#Owen glendower

[a-lilguy]

“As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.” - Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

[squash1]

gansey giggling and kicking his feet while drawing a pink heart around “glendower + gansey” in his diary

[boatshoesdude]

It has happened multiple time now where someone brings up Owain Glyndwr for some reason or another and I have to sit there like

“haha yes I like this thing for NORMAL reasons because I’m a history nerd and I like it a NORMAL amount”

instead of screaming and yelling out random facts all because of a silly little book

[withasideofshakespeare]

I’m glad William Shakespeare/Anonymous Collaborator let Joan summon some goddamn demons. Y’know how disappointed I was when I realized Glendower wasn’t gonna get to shoot his shot with dark magic in 1 Henry IV?

[ltwilliammowett]

HMS Owen Glendower at anchor, drying sails and hammocks, and a Danish pilot boat, 1822, by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)

[realgansey]

Hello sharks I am offering you friendship and magic and love and freedom in exchange for your assistance on my quest to find ancient and probably dead Welsh king Owen Glendower

[plutoslvr]

and if you kick every homosexual person out of this country then WHO is going to search for you, owen glendower

[03josten]

sorry i anglicised your boyfriend. yeah england got a hold of him and couldn't figure him out so i changed him. he's been stripped of his real meaning and native history. yeah you're gonna have to work your ass off to have him recognised in his own name and one day a YA author is going to write an entire fantasy series centered on his legacy and she's going to call him owen glendower. sucks

[poorlittleyaoyao]

If you have other thoughts about other mdzs's charac (or again jgy!) in other role, I would love to read them!

Thank you for your patience, anon! I meant to answer this yesterday along with the one about JGY and Edmund. Each of these involves characters from the Henriad--Richard II, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V.

-Hotspur, my beloved and cherished son who appears briefly in Richard II and is the antagonist (in the "opposes the protagonist" sense, not the "is a villain" sense) of 1 Henry IV, is the midpoint between Jiang Cheng and Nie Mingjue. Hotspur is essentially a child soldier; his descriptors suggest that he's a young teen when he joins his father in deposing Richard II in favor of Richard's cousin Henry IV. When we see him as a young adult in 1 Henry IV, he's fully immersed in warfare as a way of life, and while he's won great renown, he's... not really doing so great. Some of his lines are alarmingly visceral (ex: "they come like sacrifices in their trim/ and to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war/ all hot and bleeding we will offer them."), and his wife's concerned speech describing his behavior in II.3 reads like a checklist of PTSD symptoms. Hotspur also wholeheartedly believes in his personal code of honor and is clinically incapable of guile in a way that comes off to me as almost childlike. If a cause is just, then it will prevail no matter the odds (spoiler: it does not)! He loves his family and trusts that they have his and the kingdom's best interests in mind (spoiler: they do not)! Basically every line Hotspur speaks in Acts IV and V of the play could be given to Mingjue and you'd only need to replace all the proper nouns.

(Hotspur is also canonically SUCH a horse girl and so is Mingjue in my heart.)

Meanwhile, on the Jiang Cheng side of things, Hotspur also wants SO badly to do a good job. He is so so SO determined to fulfill his roles as a knight and as a son to their fullest extent, and has nothing but contempt for Hal because Hal, despite being heir to the throne, does jack shit and spends all his time drinking and pickpocketing for funsies. For all his impetuousness and general lack of an inside voice (which is NOT a Jiang Cheng problem), he shows flashes of being a strong leader--particularly in his speech outlining his grievances against Henry IV in IV.3. Personality-wise, Hotspur is filled with BIG FEELINGS and most of them manifest as cantankerousness. He is prickly and argumentative by default, which makes him lowkey one of the funniest characters in the play (see: his soliloquy arguing with a letter at the top of II.3, his entire exchange with Owen Glendower in III.1), and also make his moments of genuine vulnerability hit hard (ex: "come, wilt thou see me ride?" in II.3 and his death speech in V.4).

-On the flip side, Huaisang reminds me of Prince Hal. Remember how I said Hal doesn't do jack shit? Hal's flop era is deliberate. He knows he can't run from his responsibilities forever, so he's slacking off to lower people's expectations for him. The first soliloquy we get from him in I.2 is an EXTREME Huaisang mood and I'll try to trim it to the most relevant bits:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at... I'll so offend, to make offence a skill; Redeeming time when men think least I will.

His flop era does NOT endear him to his father, who wishes he were an accomplished warrior like Hotspur, and their relationship is rocky. When Hal becomes king upon Henry IV's death, Hal decides to jettison his past friendships, quash the joyful aspects of his identity, and go do war crimes in France. I describe Hal's actions in the play Henry V as "Hal doing his best Hotspur impression," except that whereas Hotspur honest-to-god believed he was fighting for justice, Hal is more calculating. Sure, he gives us the "once more unto the breach, dear friends" and "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers" speeches, but he also cheerfully threatens mass slaughter in response to an insult in I.2 (and ratchets up the threats in gruesome detail III.3).

