Blog Post #7 - A Court of Thornes & Roses

    Over spring break, I began the series A Court of Thornes and Roses by Sarah J. Mas – and found myself quickly enthralled by the little details, fantastic adventures, and frightening perils of the ACOTAR world. Currently, there are five books in the ongoing series: A Court of Thornes and Roses, A Court of Mist and Fury, A Court of Wings and Ruin, A Court of Frost and Starlight, and A Court of Silver Flames. While the series doesn’t focus directly on witches – or at least on witches in the sense that we’ve been discussing them – as its protagonists or antagonists, it does remind me of some of the themes we’ve explored about magic and belief – the power to harness the elements and the earth to do one’s bidding, the aliveness of the natural world around us, and the huge power of one’s imagination to build out and breathe life into a believable story or world.

    Interestingly, I came across this fantasy series in a podcast I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts: Brooke & Connor Make A Podcast. In one episode, Brooke expressed her deep love for these books and explained how they’ve offered her a means of escape away from her mundane or sad days and allowed her to immerse herself in a world so foreign to her own. At hearing this, I was reminded of the ages-old curiosity, wonder, and imagination surrounding what’s unknown to us that we feel as humans and how this connects to the idea of witches as unknown and other. To parallel this observation, I was reminded of a delineation at the center of the series: a magical Wall that separates the mortal lands from the faerie realms of Pyrthian. Those sitting on one side of the wall resent, fear, and other the beings that sit on the side opposite from them, and vice versa. The mortals, for example, don’t understand the faeries – and, so, they fear them and try and struggle to keep them away with charms and incantations. Such methods of protection include wearing iron bracelets on their wrists and adding protective engravings to the doorframes of their houses to ward off attacks by faeries.

    Another connection back to witches and cunning folk that I’ve seen in the ACOTAR world is the huge importance of nature, in terms of power, protection, and symbolism. For example, the high lords of the faerie realm – the lords of the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Dawn, Day, and Night Courts – each possess a power of the earth. The high lord of the Spring Court, Tamlin, for example, has the powers of glamour magic to make people see and think what he wants them to as well as the skill of wind manipulation at his disposal. Also, within Tamlin’s Spring Court, the high priestess, Ianthe, adorns herself with powerful blue gemstones as a symbol (or a warning) of her great power. Again, while the complex world of ACOTAR may not expressly focus on witches in the traditional sense, it showcases many of the related themes of magic and belief: the transformative power of imagination, the power and vibrance of the natural world, and the use of symbols and charms to ward off evil and protect oneself.