And Slytherin, of fen
Jun. 2nd, 2012 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerSalazar Slytherin is a puzzle. We know that he came “from fen.” Other fans more familiar with English geography than I have given convincing theories that the Sorting Hat meant the Fenlands in England, so at least we have something to work with. But how does a 10th to 11th century English wizard get a name like Salazar?
I'm nowhere near an expert on medieval Spain or England, so please correct and/or add as necessary if you know more than I do!
Slytherin isn’t a problem; it has an Old English sound to me. Maybe someone who knows the language can help me out here, but something like “slidrian” (slip/slither/slide) or “sleahþ” (from “sléan,” various forms of “strike,” including a serpent’s sting) could be candidates for the name’s origin. The name “Salazar,” on the other hand, was originally a Basque surname originating in the early Middle Ages, so it seems likely that Salazar Slytherin or his recent ancestors came to England from northern Spain. I see a few options here:
1) The Salazars moved to the Fenlands, and a Salazar daughter married a man from the local Slytherin family. They named their son Salazar in honor of her side of the family.
2) The Salazars moved to a place called Slytherin in the Fenlands, and “Salazar of Slytherin” lost its “of” over centuries of retellings.
3) The Salazars move to the Fenlands, and one of their sons married Miss Slytherin of Slytherin Fen, and hers being a very powerful family, he decided that being Mr. Slytherin was fine by him. Maybe they also had no sons, so he became their heir.
4) I can’t figure out whether anyone in 10th-century Spain used current Spanish naming conventions, let along anyone in Basque country. But we could always claim that the Basque wizards thought of it first and it caught on in Muggle Spain later, I suppose. Anyway. Under this system, a person has two surnames, father’s and mother’s – in that order. (The father’s surname is the one that person’s kids will inherit.) Under this scenario, Salazar Slytherin is actually the equivalent of García Marquez. Señor Salazar moved to England and married Miss Slytherin, and his son’s surname was Salazar Slytherin.
5) Unknown-First-Name Salazar got the epithet “Slytherin” due to his Parseltongue ability, and everybody these days assumes it was his surname.
In the latter four options, we have no idea what his personal name is. If it’s Option 4 or 5, that would also explain why we never hear Ron saying how everyone knows the whole Slytherin family was bad – just look at the dastardly Edgar Slytherin in the 1290s! No, it was the dastardly Edgar Salazar, and Ron never made the connection. The elder Blacks might have, but by Harry’s day, most wizards aren’t quite enough into genealogy to know it, especially the Muggleborns, and they just assume that Salazar was his personal name.
Given the family’s probable Basque origins, what can we guess about their pre-England background? Well, the Basques were known to be good sailors and fishers (getting all the way to Newfoundland eventually, maybe with the assistance of that Point-Me spell); maybe the not-yet-Salazars started out there in the mists of time. This site [link] says that Basque mythology includes a huge sea serpent called Herensuge. At least some of the family were probably Parselmouths, so maybe their business advantage was being able to talk the snake out of attacking their fishing boats. From what little is known of the Basques’ pre-Christian religion, a big snake or dragon named Sugaar was also an important figure. There is also a legend about Jaun Zuria, mythical first Lord of Biscay, supposedly the son of a Scottish princess and Sugaar.* In the Potterverse, this may also serve as the traditional Basque explanation of where Parselmouths come from.
The name “Salazar” (and the town) came from Burgos, Castile (at that time a Basque-speaking area [link]), which is a bit inland, so maybe the proto-Salazars made their fishing fortunes thanks to their snake-charming ways, climbed the social ladder, and moved to nice place in Burgos. Supposedly the real first Salazars were a noble family, anyway. The name itself is a mixture of Castilian and Basque and means “old hall,” so they must have gotten that old hall a while ago, and must have interacted enough with Castilian speakers to be using some of their words. By the 10th century, the name had spread to Navarre, which now has a Salazar Valley (Basque is still spoken there), so our Salazar’s branch of the family could have been from any number of places.
