#mythmaking

If you think browbeating your children into being good little purebloods is what it takes,then you have failed to understand what it means to be a Black.

We are transgressive by nature, us Blacks. Others may make rules, but we live by no rules but our own - have you not heard, have you not known? Foolish woman.

Consider this your reward for your folly. One son, a whimpering ball, ready to come and go at the slightest move of your finger - aye, you have him well-trained. But he was no Black. Blacks do not bow their knees to other men, certainly not half-breeds. Or have you forgotten your proud ancestry? Poor lad, I could have made much of him. One treats that sort of boy gently, one wins their trust and knowing them in and out, one knows how to better lead them in the straight and narrow. Alas, he is dead and so goes the last of our line; a snivelling piece of work with far too many secrets for his own good.

Ah but the other one could have truly revived our fortunes. He had gumption. An enterprising mind. Precisely the sort of son our ancestors would be delighted to have. But you, my dear, you pushed him away by beating him when you ought to have mollycoddled him. Do you not understand the minds of children? They must be led, not pushed and pummelled into shape. He could have been great, had you known howto raise him to choose for himself, when the time came, the ways of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Instead he turned blood-traitor and now he is in Azkaban and therefore, will amount to nothing. A worthless young fellow and you are entirely to blame.

Excellent. I’m sure you are quitedelighted with your handiwork. You have, after all, singlehandedly wrought the downfall of our family. I must commend you for having managed in but twenty years what others have failed to accomplish in centuries, yea millennia. They will all laud and fete you beyond the veil and demand to know how you did it.

Ah, but you want advice, is it? Ah. Charming. Should I part with my words of wisdom or shall I keep them to myself knowing that you will simply fail to understand what it is I am saying?

Had I been in your place I would have given my children something to be proud of. A name to bear with pride, to raise one’s head high. Not a bloated, pompous ideal that even a five year old could see through. Oh the dark magic isn’t the only thing that characterizes us, Walburga dear. We’re not like the others; pompous old windbags with no good to their names. I would have taught your eldest - er, Sirius, wasn’t it? Quite, quite - about the goodwe had done. Charities and fundraisers, forward thinking progressives who believed women could rule families just as much as men could - no, no, no, you mustn’t interrupt, you know as well as I that the sons and daughters of Morgana, Morgause, Elaine and Arthur could hardly believe that a woman should allow her husband to place his foot upon her neck ‘an he choose to do so. I would have told him how we were the ones who first reformed the Ministry classifications system and made them create a new class of people called beings. One has to reason with stubborn children, to show them that you are not yourself a stubborn child - you are an adult and possessed of an infinitely great fount of wisdom. It is the only way to treat with stubborn young Gryffindors, not to berate them and beat them and hope that they will see the wisdom of your path. No, you must lead them to choose your way, only then will they be all the more loyal to it.

Ah and the other one. I would have drawn him out of his shell and made him talk. Silent obedience is, as you would know if you had listened to the wisdom of your fathers, inevitably a sign of the silent rebellion that surfaces at the most inopportune moments.

What’s that? Oh, I was unpopular was I? How surprising. Those damn fool witches and wizards and their wishy washy dreams of an all inclusive society didn't like having their children labelled idiots and shipped off to the Centaur Liasion Office. Merely doing my duty by my country, for shame, is a man to be punished for doing his duty? Heaven help us all, this is the end of England as we know it and it’s all yourfault.

Of course, it is easy to be wise in retrospect and chide me for not foreseeing how little their parents or indeed they would love me for my foresight, just as it is easy for me to tell you how you have failed your sons. Merlin, what do they teach you in school nowadays? What do you mean but Phineas? I know no Phineas save myself - no there is no Phineas, cease your prating woman! No doubt it was your wagging tongue which sent Orion early to his grave - no for the last time no there is no Phineas but I! Phineas Nigellus Black, the first of his name and head of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black!

I am tired. My head aches and I am fatigued to the bone. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black will crumble and fade away and be as but dust in the wind.

You may leave.

 (Phineas Nigellus Black requested by inkyhooves)

The truth behind the Highwayman’s Tale

If those interested had bothered to ride along the London-Bath road on the day the graves bring forth their dead, they might have learnt the entire truth behind the highwayman’s tale.

Of course, it was against their interest to know what led up to the events of that fateful nights, now that they’d so firmly established that all muggles were all monsters with no honor and no loyalty. They might have to, horror of all horrors, change the way they thought of the matter in the first place.

Then again, the human mind is capable of extraordinary mental gymnastics.

For if they’d particularly cared to know the truth about this man and his deeds, they could have asked the ghosts of Frederick and his lady love, both of whom still wandered the London-Bath road late at night.

They would have learnt that Freddie, by nature, was a philanderer and that this was no great love story of theirs. He would have left Bess without a murmur when he tired of her - indeed centuries of being forever at her side had long since weaned him of all desire and tenderness he might have once felt for her.

They might have remembered that Frederick Rosier made it his business to steal from his people; the wealthy purebloods; to return those goblin-made artifacts they had once seized for their own. That he never had a second thought where killing was involved, as long as he won his spoils. They might even have gone so far to have found a paybook with neat annotations of payments received from the goblins for each item recovered - they paid him a far greater sum than the pin money his father was wont to give him.

And let us not forget to name his lady love - Bess her name was, and she was a true Gryffindor  like her highwayman - an ordinary tavern wench and muggleborn,who gave selflessly to her highwayman, knowing quite well that in time he would tire of her and marry some rich, odious pureblood witch and settle quite happily with her.

And even this is not the entire tale. This, at least, is still told among certain people, whose voices are rarely heard over the clanging of coins and proclamations of blue-bloodedness.

