//As somebody who got their last mark/grade on all of their egyptology exams at the University today and finally passed, I want to set my inner history nerd free:
(sources are to be found at the bottom or within the text)
Enkil is supposed to be a predynastic King.
So what is the Predynastic Era to begin with? According to most historians that would be the Neolithic period (a.k.a. New Stone Age!), beginning ca. 6000 BC, with the first human settlements known in the area and ending around 3100 BC, with the first Pharaoh (= Narmer/Menes).
That’s right. Enkil’s reign as a predynastic king could very roughly(!) be placed somewhere in between 6000 BC to 3100 BC. For reference and amusement: the creation of writing is roughly to be sat about 5000 years ago (which marks the beginning of history).
Now, we can’t have the Father of all Vampires be Stone Age man, can we? Let’s try to narrow that time frame down a bit:
I think, since Anne Rice describes some sort of a holding of court, we are pretty safe in ruling the time of the earliest settlements out (little mud brick houses consisting of only one window-less room for a whole family and the earliest form of homo sapiens as subject just don’t make for an epic court to rule over.)
Egyptologists speak of a so called Naqada culture, spanning from ca. 4400 BC to 3000 BC, which can be divided into the following three parts:
Naqada I (4400-3500 BC) -> almost no refined artwork/craftsmanship
Naqada II (3500-3200 BC) -> first metalworking (meteoritical iron)
Naqada III (3200-3000 BC)
We can skip the first two Naqada periods, since there wasn’t really any (known) form of sovereignty comparable to the rule of a king.
Which leads us to Naqada III: Naqada III is also referred to as Dynasty 0 or the Protodynastic Period.
Here is the issue with chronology within the subject of Egyptology: When the early egyptologists tried to name dynasties there were multiple debates and, like every time when too many big egos are involved, things went wrong. To make things short: There is now a time called “Zero Dynasty” (which comes before the 1st dyn.), which might be characterized as Predynastic by some and Early Dynastic by others.
There were kings in Naqada III, but they weren’t part of a dynasty yet (hence Protodynastic or Predynastic). Most of them were most likely not related (a dynasty is the succession of kings of the same blood line), but fighting for dominion with each other. The above mentioned King Narmer (aka Menes) is thought to be the last King of that period and the first Pharaoh of the 1st dynasty(He had been the first known King to unify Egypt).
In conclusion, Enkil’s reign should precede Narmer, but still be set in Naqada III, around 3200-3100 BC.
(We managed to narrow his reign down to 100 years, yay!)
There are, actually, some known Kings from that time that could give us an example for Enkil’s reign, or – which I find very interesting – a possible alias. Stay with me for a bit longer.
9 of them ruled in Lower Egypt, but only one can be placed in Naqada III for sure (forgive me for leaving out the rest): That King is known as “Double Falcon”, after the depiction of his crest (they didn’t use cartouches by then but crests known as serekh and the historians named them after the depicted animals). Some say he might also have ruled in Upper Egypt. 3 kings are known to have ruled Upper Egypt during Naqada III: “Elephant”, “Bull” and “Scorpion I.”
Bull was probably the predecessor of Scorpion I., whose successor is believed to have been Double Falcon and later a king names Iry-Hor (late 32th dynasty.Iry-Hor is the earliest ruler of Egypt known by name and possibly the earliest historical person known by name). No one knows for sure where to place Elephant. All of them are believed to have lived during the early 32th century BC (which allows us to place them near the year 3200 BC to 3150 BC).
Iry-Hor was succeeded by “Ka”/”Sekhen”, who was probably succeeded by “Scorpion II.” or, more probable, by Narmer himself.
Now we have a sorry excuse of a chronology of rulers close to Enkil’s mortal years, ending with Narmer:
Bull
Scorpion I.
Double Falcon
Iry-Hor
Ka (Sekhen)
Scorpion II. or Narmer (Menes)
As you can see, there is a line of succession, albeit not one you should bet on, since egyptologists are still not 100% sure about the line of succession. BUT: Where to place Elephant?