From the same source as the sea-serpent legend, we find,
Wizards, hm? The entry for “sorgin,” witch, also says that witches are important in Basque folklore. (Aren’t they in most folklores? Still, let’s run with it.) The Wikipedia entry on Sorginak [link] mentions that “Sorginak often are said to transform themselves in animals, most commonly cats,” and the Basque mythology page mentions other shapeshifters. So, in the Potterverse, we can speculate that Basque country had a high proportion of magical inhabitants, including many cat Animagi, and that many of them would still have been pagan (see “akelarre” for speculation on some kind of goat-related rite – maybe Aberforth could read after all and had done some extracurricular studying of his own) around the time our Salazar Slytherin was born.
As to why the Salazars moved from Spain to England, we can only speculate. Since they had the means to relocate, they might have been fairly well off; if they weren’t all nobles, perhaps they had established themselves a generation or two earlier as merchants or swordmakers or scholars, and watched the struggles between the Franks and Al-Andalus with trepidation until they finally decided to get the hell out of Dodge.
From which vantage point they watched is an interesting question. They might have stayed firmly in pagan Basque country, trouncing the Franks at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass and generally wanting everyone else to keep out. I suspect that the wizarding Salazars, who probably had some hereditary religious role due to their connection with their religion’s snake deity, weren’t the first on the bandwagon to convert to Christianity, which takes a dim view of snakes and magic. (Sugaar was apparently shadowy and vaguely sinister, but also a mythical ancestor, and controlling him might have made you a good guy.) But there were possibilities – passages like Matthew 17:20 (“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you”) could have been used to justify wizards as especially faithful and beloved of God – and eventually they would have seen potential advantages to converting. Sometimes healing powers and certain visions were also considered to come from God in real history, so it probably would have been the same in the Potterverse. Just ignore that bit in Deuteronomy against people who cast spells or talk to the dead and focus on how the Apostles eventually got to perform miracles. People ignoring bits they don’t like is a fine old tradition!
Or, if they were in Navarre, they might have been less neutral and left Salazar Valley for the Muslim/Basque buffer state Tudela, or even – if they were scholars or artisans by the time the Caliphate of Córdoba rose – headed to Toledo or Córdoba. So, even if they eventually became Christians, they might have been Muslim first, which might have contributed to Salazar’s later poor reputation. A foreigner and a heretic! The horror!
Probably there was some positive advantage to moving to England. This being the Potterverse, it could have been magical reason: maybe some particularly famous wizard lived in the Fens and a Salazar wanted to go learn from him or her. The famous cathedral of Ely is in the area, so perhaps they had a famous (priestly) magical scholar, or at least texts, there. Or maybe there were rare magical beasts in the Fens s/he wanted to capture and sell. Or maybe the future Mr. or Mrs. Slytherin was the attraction, being a famously powerful (and rich?) wizard or witch of the day, and our Salazar’s Basque parent was the lucky suitor.
For dramatic purposes, I’ll roll this all into two generations. Our Salazar’s father – let’s call him Jaunti – was born in Navarre into the Salazar family, magical Parselmouths of high standing with some connection to the local religious traditions, and possibly ultimately originating from successful fishermen centuries before. Not that they would necessarily advertise that part of their history, if they remembered it. Being – of course – ambitious, Jaunti Salazar traveled south to Toledo and then Córdoba to make his fortune, I’ll posit by dealing in rare manuscripts, especially rare magical manuscripts. In this business, he learned magic from wizards of different traditions: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, from many different countries. This being the Potterverse, he may also have dealt with the goblins. (Side note: Toledo was a center of swordmaking, and in the Potterverse, we know the goblins made at least one famous magical sword just a few decades after this time. Did Godric commission it from goblins his friend Sal’s family had connections with?) Particularly interesting was an imported runespoor, which only he could understand; this got him a lot of useful scholarly contacts. However, after a while he wanted to move on and learn still more, and expand his pool of customers and merchandise (and, if he hadn’t converted to Islam, maybe he got tired of paying the jizya). So off he went, though possibly not directly or solely to England. Maybe he traveled around Europe helping monasteries rebuild their collections after Viking attacks. Especially if wizards had invented magical means of copying manuscripts quickly at this time, he could have made a killing. Ely and Thorney (earlier trashed by the Vikings) were rebuilt around the 970s, which could mean he was just in time to restock their libraries.