-Huaisang is also Hamlet, of course, but I don't personally subscribe to the "Huaisang was always sooooo scared of JGY" interpretation of the timeskip. Fear makes you act with urgency, as Hamlet very much does post-Mousetrap and post-return to Denmark. Readers give Hamlet a lot of shit for dithering on killing Claudius, but he does get the job done in just a couple months (much of which he spends offstage with pirates) because all he wants is Claudius to be dead. Huaisang takes his sweet time because he wants JGY utterly destroyed, which is more a Hal vibe.

-Lan Xichen is NOT Richard II at all. I'm not even going to explain why he's not because he's not. However, Richard's big soliloquy when he's imprisoned alone in the penultimate scene of the play is VERY MUCH Lan Xichen in conclusion. It's long--66 lines!--but I will excerpt the relevant portion.

Music do I hear? Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is, When time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives. And here have I the daintiness of ear To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string; But for the concord of my state and time Had not an ear to hear my true time broke. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.... This music mads me; let it sound no more! For though it have holp madmen to their wits, In me it seems it will make wise men mad. Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me! For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.

I JUST!!!!

[jamesscarstairs]

i know maggie stiefvater uses the anglicised version of glyndŵr as an attempt to, i suppose, appease an international audience but god does it hurt. gansey the literal welsh history nut allowing them to call him “owen glendower”????? loser

[pretty--in--purple]

now listen, i love trc as much as anyone else but calling owain glyndwr, last welsh prince of wales, "Owen Glendower, Welsh King" is beyond the gd pale

[une-sanz-pluis]

Historians who have attempted to explain the Percies’ motives in this rebellion have stressed several reasons for their hostility to Henry IV - delays in the payment of March revenues, jealousy of the growing power of the house of Neville, Henry IV’s refusal to allow them to ransom the Scottish prisoners captured at Humbledon Hill and their kinsman Sir Edmund Mortimer who was the prisoner of Owen Glendower. The fact that the Percies were the wholehearted supporters of Henry IV in 1399 and gained considerably from his accession makes it essential that we re-examine the motives which lay behind their rebellion in 1403. Each of the grievances we have mentioned deserves careful attention, but none of them can in itself be regarded as a cause of the breach between Henry IV and the Percies: rather, they form a history of deteriorating personal relationships which was one of several factors in deciding the Percies to rebel

J. M. W. Bean, "Henry IV and the Percies", History, Vol. 44, No. 152 (1959)

[skeleton-richard]

Oh my God Arissa is not only the bastard daughter of Henry IV, she's Owen Glendower's cousin! Could she get any more Mary Sue?

[cypresstheworld]

watching this docuseries on netflix about the histories of british castles and im on an episode about cardiff castle in wales and they namedropped owen glendower and the gansey in my head flinched

[kevieren]

Have you ever wanted to read a my-immortal style crossover fanfic of the raven boys and the foxhole court?

No? do it anyway (it's fantastic)

The Exy Cycle (4417 words) by mycolddisaster Chapters: 9/? Fandom: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater, Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo, All For The Game - Nora Sakavic, (My) Immortal: The Web Series, My Chemical Romance, Mafia - Fandom, One Direction (Band) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences "Ronan Lynch, troubled asshole, ends up going to palmnetto state and playing exy. Meanwhile, the Moriyamas, struggling with a power vacuum, use the REAL Owen Glendower (not the fake one that gansey and co found) to resurrect the man that started the crime empire thousands of years ago: Kaz Brekker. NO FLAMES!!!!!!!!!!!!"

[peaamlipoetrydoctor]

A Nannau Second Regret

They will say that the spark was the arrow

I let fly fair and straight at a sparrow

but which hit distant cousin, Glendow- OW!

A murder attempt? The first second

a slight opportunity beckoned?

He’d suspected…

My plan was a wreck – owned ☹

Now I live in this haunted old oak,

just a myth and a punchline – a joke!

And my mansion’s just rubble and smoke…

========================================

Our optional prompt for Day 20 challenges you to write a poem that recounts a historical event. I'm late with the poem because I've been hiking in southern Snowdonia for the weekend and frankly all that fresh air took it out of me.

But I did cross the Nannau estate on the first day and heard the story of Hywel Sele's attempt to assassinate Owen Glendwr, which failed, ending in Sele being killed instead and the family mansion being torched. Somehow the estate survived but the house has been rebuilt 5 times, most recently in the 1790s (pictured) and is now on the brink of falling down again... Unlucky, much?