Reader
questions about Close
Kin
By Clare B. Dunkle. New York: Henry
Holt, 2004. 216 p.
Readers have written me to ask questions about the book. Here
are some of those questions and their answers. If you read
these and think of further questions, please go to the Contact
the Author page to send me an email.
WARNING: If you have
not read the book, DO NOT
read this page. The questions won’t interest you, and
they will ruin some of the book’s best surprises.
WHY HAVEN’T YOU ANSWERED MY
EMAIL?
ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE ANY MORE
HOLLOW KINGDOM BOOKS?
WILL THIS BOOK EVER BE A MOVIE?
DID KATE EVER FIND ANYTHING (OTHER THAN
KILLING PEOPLE) THAT SHE WAS GOOD AT MAGICALLY?
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO CONSTANTINE?
RUBY TELLS RICHARD THAT MARAK WILL WANT
TO START HEALING HIS BACK RIGHT AWAY. THE KING IS DESCRIBED
AS HAVING A TWISTED SHOULDER—COULD HE NOT HEAL HIMSELF?
WHY DOESN’T EMILY HAVE ANY MAGIC
ABILITY, WHEN KATE IS HALF ELF? THEY’RE SISTERS.
WOULD YOU WRITE A BOOK ABOUT LIM AND BLACKWING?
WHAT’S GOING ON WITH TIL IN THE BOOK?
I PERSONALLY FELT THE OL’ GIRL HAD A LOT OF PENT-UP
ANGER.
WHY WAS MARAK WORRIED ABOUT SABLE’S EYE COLOR AND SAID
SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF “HER LINE MUST HAVE WEAKENED”?
WHO IS ON THE COVER OF THIS BOOK?
IF SAY EMILY OR KATE CUT THEMSELVES WOULD
THEY SEE A MIX OF WHITE AND RED BLOOD OR WOULD A PARTICULAR
SPELL HAVE TO BE SAID TO SEE THEIR DIFFERENT BLOODS?
DO KATE AND MARAK HAVE TO DIE SO THAT CATSPAW
CAN RULE?
DID THE PRIEST SEE THORN AND SABLE?
DOES CATSPAW END UP KILLING TIL?
YOU SAID “THERE MUST HAVE BEEN
AN ELF WOMAN MARRIED TO A HUMAN MAN BECAUSE AN ELF MAN MARRIED
TO A HUMAN WOMAN COULD NEVER HAVE HAD A CHILD”, BUT
WHAT ABOUT SEYLIN AND EMILY? SEYLIN IS MOSTLY ELF, EMILY IS
MOSTLY HUMAN.
I WAS WONDERING WHY THIS BOOK WAS CALLED
CLOSE KIN BECAUSE I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT
KIN MEANT.
WHEN WILL CLOSE KIN COME OUT
AS A PAPERBACK BOOK?
HOW COULD RICHARD HAVE BEEN FOUND OUTSIDE
THE KINGDOM? DID HE ESCAPE?
LIM DIDN’T DECIDE TO STAY UNTIL SHE
HEARD ABOUT HER FATHER’S RELEASE AND BLACKWING’S
LOVE. BUT BEFORE THAT WAS WHEN SHE WROTE IN THE BOOK THINGS
SHE FORGOT THAT WERE IN ESSENCE SAYING GOODBYE TO HER OLD
LIFE. WHY THE DISCREPANCY IF SHE STILL FULLY INTENDED TO LEAVE?
WHY DID THE ELVES THINK IRINA WAS UGLY?
WHAT REQUIREMENTS DOES CHARM HAVE WHEN
IT PICKS FAVORITE KING’S WIVES? AND WHY WASN’T
LIM A FAVORITE WIFE?
WHEN MARAK FOUND HIS SON ON AGATHA’S
LAP AND ONLY ONE OF THEM WAS SLEEPING, DID THIS MEAN THAT
SHE HAD DIED?
HOW ARE CLOSE KIN NAMES PRONOUNCED?
IS YOUR TRILOGY BASED ON THE FOLKTALE, TAM
LIN?
DON’T YOU THINK THAT THE DESCRIPTION
OF SABLE’S CUTTING HER FACE IS TOO GRAPHIC FOR A CHILDREN’S
STORY?