The highwayman’s tale was far more darker. Concerned more than one man.

If only they had bothered to question the ghosts of Frederick Rosier and his tavern wench - but in truth, who would have known where to look for them when the inn no longer stood to mark the place? - they might have learnt the entire tale. For the story the purebloods told their children left out the most crucial part of the tale: the arrest of the landlord and the burning of the tavern by King James’ men.

Of those who died in the fire that night, ten were muggles and only two were wizards.  And for them, no justice, no vengeance was exacted and nobody knows their names or who they were, whether they had families who missed them and why they happened to have been there on that fateful night.

The fact that so many paid for one man’s reckless bravery is a part of the tale which is never told and will never be told as long as the sound of gold coins drowns it out.

What other tale would the purebloods tell their children about the wicked muggles, if not this one?

[Pictures Sources: The Girl Who Looked Out At the World by Alex Stoddard Photography, Screencaps from Stand and Deliver by Adam Ant,Witchfinder General,The Fellowship of the Ring,Building on fire by Sephirothmsk on Deviantart.]

The Highwayman’s Tale

Blood-red were his spurs i’ the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

- The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

The Highwayman’s tale is a story each pureblood child hears in their cradle and is repeated to them, year after year, night after night until the words are forever locked into their hearts and they can tell the tale without stumbling, so that one day they too may pass this story to their children to teach them what it means to be a witch or a wizard.

Muggleborns who ask why, in these modern times, the magical folk still hide themselves away are told this tale in answer.

For the tale is one of violent beginnings and ends, of love passionate and enduring, of betrayal and jealousy, of pain and loss and death. And most importantly, it reveals the true nature of these lesser beings who once persecuted them and would persecute them once again, if they revealed themselves.

It tells the story of young Frederick Rosier, a wizard aristocrat turned highwayman and his love, a young witch who served as a tavern wench in her father’s inn. Every night he comes to her, before he rides on his way to make his raids in the moonlight. Jealous of Rosier; jealous that she should favour a handsome, reckless stranger over a steady lad like him; the muggle ostler Tim betrays them and tells King James’ men-at-arms of a highwayman who will ride the London-Bath road that very night and will return at dawn with his spoils to greet his lady love.

The king’s men come to the inn and bind the young witch to the foot of a bed, by a casement looking on to the road below, a musket underneath her breast. She shoots herself when she hears him approaching, warning him of the danger awaiting him at the inn and Rosier flees at the sound of the shot, not knowing that it is his love who has shot herself to save him. When he does hear of it, he turns his horse and rides to avenge her death and is shot for his efforts. King James’ men are rewarded by William of Orange, Tim the ostler rejoices and business continues as usual in the village as Freddie Rosier bleeds to death.

The tragedy of the tale, as it was told, lay not in the death of an innocent, but the butchery of a pureblood scion, beloved of the wizarding world and saviour of the poor. This was the way of muggles, the story taught, they killed those who helped the poor and betrayed their helpers.

Good wizards stuck by each other. Good wizards stood by their own. And when the muggles struck them, they would strike back with such force as to show them that these were not a people to be trifled with. They might have allowed themselves to bleed once but never again and certainly not for these non-magical liars and cheats.

They stood by each other as they did by the Rosiers when Freddie died.

[Image sources: The HighwaymanbyCharles Keeping,The Highwayman by Charles Mikolaycak]

The Sacred Twenty Eight: The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

Three sisters: Morgana, Morgause and Elaine of Garlot. One dark, one brown, one fair. Three sisters: Bellatrix, Andromeda and Narcissa. One a warrior, one a rebel, one entirely unexceptional.

Of all the houses of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, the Blacks were the only ones who could trace their descent to an ancient royal family, canonized in both myth and legend. There were those who were openly skeptical that a wizarding family could claim to be related to Arthur, King of the Britons and his three half-sisters; Morgana, Morgause and Elaine of Garlot - such a claim, they said, was far too exaggerated and could never be proven (for none were allowed to see the Black family tapestry but the Blacks themselves). But most agreed - out of fear and awe - that the Blacks indeed were children of these great sorcerers.

For how could they dispute it when all the portraits of these mythical figures seemed to live again in the faces of the Blacks striding alongside them in the Ministry, studying at Hogwarts, holidaying with them in the South of France?

But if those concerned with the veracity of this outrageous claim had bothered to dig through records held in the Department of Mysteries - held purely for historical purposes, of course - they might have found a series of bills and commissions to various unknown artists and artisans of the early 11th century. Of early tapestry-weavers instructed to portray their patrons as characters from Arthurian legends - else face death (how wonderful those ancient times were, where the missing poor prompted no visits from the Auror department). Of mosaics and etchings presented to this family; all the children of the Lady Igraine shown with the high cheekbones, dark hair and pale faces particular to the Blacks. Of portraits and paintings and landscapes - all in the grand tradition of the rich families of those times. In time, any traces of the original Arthur and his half-sisters were lost and all the artworks concerning the Arthurian legends - even among the muggles - came to assign each character the same face over and over again; pale skin, dark hair (sometimes light for Elaine of Garlot was a fair young maiden), high cheekbones: trademark of the Black family. 

And yet these records would mean nothing, not even in a history textbook, not after all this time. For who could say, after all these centuries, that the Blacks were not descended from Arthur, Morgana, Morgause and Elaine?

The Blacks were not practically royalty. They were royalty.

[Paintings: Morgan le Fay by Frederick Sandys, The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse, The Accolade by Edmund Blair Leighton

Photo Credit: Helena Bonham Carter as Morgan Le Fay (Merlin, 1998), Katie McGrath as Morgana (Merlin, 2008), Imogen Poots as Fanny Knight (Miss Austen Regrets, 2007)]