John Uskglass, who is the Raven King, is the central character in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell [1]. He appears 'in person' on only two pages near the end of the book, but he threads the novel together like a sharp black needle, and he's both the first cause and the end result of all the story's frantic activity. Uskglass is green growth on the tree of world mythology, an entirely manufactured figure whom Clarke seems to have concocted out of every story about magicians and kings that's ever been told by anyone, ever. He bears a striking superficial resemblance to a lot of characters in a lot of novels (and songs) (and movies) (and comics), but he isn't much like anyone else. I think any encapsulating description I could offer would divide him into a series of increasingly precious stereotypes, like an autocratic, Byronic matryoshka — but, I suppose he's different from the rest of the world's candy-jarful of proud and lonely god-kings insofar as his motives and feelings remain completely opaque. None of the characters who share his story ever have any idea what he's doing, or why he's doing it, or how he feels about it afterward. There is no real evidence, for example, that he yearns for either love or understanding, and he doesn't seem to harbor any deep, elaborate contempt for himself or anyone else. That's a rare and valuable gift, and not one you're likely to find in any other novel.

Although everything in Strange & Norrell that relates to John Uskglass and his Kingdom of Northern England is historically accurate, none of it is true. Maybe that has something to do with the character's appeal.

NOTICE: Because what the hell, you only live once and it's not that much fun anyway: This article is officially a real fanfiction now, written from the perspective of an American reader of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a non-fiction chronicle of the bizarre epoch of English history when magic returned to the hands of ordinary men. The essay itself isn't really any different, but I was able to resolve many of my eye-crossing verb-tense problems and explain the fact that at certain points I quoted from a novel that, if my delusions were taken at face value, ought not to have existed.

here in this world he changed his life

One of the most compelling oddities in the English historical canon is the eponymous account of the ascension and subsequent disappearance of the Western world's most famous modern magicians, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell. The book reads in part like a novel, in part like a literary biography, and in part like the public memoirs of a woman who participated in the cultural turbulence she helped record — but who, in the subtlety of her authorship, remains puzzlingly anonymous. As admirers of historical manuscripts, we might be tempted to regard Strange & Norrell's unnamed writer as an unexpectedly modernist, female Bede [2] who is focused on magic rather than religion; but, because of the mythical innuendos that still cling like tendrils of smoke to its text, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is less like an exercise in archival scholarship and more like an organic fairy tale. Buoyed up by extra-textual evidence that might otherwise have been lost to time, the book preserves not just an (apparently) accurate account of the events leading up to what is now referred to as the Revival of English Magic, but also the essence of the now-forgotten context in which that phenomenon occurred. Academics have argued the merits and potential misconstructions of the book for over a hundred and fifty years now; debate still rages around the long-held assumption that Strange & Norrell is the work of a single author, for example. A few critics have suggested that the book may be a sort of quasi-fictional round-robin related to the magic-affiliated gentlemen's clubs popular in the era, and that it might have been attributed to a female writer as a means of unofficially divorcing the provocative story from its less-than-audacious authors. That's just one point of contention, though. Beyond the unresolved question of authorship, legions of readers and critics have been attracted to the text for dozens of distinct reasons. Some have described the impact the magic-assisted narrative had upon the European literary establishment; others discussed the consequences the publication of Strange & Norrell had upon modern issues ranging from feminism and the non-human gaze to global Gaiaism to racial equality to the evolution of animal rights; still others have identified the book as the inaugural text in the 'magical realism' [3] movement which flourished, primarily in the UK, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These avenues of inquiry are all worthwhile on their own merits, of course, but my focus in this article is both narrower and less acute. I only intend to examine, in brief, the figure who presides over this and every story about English magic: The Raven King, John Uskglass, whose biography is only briefly addressed within the pages of Strange & Norrell, and who has been overlooked in the subsequent study of the culture of magic that he created nearly as often as he has been remembered.