In England, Jaunti married a witch from a family in Slytherin Fen with a magical tradition of its own. Their son was, to invent another name, Seber Salazar, who learned all about how in the old country everyone understood and respected magic whether or not they had the talent themselves. Little Seber went to a monastic or cathedral school (where everyone thought “Seber Salazar of Slytherin” was a good joke because of his snake-charming ways) to learn reading and writing and the seven liberal arts – and possibly some magic, depending on whether any of the clergy were wizards, secretly or openly. He would also have learned Christian doctrine; his father may or may not have liked this, since even though Jaunti Salazar probably called himself a Christian in public in England we don’t know what religion he truly felt most allegiance to. But the church was just about the only educational game in town. Seber became a noted scholar, and everyone wanted to study and copy the foreign texts he inherited from his father. (Transcripts of the runespoor’s conversation? Practical Kabbalah? Arabic alchemical texts? Recovered Greek and Roman texts? Lots of possibilities!) During his studies, he also met three outstanding magical practitioners: Godric, Rowena, and Helga. Eventually, they decided to start a school for young sorcerers.
It makes a good story, anyway.
* One of the people who wrote about Jaun Zuria was the 15th-century warlord Lope García de Salázar. He’s too late to be closely connected to our Salazar, but hm, garbled and half-forgotten remnants of a family legend about how they came to be Parselmouths, maybe? Although García de Salázar seems to have cut the snake part and given Zuria non-magical origins, from what I can gather – trying to protect his family when he sees which way the witch-burning wind is blowing, maybe? Then, two hundred years later, according to Wikipedia [link], we have this: “[I]n 1610 as the result of a witch hunting craze the Suprema (the ruling council of the Spanish Inquisition) gave everybody an Edict of Grace (during which confessing witches were not to be punished) and put the only dissenting inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar y Frias, in charge of the subsequent investigation. The results of Salazar's investigation was that the Spanish Inquisition did not bother witches ever again though they still went after heretics and Jews.” How convenient (if ethically troublesome) for the Potterverse witches! Concealing magic seems to be a popular occupation for Salazars in Spain.
I'm nowhere near an expert on medieval Spain or England, so please correct and/or add as necessary if you know more than I do!
Slytherin isn’t a problem; it has an Old English sound to me. Maybe someone who knows the language can help me out here, but something like “slidrian” (slip/slither/slide) or “sleahþ” (from “sléan,” various forms of “strike,” including a serpent’s sting) could be candidates for the name’s origin. The name “Salazar,” on the other hand, was originally a Basque surname originating in the early Middle Ages, so it seems likely that Salazar Slytherin or his recent ancestors came to England from northern Spain. I see a few options here:
1) The Salazars moved to the Fenlands, and a Salazar daughter married a man from the local Slytherin family. They named their son Salazar in honor of her side of the family.
2) The Salazars moved to a place called Slytherin in the Fenlands, and “Salazar of Slytherin” lost its “of” over centuries of retellings.
3) The Salazars move to the Fenlands, and one of their sons married Miss Slytherin of Slytherin Fen, and hers being a very powerful family, he decided that being Mr. Slytherin was fine by him. Maybe they also had no sons, so he became their heir.
4) I can’t figure out whether anyone in 10th-century Spain used current Spanish naming conventions, let along anyone in Basque country. But we could always claim that the Basque wizards thought of it first and it caught on in Muggle Spain later, I suppose. Anyway. Under this system, a person has two surnames, father’s and mother’s – in that order. (The father’s surname is the one that person’s kids will inherit.) Under this scenario, Salazar Slytherin is actually the equivalent of García Marquez. Señor Salazar moved to England and married Miss Slytherin, and his son’s surname was Salazar Slytherin.
5) Unknown-First-Name Salazar got the epithet “Slytherin” due to his Parseltongue ability, and everybody these days assumes it was his surname.
In the latter four options, we have no idea what his personal name is. If it’s Option 4 or 5, that would also explain why we never hear Ron saying how everyone knows the whole Slytherin family was bad – just look at the dastardly Edgar Slytherin in the 1290s! No, it was the dastardly Edgar Salazar, and Ron never made the connection. The elder Blacks might have, but by Harry’s day, most wizards aren’t quite enough into genealogy to know it, especially the Muggleborns, and they just assume that Salazar was his personal name.
