Annotated 20-1
The first twelve pages here were mine, the last twelve were Phil’s, though I was certainly going to lean a lot on his notes about the Heads of Houses in the few pages after this.
Syr’Nj is still short-tempered for several reasons: her emotional recovery from the Battle of B’ial Vezk remains uneven, this little encounter is a lovely reminder of how the human on the street sees wood elves, and Fr’Nj’s damn cheeriness is a little TOO similar to Syr’s own naive optimism way back in Chapter 2. Phil talked me down from making Syr too caustic in panel 5, but I think her irritation is still implied.
Another change Phil made for the better was “in front of the humans,” originally “in front of the commoners.” Although the ‘Nj family has some superficial similarities to a royal dynasty, they don’t have the same class assumptions that we do, which is one reason Syr sees little contradiction between her many roles. She doesn’t think she’s not good enough to do things and she doesn’t think she’s too good to do them, either.
“Although the ‘Nj family has some superficial similarities to a royal dynasty, they don’t have the same class assumptions that we do,”
Reminds me of a line in Fellowship of the Ring I noticed on my last reading:
‘On two chairs beneath the bole of the tree and canopied by a living bough there sat, side by side, Celeborn and Galadriel. They stood up to greet their guests, after the manner of Elves, even those who were accounted mighty kings.’
Random Guy (Michael Palin): “Edna! Edna! There was an elf outside! She was trying to poison me!”
Edna Guy (Terry Jones, knitting): “That’s nice, dear.”
RG: “And then she wanted to eat me!”
EG: “Oh dear, that doesn’t sound very healthy.”
That wasn’t particularly funny, I just needed to get it off my mind. And now for something completely different: