These are little bits of "information" (not really) that I thought up during the process of reassembling things, but left out of the finished articles because: they didn't fit, they contradicted other, better ideas, I didn't have enough textual evidence to justify their inclusion, or, God help me, because I thought they looked impertinent.
☓ I sort of always had a secret suspicion that many of the primary characters in Strange & Norrell are the Raven King's children. They're nearly all physically "dark" in one way or another, and also they're all extremely good-looking. Childermass actually masquerades as the Raven King in a couple of early passages (as a result of the narrator's sneakiness), but Lady Pole is also pale and dark-haired and so is Segundus. And Stephen Black was born a king. And none of those characters have visible feathers fathers. So they could at least be John Uskglass's descendants. Right?
☓ There are, apparently, two main kinds of magic: Goetia, which is when you summon someone or something to do your magical bidding, and magia, which is when you do the job yourself. I guess? John Uskglass is only known by a series of epithets that prevent him from being targeted pneumatically; these euphemisms are called "noa-names" ('Concepts' #2). At least, they are if you're Polynesian.
☓ In the middle ages, study of the Kabbalah was called 'The Work of the Chariot,' which takes its name from the Hebrew mystical tradition of the merkabah, the angelic chariots holy men rode to visit God's throne. Apparently. And, and, did you know that the "bain-marie," which is the water bath you cook custards in, is actually named for the devices Miriam (the Biblical Miriam!) used in her advanced and apparently successful alchemical experimentation? Wow!
☓ Fairies are far more phenotypically homogenous than any other species of fictional being. All fairies, whether they belong to Japanese people, Navajo people, Norwegian people, Maori people, Celtic people, or African people, are tall, thin, pale and moon-colored. They usually have red, silver, or yellow hair. They are almost always beautiful, in one way or another. There is usually something shiny and disturbing about their eyes. They're usually horny. They're usually troublesome. They usually enjoy snatching people away to live with them in fairyland. It's always a bad idea to irritate them. They often make some kind of unearthly music, and nearly always practice advanced crafts that excel far beyond those of their associated human populations in skill, usefulness, and intricacy. They're often associated with water, earth, and air, and often turn into, borrow attributes from, or use as familiars birds or other wild animals. As fairy tales were overmastered by Christianity as the primary religion of the West, fairies took on didactic characteristics like tininess, hidden ugliness, and a penchant for Satanic evil, but the aboriginal varieties are usually life-sized, pretty, and capricious. I suppose that, where fairies are concerned, all of mankind must've looked into the mirror of the world and seen the same thing reflected over and over again. Or the Human Genome Project owes the Tolkien estate about 45,000 years worth of royalties.
☓ Aside from 'The Hag and the Sorceress,' that potentially vulgar folk song about the Cornish witch (which also seems to have originated with Gawain), John Uskglass is an almost perfectly sexless character. So sexless, in fact, that no one is at all worried about him chaperoning little girls around in the middle of the night. Was there an important plot point I wished to emphasize by bringing that up? No.
☓ Why did the Raven King bother to wear fashionable modern clothes when he returned to England for ninety seconds to resuscitate Vinculus and 'reprint' his book?
☓ We often accuse fairies of being wicked and profane, but we're usually the ones who betray them, aren't we? They fortify us with a geas and we always violate it, and always to our detriment, as a side effect of our appalling human curiosity (or laziness) (or common greed). Most good, old fairy stories — the Crane Wife, Melusine, Cúchulainn, Cupid & Psyche, the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden — tell us the same thing about ourselves, which is: If you just weren't human, you'd be all right. We've been kicked out of paradise in every religion on the earth, and we're still sticking our noses where they don't belong. Which is exactly the opposite of the theses of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Ladies, actually.
☓ I found this in a book called Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (ed. Reimund Kvideland and Henning Sehmsdorf): "A couple of tailors were visiting a farm. One evening they were working in the common room. The servant girl was spinning. After they had been sewing for awhile, the spinning wheel gradually slowed down and the girl seemed to dissolve into a haze. Finally, only her clothes were left. The tailors knew right away that the girl was a mare [a kind of wicked female supernatural being originating in Scandinavian folklore who haunts sleepers, and from which the concept of a "nightmare" was drawn]. They decided to wait there until she came back. Around half past nine, the spinning wheel began turning once more and bit by bit the girl regained her human form while slipping back into her clothes. Then one of the tailors said: "I believe you are a mare!" "Oh, thank you for saying that! Now I am free! But if you had waited just a little longer, I would have gotten my little finger back. Now I'm going to lose it." He had spoken to her too soon; her little finger had not yet materialized. People believed that a nightmare was freed from the spell when someone spoke to her or revealed she was a mare."