Given the family’s probable Basque origins, what can we guess about their pre-England background? Well, the Basques were known to be good sailors and fishers (getting all the way to Newfoundland eventually, maybe with the assistance of that Point-Me spell); maybe the not-yet-Salazars started out there in the mists of time. This site [link] says that Basque mythology includes a huge sea serpent called Herensuge. At least some of the family were probably Parselmouths, so maybe their business advantage was being able to talk the snake out of attacking their fishing boats. From what little is known of the Basques’ pre-Christian religion, a big snake or dragon named Sugaar was also an important figure. There is also a legend about Jaun Zuria, mythical first Lord of Biscay, supposedly the son of a Scottish princess and Sugaar.* In the Potterverse, this may also serve as the traditional Basque explanation of where Parselmouths come from.
The name “Salazar” (and the town) came from Burgos, Castile (at that time a Basque-speaking area [link]), which is a bit inland, so maybe the proto-Salazars made their fishing fortunes thanks to their snake-charming ways, climbed the social ladder, and moved to nice place in Burgos. Supposedly the real first Salazars were a noble family, anyway. The name itself is a mixture of Castilian and Basque and means “old hall,” so they must have gotten that old hall a while ago, and must have interacted enough with Castilian speakers to be using some of their words. By the 10th century, the name had spread to Navarre, which now has a Salazar Valley (Basque is still spoken there), so our Salazar’s branch of the family could have been from any number of places.
From the same source as the sea-serpent legend, we find,
“Christianity came late to the Basque Country: in the Basque heartland of Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and the French Basque Country, there is not the slightest evidence for the presence of a single Christian before the 10th century, and in some areas even later than that. There is abundant evidence that the Basques remained pagans until that time... the Arabs referred to the Basques as majus 'wizards, pagans'… Nevertheless, the eventual Basque embrace of the Church of Rome was so thoroughgoing that we know little about the old Basque religion...”
Wizards, hm? The entry for “sorgin,” witch, also says that witches are important in Basque folklore. (Aren’t they in most folklores? Still, let’s run with it.) The Wikipedia entry on Sorginak [link] mentions that “Sorginak often are said to transform themselves in animals, most commonly cats,” and the Basque mythology page mentions other shapeshifters. So, in the Potterverse, we can speculate that Basque country had a high proportion of magical inhabitants, including many cat Animagi, and that many of them would still have been pagan (see “akelarre” for speculation on some kind of goat-related rite – maybe Aberforth could read after all and had done some extracurricular studying of his own) around the time our Salazar Slytherin was born.
As to why the Salazars moved from Spain to England, we can only speculate. Since they had the means to relocate, they might have been fairly well off; if they weren’t all nobles, perhaps they had established themselves a generation or two earlier as merchants or swordmakers or scholars, and watched the struggles between the Franks and Al-Andalus with trepidation until they finally decided to get the hell out of Dodge.
From which vantage point they watched is an interesting question. They might have stayed firmly in pagan Basque country, trouncing the Franks at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass and generally wanting everyone else to keep out. I suspect that the wizarding Salazars, who probably had some hereditary religious role due to their connection with their religion’s snake deity, weren’t the first on the bandwagon to convert to Christianity, which takes a dim view of snakes and magic. (Sugaar was apparently shadowy and vaguely sinister, but also a mythical ancestor, and controlling him might have made you a good guy.) But there were possibilities – passages like Matthew 17:20 (“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you”) could have been used to justify wizards as especially faithful and beloved of God – and eventually they would have seen potential advantages to converting. Sometimes healing powers and certain visions were also considered to come from God in real history, so it probably would have been the same in the Potterverse. Just ignore that bit in Deuteronomy against people who cast spells or talk to the dead and focus on how the Apostles eventually got to perform miracles. People ignoring bits they don’t like is a fine old tradition!
Or, if they were in Navarre, they might have been less neutral and left Salazar Valley for the Muslim/Basque buffer state Tudela, or even – if they were scholars or artisans by the time the Caliphate of Córdoba rose – headed to Toledo or Córdoba. So, even if they eventually became Christians, they might have been Muslim first, which might have contributed to Salazar’s later poor reputation. A foreigner and a heretic! The horror!
