Noble and Most Ancient: The Black Family Tapestry

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Let’s think about the Black Family Tree for a moment—not the data in the possibly non-canonical display of Phineas’s branch that was created by JKR for a charity auction, but the hanging itself, that Sirius showed off to Harry, with commentary.  What does canon say, and what can we deduce, about the Black Family Tapestry?

It’s not a prepossessing object, to Harry’s eyes.  It’s a downright disgusting one, to Sirius.  But Kreacher regards it with all of his late mistress’s utter veneration.  Here they all are in OotP 6:



“Kreacher would never move anything from its proper place in Master’s house,” said the elf, then muttered very fast, “Mistress would never forgive Kreacher if the tapestry was thrown out, seven centuries it’s been in the family.  Kreacher must save it, Kreacher will not let Master and the blood traitor and the brats destroy it—”

“I thought it might be that,” said Sirius, casting a disdainful look at the opposite wall.  “She’ll have put another Permanent Sticking Charm on the back of it, I don’t doubt, but if I can get rid of it I certainly will.  Now go away, Kreacher.”

… Sirius walked across the room, where the tapestry Kreacher had been trying to protect hung the length of the wall.  Harry and the others followed.

The tapestry looked immensely old; it was faded and looked as though doxies had gnawed it in places; nevertheless, the golden thread with which it was embroidered still glinted brightly enough to show them a sprawling family tree dating back (as far as Harry could tell) to the Middle Ages.  Large words at the very top of the tapestry read:

THE NOBLE AND MOST ANCIENT HOUSE OF BLACK
“TOUJOURS PUR”

“You’re not on here!” said Harry, after scanning the bottom of the tree.

“I used to be there,” said Sirius, pointing at a small, round, charred hole in the tapestry, rather like a cigarette burn.  “My sweet old mother blasted me off after I ran away from home—Kreacher’s quite fond of muttering the story under his breath….”


“… then when I was seventeen I got a place of my own, my Uncle Alphard had left me a decent bit of gold—he’s been wiped off here too, that’s probably why—anyway, after that I looked after myself.  I was always welcome at Mr. and Mrs. Potter’s for Sunday lunch, though.”

“But… why did you…?”

“Leave?”  Sirius smiled bitterly and ran a hand through his long, unkempt hair.  “Because I hated the whole lot of them:  my parents, with their pure-blood mania, convinced that to be a Black made you practically royal… my idiot brother, soft enough to believe them… that’s him.”

Sirius jabbed a finger at the very bottom of the tree, at the name REGULUS BLACK….


“I haven’t looked at this for years.  There’s Phineas Nigellus… my great-great-grandfather, see?  Least popular headmaster Hogwarts ever had… and Araminta Meliflua... cousin of my mother’s… tried to force through a Ministry Bill to make Muggle-hunting legal… and dear Aunt Elladora… she started the tradition of beheading house-elves when they got too old to carry tea trays… of course, any time the family produced someone halfway decent they were disowned.  I see Tonks isn’t on here.  Maybe that’s why Kreacher won’t take orders from her—he’s supposed to do whatever anyone in the family asks him…”
“You and Tonks are related?”  Harry asked, surprised.

“Oh, yeah, her mother, Andromeda, was my favorite cousin,” said Sirius, examining the tapestry carefully.  “No, Andromeda’s not on here either, look—“

He pointed to another small round burn mark between two names, Bellatrix and Narcissa.

“Andromeda’s sisters are still here because they made lovely, respectable pure-blood marriages, but Andromeda married a Muggle-born, Ted Tonks, so—”

Sirius mimed blasting the tapestry with a wand and laughed sourly.  Harry, however, did not laugh; he was too busy staring at the names to the right of Andromeda’s burn mark.  A double line of gold embroidery linked Narcissa Black with Lucius Malfoy, and a single vertical gold line from their names led to the name Draco.

“You’re related to the Malfoys!”

“The pure-blood families are all interrelated,” said Sirius.  If you’re only going to let your sons and daughters marry purebloods, your choice is very limited, there are hardly any of us left.  Molly and I are cousins by marriage and Arthur’s something like my second cousin once removed.  But there’s no point looking for them on here—if ever a family was a bunch of blood traitors, it’s the Weasleys.”


So.  This tapestry is the Black family’s prime evidence for, one, its antiquity, and two, its “nobility”—in WW pure-blood Supremacist terms, its freedom from any taint, ever, of either interbreeding with Muggles or displaying any tolerance for such interbreeding (or indeed, for Muggles ourselves). 

How do we know this?  Well, first off, because the tapestry says so directly.  It’s captioned “The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black,” and it states that the family’s motto is (and has always been), “Toujours Pur.”  Family tradition says that this physical artifact has belonged to the family since the 1300’s, and the dates on the tree match up, going back to “the Middle Ages” in Harry’s cursory inspection.

But secondly, there’s the evidence of those blast marks.  Sirius made it clear that anyone who didn’t toe the family line was blasted off the hanging.  Any renegade who married a Muggle-born (or even a pureblood blood traitor), who ran away to signify his disapproval of his parents’ racist ideas, or who supported a disowned scion, was burned off.  And Tonks, poor half-blood, was never even added in the first place. 

However, openly advocating murder, or becoming a Death Eater, or even going to Azkaban for life for torturing two fellow purebloods into insanity, did NOT get one removed.  Offenses against blood purity (even just supporting someone so offending) get one blasted off; no other offenses do. 

In its way, it makes sense.  From a racist point of view.  If I commit a crime worthy of Azkaban, however heinous, I may have ruined myself for life—but only myself, and only for life.  Whereas if I marry a person of impure blood, or encourage another to do so, I’ve ruined future generations. 

To a true blood purist, I’ve caused to be polluted ALL future generations sprung from the tainted alliance.  (And concomitantly removed, from a worryingly small pool, a possible ancestor of pure descendents.)

Pruning the diseased branch entirely from the tree is the only solution, as Tom Riddle pointed out to Bella.

Ergo, all the names, every single one of them, back through twenty or more generations, that were embroidered onto that tree and never blasted off, MUST have been free of any impurity of either ideology or blood.  Right?  Because otherwise they’d have been blasted off too.

So that hanging represents seven (or more) centuries of documentation of lovely, respectable pure-blood marriages.  It’s all there in black and white, or rather in gold thread on a faded backdrop:  the irrefutable proof of the antiquity and purity of the Black family’s blood.

Right?

Right.

*

We’ve been had.

Let’s start with the least problem.  Kreacher and the narrator both called that hanging a tapestry.  Since Kreacher did, that’s presumably how the Black family tradition referred to it. 

But it’s not.  Technically a tapestry is a WOVEN (in fact, it ought strictly to be a weft-faced woven) wall hanging.  The Blacks’ hanging is, instead, a piece of embroidery.  Indeed, it pretty much has to be, because it’s been updated regularly over the past seven centuries.  Presumably no one imagines that it has been sitting, like Penelope’s web, unfinished on a loom all that time!

By itself, the distinction would be relatively unimportant.  But it shows that the Black family is guilty at least of imprecision in speaking of this venerated possession.  Any antiquarian in the Black family would have been up in arms at everyone else’s calling the treasured medieval hanging displaying the family tree a tapestry. 

So we must conclude that the Black family, unduly proud of the length of its pedigree, has never, in hundreds of years, sprouted any antiquarian pedants? 

Erm, well, I guess that’s possible….

However, it’s interesting to note that tapestries are indeed strongly associated with antiquity--with the medieval period, in particular.  Which is the time this hanging is said (by the family) to date to. 

Embroidery is not, of itself, particularly associated with any period—in particular, it’s not tied to pre-Seclusion times.  Embroidered embellishments to a simple cloth anyone (er—any trained woman with sufficient leisure) could do at any time—and did.  The Georgians, the Victorians, all embroidered like crazy.  Including, by the 18^th century, producing wall hangings (samplers) as conspicuous displays of skill.  (And of leisure.)

But as it happens, the most famous (to the British) medieval tapestry is also not really a tapestry at all.  The Bayeux Tapestry commemorating the Norman Conquest is, like the Black Family Tree, actually an embroidered wall-hanging, not a woven one. 

And the Black Family Tapestry references the same event, sideways. 

Why ever should an English family motto be in French?

Well, because (Norman) French was the lingua franca of those who came over with the Conqueror.  Families boasting of a lineage going all the way back to one of William’s followers would of course have a family motto in French.  A French motto, then, rather implies that the family sprang from one of the conquerors, from barons rather than serfs.  It suggests, delicately, that the Black family’s origins would have been considered noble and ancient by pre-Separation standards as well as by contemporary Wizarding World pureblood ones….

And that’s where it all comes crashing down.  Because that motto is in MODERN French.  As the hanging’s caption is in MODERN English. 

That hanging is supposed to be over 700 years old.  To have been created, then, sometime in the thirteenth century.  A hundred years before Chaucer.  And yet, embroidered in faded thread at the top, Harry reads:  “THE NOBLE AND MOST ANCIENT HOUSE OF BLACK.” 

Right.  Try inserting that line (and orthography) into a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.  Just try. 

First rule of forging historical documents, if you want them to stand up to any critical scrutiny—research the language(s) extant at the purported time of the forgery.

And the alphabets and writing styles.

We moderns goggling at words embroidered sometime in the 1200’s should be puzzling out something like, “ÞE NOBLE  Ä  MOSTTE  AVNCYEN HVS OF BLAK” or (far more probably) a titulus in Latin (as the Bayeux Tapestry has). 

Harry Potter should still be trying to figure out whether the figures at the top of the tapestry were mere decorative motifs or writing!  (Hermione could, at least, have enlightened Harry on that point—though not necessarily translated the hanging’s caption.  Ancient Runes, yes.  Middle English manuscript?)

And the motto?  In Old French, you’d have “Sempres Pvr” or maybe “Toz Jorz Pvr;” in Middle French, “Tovsjovrs Pvr.”

“Toujours Pur” is purely Modern French—Modern French being considered to date back to—wait for it—the seventeenth century. 

So remind me, when did Separation occur?

*

That hanging is a fake.  Or, at least, the hanging itself might not be.  A wall hanging embroidered with the family tree, continually updated (whether by needle or by magic), might have been in the Black family since the thirteenth century—I shouldn’t care to pronounce on that without a carbon-14 test of the backing. 

<Digression regarding Grimmauld Place>Though the fact that the hanging exactly fits the wall in the drawing room of what is NOT a medieval manor of the Blacks is not a good sign.  12 Grimmauld Place was, at a guess, built by Muggles in Victorian times.   That house is within twenty minutes walk of King’s Cross station.  (Whitehound, examining the tube stops Harry and his companions could have taken to get to St. Mungo’s and the Ministry, favors the Barnsbury or Holloway neighborhoods.)  That whole area, though now entirely incorporated into urban London, was completely rural as of Seclusion.  At that time nothing but fields and scattered hamlets existed north of the city, mostly along the then-main roads.

Population followed transportation:  wizards might have had brooms and, eventually, the Floo Network and Apparition, but the rest of us needed roads or canals or railways to make use of potential home sites.  The “New Road” (which Kings Cross station faces) was built in 1756 well outside the then city limits, and London started expanding north into the areas it served after that.  But most of the conversion from farmland to suburban/urban development happened in the 19^th century, per the Islington Borough website.    

But the Black family home is clearly an urban-constructed home, not a surviving manor or farmhouse that found itself surrounded by newer construction.  It’s designed as a typical single-family London townhouse, with a narrow footprint but many floors.    Moreover, Number 12 was built, in perfectly normal Muggle fashion, between Numbers 11 & 13 on Grimmauld Place, though it’s now invisible to its neighbors.   The houses may even be terraced.  This confirms that it’s not an invisible survival, but a deletion from what was constructed as a numbered set.  (As Platform 9 ¾ is an insertion into one.)  Finally, interior gas lighting, though first used around the 1810s, didn’t become common enough for gas fixtures to become standard in the “better” homes until around the 1860’s.  (Although King’s Cross boasted a Royal Gasworks, so its immediate neighborhood might have been illuminated earlier.)  I can see no reason at all for an ancient Wizarding family to install newfangled gas lighting fixtures into its ancestral mansion to impress the Muggle neighbors (or at all), so we have to assume that those gas fixtures were already installed in #12 Grimmauld Place when the Blacks first took possession.

