bits & bobs

[kethedammit]

Penelope was a name of ill omen in Mélusine, and the ship herself looked unclean, ill-cared for.
-The Virtu, Sarah Monette

Mildmay's canon is really huge and weird and full of little tiny details like the fact that matches are called 'lucifers' and bisexuality is named after a Roman god. I have to keep track of all of this shit because Mildmay would keep track of all of that shit, and so here are my notes. I am keeping them public because they're easier for me to check that way; however, if infomodding becomes a problem, they will be privatized. HOWEVER I HAVE NEVER HAD THAT PROBLEM SO WHO CARES.

→ random notes: (all page numbers are from my editions, so all hardcover except the mirador, which is a paperback.) this is a work in progress as i'm only putting notes here that are in some way immediately relevant to rptimes on a surface detail level.

• That's why I used all those fake names -- Gilroi Felter and Dennis and Jean-Thermidor and Eusteban Ross and Umberto and the rest of them. -Mélusine (p109)
list of fake names (obviously). presumably these are the ones he uses most often because they're the ones he lists off-hand. gilroi felter is still my fav even though it'd probably be cleverer to use like 'eusteban ross' or something lolol my life.

• I sat down against the wall and started reciting "Rowell's stand" in my head. [...] I got to the middle of the thirteenth stanza, where Rowell's wife looks in her mirror and it turns pitch-black [...] -The Mirador (p62)
one of the songs he knows obvs. maybe i can spin it into a reference to a military campaign if i ever need to reference melusinian history (where there are apparently no wars, only coups) ???

• Guys who get themselves into the Mirador don't need a blabbermouth spoking their wheel. -The Mirador (p246)
'spoking their wheel' presumably means bothering / questioning / interrogating in a pester-y sort of way.

• Felix had kept trying for months to get me to wear ruffles at cuffs and collar, but that idea was nuts, and I'd told him to go put garlands on a pig. -The Mirador (p247)
'ruffles at cuffs and collar' lol mirador fashion. 'go put garlands on a pig' means 'go hang' with a side of 'flying pig' ridiculousness, presumably.

• They both looked guilty when they saw Felix, like a pair of foxes with feathers in their mouths [...]. -The Mirador (p248)
to look guilty, obviously.

• The little lantern carved on it showed it’d been dedicated to St. Lemoyne Harkness, and I made up my mind right then that that was a good omen. St. Lemoyne Harkness was the patron saint of dark places and confusion, and you couldn’t’ve described better how I was feeling if you’d written a book. -The Mirador (p214)
thnx 4 explaining what the saints are patron of bro

• St. Holofernes was old and harmless and mostly forgotten. His special province was protection against the bites of mice and rats. Three guesses how he died. -The Mirador (p232)


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→ shit I made up: part of playing mildmay is, as much as i gotta remember shit, also making new shit up too, because god knows I like making things difficult for me. So here's non-canonical bullshit I referenced so I can keep it consistent.

• Saint Gilroi: He was harrowed to death. He was an adviser to King Adelstan Thestonarius, got himself killed when told old Adelstan the truth instead'a what he wanted to hear.

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→ the author of these books likes to do a Q&A every once and a while, and occasionally drops bits of supplementary canon. Here are some collected quotations from therein. These are mostly extra-canon things that aren't (explicitly) mentioned in the books.

Q:You said, in Q&A 5 that your architecture always has some source of meaning. Can you please delve into this? Are these meanings based on scholarly ideas(i.e. the genders of Greek Columns? Or the use of the Gothic Revival in the Nineteenth Century?) or more of an emotional basis

A: I meant mostly, though not exclusively, that labyrinths and mazes are a dominant motif throughout the books. And also, the idea of thaumaturgic architecture/architectural thaumaturgy means that human-made structure are always important. However, it's also important that the Mirador has no external windows, that almost all buildings in the Lower City have roof accesses, that the Mirador in itself is an archaeological dig waiting to happen. I'm not, myself, well-versed enough in architectural schools and history to go much farther than that. (Although, when I said the churches in Mélusine are Gothic, I should add that St. Kirban's is definitely Romanesque.)

Q: I know you have a broad understanding of the Latin language. Can you tell me how this effected any of the Doctrine of Labyrinths.

A: Well, there's the geeky multilingual puns (Virtu, Cade-Cholera, etc.). I also use Latin to represent the principal language of most of Kekropia (Troian (Greek) is really only spoken along the coast), and thus the lingua franca of the international scholarly community. (Ergo, the book titles in Latin.) So, yeah. Pretty much woven into the fabric of the books, would be the answer.
-notes from the labyrinth

Q: What does Melusine's money look like? Does it all have Stephen Teverius stamped on it or something? (Or perhaps a stylized gorgon, hence the name? )

And, related, what is the relative purchasing power of a gorgon?