Enkil was the Pharaoh, whose throne-name was Pen-abu (“Great one from the (throne) seat”) how fitting. Historians how call him “Elephant” and he was the predecessor of “Bull”, one of the earliest rulers of Naqada III period, in the early 32. dynasty.
//HAHAHA. Listen, I can’t write impartially about Titanic. I was in high school. I think I went and saw it four times. I legit can never watch it again.
True, I also was in high school and I remember distinctly the effect it had on ppl at the time… ppl bragging about seeing it multiple times in the theatre when it’s a 3 hr long movie.
However… Lestat probably saw it at home w/ Louis, who was quietly tearing up, Lestat angrily elbowing him during *that scene*…
Lestat: “Look at this little b*tch, do you see this? She just said she’d never let go-”
Louis: “I’m watching it.”
Lestat: “-Says that again and again and then- what does she do?” *beginning to tear up, too*
Louis: “She let’s g-”
Lestat: “She f*cking… PRIES HIS FROZEN FINGERS OFF THE BOARD- or door or whatever it is…” *tears rolling down, as he smears them off*
Louis: –
Lestat: “SHE MORE THAN LETS HIM GO! SHE PUSHES HIM OFF!”
Louis: –
Lestat: “See any similarities there?”
Louis: –
Lestat: “Anything familiar about that at all to you? Anything at all?”
I get why you might be frustrated, I’m not sure how much VC you’ve read, I hope this answer doesn’t spoil you if you don’t want to be spoiled but here we go…
Lestat was born in 1760. Not sure where you got 1780… I believe you are forgetting the almost 10 yrs Lestat and Gabrielle ~wandered the Devil’s Road~ together, which was from 1780-89. There’s a timeline in the official Vampire Companion (there is some debate about discrepancies of this book to canon, but this book was intended to be the author’s deciding word on canon facts):
Here’s a snippet of the time line, sorry for the warping, but it’s a thick paperback book and I didn’t wanna injure the binding!
Worth noting also: AR underscores that Lestat was 20 when he was turned.*
So by 1791, Lestat is actually like 31 mortal years old, and Louis is in fact younger than he is, at 25 (why they made him 24 in the movie is beyond me bc it’s only a year different? IDK).
*Re: Lestat being turned at 20 or 21, that’s a topic that’s been debated for aaaaages, too, since he says in his book, “In the winter of my twenty-first year, I went out alone on horseback to kill a pack of wolves” and more confusingly, in the timeline above, AR indicates that Lestat is 19 when he goes to Paris w/ Nicolas so I am confusion, but taking Lestat’s line from TVL alone, that it’s his “twenty-first year”:
a baby’s “first year” is actually the day it’s born through it’s one-year birthday;
therefore, Lestat’s “twenty-first year” could be his year from his twentieth-year birthday through his twenty-first year birthday.
(Not that his birthday was celebrated in his house anyway, so it’s really just about whether he gets carded at bars, currently, and he totally does.)
I headcanon that:
Lestat kills the wolves in the winter, sometime after his twentieth birthday, 11/7/1779,
and then goes to Paris w/ Nicki that spring (5/1/1780 maybe).
Lestat and Nicki are working at the theatre for only a few months and then Lestat gets his big break in August: “It came in late August at last.”
Lestat only gets to perform for a few months, at least through October (”But in the month of October when Paris was already freezing,…”).
and then Magnus turns Lestat sometime close to, or before, his actual twenty-first birthday 11/7/1780. Maybe in October or that first week of November.
Hmmm… I can see why you might suggest this person, there’s definitely an otherworldly presence there, subtly androgynous features.
(I’m not going to add here that
Shatilov “has the perf hair zomg!” bc there’s debate about Louis’ hair, and I enjoy both options separately, the fanon: long and silky like Shatilov here; and the more canon: short and wavy/full like Ezra Miller. There are even more variations of headcanons about his hair than these two but I think they’re the two main options.)
