The Dark Lady’s heart was captured, and they became lovers. And then one night (...) they lay together in the fashion of a >man and a woman. But Perenelle had been a virgin until that night.
I get what is meant, but if they had been lovers for some time then I would say that Perenelle was not a virgin in any meaningful sense of the word. Of course, from an old-fashioned point of view she might have been, but this sentence is not accompanied by a modifier expressing the change in values as the next one is.
Let us recall that this story takes place in the 90s and that Tom Riddle attended Hogwarts in the 40s. I don’t think that his views on sexual politics are entirely consistent with those of the present-day, so he may view “virgin” as meaning “not penetrated by a man”.
Then again Eliezer has been imposing modern sexual attitudes on the Wizarding World, whether out of ignorance or a desire to be politically correct I’m not sure. In any case, I find it one of the most jarring aspects of the fic.
Not just modern sexual attitudes, but specifically the sexual attitudes you see in the Harry Potter fanfiction community. And I’m sure it was meant to be jarring. Magical Britain’s culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.
Magical Britain’s culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.
The jarring thing is precisely that it isn’t. The sexual attitudes of the fanfiction community have a lot more in common with general contemporary western post-protestant sexual attitudes then with the sexual attitudes of any other (contemporary or historical) culture.
No, I mean she had an intact hymen probably, but it’s just the fact that “virgin = intact hymen” is a pretty silly notion to begin with. Especially since it outright says she’d been Baba Yaga’s lover for some time already. Having sex pretty much means you’re not a virgin any more. Kind of the point.
An anecdote: in contemporary Russian, lovers most readily translates as любовники, and not only has it a strong meaning of people having sex, but also that at least one of them is cheating upon their rightful spouse. The situation you describe would need the word влюбленньіе, literally ‘those in love’.
Yet it’s not impossible for ‘lovers’ to mean exactly ‘those in love’, if you speak colloquially/in a ballad mode.
koibito 恋人 vs. aijin 愛人 -- so it’s only half identical. 人 has kun’yomi hito (from Old Japanese *pi₁to₂), with voicing of the initial consonant in the compound word koibito, and kan’on reading jin. If Wiktionary can be trusted, koibito is the generic term for ‘lover/boyfriend/girlfriend’, whereas aijin was borrowed (regularly) from Chinese to translate the English terms ‘lover’ and ‘sweetheart’, underwent semantic shift in Japanese, and ended up meaning ‘mistress’.
Interestingly, Chinese 愛人 àirén is just an old-fashioned word for ‘lover’, and the word for ‘partner in an extramarital relationship’ is 情人 qíngrén… except Valentine’s Day is qíngrénjié. Wiktionary also thinks there’s a difference in usage of 愛人 àirén between the PRC and the ROC, but it doesn’t describe it.
(Why was rén borrowed as jin? I’m guessing there are borrowing patterns, like how English has borrowed enough from Latin that new Latin borrowings will mangle the vowels in entirely predictable ways, but I don’t know what they are. My first guess was that kan’on readings are based on a dialect of Chinese that had the same ȵ > ȵʑ > ɻ shift as Mandarin. I figured that was too simplistic, but given that 日 has the kan’on reading jitsu and the go’on reading nichi (go’on was earlier than kan’on), it might be right. Aijin is almost certainly regular, since 刃 is rèn in Mandarin and has kan’on jin. *ɻiC > ɻəC? Could be, since the apical vowel can’t occur with a coda consonant.)
(edit: I should probably point out that I don’t actually know most of this stuff—I just know how to look it up. So my sources could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting.)
If you’re going to be using old definitions “lovers = having sex” is a pretty recent change in meaning.
Well, given that I’ve been asked if I was dating someone who lived on the opposite coast, by someone who knew about the fact that she lived on the opposite coast, and knew that I hadn’t been over there in quite some time...
Then again, it could still be a recent change in meaning, just reversed by the internet.
Sure. ‘Lovers’ isn’t contemporary English at all, is it? But if a semantic shift / euphemistically-useful pattern of meaning is found in one place, that means it can occur elsewhere.
(Which reminds me: I’ve heard that ‘dating’ meaning ‘in a relationship with’ is a recent development, and that in the ’50s or so, ‘in a relationship with’ would have been ‘going steady’ and ‘dating’ wasn’t committed or exclusive. Is that true?)
Sure. ‘Lovers’ isn’t contemporary English at all, is it?
It is, but it’s more restricted in usage than it used to be. One might say “the notorious criminal Alice was captured last night, thanks to testimony from her former lover, Bob”, or something along the lines of “Catherine the Great’s numerous lovers”; but one wouldn’t say “this is my lover, Charlie”, and “Dennis and Eve are lovers” would sound stilted, if not exactly incorrect, in most situations. I get the impression that it’s now used with indirection and a slight pejorative air, where originally it might have been a direct, neutral description of a relationship.
(“This is Charlie, my loooover” is a possibility in some dialects, but that construction emphasizes the relationship by drawing attention to the archaism.)
My memory of sitcoms and comics from the ’50s agrees with you.
That’s all that I have to go on; I wasn’t alive myself back then.
