Elena, daughter of Lena

[Hearthcoal]

Robo kicked off a great discussion about Elena and her relationship with TC.

Personally, I think that this is one of the most curious relationships I have read about. What could be more bizarre than to meet your own daughter and find her older than you are?


Click here for the archive: Elena, daughter of Lena

[Bannor]

Certainly a troubling relationship. Hers: wanting Covenant even though she knew she was his daughter. Covenant was right to abhor the relationship she wanted. I wonder if everyone was that liberal in the Land. Then there was her obsession with killing Lord Foul at any cost.

[amanibhavam]

I guess it's not that easy; if you grow up not knowing your real father, only from legends, tales and dew-eyed stories of your half-crazy mother, and then boom! you meet your father who turns out to be at the same age as you...

[Guest]

a long time ago ( ie egypt etc..) it was normal and sometimes profitable to wed /bed a familly member , to comsolidate wealth , frued argues the oedipus complex .....

was TC and Elena just doing what would be noraml in a world lacking taboo???

or was donaldson re-establishing the anti-hero quality of TC????
so many questions...

[arwenavery]

that anonymous was me again

[Bannor]

Certainly different cultures and different times are reflected here. I know of royalty doing such to preserve a clean bloodline. The idea is just abhorrent to me (and certainly to Covenant).

[Skyweir]

well TC wasnt entirely dissinterested in Elena as a lover .. He wanted her but his internal taboo wouldnt allow him to have her,

which .. actually .. makes that passage of time more easily digested to me too.

Totally that was a weird thing in the book .. and good on SRD for introducing it .. I love the way he introduces ethical dilemas even those that make us squirm a little .. in this way he does more than tell a story he challenges the world view of the reader .. this is one of the things I enjoy most about his books .. The Gap is very similar imo ..

[robo]

These taboos did not just pop up out of nowhere. They exist for the prime reason that children born from close relations just don't work out. It's a physical aspect of human beings - the moral derives from the physical. At least, that's what I've heard.

[Bannor]

In today's world, children from related parents certainly face physical and mental problems, but in the "old days" when the blood line was kept pure, it was not as common. Certainly the taboo is in there for a good reason (as Robo so aptly stated). It is an intriguing aspect of SD's book, and he certainly isn't afraid to branch out into those ideas that make us squeamish, and (as Skweir stated) SD challenges us. (Or as Khan in Star Trek 2 said, "He tasks me. He tasks me.")

[Hearthcoal]

A sexual relationship between closely related humans. Now there's a hot topic.

I have been trying to think about it objectively for a while and have come to several conclusions.

Strictly speaking, we are all related to one another. Start going back far enough and eventually you begin to find common ancestors.

Historically, sex between parent and off-spring or between siblings is just a fact. It happened. Who else did our earliest ancestors have to "marry"?

Incest was not proscribed in the Bible until the Mosaic/Levitcal law (c. 1400 BC), approximately 1,000 years after the time of Abraham, who was married, by the way, to his half-sister, Sarah. Their son, Isaac, married his second cousin, Rebekah (the granddaughter of Abraham's brother), and their son, Jacob, married his first cousins, Leah and Rachel (the daughters of Rebekah's brother).

The mental and physical defects that are seen in the children born from the union of close relatives are more directly the results of the narrowing of the gene pool, rather than incest per se. The same processes that eventually brought about the "races" have served to narrow the gene pool within our family blood lines. (In other words, in most cases even "perfect strangers" are darn closely related.)

While I won't disagree that the taboo against incest may have sprung from negative physical results, not all taboos can be justified on that basis (e.g., taboos against miscegenation. There is no evidence that the off-spring of an inter-racial union is physically inferior.)

I believe that our aversion to incest is tied more closely to our own cultural understanding of a parent/off-spring relationship, than it is to the possible physical consequences in children born of such a union. (Mere physical consquences have not been enough to stop the spread of AIDS and STD's, both of which afflict parent and child alike.)

For thousands of years, children were chattel, the property of a father to dispose of as he saw fit. A virgin daughter was a valuable commodity. It is entirely possible that prohibitions against incest grew out of the self-interest of fathers who wanted to make the most profitable arrangements when it came time to make alliances for their daughters.

How many of you who are parents see your children, particularly your daughters, as property that, at the proper time, could be traded for cattle, land or money? But that is still the common practice in many cultures today.

Clearly, the modern, Western-European, notions of parent/child relationships that most of us on this board share are significantly different in many ways, not only from those of our past, but also from those of other cultures.

We recoil at the thought of sex between a father and a daughter, primarily because it is an age old taboo in our culture, and secondarily because it echoes pedophilia and child molestation (a daughter, however grown up will always be someone's "little girl").

TC was no less a product of his culture than you and I are.

But Elena was not. And SRD does not detail culture of the Land to the extent that we can be certain of its taboos. We have no reason to believe that the Land was afflicted with the genetic limitations that we experience in our world. Given the power resident in the Land, a child born to Elena by TC would probably have been an extraordinary kid (TC-squared or something).

With all of the taboos surrounding leprosy and all of the guilt over Lena's rape, not to mention residual feelings of inadequacy as the absent father of Roger, I guess in the end TC just couldn't add one more thing to his overloaded conscience.