So everything points to Number 12 having been constructed by Victorian Muggles as a perfectly normal “Desirable Modern London Residence” and having been acquired by a Victorian Black patriarch (Phineas?  His father?  His grandfather?)  as the Black family seat.  Which makes the fact that the then-600-year-old family tapestry, treasured possession through whatever upheavals had dispossessed the ancient and noble family of its original (or latest) family home, happened to be just the perfect size to be displayed to all visitors on one wall of the newly-acquired drawing room a most interesting (and gratifying) coincidence.

And isn’t it also rather interesting that Headmaster Black’s family are the only wizards we know who live within walking distance of Platform 9 ¾?  I seriously don’t know what to make of that coincidence, but it is interesting….

(Which raises an entire other problem—before 1852, the earliest date that the Hogwarts Express could have run from Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Stations, how DID students get to Hogwarts?  Or, in fact, did they?  All of them?  Maybe it was common, before then, for some to be left uneducated?)

</Grimmauld digression>


We don’t know that the “tapestry” itself is, shall we say, rather younger than it’s said to be.  Similarly, we have no information as to whether the genealogical information it conveys is accurate or not.

But even if the hanging were original and every name on it embroidered with scrupulous accuracy —it still would not establish that the Blacks were “toujours pur.”  First, we don’t know that the blast marks indicating “someone halfway decent [being] disowned” extend through all the earlier generations.  And even if they did, we would still have to prove that the criteria for the family’s disowning a scion had always been the same.

Without such proof,  no one looking at that hanging now has information to conclude whether a given pre-Seclusion Matilda or Thomas or Sophia marrying into the family were pureblood or half-blood or Muggle.  The most you could try to do would be to look for familiar surnames.  (Look!  There’s a Smith!)

But it’s worse than that.  We can fairly deduce that back in the thirteenth century, “purity” was not an overriding concern of the noble (if not then very auncyen) house of Black.

For if it had been, there would have been a real family motto to the effect of “always pure,” in Middle English or dog-Latin or Norman French.  And that motto is what would have been stitched at the very top of that hanging.  Not a made-up modern one, rendered in (modern) French by a clumsy forger trying to imply by its Frenchness that said motto went all the way back to the Conquest!

The whole hanging might be a comparatively modern fabrication; we have no information on that point.  But the caption and the motto must be, and so too, therefore, must be the meaning they give to the whole. 

That hanging, if original at all, was altered in modern times—at least post seventeenth century, but given the lack of any spelling archaisms, more probably in the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries—to serve as propaganda.  

To establish that the Black family not only had had magical forebears back into the mists of time, but that they had had ONLY magical forebears back ditto.  That the family was not just ancient (*cough* technically, all families are the same age), but noble, and most importantly, “toujours pur.”

Like I said, we’ve been had.  And most probably, so had Walburga. 

Unless, of course, it was she who performed the forgery. 

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

You know, I had assumed the "tapestry"/embroidered hanging magically updated its spelling as well as adding names to itself... but one doesn't update family mottoes, does one? The whole point is that they're so authentically old (or in Latin) that you have to teach the kids the translation.

And yes, who starts a family tree by calling it "ancient" and then doesn't add any ancestors? If "ancient" were on the heading when the thing was new back in 1295 or whenever, there would be ancestors at least back to, oh, 1066 or so, if not earlier. So someone altered it, or it wasn't made until at least a century or two later. Or both.

Another curiosity, which we can't resolve given the alteration(s) over the years: where did they acquire the surname Black in the first place? Is it from the French blanc (and is that medieval Norman French or did they have a variant)? Or is it from an English branch of the ancestral tree? There's Old English blœc (black) and blac (pale) as possibilities, and even a guy named Wulfric the Black/Wulfrigus Niger around 980 to claim as an ancestor of a noble thane who won the heart of a beautiful Norman duke's daughter. But none of them are on the family tree...

If you jump forward to the fifteenth century, the term "blacksmith" is coming into use, and quite possibly some people are getting the surname "Black" from their profession. Suppose the Blacks were blacksmiths made good in the fifteenth century. (Maybe the magically talented smiths among them made some cunning deals with goblins and thus their fortunes. Like their traditionally Hufflepuff counterparts, the Smiths...) They started keeping track of their members more closely and calling themselves a noble and most ancient house. Then their descendents--around 1700, let's say--commission a fancy embroidered hanging. They add in a few generations before Original Black based on family tradition--and just because he wasn't called Black in the oldest diaries etc. doesn't mean that wasn't his name, it must have been after all, so why not add it into the "tapestry" for greater "accuracy"? That motto has been passed down by oral tradition and was written down ages ago, they have a letter from great-grandpa with it, so of course it would have existed from the beginning. And then the grandkids started assuming the tapestry was actually made at the date of the first entry, and, well, it's as good as true, almost, so why correct them?

