Month: May 2025

A Robin Hobb Rereading Series, Entry 448: Fool’s Quest, Chapter 26

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Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

Another content warning for the chapter: discussion of child abuse / neglect, torture.

After a Servant’s commentary about the Fool, one noting his youthful intransigence and certain measures attempted and suggested to address the same, “The Glove” returns to Bee and Shun as they flee the fracas between the Servants and their Chalcedean hirelings. Shun directs Bee as they flee, and they come at last to take a tentative rest. A cold night passes for them.

Something like this, perhaps?
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In the morning, Bee and Shun press on after some disagreement about what path to take and why. They proceed with difficulty and in cold hunger, and Shun divulges some of her personal history. Bee ruminates on it as she takes a turn breaking trail for Shun, and they come at last to a place to rest for the evening.

Bee wakes in the night, prompted by the echo of Nighteyes within her. One of the Chalcedean hirelings, Kerf, approaches in seeming kindness, offering escort and food. Kerf relates some of his own history and makes to attend to Bee and Shun, and they sleep.

The next day dawns with Kerf providing more food for Bee and Shun, and the trio set out again. Reluctantly, Bee and Shun follow Kerf as he leads them along, and they realize that he has led them back to Dwalia under Vindeliar’s power. Dwalia takes them in hand, noting the end of Bee’s deception, and she bids them be taken through a Skill-pillar. Bee acts, allowing Shun to slip free before she is dragged into the stone of the portal.

The present chapter does quite a bit. For one thing, in its prefatory materials, it brings back to mind the ways in which the Fool had been marked by those in Clerres, tattooed in his youth. In the earlier discussion of those marks, the Fool reports them as inflicted in an attempt to render him not-White. (As I write the words, I recall some earlier comments that motion towards Hobb’s use of tattooing as a trope, and I have to wonder about Manichean allegory and race politics–more scholarly somedays, I think.) While he might well have recalled them as thus inspired, the broader issues of control that are reported in the prefatory materials remain…chilling.

It’s not the only thing in the present chapter that is so. Aside from the weather depicted, there is a more to indicate the ruthlessness of the Servants and their ilk in dealing with those who resist them. As Dwalia and her company prepare to take Bee through the Skill-pillar, she produced “a single strange glove. [Bee] could not tell what it was made from. The hand of it was pale and thing, almost translucent, but to three of its fingertips a shriveled silvery button had been attached” (521). Another of the injuries inflicted on the Fool is accounted for in the description; in Fool’s Assassin, Chapter 30, Fitz notes when he surveys the Fool’s injuries after stabbing him that the fingers with which he had touched the Skill had been damaged, the magic-tinged tips taken away. It would seem they found another home–a macabre little touch that I do not think I caught in my earlier readings.

It’s a good sign when a book gives you something new upon rereading.

Another note, and on another topic entirely: I’ve remarked many times before about Hobb’s use of emblematic names in the Elderlings novels, something overtly discussed as at work among the higher social strata of the Six Duchies and seemingly present among other social groups in the milieu, as well. With that, I have to reflect on Kerf, whose name Merriam-Webster reports as meaning either “a slit or notch made by a saw or cutting torch” or “a slit or notch made by a saw or cutting torch.” In either event, the name indicates that something is missing because it has been removed, and I have to think, given the character’s self-report of his personal history and what has been done to him both by his native society and by Vindeliar at Dwalia’s command, it is an apt name.

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Another Rumination on Cinco de Mayo

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Two years ago, I wrote a rumination on Cinco de Mayo, the commemoration of the Mexican victory over France at Puebla. I’ve had a chance to look back over the piece, and I stand by the assertions I made in it. I remain pleased to celebrate a portion of my wife’s heritage and my daughter’s, and I acknowledge the fraught history that underlies such of my own (trained, not inborn) heritage as I do so. Too, I will be going to look for tacos for dinner tonight; I do still love me some tacos.

Gotta love the classics…from Giphy, here.

