think I'm taking Norrell's side this time.
"It is John Uskglass's magic that we do" if so, I want a refund.
KathrynVane: \@AbbyCarrahan, to add to your points: 3) something tragic happened when he was very young which meant he didn't know his name. He had some kind of permanent separation from his family or anyone who could identify him.
CordiaCharnoski: Not necessarily if we're talking about a Faerie court. His mother could well have never told him his name in order to protect him. And if his mother was still alive as of when he did the spell of revelation, it might just be because he didn't want to ask her, for whatever reason. I've done stupid things to avoid worrying my parents. No reason the Raven King couldn't have decided not to let his mom know he was going to open himself to all manner of magical attacks by trying to find out his name.
ZAGibbon: He called himself the 'nameless slave', though. That indicates to me that he thought he didn't have one, not that he merely didn't know it. So I'm in agreement with Kathryn: something happened when he was an infant to separate him from anyone who knew him.
SamEary: You know what I think of when I think of Faerie courts? Excellent infant care.
KevinJohnson: How are the students?
SamEary: Summoning themselves a pizza instead.
KevinJohnson: *thumbs-up*
VincentVMeers: There was a very good article in FOEM a few years back that posited that the Raven King took his banner from the form of his fairy nursemaid. He was acknowledging a magical debt.
ZAGibbon: hey, \@QuentinAllen, did the Starecross team have any spell confusion?
QuentinAllen: Nope.
ZAGibbon: So if there was time travel (I'm really beginning to think there's time travel), the Raven King isn't doubled right now.
But maybe he expected he'd be doubled during the Vanished Years.
It would make sense to stay away from England so any spells aimed at either him or his baby self wouldn't get stuck or maybe reverberate.
And it would really make sense if he didn't know what year he was born. Or even what century. He stays away from England during the suspect time and only comes back once he's sure it's over.
This also gives a time frame exactly on when he was born, because we know when Jonathan Strange was.
WillGrandmont: There is no goddamn way that Jonathan Strange is the Raven King's father.
You guys can speculate all you want, I'm telling you, this isn't real.
When would Jonathan Strange even have time?
ZAGibbon: Um. Well.
LarissaShanberg: Yeah. Based on Arabella Strange's letters, his stamina and patience in magic was always more... developed than his stamina and patience in other areas. It would not have taken him very long to do his part of it.
And even assuming he never cheated on his wife, all he'd really need is a one-night stand before their wedding.
The real question is, if Strange is the Raven King's father, why would the Raven King help him become a magician? Why include him at all? We know the King holds grudges, why isn't there a grudge against dad?
KevinJohnson: Don't drag me into this... okay okay, but, you know, including him in the spell is not doing him a favor. It ended up with Strange stuck in darkness for a century. That's not helping him.
We have Vinculus's testimony alone that the prophecy was a spell of the Raven King, but the prophecy itself was known widely in Faerie. The Raven King's words were "long to behold me". Strange was seeking the Raven King. But did Strange also long for a son? Is there another meaning there to connect the spell?
"His dearest possession in his enemy’s hand" was never the easiest to understand, since Strange's first attempt at magic showed him "his enemy" being Norrell. The classical interpretation is that the "dearest possession" has to be Arabella Strange's abduction. But if we're going to assume that, we may as well consider an unknown son to be a dear possession as well and that Strange had multiple enemies.
And I'm on Team Norrell Destroying Strange's Book for that line in the prophecy anyway.
RyanKwasnik: Congratulations. The spell being an alarm clock to tell him when it's safe to return because his father's shown up and it's after the latest he could be born/abducted into Faerie is simultaneously the least and also most plausible explanation I've heard this year for the Raven King's disappearance.
ZAGibbon: Thanks. I aim to horrify.
KathrynVane: I am certainly horrified.
CordiaCharnoski: \@LarissaShanberg, why do you think he'd be angry at his dad?
LarissaShanberg: Nothing but baseless speculation. But his stated reasons for going to war all have to do with what he thinks he's owed due to what he's endured in his life. If he finds another target for getting recompense, wouldn't he go after it? If he really did think his dad was John Uskglass Sr until he did the spell, well, that man is dead. But if there was someone else, maybe he might have a grievance there. No one came to rescue him from Faerie. He had to fight his way to the top and then never really did end up leaving Faerie entirely. He's spent more time there than here. And if he got abducted through no fault of anyone still living, he could focus on other targets. But if someone's still alive, why not go after them as well?