WHEN DOES THE STORY TAKE PLACE?
IF RICHARD USES SUCH LONG WORDS, WHY DOESN’T
HE KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN?
WHO WAS KATE’S ELVISH ANCESTOR?
IF THE ELVISH MEN WHO LOST THEIR WIVES
SPOKE ELVISH AND THE HUMAN WOMEN THEY STOLE TO RAISE THE CHILDREN
SPOKE ENGLISH, WHY DOESN’T SABLE’S BAND OF ELVES
UNDERSTAND BOTH ELVISH AND ENGLISH?
YOUR ELVISH IS DIFFERENT FROM TOLKIEN’S ELVISH. WHY?
WHY HAVEN’T YOU ANSWERED MY EMAIL?
I personally answer every email that comes to the website
within a couple of weeks (sometimes longer if I am facing
a manuscript deadline). If you haven’t received an answer,
one of the following things has gone wrong: a) you filled
in the form and forgot to fill in your email address; b) your
email address is invalid; or c) your email account has blocked
my reply to you as “spam.” Unfortunately, the
last problem happens quite frequently!
If you haven’t received a reply, please email me again
from a different account and let me know it is the second
time you are trying to reach me. Perhaps another email address
will not be so picky.
BACK TO TOP
ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE ANY MORE HOLLOW KINGDOM BOOKS?
I appreciate the desire to see more books about this world,
but I hate to repeat myself. For three books, I was able to
use this world to say new things and to take you readers to
new places, but I think that by the fourth book, I would be
in entirely familiar territory. You love the first book because
it surprises you. Don’t you still want to be surprised?
I can do that by taking you to new worlds, like the one in
By These Ten Bones. I don’t plan on writing
any more books in this world.
BACK TO TOP
WILL THIS BOOK EVER BE A MOVIE?
I doubt it. Not every good book makes a good movie. The Hollow
Kingdom are all about ambiguity, prejudice, and perception.
No one in the trilogy is completely good, and very few people
are thoroughly bad, either. I wanted to make readers think
about that. I didn’t want to give you easy answers about
who to like and who to hate.
Movies work best with simple characters and lots
of action, but that isn’t why I wrote the trilogy. I
won’t let a movie director turn my characters into something
they aren’t just to make a more exciting movie.
BACK TO TOP
DID KATE EVER FIND ANYTHING (OTHER THAN KILLING PEOPLE) THAT
SHE WAS GOOD AT MAGICALLY?
Alas, no. Warfare was in her blood. All the rest was education,
and while she proved a sharp pupil, she could never fully
undo that early education she had received as a human girl,
when she learned (and rightly so) that magic is improper to
our race. Thus, she and Sable could battle it out in class
to see who could do the magic assignment best, but whereas
Sable had no qualms about floating objects around with her
so that she didn’t have to carry them, Kate just couldn’t
do it. She felt embarrassed working spells for casual use.
She did work the occasional spell to undo magical trouble
caused by her feuding children, but she never overcame her
scruples about working magic in general. Marak, of course,
found her irrational behavior a constant source of amusement.
BACK TO TOP
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO CONSTANTINE?
Dog was in Close Kin for the first draft, sleeping
outside the workroom along with Helen, but the presence of
two dogs was distracting there, so I removed Dog from the
text. Not to worry: Dog lived a long and happy life, tagging
around after Marak and then young Catspaw. But he was long
dead by the start of Book III.
BACK TO TOP
RUBY TELLS RICHARD THAT MARAK WILL WANT TO START HEALING HIS
BACK RIGHT AWAY. THE KING IS DESCRIBED AS HAVING A TWISTED
SHOULDER—COULD HE NOT HEAL HIMSELF?
Yes, the King can use his magic on himself (or, more likely,
his father the King can use magic on him when he’s young),
but he doesn’t use it to correct deformity that is harmless:
the goblin King finds such deformity attractive, as do his
subjects. Richard, however, is losing quality of life. His
deformity is producing a serious hunchback that has bent him
over so that he can’t straighten up anymore. In this
case, goblins work magic to repair, not the deformity, but
the effects of the deformity (the uneven development). In
fact, Marak has had this series of magical operations himself.