Uskglass came into being shortly after the Norman Conquest, perhaps as a result of having been born. In 1110, when he was about fourteen years old, he somehow convened a fairy army and used it to invade northern England, starting with a small town outside Newcastle called Penlaw and then seizing territory gradually in multiple small battles, moving south and west with every victory. In the aftermath of the conflict, John Uskglass separated northern England from its southern counterpart and declared himself its king. The fairies who served in his army were efficient and intimidating conquerors, but not nearly as outrageously violent as their human contemporaries; during the conquest, only the city of Lancaster was decimated, and accounts of only a handful of civilian casualties are reported by history. The territories over which The Raven King established sovereignty were: Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and part of Nottinghamshire [4]. At the time that he took ownership of this part of England [5], John Uskglass had already acquired a fairy kingdom, through either conquest or inheritance, and he later procured a third kingdom in an uncharted country near Hell (whose metaphysical geography does not appear to interfere with its physical location). He ruled his English nation unopposed until 1434, when he left it in the neglectful stewardship of the southern monarchy and withdrew to parts unknown.

Very little is known of John Uskglass’s early life, other than his upbringing at the hands of fairies and the fact that he was, for some reason, tremendously gifted at fairy magic. He claimed to be the only surviving heir of a Norman nobleman named John d'Uskglass, and believed he'd been abducted into Faerie when his biological family was murdered. But, his ultimate origins remain unclear. His adopted name was a fairy word for ‘Starling,’ probably owing to his status as an orphan, but his birth name, if he had one, is known to no one — perhaps not even to Uskglass himself. Because he was a very, very young king, and because he'd been brought up in a fairy household (fairies, like soldiers, are not your great respecters of books), in the earliest days of his reign John Uskglass was unlettered and uncultivated. He lettered himself rapidly by inventing his own language, in which he composed a renowned and difficult-to-interpret prophecy which forecast the future of English magic; despite his foresight, though, Uskglass remained attached to evocative magical images as a means of communication for the entirety of his life. For several centuries after his departure he preferred, for example, to maintain his memory by making theatrical personal appearances at unscheduled times and locations all across northern England, rather than relying on more traditional observances like commemorative parades, or the placing of his portrait on different denominations of local currency. And while he ruled, it was only as an adult man making an active attempt to adapt to human culture that Uskglass reluctantly learned to read and write in English, French, and Latin, the languages used by his subjects. The famous magician Gilbert Norrell once said of him: "[T]he longer he remained in England, the more he changed — becoming less silent, less solitary — less like a fairy and more like a man."

But, no matter where he lived or traveled, the Raven King remained only partly of the ordinary, visible world. This, perhaps, explains his ability to slide in and out of it with such great frequency and facility. Dissatisfied with convention and eager to make use of the authority he'd obtained, Uskglass was a stranger in every imaginable land: he was a human child in his fairy country, a feral foundling governing an earth-bound kingdom, a native mortal inhabiting the planes of the divine. During his reign, and after it formally ended, he trespassed incessantly across boundaries of class and convention, avidly imposing his will on any person or thing he found objectionable. He taught women magic, chose a black man as his only heir, and, inexplicably enough, spent much of the first decade of the nineteenth century actively working to return the brand of English magic he'd devised to the common citizens of his kingdom. Perhaps as a result of this penchant for revolution, Uskglass is notorious for his self-concealment in every possible shade of darkness and namelessness. In the most well-known anecdotes describing his visitations, he invariably waits silently to be found and recognized. The standard salutation, should you ever meet him, is agreed by the experts to be: "I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart."

