Aha! The prophecy we just heard in chapter 96 is Old English. However, by the 1200s, when, according to canon, the Peverell brothers were born, we’re well into Middle English (which Harry might well understand on first hearing). I was beginning to wonder if there was not some old wizard or witch listening, for whom that prophecy was intended.
There’s still the problem of why brothers with an Anglo-Norman surname would have Old English as a mother tongue… well, that could happen rather easily with a Norman father and English mother, I suppose.
And the coincidence of Canon!Ignotus Peverell being born in 1214, the estimated year of Roger Bacon’s birth, seemed significant too… I shall have to go back over the chapters referring to his diary.
The name isn’t really an issue for a number of reasons. It could have been changed by the family itself to take advantage of political and social conditions, and storytellers also would have reason to update the name to appeal to their audiences.
In fact, considering the centuries-long game of telephone that would be at play, it’s more surprising that the modern name is as close as it is to the name that appears in the prophecy itself. This makes it fairly likely that the whole story had been lost and was rediscovered relatively recently and then gallicized.
Aha! The prophecy we just heard in chapter 96 is Old English. However, by the 1200s, when, according to canon, the Peverell brothers were born, we’re well into Middle English (which Harry might well understand on first hearing). I was beginning to wonder if there was not some old wizard or witch listening, for whom that prophecy was intended.
There’s still the problem of why brothers with an Anglo-Norman surname would have Old English as a mother tongue… well, that could happen rather easily with a Norman father and English mother, I suppose.
And the coincidence of Canon!Ignotus Peverell being born in 1214, the estimated year of Roger Bacon’s birth, seemed significant too… I shall have to go back over the chapters referring to his diary.
The name isn’t really an issue for a number of reasons. It could have been changed by the family itself to take advantage of political and social conditions, and storytellers also would have reason to update the name to appeal to their audiences.
In fact, considering the centuries-long game of telephone that would be at play, it’s more surprising that the modern name is as close as it is to the name that appears in the prophecy itself. This makes it fairly likely that the whole story had been lost and was rediscovered relatively recently and then gallicized.