[danlo]

Hearthcoal: u've done a very eloquent and succinct job of summing up the situation, especially w/ur last sentence! I remember attending a play back in '74 (yes the ice age kiddies) called The Hollow Crown w/Sir Michael Redgrave (yes dad of Lynn and Vanessa) it was about all the British rulers throughout the ages that had been the product of incest--It was very interesting, tho quite depressing: hemophilia, genetic defects, mental retardation--insanity--and the sanest ones were Richard II and William the Longshanks: now that's scary! Of course it didn't mention the babies killed off or the monsters locked away in dark places...4 that topic read The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. btw: Sir Mike did a great job of acting, despite his Parkinson's (a disease, or condition that should not be associated in anyway 2 the nature of this post)

[Guest]

And very good points, Hearthcoal. I too was going to point out that perhaps the natural Earthpower of the Land prevented the kind of physical defects that can be brought about through "inbreeding", and thus there were never any reasons for the people of the Land to develop an aversion to these kinds of relationships.

In The Illearth War, when Covenant tries to put Elena off ("Hellfire! I'm your father, Elena!" is the line, I think), she tells TC that Triock is the father of her heart. Was she trying to help TC overcome his own taboos, or was she demonstrating that there was a taboo in the Land for father-daughter relationships, if the father had actually raised the daughter?

Personally, I think that there was probably a taboo, but that Elena felt unaffected by it. She's a strange character; to me, she seems to lack the humanity that most of the inhabitants of the Land have. Perhaps her encounters with the Ranyhyn have left her devoid of many human concerns?

[Vexis Larseker]

Sorry, that last post was mine. Stupid proxy server...

[Bannor]

Very well written (all of you). Wish I could have written something that cohesive. I will keep the taboo in the highest priority, but a good point has been raised about the Land and its pure qualities. Again, very well written.

[KaosArcana]

... was nuts.

Aside from the whole wanting to know her father in a biblical sense,
she was just ... off. Like Triock said, she wasn't right from birth.

I never found Elena to be an attractive character ... physically, I
suppose she was attractive, but I never sensed the charisma that
she was supposed to have.

If I'd been Covenant, I'd have been scared of her too.

[Hearthcoal]

Life Imitates Art

Some of the headlines recently have been relevant to this discussion, so I'm posting a link to one of the articles.

Being more than kissing cousins OK
Fears of passing defects to offspring overblown, research finds.

If genetics interests you or if you're like me and just plain curious about everything, here are a couple more related sites:

international communication forum in human molecular genetics

(What the heck is Archangel Syndrome and is it related to Messiah Complex?)

The Genetic Education Center Web Site at the University of Kansas Medical Center contains clinical, research, and educational resources.

[Nerdanel]

I think it's pretty clear that Donaldson intended that Sunder's son's hemophilia was result from the inbreededness of the villages and particularly from the fact that Sunder had married his cousin. However keeping in mind that hemophilia is a disease that resides in the x-chromosome the sons of Sunder's cousing would have had the same risk whomever she had married.

A woman has two x-chromosomes and a man an x-chromosome and a y-chromosome. That means a man cannot be a carrier of hemophilia: he either has the disease in his only x or not. Sunder's cousin was a carrier and each of her children had a 50% chance of inheriting from her the defective x. If the child is a boy it means that he got an y from his father and so the father's possible hemophilia doesn't even factor in this case because only x's matter in hemophilia. Even if the child had been a girl it wouldn't have mattered that Sunder was a cousin because he was healthy and couldn't possibly have been a carrier.

Or perhaps Donalson knew all of this and chose hemophilia for Sunder's son's disease so that Sunder would get to blame himself for something that was in no way his fault.

[Skyweir]

Very interesting .. 1. whether the earth power in the Land prevents defects and disease .. TC was told that the inhabitants of the Land knew no illness/disease .. and I remember when TC had that vision of himself given leperosy to the inhabitants of the Land .. and his son Roger etcc...

.. but even though earth power still prevailed .. from birth there seemed something wrong with Elena .. it may well have been her experience with the raynhin that affected her .. or just the environment that she was raised in ... dominated by her mother Lena's psychotic/nuerotic obsessivion with TC .. who knows? also maybe being the offspring of an off-worlder (TC) and a stonedowner (Lena)?? ..

.. and as someone raised .. Sunder's son suffered from haemophillia .. though he was born in the era when the sunbane was present and the earth power had been corrupted and may no longer have served to protect its inhabitants from these kinds of illness

.. actually apart from the genetic propensity of closely related individuals .. and the whole "inbreediness" of the villages .. to have offspring with defects/ in particular haemophillia .. This choice of illness was profound imo .. I found it interesting that haemophillia is a blood disease .. and seemed to fit in well with the whole bloody concept of the sunbane and the peoples blood letting into the earth to aid there crops etc.. the whole ewwy bloody thing ..

very clever I thought .. albeit grossly disturbing ..

[Hiltmark Quaan]

It may be important to remember there is a moral progression through the first Chronicles. In LFB, TC commits rape on an unwilling victim (he is guilty, his victim innocent), in TIW TC is offered incest but declines (but is tempted - both he and Elena are in a moral middle ground here), and in the final book (TPTP) he commits an "anti-rape" - he draws the poison delivered by the timber rattler (how's that for a phallic symbol?) from the leg of an innocent little girl. This progression is seen thoughout the novels - in the first he is actively hostile toward belief in the Land, the second ambivalent, and the third actively seeking to save it in spite of (dare I say "despite?") his unbelief. Judge Elena by her context - she is very useful symbolically to show the change in TC...

[amanibhavam]

that is a very good point