Question about a name
How does Fitz get his name? I listen to it on audio book so I can't easily find the part in Assassin's Apprentice I just finished Assassin's Quest.
Posted Aug 22, 2017, 10:02 PM UTC
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"fitz, my boy!" </3
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My required post in threads like this. . .
I miss Chivalry. I really really wanted to know him more.
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It's very odd in retrospect how we (the readers) know NOTHING about Chivalry. Only the barest scraps from people who knew him.
I suppose that mirrors how in the dark Fitz was. All the major people around him had met Chivalry, but he never did. Likewise we, as readers, never met him. He's never quite real.
And it always seemed rather unfair to me that Chivalry apparently used to look in on Fitz using the Skill, so got to know Fitz, but Fitz never got the same back. Fitz actually knew Verity much better than Chivalry.
I wonder if Fitz actually shut his awareness of Chivalry out, much like he shut his awareness of his mother out...
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And it always seemed rather unfair to me that Chivalry apparently used to look in on Fitz using the Skill, so got to know Fitz, but Fitz never got the same back.
My heart nearly broke when I read that in the books, when it all came to out to him about that. I remember thinking of how callous Chiv seemed, that FitzChivalry was an embarrassment and he went away to hide and abandon him. Then that hammer drops, and we see that he hid to protect Fitz, and to protect Lady Patience from mockery and her own feelings.
I loved him from that moment on. In a weird way, Chivalry is my favorite character in the first trilogy. Maybe out of all of them. I dunno, though. Anyway. Yea. I love Chivalry.
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Burrich calls him "fitz" first--note the lack of capital (which you ofc wouldn't have noticed if you listen to them). It's because "fitz" is an oldtimey word for "bastard". He's Chivalry's bastard, after all.
Later on someone (I think lady Patience) says "well, Burrich did always call things by their names".
So yeah, Fitz is called Fitz because he is a fitz.
True, but Verity also tells him later, after using him as a Kings Man in the tower, that he wrote his name down as FitzChivalry Farseer on the day he took him in. I don't know if Burrich knew that or not, I think not.
I would guess that most people with Fitz in their name wouldn't go by just that so him going by Fitz is thanks to Burrich but his name actually being Fitz is because of Verity and the naming custom for bastards.
Ahh I didn't know it meant bastard. I knew Burrich was the one who first called him that but you are totally right the lack of seeing capilization I didn't catch that. It is all making so much more sense. Haha Thanks!
No problem! It was also weird to me te first time reading it, until Patience made that remark about how Burrich calls things what they are, as to why Burrich calls him "fitz". But maybe you haven't come to that point yet in the books. That's definitely a posibility.
Fitz means "son of", you don't have to be illegitimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz
Granted the page does mention "From the Stuart era (1603–1714) and later, a pseudo-Anglo-Norman usage of Fitz was adopted for younger sons of the British royal family who lacked a legal surname, and particularly for illegitimate children of kings, princes, or general upper class men"
Fitz
Fitz (pronounced "fits") is a prefix in patronymic surnames of Norman origin, that is to say originating in the 11th century. The word is a Norman French noun meaning "son of", from Latin filius (son), plus genitive case of the father's forename. Whilst Fitz is now the standard form used by modern historians the word appears in ancient documents with various spellings such as fiz, filz, etc. The word has developed in modern French to fils de, with which it is thus cognate.
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Yeah, though I think it's most known from the Fitzroys, the bastards of kings, so most associate fitz with bastard status.
Huh, I didn't know that. I guess that in Fitz's time, it would've just meant "son of", but it is implied in the story itself that Burrich calls him "fitz" specifically because he is a bastard. I think it's Lady Patience who said that, but I can't for the life of me remember in which book.
So maybe Hobb didn't know either, or she made a conscious decision to use the 17th century meaning instead.
It's because "Fitz" is just a prefix. His real, full name would have been FitzChivalry. But being called just "Fitz", is a crude way of denoting that he was a son of no-one, because it didn't reference his parent.
Burrich didn't know that Fitz's name was FitzChivalry. No one did, until Fitz asked Verity about it.
and Burrich definitely calls him "the fitz" at the start of the book, which later turns into "fitz" and then "Fitz". And from that point everyone just runs with it.
Edit: I now see that you said " would have been FitzChivalry", which implies that that's the general form for naming a bastard. But as far as I know, that's not the truth. It might've happened a few times, but more likely than not, a bastard child would've been given an ordinary name. I'll point at Game of Thrones here for a second, which is roughly based on the same time period, where people have regular first names. It's more likely that Fitz surname would've become FitzChivalry (it's why we have Fitzgeralds, after all), and would've recieved a regular first name. And he actually did, because his "mother" calls him Keppit (or Kippet?) in the books at one point.
That may be true for our world but in the Realm of the Elderlings, we only ever see fitz in the Six Duchies as a prefix for bastards. We don't see everyone in the world so it can't be absolutely confirmed, but it is heavily implied that they consider fitz to mean bastard.