All the same, I still think that ‘lover’ is a contemporary word. A bit old-fashioned, and usually singular, but I was alive for a time when a gay man could introduce another man as his ‘lover’ and it would be perfectly natural, with no other word that would mean quite what he wanted to say. (Now he could say ‘fiancé’ or even ‘husband’ and that would seem natural, but once upon a time it wouldn’t have.)
Hell, it wasn’t even considered committed in the 80s. Although I suppose different regions may have changed faster, in the South in the late 80s/early 90s, “going out” was what we said for “going steady”, while “dating” implied a more casual relationship. (And the actual term ‘dating’ was rarely used—I remember being asked, “you guys messin’?” after a couple dates with a boy.)
The story doesn’t really make sense as told. It fit’s Quirrell’s view of the world to a T, tough, so he isn’t questioning it enough.
Dons tinfoil
Someone on reddit pointed out that “confused scribble” might simply mean “A busload of aurors in a bag of holding” Now for really amusing wtfry, let’s make that “A busload of arch-wizards.”
Follow me down the rabbithole for a second: Voldemort’s read on the tale of Perenelle is obviously, blatantly, just wrong. It fits his worldview far to well, and has some logical flaws in it, especially concerning the cup.
So, I had a thought. As Harry pointed out, one thing to do with immortality, is to share it.
Further, it is a core part of wizarding culture to not share dangerous magic freely. And the stone is dangerous. It isn’t just immortality, it is also a weapon of utterly insane destructive potential.
Theory 1: Baba Yaga is not dead. Perenelle was simply the first person she chose to share her secret with.
I give this one quite high odds. The most likely alternative is that her death was accidental, which would be just.. ugh. Traumatic, much?
Theory 2: All those historical wizards that lived very long lives? Those were her further apprentices as she—being appropriately cautious with the dooms-day device—established that they could, in fact, be trusted with this level of power over a very long period of time. (.. and probably some mind-reading) Most of them are also not dead. And most of them are sitting in that chamber, playing poker.
I get what is meant, but if they had been lovers for some time then I would say that Perenelle was not a virgin in any meaningful sense of the word. Of course, from an old-fashioned point of view she might have been, but this sentence is not accompanied by a modifier expressing the change in values as the next one is.
Let us recall that this story takes place in the 90s and that Tom Riddle attended Hogwarts in the 40s. I don’t think that his views on sexual politics are entirely consistent with those of the present-day, so he may view “virgin” as meaning “not penetrated by a man”.
Then again Eliezer has been imposing modern sexual attitudes on the Wizarding World, whether out of ignorance or a desire to be politically correct I’m not sure. In any case, I find it one of the most jarring aspects of the fic.
Not just modern sexual attitudes, but specifically the sexual attitudes you see in the Harry Potter fanfiction community. And I’m sure it was meant to be jarring. Magical Britain’s culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.
The jarring thing is precisely that it isn’t. The sexual attitudes of the fanfiction community have a lot more in common with general contemporary western post-protestant sexual attitudes then with the sexual attitudes of any other (contemporary or historical) culture.
Romeo and Juliet, the Star-Crossed Lovers (so called by Shakespeare), never had sex. So the words were used as Quirrel describes, six centuries ago.
They have sex before Act III Scene 5.
*shrug* Maybe Perenelle didn’t exercise much and still had an intact hymen. There’s your drop of blood.
No, I mean she had an intact hymen probably, but it’s just the fact that “virgin = intact hymen” is a pretty silly notion to begin with. Especially since it outright says she’d been Baba Yaga’s lover for some time already. Having sex pretty much means you’re not a virgin any more. Kind of the point.
If you’re going to be using old definitions “lovers = having sex” is a pretty recent change in meaning.
Um, the relevant property is that the man can be sure the woman’s child will be his, and for that “virgin = intact hymen” is useful.
I’m not sure it’s even the current meaning. I would call two religious people who avoid sex before marriage lovers before they have sex.
An anecdote: in contemporary Russian, lovers most readily translates as любовники, and not only has it a strong meaning of people having sex, but also that at least one of them is cheating upon their rightful spouse. The situation you describe would need the word влюбленньіе, literally ‘those in love’.
Yet it’s not impossible for ‘lovers’ to mean exactly ‘those in love’, if you speak colloquially/in a ballad mode.
In Japanese, IIRC, one of these is ‘koibito’ and the other ‘aijin’, written with almost identical kanji, both meaning ‘love person’....
koibito 恋人 vs. aijin 愛人 -- so it’s only half identical. 人 has kun’yomi hito (from Old Japanese *pi₁to₂), with voicing of the initial consonant in the compound word koibito, and kan’on reading jin. If Wiktionary can be trusted, koibito is the generic term for ‘lover/boyfriend/girlfriend’, whereas aijin was borrowed (regularly) from Chinese to translate the English terms ‘lover’ and ‘sweetheart’, underwent semantic shift in Japanese, and ended up meaning ‘mistress’.