Probably there was some positive advantage to moving to England. This being the Potterverse, it could have been magical reason: maybe some particularly famous wizard lived in the Fens and a Salazar wanted to go learn from him or her. The famous cathedral of Ely is in the area, so perhaps they had a famous (priestly) magical scholar, or at least texts, there. Or maybe there were rare magical beasts in the Fens s/he wanted to capture and sell. Or maybe the future Mr. or Mrs. Slytherin was the attraction, being a famously powerful (and rich?) wizard or witch of the day, and our Salazar’s Basque parent was the lucky suitor.
For dramatic purposes, I’ll roll this all into two generations. Our Salazar’s father – let’s call him Jaunti – was born in Navarre into the Salazar family, magical Parselmouths of high standing with some connection to the local religious traditions, and possibly ultimately originating from successful fishermen centuries before. Not that they would necessarily advertise that part of their history, if they remembered it. Being – of course – ambitious, Jaunti Salazar traveled south to Toledo and then Córdoba to make his fortune, I’ll posit by dealing in rare manuscripts, especially rare magical manuscripts. In this business, he learned magic from wizards of different traditions: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, from many different countries. This being the Potterverse, he may also have dealt with the goblins. (Side note: Toledo was a center of swordmaking, and in the Potterverse, we know the goblins made at least one famous magical sword just a few decades after this time. Did Godric commission it from goblins his friend Sal’s family had connections with?) Particularly interesting was an imported runespoor, which only he could understand; this got him a lot of useful scholarly contacts. However, after a while he wanted to move on and learn still more, and expand his pool of customers and merchandise (and, if he hadn’t converted to Islam, maybe he got tired of paying the jizya). So off he went, though possibly not directly or solely to England. Maybe he traveled around Europe helping monasteries rebuild their collections after Viking attacks. Especially if wizards had invented magical means of copying manuscripts quickly at this time, he could have made a killing. Ely and Thorney (earlier trashed by the Vikings) were rebuilt around the 970s, which could mean he was just in time to restock their libraries.
In England, Jaunti married a witch from a family in Slytherin Fen with a magical tradition of its own. Their son was, to invent another name, Seber Salazar, who learned all about how in the old country everyone understood and respected magic whether or not they had the talent themselves. Little Seber went to a monastic or cathedral school (where everyone thought “Seber Salazar of Slytherin” was a good joke because of his snake-charming ways) to learn reading and writing and the seven liberal arts – and possibly some magic, depending on whether any of the clergy were wizards, secretly or openly. He would also have learned Christian doctrine; his father may or may not have liked this, since even though Jaunti Salazar probably called himself a Christian in public in England we don’t know what religion he truly felt most allegiance to. But the church was just about the only educational game in town. Seber became a noted scholar, and everyone wanted to study and copy the foreign texts he inherited from his father. (Transcripts of the runespoor’s conversation? Practical Kabbalah? Arabic alchemical texts? Recovered Greek and Roman texts? Lots of possibilities!) During his studies, he also met three outstanding magical practitioners: Godric, Rowena, and Helga. Eventually, they decided to start a school for young sorcerers.
It makes a good story, anyway.
* One of the people who wrote about Jaun Zuria was the 15th-century warlord Lope García de Salázar. He’s too late to be closely connected to our Salazar, but hm, garbled and half-forgotten remnants of a family legend about how they came to be Parselmouths, maybe? Although García de Salázar seems to have cut the snake part and given Zuria non-magical origins, from what I can gather – trying to protect his family when he sees which way the witch-burning wind is blowing, maybe? Then, two hundred years later, according to Wikipedia [link], we have this: “[I]n 1610 as the result of a witch hunting craze the Suprema (the ruling council of the Spanish Inquisition) gave everybody an Edict of Grace (during which confessing witches were not to be punished) and put the only dissenting inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar y Frias, in charge of the subsequent investigation. The results of Salazar's investigation was that the Spanish Inquisition did not bother witches ever again though they still went after heretics and Jews.” How convenient (if ethically troublesome) for the Potterverse witches! Concealing magic seems to be a popular occupation for Salazars in Spain.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-07 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-07 02:47 pm (UTC)