And Louis is supposed to be slender…
^Idk, for my headcanon, Louis is slender but muscled, too. He’s a fighter! He was living a pretty unhealthy lifestyle, and ppl tried to bleed out his mortal madness twice (or more times), he’d need to be a somewhat sturdy to withstand all that. Anyway, Shatilov
Hello hello~~~ This post got very long! It’s a big question!
I guess I haven’t talked about Lestat’s singing voice bc I can’t find it, but YES, #headcanon accepted, Lestat would have a kick ass falsetto voice!
I just drafted this post and it’s too long, so much more can be written and more vids could have been featured, but I’ve spen
The short answer: As with Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is music in the ear of the beholder, and your idea of Lestat’s voice is as valid as anyone else’s. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I’m gonna offer a few responses on this, from AR, from canon, from a mutual VC fan friend of mine, and then respond to your suggestions. I had to make a cut bc the post was getting long.
SO, AR has said, on several occasions, that Bon Jovi was a big influence on Prince Lestat. She even dedicated Prince Lestat to Bon Jovi (as one of her muses). [X]
I also seem to recall Lestat mentioning a love for Bruce Springsteen in canon, but that might have been fanon. In QOTD, Baby Jenks says Lestat sings like the Boss:
Baby Jenks did love the Vampire Lestat’s music,… Yes sir, that was the one she loved… It wasn’t the words that got to her, it was the way he sang it, groaning like Bruce Springsteen into the mike and making it just break your heart.
I’m on Fire, the lyrics and the way he sings it, seem very Lestatuesque to me. Try Dancing in the Dark, also very Lestatuesque to me…
What do you think Lestat’s band would sound like now?
Well, it always sounded to me like Jim Morrison. That was the band I based it on — Jim Morrison’s voice, physical beauty, and the sound of that band in a song like “L.A. Woman.” That’s how I imagined Lestat’s band sounding. I don’t know a lot about rock music right at this moment; I haven’t listened to a stadium band in a while. I don’t know the latest stuff. I really don’t know. The main thing in emphasizing Morrison is that I’m emphasizing hard rock. It’s really acid rock. It’s not lightweight rock music and there has to be a good voice at the helm. Morrison had an exceptionally good voice for a rock singer. But modernizing it? Sure, whatever. Bring it on.
AR also sort of answered this in response to her Fan Questions for Lestat series on FB, I’ll post the whole response momentarily, but here’s a relevant snippet:
“Of course I am enchanted by popular music of all kinds — Jim Morrison, Tina Turner, Bon Jovi, Joan Jett. I find myself highly susceptible to the most emotional and intense music.”[X, 10/12/15]
@liquorandptsdvarietyshow, VC fandom friend of mine, had commented on a post re: Bon Jovi:
1) Lestat has pretty schlocky taste in music, all things considered. Yes he is a musician and a rock star but basically he likes anything you can dance to;
2) Bon Jovi are tbh pretty cool. I’m not saying rush out and buy all their albums, but Slippery When Wet is a good time with a gross title.
Personally, I’ve always felt Brett Scallions of FUEL would have done well as Lestat, and Last Time feels very Lestat/Akasha to me.
ANYWAY. Anon’s suggestions!:
I personally always thought of him as having an almost Bowie sounding voice
*nods* I think that’s possible, but subtract the British accent. I bet Lestat could emulate it easily, though.
but with the energy and range of Brendon Urie from Panic at the disco. Idk if you’ve heard the song Emperor’s New Clothes by Panic!
I’m not a Panic! fan, I’m still stuck in my love for 80′s + 90′s music, but listening to this song now, first of all, yeah, I hear some Bowie in Urie! And there’s a lot of charm and silliness, but it’s all grounded in real feeling, IDK, you may be starting to turn me into a Panic! fan, Anon!
^I also really like the sass in the lead singer, and the lyrics are pretty Lestatuesque!
Ave Cesaria by Stromae – Well, it is a nice song, but something about the singer’s voice seems smoother and older to me? Not really snazzy and cheesy enough? Like this is how David might sing if David was a singer. Nice example for French music, tho!
