Severian's family tree

Roy C. Lackey · 22 Aug 2006, 05:47 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:47:58 -0500
Subject: (urth) Severian's family tree
Message-ID: <000c01c6c5ae$88e92540$9d3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

My old _Webster's_ defines "chatelaine" this way: "1. the lady of a castle;
mistress of a chateau." "Chateau" is defined as: "1. a French feudal castle.
2. a large country house, especially one in France."

b sharp wrote:
>Thecla talks about her time  up at the northern villa before she became a
>concubine.  Now a villa is the secondary, country estate of a noble family.
>Her primary estate is never mentioned, but twice, after Severian shares her
>memories, it is hinted she had an early childhood being raised in the
>Citadel.  So maybe the Citadel is the primary estate and her parents are
>Catherine and the Castellan.

In chapter VIII of SHADOW, the Chatelaine Thecla spoke to Severian about
Gurloes having allegedly sent some people to the House Absolute to fetch her
some more clothes:

"I already have, and he says he sent some people to the House Absolute to
fetch them for me, but they were unable to find it, which means that the
House Absolute is trying to pretend I don't exist. Anyway, it's possible all
my clothes have been sent to our chateau in the north, or one of the villas.
He's going to have his secretary write them for me."

This statement makes several things clear. One is that Thecla's "primary
estate" is not there in the Citadel. Her family had more than one villa, and
their primary estate seems to be a northern chateau.

Thecla's family apparently had a villa in the area of Thrax. Severian
confirmed something Cyriaca had said near the end of their conversation
together (SWORD, chapter XII) by calling up a memory of Thecla's dealing
with a "country villa -- half manor and half fort". Forts -- to say nothing
of castles -- usually have defenders.

The memory "as Thecla dodged the hooves of my father's mounted guard" could
easily apply to mounted guards at a family villa or at the chateau.

But this is all secondary. The one insurmountable problem of the Castellan
being Thecla's father is the fact that the Castellan was alive and Thecla's
father was dead. One of Thecla's surfaced memories: "my father had given a
ball for me each year until his death". (CITADEL, chapter XXIII, last
paragraph)

-Roy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net