He, too, had an uneven spine that would have resulted in a
hunchback, but he can stand up straight. All that is left
of his scoliosis is a high shoulder, and that’s all
Richard will be left with, too.
BACK TO TOP
WHY DOESN’T EMILY HAVE ANY MAGIC ABILITY, WHEN KATE
IS HALF ELF? THEY’RE SISTERS.
Do you have a sister? If you do, you know how different the
two of you are. She may look exactly like your father, while
you look exactly like your mother. While we all inherit 50%
of our traits from each parent, those play out in combinations
of dominant and recessive genes to produce tremendous differences
in how strongly we favor one side or the other. And this has
happened to Kate. She has inherited the elvish side so strongly
that she is more elf than her mother was—she is a throwback
to her ancestor Elizabeth. But Emily has strongly inherited
traits from her father. She both looks like him and responds
to magic as he would because he is a human.
BACK TO TOP
WOULD YOU WRITE A BOOK ABOUT LIM AND BLACKWING?
I’m happy you liked that story enough to want to see
it as a book: it’s my favorite piece of my own writing.
I won’t write a book about them, though, because the
most interesting part is already written. Besides, this way
readers like you don’t have to go to the bookstore and
pay for their story. You can enjoy it right
here on the website.
BACK TO TOP
WHAT’S GOING ON WITH TIL IN THE BOOK? I PERSONALLY FELT
THE OL’ GIRL HAD A LOT OF PENT-UP ANGER.
Til’s behavior makes sense to me. She’s a very
ambitious, headstrong girl, and her foster parents haven’t
handled her very well. One of them (Kate) shies away from
conflict, so she never confronts Til. The other (Marak) is
so emotionally callous that he finds emotional displays amusing.
This isn’t the parenting Til needs.
To make matters much worse, an accident of “birth,”
if you will, has made her the powerless older sister to an
extraordinarily important and powerful little brother. If
Til had a docile temperament, this wouldn’t matter,
but Til has just as much ambition as anybody, and she’s
frustrated to find that she is not only socially inferior
to Catspaw but physically inferior to him as well, being one
of the few people in the kingdom unable to perform magic.
Moreover, she is surrounded by peers who are both tractable
and brutal, which is an odd combination: their callous temperament
makes goblins fairly easygoing, but given to displays and
tests of strength, which means that goblin childhood is essentially
one long hazing process. Even good-natured Emily has been
damaged somewhat by growing up among goblins. Small wonder
that Til doesn’t do so well.
BACK TO TOP
WHY WAS MARAK WORRIED ABOUT SABLE’S EYE COLOR AND SAID
SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF “HER LINE MUST HAVE WEAKENED”?
Seylin has just told Marak that, although Sable is a camp
lord’s daughter, she has blue eyes. Marak knows that
pure-blooded elvish aristocrats always have black eyes. This
leads him to suspect that, in the absence of sufficient choice,
Sable’s ancestors have married commoners, a disappointment
for the goblin King since commoner elves are not so strongly
magical.
This is true. In spite of the strong prejudice among the elves
which led aristocrats to marry only members of their own class,
Sable’s father has been driven to choose for his second
wife a common elf woman. Sable’s mother had blond hair
and blue eyes. Sable has her mother’s eyes, but her
father’s hair (Marak has noted the black hair and hopes
for the best). Fortunately for Marak, Sable has most of her
father’s magic as well.
BACK TO TOP
WHO IS ON THE COVER OF THIS BOOK?
Emily holds the mirror, and Sable is looking away (retreating
from life). Seylin is in the mirror, cracked, because the
artist liked the mirror ideas in the trilogy and the way that
mirrors played into the theme of changing ideas of identity.
The artist’s comment gave me an idea for Book III, in
fact: I worked one last mirror reference in at the end, when
Nir rejects the idea of studying his own appearance in a mirror
in favor of seeing Miranda’s happy face instead.
BACK TO TOP
IF SAY EMILY OR KATE CUT THEMSELVES WOULD THEY SEE A MIX OF
WHITE AND RED BLOOD OR WOULD A PARTICULAR SPELL HAVE TO BE
SAID TO SEE THEIR DIFFERENT BLOODS?