☓ What was the nature of John Uskglass's mysterious chronic illness? And, for that matter, why did he leave England? I wouldn't have left England, if I were him. Arthur engineered his own destruction in the elegant Greek style, but there's no evidence of anything like that happening to the Raven King. Is there?
☓ Speaking of which: I wanted to add something about the Raven King's story being a revision of 'The King of the Wasteland' motif, but I'm not at all sure that's really a legitimate 'motif.' All the sources I could find started the story with Bran the Blessed and his magic cauldron and then moved on to the multiple incarnations of the Fisher King. Two dudes does not a motif make, especially when they are clearly the same dude, perverted out of shape by oppression and cultural drift. Also, who would like to volunteer to tell Yorkshire it's a wasteland?
☓ "Uskglass" is a confusing name. It's original form was "d'Uskglass," which is "duskglass," which is "dusk glass," which doesn't actually mean anything. Well, it means "dusk" and "glass," which are two of the most important aspects of the character's metaphysical demeanor, but it doesn't cohere into anything particularly suggestive. There's a river called the Usk in Wales, but I don't have any evidence that it has anything to do with the Raven King. I looked up "glass," which is ultimately Germanic in derivation but comes to us through the Anglo-Saxon glæs, and it isn't really a very old word. It's actually only a few centuries older than the character was meant to be himself. Does that mean something? Uskglass is a Norman surname (it's not, though, I looked in the Battel Abbey Roll and didn't see it) (shhhh) (Norman names didn't usually look like that, anyway), drawn from a time when surnames weren't necessarily standard issue. Then again, British English is maybe the scariest language on the earth; there have been people living in England for so many years, and writing things down for so long, that many place names and surnames actually reflect the activity of language changing across centuries when the people who spoke it didn't. So maybe the name comes from somewhere other than the Norman Invasion. Which is the long form of "I couldn't find anything good." When I was poking around in the dictionary, the only word I saw that sort of looked like "Uskglass" was "usquebaugh," which is an Anglicization of the Gaelic word for whiskey. Which makes me think of John Barleycorn, because I suppose I don't have enough to do. ETA #1: And hey, yeah, why would a Norman nobleman have a name that's half Anglo-Saxon (or German)? Weren't the Normans French vikings? ETA #2: Twisting in the searing blowback from a terrible Christmas gift, I recently encountered the word "gallowglass" for the first time. It made me think of the Raven King, because everything does. Since Uskglass's unpronounceable childhood name was rendered in a Goidelic fairy dialect, however, I think this may actually turn out to be slightly less meaningless than usual: The "glass" part of "gallowglass" comes from the Irish word "glaigh," which means "soldier." After ten intensive minutes Googling Celtic dictionaries, I found another word, "dubh," which means "black." So maybe "d'Uskglass" is an anglicization of, um, "dubh glaigh," which would mean "black soldier." Or maybe not! Maybe Clarke just made it up :[
☓ I toyed with the idea that each verse of "The Raven King" was spoken or sung by a different abductee — some of whom were men, some women, some adults, some children. Which would explain the fact that the only repetitious device is 'the Raven King, the Raven King' emphasized again and again in every verse. It would also account for the frequent change of location. The first stanza could represent a beautiful young woman (or man), the second a desirable priest or a novitiate, the third a child or a groom, and then the final two stanzas would be all the voices, singing or speaking together. Then again, that destroys the story of the song. Assuming there is one.