As a magician, Uskglass was unknowable. According to an account of his magic published by Jonathan Strange: "[I]n 1138 he caused the moon to disappear from the sky and made it travel through all the lakes and rivers of England... [I]n 1202 he quarrelled with Winter and banished it from his kingdom, so that for four years Northern England enjoyed continual Summer... for thirty consecutive nights in May and June of 1345 every man, woman and child in the kingdom dreamt that they had been gathered together upon a dark red plain beneath a pale golden sky to build a tall dark black tower. ...In all these stories — but particularly in the last — we have a sense of great events going on, but what they might be we cannot tell." Not even Norrell, who made the study of John Uskglass his life's work, knew why he did these things — or how. Most of Uskglass's deeds remain as cryptic as his language, his origins, and his motives. But, despite his cultivated vagueness, Uskglass was not utterly incomprehensible. As a king, for instance, he was noticeably more conventional. He built usable roads and bridges both ordinary and supernatural, levied equitable taxes, took effective precautions against the ravages of the Black Death, aggressively defended his country and kingdom with martial force and enchantment, codified into law the fair practice of magic, tendered peace between England and the fairy countries from which he came, and also constructed for himself a huge and beautiful home [6]. Actually, that home may have served both the king and the magician; when Jonathan Strange traveled the highways built by Uskglass to connect all the reflective substances on the surface of the earth to one another, he described the landscape was a sort of enclosed structure comprised of worlds both bleak and intriguing. That isn't entirely different from the reports of the interior of the king's house at Newcastle, which contained empty-looking rooms filled with nothing but birdsong, summer, and the past. It's possible that the Raven King simply favored ambiguous architecture enlightened by his own style of obscure sorcery, though, and used one as a practice for the other. (The thought of Strange tracking through the Raven King's broom closets on his circuits of the fairy roads is an unpleasant one, for many reasons.)

As a man, John Uskglass is reportedly constructed of shades of light and shadow. Physically, he's described as a tall thin man with pale skin, light-colored eyes, and long, straight dark hair. He favors black clothing in the style of whatever era he occupies. Accounts of his behavior are conflicting, but the least untrustworthy anecdotes describe him as soft-spoken and quiet under most circumstances, and potentially violent under the others. Everyone who knew him was frightened of him. Although reports of his feelings for his subjects are inconsistent, he always seemed to be aware of the individual business of cities and towns all over his kingdom (exemplified by the story of the speaking statue at Alston, or the destruction of that fine coastal town in Yorkshire, for instance), and he often took the time to correct his citizens' problems himself. Certainly the affection of his subjects for him seems eternal and undimmed by time and distance; as they are described in the text of Strange & Norrell, all the different peoples of northern England continued to recall him fondly more than four hundred years after his departure, and even the trees and the birds were very seriously described as anxious for his return.

John Uskglass was a complicated figure whose accomplishments and activities look, to the modern eye, only hypothetically possible: history suggests that Uskglass was equal parts folkloric hero and pragmatic politician, a thoughtful artisan who designed a functioning amalgam of fairy and human cultures, as well as being an intellectual who blended elaborate theories of magic with more practical concerns of safety and national stability. In Strange & Norrell, we see that Uskglass's acolytes and supporters somehow managed to adapt his unmistakeable, professional fondness for constructive revision on their own terms. Possibly the best-known followers of Uskglass's example were the Johnannites, "machine-breakers" who used as their calling card Uskglass's standard, the Raven-in-Flight, and who, starting in 1812 (near the middle of the Restoration of English Magic) began vandalizing industrial metalworks in Uskglass's name. Their behavior, which seems a little quaint now, was at the time seditious enough to worry the orthodox English government; even today, with the issue laid to rest, post-Industrial intellects refer to anyone who resists the power of technology as a 'Johnannite.' When it comes to the practice of magic, of course, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell notoriously proved that the Other-worldly renaissance England experienced in the early 1820s was predicated entirely on Uskglass's canon. Even Charles II, who ruled over two hundred years after John Uskglass had vanished — and who (as Strange & Norrell's author tells us) may have been, like his subjects, far more likely to respect than to adore the Raven King — was enough inspired by Uskglass's biography to immortalize his likeness in a royal portrait. On the other and more sentimental hand, it seems that nearly everyone in northern England began wishing the Raven King home again the moment he left. Long after he disappeared and without any real certainty of his continued existence, the northern English familiarly referred to him as "Old John," they sang songs of his greatness and his foolishness, and they built their houses upon land which they very gravely considered to be his property. They repatriated the raven as a symbol of good luck. Memories of Uskglass's magic still survive in Yorkshire folk sayings and expressions, as John Childermass once explained to Henry Lascelles: "[w]ere it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John's Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have warm weather in winter or it rains in summer the country people say that John Uskglass is in love again and neglects his business. And when we are sure of something we say it is as safe as a pebble in John Uskglass's pocket." And although it's impossible to say for certain, judging only the trouble the Raven King went to on their behalf, and all the years he stretched out to return to them the gift of magic, their love is intensified and returned. Despite his status as a king, Uskglass's interests in magic seem peculiarly egalitarian [7].