Kate’s and Emily’s blood looks normal because
the elves are more like us than the goblins are. Otherwise,
Marak would have noticed a difference when Kate’s forehead
was bleeding so heavily. Goblins don’t ordinarily have
black blood, even though the spell on the color disk reveals
goblin ancestry as black; like Marak’s, their blood
is often dark brown if it isn’t red. The spell just
analyzes the blood and gives back what scientists would call
a graph, showing the strengths of the different races in an
individual, and assigning colors to those races that are easy
to distinguish from one another. Dwarf ancestry shows up as
yellow, but that isn’t the color of their blood, either.
Emily’s disk is almost entirely red with a tiny bit
of white. Kate’s would look the opposite: mostly white
with a little red.
BACK TO TOP
DO KATE AND MARAK HAVE TO DIE SO THAT CATSPAW CAN RULE?
Marak does, but Kate doesn’t. She just loses her protective
snake when Marak dies: Charm turns back into a sword.
BACK TO TOP
DID THE PRIEST SEE THORN AND SABLE?
No. This incident took place years earlier. The priest saw
Sable’s father (much handsomer than Thorn because he
was a lord) with Sable’s mother.
BACK TO TOP
DOES CATSPAW END UP KILLING TIL?
No, he doesn’t. She’s part of his family, so the
rules of goblin revenge forbid him to take drastic action.
BACK TO TOP
YOU SAID “THERE MUST HAVE BEEN AN ELF WOMAN MARRIED
TO A HUMAN MAN BECAUSE AN ELF MAN MARRIED TO A HUMAN WOMAN
COULD NEVER HAVE HAD A CHILD”, BUT WHAT ABOUT SEYLIN
AND EMILY? SEYLIN IS MOSTLY ELF, EMILY IS MOSTLY HUMAN.
Seylin’s feeling that he trulyis an
elf amuses Marak at the beginning of Close Kin because
Marak knows perfectly well that Seylin is actually a goblin.
Therefore, when the elf quest is over, Marak proves to Seylin
that he isn’t an elf man at all. He’s a goblin
man, even though he has a great deal of elf blood in him.
Marak points out at the time that lots of elf blood doesn’t
make someone an elf. The goblins like to call Kate an elf
because she is such a powerful elf cross, but Marak notes
that even though Kate has a great deal of elf blood, an elf
man couldn’t have a family with her. But, because Seylin
is actually a goblin man, he and Emily can have a family.
BACK TO TOP
I WAS WONDERING WHY THIS BOOK WAS CALLED CLOSE KIN
BECAUSE I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT KIN MEANT.
“Kin” means the people who are related to you,
and if they’re close kin, then they’re close relatives.
I named Book II that because many people in the book have
to think about who their “kin” really are. For
instance, Seylin thinks he’s related to the elves because
people have made fun of him for looking like one. But he’s
really not an elf at all; he’s really a goblin, and
he has to find that out the hard way by learning that he doesn’t
really want to live the way elves have to live. And the goblin
teacher, Ruby, has always thought that her people, the goblins,
are much better than everyone else, but she has to learn that
all rational people share a common bond and have to learn
to live together. She learns that she is “kin”
to the two little human children who need her. And Sable learns
to trust goblins, whom she had always thought were horrible
monsters. So that’s why the title is Close Kin:
we have to see brothers and sisters everywhere we look, no
matter what religion or color or nationality they happen to
be.
BACK TO TOP
WHEN WILL CLOSE KIN COME OUT AS A PAPERBACK BOOK?
In late December of 2006.
BACK TO TOP
HOW COULD RICHARD HAVE BEEN FOUND OUTSIDE THE KINGDOM? DID
HE ESCAPE?
Richard was born in Portsmouth, England, to a human mother
who was a prostitute. His father was one of the goblin men
who made the trading journeys. This goblin had gotten drunk
and accepted the invitation of the street-walker to have a
good time. That’s what made the King so angry: no goblin
man should have behaved so badly as to have had a child with
a human woman outside the kingdom.
Because the strange-looking Richard was abandoned by his human
mother immediately after birth, he had no knowledge of his
mother or father. He grew up under the “care”
of a man who was only interested in using this child as a
freak-show exhibit. Mr. Simmons told Richard that he had no
parents, so Richard thought he was not an orphan at all. He
probably half-believed the stories that they made up to tell
the people about him, that he was some sort of devil.