☓ Because all fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell are required by law to offer an opinion on the identity of the novel's narrator: I think she's the niece of one of the York magicians disenfranchised by Norrell. She speaks very familiarly of nearly everything, including things she ought not to be familiar with at all, but I felt as though the passage about the York magicians post-"Stones of York" was tinged with personal familiarity: "The Learned Society of York Magicians was disbanded and its members were obliged to give up magic (all except Mr Segundus) and, though some of them were foolish and not all of them were entirely amiable, I do not think that they deserved such a fate. For what is a magician to do who, in accordance with a pernicious agreement, is not allowed to study magic? He idles about his house day after day, disturbs his niece (or wife, or daughter) at her needlework and pesters the servants with questions about matters in which he never took an interest before all for the sake of having someone to talk to, until the servants complain of him to their mistress. He picks up a book and begins to read, but he is not attending to what he reads and he has got to page 22 before he discovers it is a novel — the sort of work which above all others he most despises — and he puts it down in disgust. He asks his niece (or wife, or daughter) ten times a day what o'clock it is, for he cannot believe that time can go so slowly — and he falls out with his pocket watch for the same reason."
☓ Who is the lady is the red dress at the end of the novel, Miss Redruth? Clarke mentioned in an interview that she was particularly important, but I don't know why.
☓ I felt that Mrs. Mabb was vaguely Persuasion-shaped, because of the ending, but in the end Venetia has been driven mad, hasn't she? Which is why Fanny says, "I have found her!" instead of, "I have found them!" Right? So, it's not really Persuasion-shaped at all. Good.
☓ I told you I would dig something out of Japanese: In Imaginary Yorkshire, they say that John Uskglass is in love again and forgets his business when it's rainy in summer or warm in the winter. In Real Times Japan, they say "狐の嫁入り [kitsune no yomeiri]" if it rains when the sun is shining — this means "the fox spirit has taken a bride." (Kitsune, or fox spirits, are a kind of Japanese fairy.) (I'm not sure which kind of 'taking' is being described, because the expression literally means "fox's marriage." So pick your favorite.) Score!
☓ There are millions of things to love about Strange & Norrell, but my favorite thing is that Clarke's magic is allowed to be itself. Hardly anybody ever does that. Magic in fiction is usually a metaphor for death (The Chronicles of Narnia) or sex (every pulp fantasy novel ever written), or, even more horrifyingly, puberty (Harry Potter). I don't think anyone can bear the thought that magic might be even hypothetically real, and unavailable, so less talented authors tend to treat it with psychological dishonesty. Or, they just suck.
☓ I just discovered that there are all kinds of English fairy tales available for free at Sacred Texts. My favorite so far is "The Stars in the Sky," which is very Clarkean (or, of course, it's probably the sort of story upon which she based her own interpretations), although I can't help but feel she would've come up with a better ending. I also liked "The Little Bull-Calf." And this one is a cleaned-up version of these. Lillie was right, though — except for Tamlyn, none of these are very old, and I'm not sure of their cultures of origin. They're all sort of reminiscent of the Shakespearean style of fairy culture, too. So: very beautiful, but not immediately edifying. I wonder if any colleges in the world offer degrees in Fairy Tale Comprehension?
☓ I just found this in my Shovebox: "The characters and events of Strange & Norrell converge in shapes and patterns in the way that letters and words align to make language; the novel is written in its own strange tongue." So that's kind of nice, isn't it? I wonder where I was going to put it? (Probably in the barmy Raven King article.)
☓ The first time I ever heard "Tom Tit Tot," it was one piece in a series that aired on a West Virginia PBS station in 1990 or 1991. (I grew up in a tiny, tiny town which squatted athwart the Mason-Dixon Line and now no longer technically exists.) The series featured folktales from the Appalachian Mountain region being 'performed' by 'actors.' The woman delivering the 'performance' of "Tom Tit Tot" told the story in the worst and most prejudiced-sounding approximation of an Appalachian accent ever ("AN' THAYUT TAWHURRRRRLLLLED THATYUT'S TAYUUUUL!"), which is why I've confined her to ironic quotation marks — but I've honestly always thought "Tom Tit Tot" was a product of Mountain folklore, since it is so very weird. When I met it again in The Ladies disguised as On Lickerish Hill, I was really surprised to discover that it's actually Scottish. Despite my best intentions, though, I read the accent in these exact tones (do not look at the comments unless you hate yourself). Also, and unrelated: I think On Lickerish Hill is the best example of the instantaneous characterization of a protagonist in any work ever written in the English language. I loved Miranda to pieces within two sentences. James Joyce, ya burnt.
☓ I meant to share this with you ages ago, and I forgot! How rude of me: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, as it happens, is non-fiction. So there.