And by the 19th century, they're absolutely sure that the original Blacks only married other magicals rather than other families who belonged to the blacksmiths' guild.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Question: Is there a place where one can view the 'entire' 'tapestry'? The movie version, I presume?

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

Don't quote me on this, but it's possible for Warner Bros. to have released it as a gigantic wallpaper either online or in print. I know that New Lines printed a full-scale map of Middle-earth (movie style, the one you got a glimpse of in the first movie), my brother bought one of those for me in Ottawa.

[maidofkent.livejournal.com]

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<suppose [...] smiths...)>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

<Suppose the Blacks were blacksmiths made good in the fifteenth century. (Maybe the magically talented smiths among them made some cunning deals with goblins and thus their fortunes. Like their traditionally Hufflepuff counterparts, the Smiths...)>

Historically, of course, blacksmiths were associated with magic, or believed to have magic powers. The ballad 'The Two Magicians' is about a 'coal-black smith' who is a shape-shifter. This link is useful;

http://www.lifepaths360.com/index.php/ancient-magic-and-power-of-blacksmith-charms-16770

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

"Another curiosity, which we can't resolve given the alteration(s) over the years: where did they acquire the surname Black in the first place? Is it from the French blanc (and is that medieval Norman French or did they have a variant)? Or is it from an English branch of the ancestral tree? There's Old English blœc (black) and blac (pale) as possibilities, and even a guy named Wulfric the Black/Wulfrigus Niger around 980 to claim as an ancestor of a noble thane who won the heart of a beautiful Norman duke's daughter. But none of them are on the family tree..."

~*~

Isn't Blanc the French for "White", though?

Black and White

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

When we first meet the portrait of Sirius’ great-great-grandfather, he is referred to only as Phineas Nigellus, not Phineas Nigellus Black. Up until about the time of Seclusion, translating one’s name into Latin was the usual practice for anyone with pretensions to scholarship. No one knows Gerard Kremer (“Gerry Merchant”), poor cobbler’s son from the Low Countries, but everyone’s heard of Gerhardus Mercator and his famous map projection. So Phineas is just being old-fashioned, and Nigellus is not his middle name but an alternate version of his surname. Some of the Blacks might have called themselves Black in English and some Nigellus in Latin and some Noir in French. But probably not Blanc, which is, as you say, White.

[sunnyskywalker]

Yes, but apparently by some conjectures, some people were called "Black" because the English couldn't properly pronounce blanc. (Others were blacksmiths. Same sound, different origins.) The Old English possibilities actually offer the same ambiguity, since blœc is black and and blac is pale. Instead of translating the word, they could have just kept the sound, more or less, and eventually it resembled another word entirely, which happens sometimes in language.

Hundreds of years ago, there might well have been some blond Blacks. Why not?

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

Why not, indeed? 'Black' need not have had anything to do with anyone's coloration. It could easily have been 'blanc' mis-pronounced, or any combination of the suggestions put forward.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

I would say however that the most common reason to be named 'Black' would be coloring. It was a VERY common way of getting an identifying name. And a blacksmith usually would have ended up as 'Smith'.

There really isn't any need for the Black family to have originally been named 'white' in french. Just because their motto is written in french doesn't mean THEY were french. As has been mentioned, french was the language of the 'court'. Almost ALL mottos would have been in french (or perhaps latin). I know my family's background is welsh and yet our family motto is in french. So why would the Blacks necessarily have a french name?

And the more likely mispronunciation of the name Blanc would have been 'Blank'.

If nothing else - 'Black' is also supposed to remind us of of how "dark" the family is 'supposed' to be.

[sunnyskywalker]

I saw something somewhere that "Black" for smiths was more common in Scotland? If it was a color name, OE blac (pale) is probably more likely than blanc. But I've learned not to be too quick to assume things in the Potterverse, and that people here are very good at spotting brilliant connections I haven't spotted, so I thought I should bring up all the possibilities in case something jumped out.