the names of the Raven King

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

• There are eight different names and titles used to refer to this character over the course of the book: the Raven King, the Black King, the King of/in the North, the King, John Uskglass, John d’Uskglass, the nameless slave, and an unknown word in a language of Faerie that supposedly means ‘Starling’.
  
• It’s a plot point that none of these names is actually the character’s ‘true name’ in a magically meaningful sense, and he considered himself to be nameless because he was taken into Faerie before he could be christened. However he was presumably christened at some point, after his return to England — he at least behaves as a Christian as king. The name he used at this point was probably John d’Uskglass, after his Norman (supposed) father, and it’s interesting that this apparently doesn’t make it his true name.
• John Uskglass and the Raven King are by far the most frequently used names. However, John Uskglass doesn’t appear at all until page 396, after which it gradually takes over from the Raven King as the most used name. I’m not sure why this is — perhaps it’s part of the gradual demystification of the character that we increasingly hear him called by a more ordinary-sounding human name, or perhaps Clarke/the narrator is hiding, in the early part of the book, just how important the character is going to be by concealing who the title of the third volume refers to.
• The Raven King is not a unique name, and has applied to other characters before. Possibly the original Raven King is the Welsh mythological King Brân the Blessed (his name literally means ‘crow’ or ‘raven’), who is associated with all sorts of interestingly relevant ideas about mythological kingship and the relationship between the king and the land, and with the Arthurian legends and the story of the Fisher King — and, incidentally, one story that involves an important starling.
• d’Uskglass is a strange name, and an evocative one (it always reminds me of ‘we see through a glass darkly’ — the image of a dusky mirror imperfectly reflecting the world, or perhaps reflecting something other than the world we think is real, is beautifully appropriate — and the rest of that passage is surprisingly relevant too). It and its original bearer are both Norman French, but Uskglass appears to be an older English place name, and its actual etymology seems to be Celtic (in which case it would mean something like ‘blue-green water’). Perhaps this unclear mix of sources reflects the messy reality behind the idea of Englishness and English magic as single coherent things.
• The language of Faerie in which he was first named is supposedly related to the Celtic languages. In both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the word for ‘starling’ is druid. This must be an out-of-universe pun rather than anything significant, since this word has no actual relation to the English word ‘druid’, but still.

Tags: i won't tag 'the raven king' because everything in that tag at the moment seems to be about the raven cycle books, don't want to get in the way, confusing the spells of your enemies is all very well but what about confusing the tagging of your fans on tumblr hmm