As I write now, though, I have to think things are even more fraught than they were before. The prevailing political rhetoric at work–not only where I am and have been, but also more broadly–is not one that would seem to lend itself to any kind of multiculturalism, even that which was subsumed into something of a gestalt cultural identity decades and more ago. I know I am not the only one who was taught with pride about the six flags to have flown over Texas, and it continues to boggle my mind that groups of people who in so many other ways have not advanced beyond the understandings inculcated into them in fourth grade have moved away from one of them that might actually have some good in it. But then, many things do boggle me.

For my own part, I do what I little I can to learn more about that history, including the unpleasant parts of it that are often elided in the name of “teaching true history,” the parts that proceed not from Great Man narratives traditionally promulgated because they present a whitewashed vision of events such as conduce to the formation of particular opinions. And even if we assume, as many do, that the Great Man narratives presented are reasonably accurate insofar as they go, they are not representative; the records left behind in diaries and journals, in the logs of junior soldiers and on the backs of kitchen cabinet doors, do more to describe how things were for the majority of people, the kind of people among whom I would have been had I been then and not died young from some malady that modern medicine and vaccines easily address (I have never been the kind of medievalist who longs to live in the bygone days I studied, in large part because I have studied them, and I’m not much more fond of many more recent times). It is less easy.

It is less convenient to learn such things than it is to learn others. It does oblige me to look at myself and my background more carefully and closely and to deal with the ways in which those I have succeeded succeeded because others were made to fail. It is also a fuller and more accurate thing, and it does give me some hope that, rather than failing to live up to the examples of the past, I might well be able to move beyond them.

Trite as it is to say, things can’t get better if they stay the same.

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A Short Reflection on #NaPoWriMo

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It is no secret that I made an attempt at National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) last month, putting together a poem in each of the thirty days of April 2025. The first one is here, itself a response to a long-standing thing and one I’ve indulged in in previous years, while the last is here and is much less structured, much less formal, and much less embedded in traditions in which I participate happily. So much noted, I am glad to have made the attempt, even if on my own and in my own small way, and I am glad to have actually seen it through amid the busy time that April is for me, what with tax day and my daughter’s state-mandated high-stakes testing and all.

It’s a computer instead of a typewriter, and I’m both bearded and bespectacled rather than shaggy-headed, but, yeah.
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I think I might well do it again (circumstances permitting, of course), although I think I will approach the task differently if I do so. I feel I tend to do better work if I work within a structure, so I think the next time I do NaPoWriMo, I will do so as a series of a particular kind of poem. Sonnets come to mind for me, of course, since I seem to be able to write them, and there’s a long tradition of sonnets in sequences that I can look to for inspiration and guidance. But they’re not the only form in which I’m conversant, and form is not the only structure that I can use to help direct and focus my efforts.

The thought also occurs that I might use a particular theme to guide my writing. So much has been recommended for compiling chapbooks and the like, if my readings are any accurate reflection of things, I’ll admit, too, that I already do something very much like that; those of you who read much of what I write will notice some series of poems, a few of which even get numbered from time to time. I don’t know that I would use those themes for new projects–it feels a little bit like double-dipping, and I’ve long been trained against such things–but I’ve no doubt that I can look to other themes for inspiration, and it would be good to stretch myself a bit.

There are other events like NaPoWriMo to be found. National Novel Writing Month is one that comes to mind, and I’ve attempted it before, although without success. (I can still help you with your writerly efforts, though, and gladly.) There have, evidently, been some things happen over that way (I’ve been busy and haven’t kept up), so I don’t know that I’d do anything formal with it, but I didn’t do anything really formal with NaPoWriMo, either; the idea’s good, even if the surrounding organization may not be so. And I might try to do something parallel to it in a kind of NaSchoWriMo, insofar as I do any kind of scholarship anymore…hell, the Robin Hobb Rereading Series might get a month of solid focus.

I probably ought to write something for its anniversary, anyway.

So, yes, I am glad to have done NaPoWriMo this year, and I look forward to the opportunity to do it again–as well as to do other, similar projects, as time and circumstances allow. Whether they will, of course, I cannot say; I am familiar with the past but can only guess at the future. But, if they do, I will do–and I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

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