Gorgon on the face of the gorgons, yes. I don't know about the centimes. Not Stephen, though. I think I said somewhere that the obverse is a wheel, but I may be making that up (in the delusional rather than creative sense).

I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out the relative purchasing power of a gorgon, in the same way I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out any actual distances.

Q: So the hours of the day are either in the 24 hour system, or associated with flowers, the weekdays are, I'm guessing, French inspired?, years are indictions, and what are wheels? And what are the Corambin specifications like "in the Seventh of the oOne Hundred Forty-seventh" for instance, refering to?

The days of the week are actually Italian inspired (Marathine days of the week are French).

Wheels are what Mildmay calls septads: groupings of seven indictions.

So the Seventh of the One Hundred Forty-seventh is the seventh indiction of the one hundred forty-seventh wheel since whatever date the Corambins count their calendar from. (I think that's from the founding of Cassander, the first Cymellunar Corambin city, but I don't remember for sure, and although I know I've got it written down somewhere, I don't know where.)
-notes from the labyrinth

Q: Is the village of Mouldiwarp closer to Porpentine or Heronshaw?

A: The village of Moldwarp (please note correct spelling) is actually quite isolated, except for the Lemerii country seat, Copal Carnifex.
-notes from the labyrinth

Q: Where did Mildmay get his name from, in story? I know where his first name comes from, but where did he get the fox epithet from, and why? I'm guessing it has to do with him becoming a more established assassin, but how does that automatically equal fox?

A: Mildmay is called "the Fox" partly because his cheekbones give him a foxish look (and, of course, once the dye is stripped out, his hair is fox-colored, but nobody (except Kolkhis) knows that when they start calling him the Fox, so it's just one of those little narrative ironies). There's also a lot of folklore in Meduse associated with foxes and their cunning, their ability to evade or escape traps. Foxes are liars, and also storytellers. And like anyone who's willing to be an assassin for hire, they are amoral. It fit him.

Q: Kept thieves don't have last names, although whores seem to (at least, Vincent does, but then he comes from what seems to be solidly middle class or higher, originally...). Are there other social classes that lack last names? Is this part of a class thing? Does Cardenio having a last name signify anything?

A: Yes, it is a class thing, the distinction between the working class and what probably gets called the criminal class, although that's a misnomer: kept-thieves and whores and pack kids, spiders and pimps and resurrectionists, sangermen and ketches and cade-skiffs. The people who make their living, legally or illegally or some of both, in Mélusine's underbelly. But of course people with surnames can end up in those places, and they may or may not choose to drop the surname, just as people without surnames have nothing to prevent them choosing to adopt one. So it's not reliable.
-notes from the labyrinth

Q: A week is seven days, and our numerical system is based on ten. A decad is ten days, and the Lower City's numerical system is based on seven. Coincidence? Also, what inspired you to make a secondary numerical system, on top of the wizard's way of couting? Was there originally just one, but you put the Wizard's version in to help the reader, or vice versa (to world-build, or...?) And why seven? (etc etc etc)

And, can you give a breif explanation of the Lower City's numerical system?

A: The decad, along with the rest of the Lower City calendar, is stolen from the French Revolutionary calendar. (I believe I made up the word "decad," but I wouldn't swear to it.) Counting indictions in groups of seven is stolen from the Byzantine calendar. (I think, if I'm remembering correctly, there was also a method of grouping by fives, but it's been a while.) I combined the two and decided, for reasons that are now lost in the dim and distant past, that since seven was clearly sacred, it would be far more culturally pervasive.

A septad is seven of something. The Lower City tends to group things by sevens, rather than by fives or tens. An indiction is a year. Seven indictions is a septad. Seven septads is a Great Septad. This is one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" things that I wouldn't do again, and I didn't expect it to be so difficult for people to figure out, either.
-notes on the labyrinth

Q: Is the Doctrine of Labyrinths world based (however loosely) on the real world? For instance, is Marathat France, Kekropia Germany, etc.?

A: Well, very broadly speaking, Tibernia, Marathat, and Kekropia are the North American continent, although I've moved the geographical features around to suit myself (the Rockies seem to run east to west in Meduse, for instance, and about where the Great Lakes are). On the other hand, Troia is, symbolically anyway, Asia Minor, so I'm not quite sure what I've done with Europe. And the language progression goes Anglo-French, Latin, Greek, with the Russian-speaking merrows in the middle, and Dutch/German/Norse up north and Italian to the south.

Perhaps a better answer would have been a simple no. *g*

Q: Is there any specific time period the clothes worn in The Doctrine of Labyrinths would fall into?