Yes, I did get your ask, but I have decided not to answer it. I still haven’t finished PLROA bc of reasons, but bc I still don’t entirely accept PL as canon, I will just post to the fandom to answer, momentarily.
Re: Whether our gang of vampires are a formal coven, and what that means, and how welcoming they are of eachother and how welcoming they are towards the as-yet unknown vampires? There is alot of welcoming in PL and PLROA towards new and unknown vampires. They all seem to want to be together. What do we really know of the covens of old? The Children of Darkness were a coven, with branches in different locations, that all served (probably) a Dark Pope of some kind. Or maybe it was a democracy? We don’t really know. We know that they had laws, rites, and a sense of purpose. They had common goals.
What is a coven?: With people, there is wide variation in what constitutes the structure of witch covens. Vampires are not people. I don’t know that I would call the Children of Darkness a “cult” even, I feel like it was more like the wolf packs that occur in the wild. More organized because the vampires had communication, written texts, and more goals than simply survival, but I would think there would have to be a major amount of inhuman element(s) to it all.
Just discussing the dividing up of vampires into covens is a delicate issue bc it deals with the exclusivity of vampires being already set apart from society as a whole,and then this whole push in the recent books to gather them up into a *~Tribe~* so that they no longer have to be wandering lost souls and/or forming their own small covens. It’s 2017, and according to canon, they’ve gathered, they’ve chosen a LEADER. They have the beginnings of a community to share their knowledge/gifts/news, they have the beginnings of a justice system, for the airing of grievances. They have court performances for entertainment! It feels like we have the United Vampires of the World ™ or something.
*~Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.~*
[^This gif is from the ‘91 movie ‘Hook’** in which we have a tribe of Lost Boys (it’s no mere coincidence that there’s also a vampire movie called ‘the Lost Boys,’) with a leader they elect, who reluctantly takes on that role. It’s kinda like Lestat accepting leadership of the vampires of the world even though, yes, the power and camaraderie is nice, does he really want to sacrifice so much of his own nightly freedom for it? ‘Hook’’s Peter Pan doesn’t want to stay in Neverland despite all the benefits, so he delegates leadership before he goes back to Real Life.]
So, the Tribe concept, well, it’s clear to me that it’s something many fans really enjoy, and I enjoy it as AU fanfic. Even if noone else enjoyed it but AR herself, it falls under #Live and Let Live ^______^ IDK what the breakdown is within the Tribe itself, but from my reading, it feels nebulous and amorphous, most of the vampires (those in good standing in the Tribe) are basically invited to come and go as they please from one coven house to another all over the world.
TL;DR: So many VC relationships, both platonic and romantic, are up to the individual reader’s interpretation, and how much the individual reader projects their own imagination onto it, that’s where groupings of any kind are formed.
**More comparisons between VC and Peter Pan could be made, especially w/ this adaptation, but that’s for another blogger and/or another time.
Yeah, I can see why you might imagine Mojo that way! I imagined him as more of a Siberian husky, myself, when I first read the books, bc a neighbor of mine had a black & white husky… the floof and the smile seemed to be a perfect fit for Mojo to me! This one here is a Siberian husky [X]:
From TOBT:
[Mojo] was covered in deep, plush fur, beautifully golden and gray in places, and overlaid
with a faint saddle of longer black hairs. His overall shape was that of a wolf, but he
was far too big to be a wolf, and there was nothing furtive and sly about him, as is the
case with wolves. On the contrary, he was wholly majestic in the way that he sat
staring motionless at the door.
Even though it’s right there that he’s more of a German shepherd mix:
On closer inspection, I saw that he most truly resembled a giant German shepherd,
with the characteristic black muzzle and alert face.
German shepherd w/ the black saddle pattern on the back and muzzle [X]:
I can’t find it now (does anyone have it?) but I know I saw a pic of the REAL Mojo w/ Anne Rice, she confirmed that he was a long-haired German shepherd [X]:
I-want-my-IWTV 