Interestingly, Chinese 愛人 àirén is just an old-fashioned word for ‘lover’, and the word for ‘partner in an extramarital relationship’ is 情人 qíngrén… except Valentine’s Day is qíngrénjié. Wiktionary also thinks there’s a difference in usage of 愛人 àirén between the PRC and the ROC, but it doesn’t describe it.
(Why was rén borrowed as jin? I’m guessing there are borrowing patterns, like how English has borrowed enough from Latin that new Latin borrowings will mangle the vowels in entirely predictable ways, but I don’t know what they are. My first guess was that kan’on readings are based on a dialect of Chinese that had the same ȵ > ȵʑ > ɻ shift as Mandarin. I figured that was too simplistic, but given that 日 has the kan’on reading jitsu and the go’on reading nichi (go’on was earlier than kan’on), it might be right. Aijin is almost certainly regular, since 刃 is rèn in Mandarin and has kan’on jin. *ɻiC > ɻəC? Could be, since the apical vowel can’t occur with a coda consonant.)
(edit: I should probably point out that I don’t actually know most of this stuff—I just know how to look it up. So my sources could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting.)
Edit: moved the comment to the right place, sorry.
Well, given that I’ve been asked if I was dating someone who lived on the opposite coast, by someone who knew about the fact that she lived on the opposite coast, and knew that I hadn’t been over there in quite some time...
Then again, it could still be a recent change in meaning, just reversed by the internet.
Dating is one thing, but if you were asked if you were ‘lovers’, then that would seem a strange use of contemporary English to me.
Sure. ‘Lovers’ isn’t contemporary English at all, is it? But if a semantic shift / euphemistically-useful pattern of meaning is found in one place, that means it can occur elsewhere.
(Which reminds me: I’ve heard that ‘dating’ meaning ‘in a relationship with’ is a recent development, and that in the ’50s or so, ‘in a relationship with’ would have been ‘going steady’ and ‘dating’ wasn’t committed or exclusive. Is that true?)
It is, but it’s more restricted in usage than it used to be. One might say “the notorious criminal Alice was captured last night, thanks to testimony from her former lover, Bob”, or something along the lines of “Catherine the Great’s numerous lovers”; but one wouldn’t say “this is my lover, Charlie”, and “Dennis and Eve are lovers” would sound stilted, if not exactly incorrect, in most situations. I get the impression that it’s now used with indirection and a slight pejorative air, where originally it might have been a direct, neutral description of a relationship.
(“This is Charlie, my loooover” is a possibility in some dialects, but that construction emphasizes the relationship by drawing attention to the archaism.)
My memory of sitcoms and comics from the ’50s agrees with you.
That’s all that I have to go on; I wasn’t alive myself back then.
All the same, I still think that ‘lover’ is a contemporary word. A bit old-fashioned, and usually singular, but I was alive for a time when a gay man could introduce another man as his ‘lover’ and it would be perfectly natural, with no other word that would mean quite what he wanted to say. (Now he could say ‘fiancé’ or even ‘husband’ and that would seem natural, but once upon a time it wouldn’t have.)
ETA: Also Nornagest’s ‘former lover’.
Hell, it wasn’t even considered committed in the 80s. Although I suppose different regions may have changed faster, in the South in the late 80s/early 90s, “going out” was what we said for “going steady”, while “dating” implied a more casual relationship. (And the actual term ‘dating’ was rarely used—I remember being asked, “you guys messin’?” after a couple dates with a boy.)
So yes, true.
Maybe, but it’s certainly the common definition at the time, and besides the terms of the deal pretty explicitly said “drop of blood” anyway.
The story doesn’t really make sense as told. It fit’s Quirrell’s view of the world to a T, tough, so he isn’t questioning it enough.
Dons tinfoil
Someone on reddit pointed out that “confused scribble” might simply mean “A busload of aurors in a bag of holding” Now for really amusing wtfry, let’s make that “A busload of arch-wizards.”
Follow me down the rabbithole for a second: Voldemort’s read on the tale of Perenelle is obviously, blatantly, just wrong. It fits his worldview far to well, and has some logical flaws in it, especially concerning the cup.
So, I had a thought. As Harry pointed out, one thing to do with immortality, is to share it.
Further, it is a core part of wizarding culture to not share dangerous magic freely. And the stone is dangerous. It isn’t just immortality, it is also a weapon of utterly insane destructive potential.
Theory 1: Baba Yaga is not dead. Perenelle was simply the first person she chose to share her secret with. I give this one quite high odds. The most likely alternative is that her death was accidental, which would be just.. ugh. Traumatic, much?
Theory 2: All those historical wizards that lived very long lives? Those were her further apprentices as she—being appropriately cautious with the dooms-day device—established that they could, in fact, be trusted with this level of power over a very long period of time. (.. and probably some mind-reading) Most of them are also not dead. And most of them are sitting in that chamber, playing poker.
Baba Yaga is Flamel.
That might be the case, but we have the breaking of the tradition of Dark Wizards teaching Battle magic as independent evidence for the murder.
It’s evidence that it’s generally believed she was murdered.
Couple of centuries ago. Their definitions are not our definitions.
Also possibly a stupid natural-language parsing artifact.