HP Heraldry?

[persephone_kore]

Marvolo Gaunt refers to the ring as having "the Peverell coat of arms engraved on the stone," saying it's been in their family for centuries and presenting it, apparently, as evidence that they are pure-blood. (This is before he hauls Merope forward by the locket around her neck and yells that they're Salazar's last living descendants.)

Who are the Peverells? I've tried looking up the Peverell coat of arms online, although not with a lot of hope of accuracy given what a thriving industry it seems to be to track down potentially famous or titled relatives for people. I have, unsurprisingly, not had a lot of luck: there's a Peverell that seems to be part of a Plymouth in Devon, and there seems to have been a William Peverel whom William of Normandy gave a whole lot of land, much of it in Nottinghamshire. That William Peveral may, although this seems somewhat unclear and it might have come in later in the family, have used arms involving a lion rampant and/or red and gold. (The mind boggles. Then again Gryffindor is the one that sounds French.)

Of course, it would have to be a set of wizarding Peverells for Marvolo's behavior to make sense even to him.

Anyway, I don't know whether this has actual significance, but it somehow sounds as if the Peverells are a separate branch of ancestry (okay, so there's apparently not been a lot of separate in the Gaunts' ancestry, but it has to have happened at some point) from Slytherin. Which means that there aren't two Salazar-derived horcruxes.



And another random thought: Godric gave Harry the weapon against the basilisk, but Salazar gave him the weapon against the diary. (Both of them hurt him first, the fang obviously much worse.) Of course, Dumbledore does mention Voldemort creating his own downfall as tyrants always do.... Implications perhaps unclear here.

Comments

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

One can only assume that the Peverells were also descendants of Slytherin. Or perhaps that the Gaunts were descended from the Peverells who were descended from the Slytherins - after all, there must have been quite a few changes of name along the way. Just look at the English royal family, which has a direct line of descent down a similar time-period: from the Kings of Wessex to the Normans to the Angevins to the Plantagenets to the Lancastrians to the Yorks to the Tudors to the Stewarts to the Hanovers to the Windsors...I suspect Slytherin's descendants have gone through similar convolutions. After all, they can't ALL have married their cousins or they would have run out of cousins.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Well, I was mostly thinking the Peverells might have been one of the families that married in. Which would mean that some of the Peverells were probably descended from Slytherin, but possibly not the ones with whom the coat of arms originated.