Richard, therefore, never had left the goblin kingdom; he
had never been anywhere near the goblin kingdom. He had learned
only frightening things about those in authority from his
lawbreaking friends. All his life, no one had really wanted
him around. Consequently, he was terrified of facing the goblin
King and being judged “not good enough” to have
a real home.
BACK TO TOP
LIM DIDN’T DECIDE TO STAY UNTIL SHE HEARD ABOUT HER
FATHER’S RELEASE AND BLACKWING’S LOVE. BUT BEFORE
THAT WAS WHEN SHE WROTE IN THE BOOK THINGS SHE FORGOT THAT
WERE IN ESSENCE SAYING GOODBYE TO HER OLD LIFE. WHY THE DISCREPANCY
IF SHE STILL FULLY INTENDED TO LEAVE?
Lim does not have to make her real decision until the last
minute, and so she hides from herself the decision she will
make. Her mind blocks this, in the way that a traumatized
child might block the memory of a horrible episode: she protects
herself as best she can from the impending decision; or, rather,
from her own foregone decision. Lim has actually already realized
that she must marry Blackwing at least before that last day,
and very probably during that last week. She is saying her
good-bye on paper but not letting herself see or understand
it.
Blackwing works no magic to keep her writing from her; she
genuinely doesn’t read what she writes, or simply isn’t
aware of it. She is writing for the sake of writing, in order
to give herself an occupation—filling up the time so
she won’t think. In doing that, she is performing what
psychiatrists call “automatic writing,” and this
very often is a way of letting the subconscious mind speak
(sometimes in surprising and upsetting ways, similar to the
results one gets under hypnosis). Since she never goes back
to look at the book, she never does learn what she has written.
BACK TO TOP
WHY DID THE ELVES THINK IRINA WAS UGLY?
Thorn always called Irina an ugly puppy because of classic
family dynamics: he was just like a big brother to her—a
very mean big brother. Irina grew up with no adult women,
two adult men (Sable’s father and her father, both dead
by the time she was about six) and all the other children,
of whom only Willow was younger. Thorn and Rowan were near
in age, and their relationship was pretty close; Sable and
Laurel were only a year apart, and they were best friends.
But Irina was six years younger than Sable. She was the tagalong
little sister, teased and snubbed. Imagine growing up without
mothers—imagine being raised by careless older siblings.
And then imagine having to marry one! Marrying the same guy
who shoved you into the mud puddle and snapped the heads off
all your dolls ... now, that’s a miserable existence!
Thorn would have had his eye on Sable pretty early, so he
would have been more considerate to her. With Irina, he never
would have seen any need to be nice. He and Willow made fun
of Irina as “ugly” because that’s the meanest
thing you can say to an elf. (Rowan just teased her for being
stupid.) We often have to leave home to learn the truth about
ourselves, and Irina is a case in point: she never knew that
she was pretty because she had never left her “family”
before.
BACK TO TOP
WHAT REQUIREMENTS DOES CHARM HAVE WHEN IT PICKS FAVORITE KING’S
WIVES? AND WHY WASN’T LIM A FAVORITE WIFE?
Charm’s criterion for a favorite King’s Wife is
a bit different from what the Kings care for—or even
from what the Wives care for! Charm likes to be needed. Its
favorite Wives are usually either those who have lived through
the most dangerous ordeals (as Kate did), or simply those
who have given the snake the most trouble (as Adele did).
Lim never gave Charm a minute’s grief—or, for
that matter, a minute’s exercise. It slept right through
her life. She might have been tremendously heroic, but she
didn’t give Charm a single interesting statistic.
BACK TO TOP
WHEN MARAK FOUND HIS SON ON AGATHA’S LAP AND ONLY ONE
OF THEM WAS SLEEPING, DID THIS MEAN THAT SHE HAD DIED?
Yes, old Agatha had died. And at the end, she had been mentally
traveling, as the elderly often do before death. She had mistaken
Catspaw for her own Marak, many years before.
BACK TO TOP
HOW ARE CLOSE KIN NAMES PRONOUNCED?