John Uskglass did a lot of magic; it seems he was a lot of magic, too. A late medieval magician called Peter Watershippe wrote a book about the Raven King's withdrawal called A Faire Wood Withering, which "contains precise accounts of spells which were perfectly practicable as long as Uskglass and his fairy subjects remained in England but which no longer had any effect after their departure." Apparently the events related in Strange & Norrell were intended to end this dependency. As a result of Uskglass's careful planning and near-omnipotence, magic returns to England at full strength and unchaperoned. "[Strange and Norrell] are the spell John Uskglass is doing," Vinculus tells John Childermass near the conclusion of the story of the two magicians, and that's the focus of the king's singularity. Other magicians may manipulate matter, energy, words, or intentions, but the Raven King's canvas is the force through which the green fuse drives the flower. Unlike the feral fairies whose magic he adapts for his own purposes, or the gentleman-magicians who disfigure magic in their attempts to own and domesticate it, he is made of that which he uses — not just the flesh and spirit, or the water and bone, but the homely urges of common sympathy and moral judgement as well.

His practical magic looks like this: "[John Uskglass] bent closer to Vinculus's corpse. He plucked something out of his own mouth — a tiny pearl of light faintly tinged with rose and silver. He placed it in Vinculus's mouth. The corpse shivered. It was not like the shudder of a sick man, nor yet like the shiver of a healthy one; it was like the shiver of a bare birch wood as spring breathes upon it."

Strange and Norrell could cause the magnificent illusion of heavenly fire to rain down upon the heads of their enemies. They made horses out of sand, voices out of stone, and out of the air they built an army roads. It never occurred to either of them to call upon the pandemonium of springtime, for any reason at all.

Lastly, and most importantly, beyond his distinctions as a king or a magician or a thaumaturgic oddity, John Uskglass is always identifiable by the strength of his humanity. Because he was brought up by fairies and segregated from other human beings at an early age, the Raven King underwent the process of becoming human publicly, openly, and backwards. His knowledge of himself as a man, separate from the intransigent mastery of his fairy self or his sovereignty as a king, is the source from which his power flows. And because his humanness is an acquisition, it's more valuable to him than it would be to any other person [8]. Most of us acquire our humanity as children, or never at all. Our ordinary, infant preoccupations and obsessions are thinly tolerated until they're trained out through social instruction, and we eventually emerge from the conversion solid, responsible, and adult. John Uskglass, though, is not like us. He traveled through the landscape of mortal whims and longings as a half-wild child-king. In place of parental influence, the earth folded around him. The trees protected him. The rivers loved him. Even the unmovable rocks that comprise the famed northern English landscape were willing to submit to his desires. For his sake, the living world accepted and defended England, raising it above its station as a lump of verdant earth floating in the ocean, elevating it to the enigmatic level of the fairy lands, of the mirror lands, of heaven. The magic of the Raven King and the life it gives to England are part and particle of the same thing, related but separate, like the salt in blood, the salt in the sea. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that John Uskglass is the stellar center of the transforming and transformative constellation that is England, which in Strange & Norrell is made of equal parts magic and sturdy soil.


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