![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeClearly some sort of magical tradition is important – it’s what English magic is, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is all about history. Yet at the same time, the story is basically one of deliberately not going back to the past, of instead turning the entire thing into something new.
Throughout the story, books are Very Important to pretty much all the magicians we meet. A magician needs books of magic. And then what happens at the end? Strange and Norrell try to summon the King of Magic himself and he responds by symbolically turning all of the books in Norrell’s library into birds (<3). He also erases the old book that he wrote, and rewrites it. And then Hurtfew Abbey itself vanishes into oblivion, taking its library with it. It’s pretty clear here that, while a tradition of magic may be important, the reliance on books alone is a fundamentally wrong view of magic.
When, near the end of the book, English Magic returns to the land and as a result people with no experience start being able to do magic, this is how it happens:
“Mr Norrell,” said Lord Liverpool, “These girls were thirteen. Their parents are adamant that they have never so much as seen a magical text. There are no magicians in Stamford, no magic books of any kind.” (…) “The girls told their parents that they looked down and saw the spell written upon the path in grey pebbles. They said the stones told them what to do.”
One particular bit of John Uskglass’s prophecy/spell that has puzzled me for a while is where he says ‘Englishmen have despised my gift’ in reference to the disappearance of English magic. Were magicians somehow responsible for what happened, through their negligence? ‘Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it’, apparently because they’re all convinced that they should be reading old (irrelevant?) books of magic instead. But that’s not what magic is.
Tags: i think this is interesting if fairly obvious, there are probably some philosophical conclusions somewhere in here