English names are pronounced normally. Goblin and elf names
are pronounced in typical American style, with unaccented
vowels generally falling into schwa sounds. (My Webster’s
New World Dictionary defines the schwa as the sound of
the a in ago, the e in agent,
the i in sanity, the o in comply,
or the u in focus.) Although all elf and
some goblin names are based on actual foreign words, I have
changed their pronunciation to suit myself.
Seylin: SAY-lin
Second syllable rhymes with thin.
Thaydar: THAY-dar
Soft th, as in thin, and first syllable
rhymes with flay. Second syllable’s vowel is
not a schwa sound, but rhymes with car.
Jackoby: JACK-oh-bee
Marak: MARE-ik
Second syllable vowel is a schwa; vowels rhyme more or less
with vowels in garret or parrot.
Nameshda: Nuh-MEZH-dah
The a in the first syllable is a schwa.
The sh in the middle syllable has the sound of z
in azure. The vowel in that syllable sounds like
e in met, and the last syllable has a schwa
sound.
Aganir Immir: A-guh-near IM-mer
The first word means king in elvish; the first syllable
has the sound of a in bag, the second is
a schwa, and the third syllable rhymes with fear.
The first syllable of the second word has the sound of i
in in, and the second syllable rhymes with her.
Lim: rhymes with him
Aganir U-Sakar: A-guh-near oo-sa-CAR
The middle syllable of the second word has the sound of a
in sack, but when said quickly, it tends to become
a schwa sound.
Sabul: sa-BOOL
The a in the first syllable of Sable’s elvish
name is like the a in father, but when said
quickly, it tends to become a schwa sound. The second syllable
rhymes with pool.
Katoo: ka-TOO
First syllable vowel sounds like cat. The two syllables
have almost equal stress.
BACK TO TOP
IS YOUR TRILOGY BASED ON THE FOLKTALE, TAM LIN?
No: although my trilogy is based on British folklore, it isn’t
based on Tam Lin at all. There are many abduction
folktales in the British tradition that come much closer to
my trilogy than Tam Lin does; properly speaking,
Tam Lin is not an abduction tale at all, even though
some versions allude to the abduction of the human knight
before the story begins.
Childe Roland is a much closer antecedent to my trilogy.
Concerning that tale, some scholars assume that Burd Ellen
has been stolen to pay the fairy teind, but there is no evidence
for this in the story as I learned it. And I find it interesting
that while the most famous retelling calls Ellen’s captor
the King of Elfland, one scholar calls him a goblin king.
This highlights the confusion in British folklore between
the beautiful and the ugly magical races: sometimes “fairies”
are described as misshapen.
If you are interested in the ideas that I took from folklore
to build the trilogy, you may find them on the Creating
Fantasy Worlds page under the Fiction Writing section
of this website.
BACK TO TOP
DON’T YOU THINK THAT THE DESCRIPTION OF SABLE’S
CUTTING HER FACE IS TOO GRAPHIC FOR A CHILDREN’S STORY?
No, I don’t, but then, this book is not for children:
it is for ages twelve and up. During these years, teens are
learning many harsh truths in history and sociology classes,
such as the atrocities of the second World War, and they are
reading such graphic stories as The Jungle, The
Grapes of Wrath, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Our schools teach these disturbing truths in the hope that
history will not repeat itself—that education will bring
about improvement.
I brought Sable’s tragic decision into this book for
a reason. Right now, millions of girls all over the world
are facing exploitation and abuse. In Africa, there are women
scheduled to be executed by stoning as soon as their children
reach the age of two. In India, a busy slave trade exists,
bringing girls from poor villages and locking them up in brothels,
to face a lifetime of forced prostitution and almost inevitable
death from untreated disease. In the Middle East just a short
while ago, a fire broke out at a girls’ school, and
some of the girls rushed outside without wearing their voluminous
veils. The police sent them back into the burning building
to find their veils—and several of those girls burned
to death. Here in our own country, sad to say, there are girls
dealing with horrendous abuse. Some of them will fall into
the trap of prostitution and even lose their lives as a result.
The best thing I can do as an author is to help teens develop
a sense of empathy with these mistreated and oppressed young
women. If a reader lives along with Sable through her difficult
choice and the abuse that follows, I hope that reader will
be more likely to take the plight of exploited women seriously.