CordiaCharnoski: If he was really pissed off about the abduction itself, wouldn't he have stopped the practice of abducting humans into Faerie? He even did it himself, too. There's ballads and everything.
SamEary: Then those people should bootstrap themselves their own Faerie kingdom. It's their own fault if they don't.
RyanKwasnik: That's it, I'm going to go walk between those two bent trees and knock on John Uskglass's door and demand that he spit into a cup for me, and then for the insult, I'll spend the next 30 years washing dishes in the brugh basement. Why the hell not, beats my current retirement plan.
AbbyCarrahan: No, he's a magician first. Before he does that, he'll want to see what kind of spell you're thinking of doing. Personally I'm more curious at how you're gonna get Strange's cheekswab for this. I think that's harder than the Raven King who, for all we complain, we do KNOW where he is. He just isn't HERE.
RyanKwasnik: If a cat can still get into Strange's house, so can a roomba.
QuentinAllen: I'd fund that grant.
SamEary: I'd fund that grant just to see Jonathan Strange's reaction to a roomba. This is a guy we can't even get to use a ballpoint pen. Maybe he'll suddenly see the light and we can toss him a satellite phone and no longer need to talk to him through plates of stream water under a full moon every fifth solar eclipse.
QuentinAllen: Amen.
LarissaShanberg: You don't want that. Then you'll have to listen to Jonathan Strange. This way, when you hear from him, it's because you really, really want to.
AbbyCarrahan: Are you kidding? I'd pay so much money for the ability to ignore Jonathan Strange's calls. That sounds like a dream come true.
CordiaCharnoski: Norrellite. :P
AbbyCarrahan: Gilbert Norrell Was The True Epitome Of English Magic Because His Main Magical Achievement Was Done Via A Fairy Servant Whose Existence He Never Acknowledged, Thus The Pure Exploitation Of Fairy Magic And Of A Woman's Suffering To Gain His Reputation Makes Him The Most English Magician To Ever English With Or Without Magic, Thank You For Attending My Dissertation
LarissaShanberg: I mean, you're not wrong.
ZAGibbon: Half of what Strange did on the Peninsula is now classified as war crimes, doesn't that count for anything in this competition?
RyanKwasnik: No, that's just him taking after his son, the Raven King.
KathrynVane: *incoherent screaming*
KevinJohnson: They do share a family predilection for making roads and also interrogating dead people.
SamEary: Say what you like about Norrell, but at least he never stranded three hundred deserters in America or, when reality didn't match a map, changed reality instead of the map. Jonathan Strange was the purest Englishman when it came to the geography of other countries.
LarissaShanberg: You're also not wrong.
QuentinAllen: If Norrell had his way, there wouldn't be any other magicians around to argue which one of them was better. Or which was worse, as the case may be.
(Norrell was worse. Fight me.)
LarissaShanberg: I'm not gonna fight you. Norrell's the reason, though, that there was so much room for magicians after him, seeing as how he took all the books with him. I'm sure we're still writing books that we wouldn't need to if he hadn't just fucked off into darkness with every book of magic except the Raven King's book. Which we still can't read.
KathrynVane: At least Jonathan Strange had students, plural.
ZAGibbon: I want my tombstone to read "did more for English magic longterm than goddamn S&N"
SamEary: There's an entire cemetery's worth of people who could say that and be right.
ZAGibbon: Great. I'll be one of them.
KathrynVane: "Who won the Strange and Norrell wars, Grandma?" "Everyone but them."
KevinJohnson: I do think it's significant that most of us would be more than happy to read Strange's latest tome, even if only to dispute it, but the only thing we want from Norrell is his library.
CordiaCharnoski: If Norrell had any interest in anyone but him and Strange being magicians, I'd care what he thinks.
LarissaShanberg: We're living in Norrell's hell right now: everyone's a magician and no one gives a fuck what he thinks.
You know what would bring Norrell out from the impenetrable thicket around Hurtfew? Finding out that his apprentice was the father of the man Norrell tried to eradicate from the history of English magic. There's no one Norrell loves more than Strange. There's no one Norrell hates more than the Raven King. I wanna eat popcorn and watch his head explode.
KathrynVane: OK, you've convinced me. For this reason alone, I want this absurd nonsense to be true. I want to share in that popcorn.
LarissaShanberg: There is enough popcorn for everyone in this wonderful hell.
ZAGibbon: Sprinkle mine with enough butter and I'll be convinced not to track down Strange and interrogate him about his sexual history.
LarissaShanberg: Deal.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1097273.html.