A: No. I took advantage of this being an entirely made-up world to mix and match clothing styles and periods. So Felix's beautiful coats are eighteenth century, but Mehitabel's dresses are late Victorianish. And some of it doesn't fit anything because, like I said, made-up world.
-notes from the labyrinth

Q: Would you be willing to make me an extremely happy person and make a map of Meduse, not just Melusine? On that note, a list of the saints, gods and general Parthenon in Melusine's mythology?

A: I don't have a map of Meduse, nor any more than a very general idea of how the territory looks. Like I said above, I don't work things out unless I need to know them.

I can tell you that there are five principal gods in the Marathine pantheon. Phi-Kethetin (sun god); Min-Terris (goddess of time, history, and endings); Heth-Eskaladen (library god--god of memory); Ver-Istenna (goddess of balance and fair trade); Cade-Cholera (god of disease and death). It's an accretive pantheon, so there are a number of other gods, including the God of the Obscured Sun and Phi-Kethetin's daughter Phi-Lazary. Kethe is somewhere between a saint and a god (like the hero cults in ancient Greece).
-notes from the labyrinth

Every four years, the [wizard] court observes one day of the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen--the equivalent of February 29th--meaning that there's a day in that year that has no date for them. And, no, the court does not celebrate the Trials--too, too plebeian, darling. They simply use it as the hop-skip to keep the calendar in line.

And, yes, presumably, the length of the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen gets recalculated every so often (Heth-Eskaladen is a librarian god, so that would be the prerogative of his priests), although that's a detail that's never come up, since my poor protagonists never have the chance to actually attend the celebration.
-notes from the labyrinth

And I would expect, actually, that [their pentatheon] was originally a septatheon, but a couple of gods have been eroded away.

Kethe used to be a god. That's why Mildmay never refers to him as Saint Kethe.
notes from the labyrinth

One more Q: On page 18 of "The Mirador," Mildmay casually refers to someone as a eunuch. Is this slang for something or are there really eunuchs in Melusine? How do they fit into society?

And an A: No, it isn't slang. In Ervenzia, castrati are opera singers (p. 206). In Mélusine, it's clear that eunuchs work in brothels. There's the gofer you cite, and on p. 48 of Mélusine, Mildmay mentions Philippe le Coupé (Philippe the Cut), the eunuch who tends bar, also at the Goosegirl's Palace.

(All page numbers refer to the hardbacks.)

You don't find many eunuchs in Mélusine outside of Pharaohlight and the Arcane. Except in the households of blood-wizards. There's a brothel in Pharaohlight called the Seven Sisters that specializes in eunuchs, and another in the Arcane, the Lamp of Sycorax. (And if you know the right person to ask at the Lamp of Sycorax, and what to say to him, you can watch a castration. But you'd better be prepared to pay through the nose.) The Brothers of St. Origo practice ritual castration (three guesses, as Mildmay says, how he died).

The preceding paragraph is all stuff I just made up. But it's canonical now.
-notes from the labyrinth

In my head, the language that Felix and Mildmay speak is roughly analogous what Anglo-Norman would be if it were the principal language of the southern and midwestern United States. So there's lots of French, but it's all pronounced by American rules.
-notes from the labyrinth

-notes from the labyrinth

→ naming guide, because mildmay is invariably going to have to tell stories, which means I'm gonna have to come up with names for shit. Melusinien names tend to be really extravagant Italian, English, or French names, Scientific names, and occasionally Anglicized Greek-- with the exception of the ruling class, where they get fairly straight-forward Anglo names (Stephen, Mark, Laurence, etc). Finding the right kind of irreverence for common names is tough, though, so I'm giving myself lists for easy perusal for the type of name I'm looking for (which is why, for example, Mozart's German operas have been left out). That is: Shakespearean names, names from Mozart's operas (Magic Flute, The Pretended Simpleton, The Pretend Garden Girl, The Deluded Bridegroom, The Marriage of Figaro, Thus Do They All), common Victorian names, more Victorian names (scroll to the bottom for the good ones), 'classical' French names, popular French names from 1990 (futz around with this one to get old / uncommon results, pick around the 1910s and go back to like the 9th page), medical terms with Greek roots, Occitan names, some random Occitan names (probably best for surnames), Italian male names from 1427 (just make the 'o' an 'a' if needed), Latinized Medieval names.

→ a glorious timeline of Marathine history (and a companion) so I don't fuck up and make Mildmay contradict himself, since he knows this timeline like the back of his hand, surely. And a home-made Teverii family tree because I really need to stop getting that whole mess so confused.

→ another rundown of the Mélusinian calendars, of which there are two. This one is more detailed, but this one has a table. (And, yes, that's on the link list, but why not link it to hell and back, I ask you. While we're at it, have the map of Mélusine, why don't you.) Confused? So am I. I tried to do a comparative dating system for Mildmay once. It didn't work out. I've no head for numbers.