Awareness and concern are the first steps toward solving a
problem.
BACK TO TOP
WHEN DOES THE STORY TAKE PLACE?
This story takes place eight years after Kate’s marriage
to Marak, in the year 1822. Emily is eighteen, Seylin is twenty-two,
Kate is twenty-six, Marak is almost seventy, and Catspaw is
five and a half.
BACK TO TOP
IF RICHARD USES SUCH LONG WORDS, WHY DOESN’T HE KNOW
WHAT THEY MEAN?
Most of Richard’s childhood has been spent as the exhibit
of a freak show. Mr. Simmons, the man who took him around
Great Britain, was what we would call a sideshow barker. Everywhere
the two of them went, this man would use his loud voice and
impressive-sounding talk to try to bring together an interested
crowd. Then, once the crowd had paid, he and Richard would
perform their act.
Because of his trade, Mr. Simmons used long words to “dress
up” his sentences. The young Richard fell in love with
these glorious-sounding words, and he peppers his own speech
with them whenever he can. He often doesn’t know exactly
what the words mean, but this may not be his fault. Mr. Simmons
may not have used the words correctly, either.
BACK TO TOP
WHO WAS KATE’S ELVISH ANCESTOR?
Marak guesses in the book that Kate is descended from high-ranking
military lords. In fact, Kate is a direct descendent of the
last elf King’s military commander, the highest-ranking
military lord in the entire elvish kingdom. Thaydar is his
equivalent in Marak’s hierarchy.
The daughter of this elvish lord survived the last battle
of the elf harrowing, the attack on the King’s Camp,
but her right arm was smashed, and she could no longer work
magic. The goblin King, Marak Whiteye, healed her and let
her go. He told her that he did this because the two of them
were cousins: his mother and her grandmother were sisters.
But in fact, Whiteye had read his mother’s book by this
time and had lost his taste for revenge. Ruby tells Emily
that no one except babies survived this battle, but that’s
because Whiteye didn’t record this episode in the Kings’
Chronicles—it was just one more secret that this
gloomy and guilt-ridden King decided to take with him to the
grave.
BACK TO TOP
IF THE ELVISH MEN WHO LOST THEIR WIVES SPOKE ELVISH AND THE
HUMAN WOMEN THEY STOLE TO RAISE THE CHILDREN SPOKE ENGLISH,
WHY DOESN’T SABLE’S BAND OF ELVES UNDERSTAND BOTH
ELVISH AND ENGLISH?
Teaching someone else a foreign language is a lot of work;
it’s easier, if you know the other person’s language,
just to speak to him or her in that language instead. The
elvish men got used to speaking English around the human slaves
because they didn’t want to go to the effort of teaching
them elvish. The little children, then, grew up hearing much
more English than elvish, and after a couple of generations,
their own language was lost.
Exactly the same thing happened to the children of the Norman
knights who came to England with William the Conqueror in
1066. These knights tended to marry English women, and it
was the mothers who spent the most time with the children.
It wasn’t too many generations, then, before these proud
“French” lords were struggling with their French,
and around the reign of Henry the Fifth, they gave it up entirely.
But, thanks to them, our language has many words derived from
Norman French.
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YOUR ELVISH IS DIFFERENT FROM TOLKIEN’S ELVISH. WHY?
The Hollow Kingdom world isn’t based on Tolkien’s
Middle Earth, and my elves are very different from his: for
instance, elves living a normal elvish life die after a lifespan
of about a hundred years, while Tolkien’s elves never
die of old age. (Sadly, the parents of the Close Kin
elves were lucky to make it to thirty-five.) Because the two
races and two worlds aren’t related, it wouldn’t
make any sense for my elves to speak Tolkien’s elvish.
My elvish is based on Sumerian, a real language spoken before
the time of Christ in the land of Mesopotamia, and my elves
come from that part of the world, as well. In the trilogy,
whenever I translate an elvish word or phrase, I’m giving
the meaning of a real Sumerian word.
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Webpage text copyright 2004 by
Clare B. Dunkle. Permission is given to print this page for
educational or private use, provided the author is acknowledged
on the printed copy. It is forbidden to copy, distribute,
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