Some Black-related musings

[snorkackcatcher]

Meta for a change. :)

A couple of things caught my eye in passing recently while looking up other bits of information, and since they left me a bit baffled I thought I'd see if anyone else had any ideas! Apologies if this has been done to death before and I missed it.

Firstly, a question and answer from the transcript of JKR's "cub reporter" press conference shown on ITV shortly after HBP came out, which I can't remember seeing before. Emphasis mine:

Sorley Richardson for Publishing News - Why did you have to kill Sirius when it was the best thing that happened to Harry for years?

JK Rowling: We are back to me being a murderer, aren't we? People have asked me this a lot. I have been repeatedly told Sirius was my favourite character, why did he have to die? You can imagine how bad that makes me feel and in fact after I killed Sirius I went on the Internet and somehow stumbled across a fansite devoted entirely to Sirius and I killed him in the last 48 hours, so that wasn't good.

I think you will realise why he had to go in terms of plot when you read the seventh book. It wasn't arbitrary although part of the answer is the one I have given before. It is more satisfying I think for the reader if the hero has to go on alone and to give him too much support makes his job too easy, sorry.

So by the sound of that, there's some structural plot reason why Sirius needs to be dead by Book 7, beyond the 'strip Harry of his protectors' aspect? I'm struggling to think what it might be. The best theory I can come up with is that Harry needs to be the owner of 12GP and/or Kreacher in order for some particular plot-critical magical effect to take place, but I'm not exactly convinced.

And while on the subject of 12GP ...

I was thinking of submitting Toujours Pur from the back catalogue to Checkmated, so I thought I'd check it against the Black Family Tree and make sure everything now fitted. When I did I noticed (yet another?) oddity with the dates. For a start, we have Sirius' parents as follows:

Orion Black 1929-79
Walburga Black 1925-85

Fair enough -- 12GP went to Walburga on Orion's death, then to Sirius on her death. As he says in OotP, it had been empty (apart from Kreacher and the portraits) for ten years, which fits in nicely with the Tree. She wouldn't have let the disinherited Sirius get the house if there'd been anyone else to leave it to, right? Except there was. Sirius wasn't the 'last Black' at the time. There were lots of 'em left:

Arcturus Black (Orion's dad) 1901-1991
Pollux Black (Walburga's dad) 1912-1990
Cygnus Black (Walburga's brother, father of Bella etc) 1938-1992
Cassiopeia Black (Walburga's aunt) 1915-1992
Lucretia Prewitt, nee Black (Orion's sister) 1925-1992

All of which set me wondering:

Early nineties were a bit of a bad time to be a Black, weren't they?

Why didn't Walburga leave 12GP to one of these people instead (given that there clearly isn't a 'normal' down-to-the-bottom-of-the-tree-then-across family entail on the house if Sirius could leave it to Harry rather than Bella)?

Why didn't they just live there regardless, or at least give Kreacher someone three-dimensional and (relatively) sane to take orders from occasionally?

Why was Walburga (and presumably Orion before her) in sole possession of the Black Family Seat anyway, given that both their fathers were still alive?

Do any of the dates on that Tree make sense, or did Jo just pull them out of thin air?

Comments

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how to finesse the still-living-father thing, apart from having them give the place to Orion and Walburga as a gift while they were still alive (I think Jo probably did pull the dates out of thin air), but don't you have to be sort of compos mentis to make a legal will? Possibly Walburga was too loopy by then to will 12 GP away from Sirius, even if she'd wanted to, and given that she presumably believed him to be a mass murderer of Muggles, perhaps she didn't want to at the time.

[snorkackcatcher]

Now there's a thought. She still has a lot of contempt for him in Toujours Pur, but it might work as something that would make her inclined to will it to him -- or not bother to make a will, which would have the same effect presumably, given that she can't have expected him to get out of Azkaban. Perhaps a good old family row would be enough to explain her not making a will which passed it on elsewhere (she seems to have been the type to fall out with family members, after all).

I guess the 'gift' idea is necessary if I take the dates seriously (I'm very inclined not to, especially as Walburga's age doesn't quite seem to square with her physical description in the portrait).

[tree_and_leaf]

Does the wizarding world have inheritance tax? A gift to Orion and Walburga would probably get round that.... (clutching at straws, here)

[snorkackcatcher]

Hmm ... I'm not entirely sure they even have tax -- or more to the point, that JKR worked out the economics of the wizarding world to that level of detail. Thinking about it, I'd say that for the rather old-fashioned WW, anything much beyond indirect taxes on sales or poll taxes sounds less likely.

You'd also imagine (off the cuff theorising here) that the pureblood families would spit fire at the idea of inheritance tax, the same way as real-world elites did. And since it took a big fight to get real-world inheritance taxes fight passed, and the purebloods are probably a higher proportion of the population than the real aristocracy were -- probably not?

[tree_and_leaf]

That's probably right. I now have even less idea what might be up with the tree!

