Fanfiction: Jackdaw (Princess Tutu)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Drabble: Jackdaw
Fandom: Princess Tutu (anime version)
Character: Autor
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Word Count: 100
Warnings: None.
A/N: Yet another Princess Tutu drabble: I wasn't expecting Autor to jog my elbow, but he did, at once entrancing and horrifying me with visions of old books recycled to bind new ones. I think him a jackdaw; he considers himself a scholar. We compromised on slightly demented antiquarian. Crossposted from nebroadwe to princesstutu and tutufic.
Dedication: Still for fmanalyst.

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      He haunts Goldkrone's secondhand shops, almost a byword for oddball acquisitiveness. The merchants of Nikolausstrasse call him (not quite behind his back) Herr Dohle, but as long as they take his money, he ignores their jibes. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Who tells gold from lead by weight alone?

      Books he buys to disbind, teasing manuscript fragments from backstrips and linings, searching for overlooked words. But those teacups, that inkwell: them he touches sparingly, lovingly, for history fills them as full as he expects to brim with power, once his knowledge is complete.

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Author's Note: Dohle is the German word for jackdaw, a member of the crow family proverbial for snapping up unconsidered trifles; Sankt Nikolaus (Saint Nicholas) is the patron of pawnbrokers as well as of children. The saying about the one-eyed man's advantage among the blind is usually attributed to the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus. And it was long customary for bookbinders to use scraps of old manuscripts in the bindings of new books; some fragmentary pieces of medieval literature have been recovered by dissecting later tomes, to the subdued joy of my colleagues in paleography.

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[Disclaimers: Princess Tutu was created by Ikuko Ito and Junichi Sato. Copyright for this property is held by HAL and GANSIS/TUTU. All rights reserved.]

Comments

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

A lovely drabble, but you know what really caught the eye of the writing teacher? The reference to paleography. I'd never known the term, but I have had a story in the back of my mind -- rather Saiyukiesque -- with a linguistic historian in the Sanzo role.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

A lovely drabble, but you know what really caught the eye of the writing teacher? The reference to paleography.

[grin] We academics always gravitate to the footnotes.

I'd never known the term ...

Paleography's more a premodern and early modern concern -- once type hits, you're in a different world (she says, sighing over her nth reading of McKerrow on bookmaking). My current job requires me to squint at handwriting only for the purpose of determining provenance (e.g. from autographs and inscriptions), but it's a bit of a pain because my training (such as it is) is in medieval hands and everything I'm looking at is Renaissance or later. Maybe over the summer I'll see if I can find the later-period equivalents to Michelle Brown's Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600.

... , but I have had a story in the back of my mind -- rather Saiyukiesque -- with a linguistic historian in the Sanzo role.

If you ever write it, I'll read it. [looks hopeful]