[magnetic-pole.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, oh! I'm excited to see if anyone has any plausible answers to this one.

My take on it? Like a_t_rain, I think the numbers were pulled out the air, because they just don't make sense. I think JKR wanted to ensure that the Blacks had died off by the time of the books, and thus we find characters of two different generations (born c. 1900, 1915, 1925, and 1935) all dying at the same time. Which, incidentally, is a little early for all of them (even if you believe, as I do, that most of the characters in these books live Muggle-length lives, JKR's theories to the contrary). I suspect she may have forgotten about the inheritance issue for Walburga.

But I wanted to be proven wrong. Please, JKR, tell us something interesting happened in the early nineties that can help account for the deaths in these years.

I agree with you that there needs to be a more compelling reason for Sirius' death than the logic of the young hero going it alone. But I'm not sure it's 12GP. JKR doesn't seem adverse to finessing the rules of the game when she needs to (no Apparating at Hogwarts, for example), so I'm not sure that the rules of inheritance are that significant here, especially given the relationship she sets up between Sirius and Harry and our expectation that Harry would inherit something from him. There are other ways of getting him into the house or placing him in charge of Kreacher. More to the point, I just don't think the "problem" that Sirius' death solves is purely logistical.

So what do I think? I really don't know. I'm still convinced that there's crucial backstory for Harry's parents that we'll discover in the last book, and that Sirius' absence is a way of withholding that information until we're ready for it. That's a weak answer, but the best I can come up with right now. Maggie

[snorkackcatcher]

Yep, the more I look as those dates, the less convincing they are (unless JKR really wanted to imply a lot of early-teenage Black fathers, or unless the fan who copied down the dates at the viewing got them very wrong). The fact that there are so many early 1990s death dates does suggest she might have just drawn a line under them at a point before the issue becomes relevant in the books. (From what I remember, the process by which the authors were asked for stuff for the auction was rather ad hoc, so that may account for it if she just made it up on the fly from rough notes -- the name-checking of other pure-blood families hints at the same thing).

The suggestion that Sirius needed to be killed off to stop him giving away useful info about Harry's parents would work -- now I think about it, the same argument might apply to Regulus too?

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

Would it possible that in the good old sexist way, the family home always goes to the eldest son (or eldest still acceptable son) without a way of reverting to the previous generation? The first part I could imagine quite easily, but the second feels dodgy...

[snorkackcatcher]

Yes, exactly. The fact that it could go to Harry is a bit of a spanner in the works (modulo my vague idea that Kreacher might be only pretending to obey Harry and so the 'test' of whether ownership had passed to him wasn't good enough -- he never actually does anything important for Harry, Dobby does the real Draco-tracking).

I could see it going to Sirius because it had to. I could see it going to Harry because it didn't. I'm not sure I'm happy with both together. although there are ways round that -- a_t_rain's theory above (which I think I'll hint at in any revision), or the idea that Harry being his godson is legally/magically the same as an actual son (I've seen that idea used before).

Neither of those gets round the still-living parents, because as I understand the inheritance of old family seats, the next oldest male in the family gets it (going sideways across the tree if necessary), and keeps it as long as they live without passing it down. Oh well, that's finessable. :)

[snorkackcatcher]

And now I think of it that doesn't explain why Walburga had the house, unless it was really Sirius' all along and he just didn't care ... Hmm, there's a plot idea. :)

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

I think the dates are totally out of thin air, and that this tree is meant to be a curiousity, not written-in-stone canon. It's like the full moon during Christmas in PoA. It's there for dramatic effect, and because it never even occurred to JKR when she was writing the series that she might have fans obsessed enough to work out the dates and then consult a moon chart. :P

I'm in the camp that Sirius going through the Veil has some significance. I like the theory that Harry will have to travel beyond the Veil and Sirius will somehow serve as a guide. However, I've always been at peace with Sirius's death, too. Sometimes, you have to kill off characters people love, and I can understand why she killed Sirius. I totally would have done the same thing, because I am cruel.

I also really, really like the idea that Sirius is going to communicate with Harry by messing with his tea leaves.

[snorkackcatcher]

I'm in the camp that Sirius going through the Veil has some significance. I like the theory that Harry will have to travel beyond the Veil and Sirius will somehow serve as a guide.

Hmm ... could be. I must admit I've never been keen on this theory because it lessens the impact of killing Sirius off in the first place, and really hope JKR doesn't plan to go that route -- I'll be rather disappointed if she does.

I think you're right about the dates though. :)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Early nineties were a bit of a bad time to be a Black, weren't they?

I have suggested elsewhere that it was all due to a suicide pact upon realisation that age had made them impotent and there was no male heir.

[snorkackcatcher]

Ah right. Yes, 'barking but brilliant' (well, the former at least) is a pretty good description of those essays. :) Although I do like the idea of Orion helping out in the cave. Or even better, Walburga, and that's what drove her round the twist. (Then again, I'm not sure Regulus ever went near that cave -- it read to me like he switched lockets before it was taken there.)