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Character ages
There is a lot vagueness and many contradictions about some of the character ages - either by deliberation or by mistake.
- Simon:
- Simon’s birth is stated by Rachel at the start of »The Dragonbone Chair« to have been about 15 years ago - mind you, she is asking herself if it had been that long - but Simon tells Miriamele and Binabik about 1 year and a half later that he is 15. When Rachel was wondering about the time that had passed since his birth, Simon must have been not yet 14 as he is born somewhen around the end or start of the year. For someone as pedantic as Rachel it seems odd that she was wrong by more than a year regarding something so important to her.
- Benigaris/Eolair/Josua:
- When Camaris remembers his nephew Benigaris, he says he knew the latter only "as a bawling child", which means that Benigaris was already born before Camaris disappeared 40 years ago.
- Around half a year before Camaris comes back to his wits, however, Eolair muses that the last time he had seen Benigaris had been "nearly 20 years ago" and that back then the other had been 17 or 18, which would make him 37/38 by the time.
- Going by the more precise claim of Eloair, would mean to accept the several times mentioned "40 years"/"two score years" of Camaris’ Heroic BSoD as a vague abbreviation of the respective person speaking or musing. It would mean that instead of giving us the exact number of years in which Camaris was believed dead, everyone always gave us this colloquial abbreviating deviating several years down.
- Which would be possible, if not for another contradiction:
The number or years Camaris is missing corresponds to the number of years of Josua’s life - and Josua is around 40 by the time Miriamele meets Dinivan in Nabban, where he tells her "I am nearing forty years - not much younger than your Uncle Josua". - From the several times that Camaris’ years of being lost are mentioned by himself and several other characters and from Dinivan’s explicit wording of his age in comparison to Josua’s, it seems more likely that Eolair was incorrect about Benigaris’ age.
- Hence: Either this is a writer’s mistake. Or one of two options is the case:
1. Eolair does in fact not know how old Benigaris is or was 20 years ago and therefore does not know how many years older than Benigaris he is himself, or
2. Camaris has not been missing 40 years but only 37-38 since he remembers Benigaris (who is only that old by Eolair’s account). That would also mean that Josua is 37-38 years old and that Dinivan was incorrect about being younger than the Prince.
- Eolair's age by Maegwin's word:
- On another note, Eolair mentioning that he was 8 years older than Benigaris – which would make him 48 with the Camaris/Josua-calculation and 45 with his own – does not work with Maegwin’s memory, that she saw Eolair for the first time about 20 years ago, when he was 22 – making him 42 now.
- Despite Maegwin’s numbers being so very precise, it is the very calculation easiest to put aside – since it is very unlikely that Maegwin knows Eolair’s age better than he himself. He might be incorrect about the age of Benigaris and be giving us therefore a false base for deducting how old the Count is (45 or 48), but this is not based on him not knowing his own age but on him not knowing Benigaris’. Whatever would proof to be the correct age of these two men, Maegwin’s claim of Eolair being 42 is definitely wrong.
- Camaris:
- Doctor Morgenes writes in his work on the life of Prester John, that John was *more than 20 years Camaris’ senior". What is necessary to note is that Morgenes for sure knew the exact ages of both men and only shortened his expression to "more than 20 years" because he felt that the exact number of months and years was not too important. This would mean that it is more likely for Camaris to be somewhat around 20-22 years younger than John, because else Morgenes would more likely have written "almost 25 years" – or in case there was even more of a difference "almost 30 years".
- With Prester John being well in his nineties by the time he dies (it was 80 years ago, that he rode into the Hayholt, when he can't have been much younger than 16-20), this would mean that Camaris was in his late seventies today and had been into his late thirties at least forty years earlier when he had his affair with Queen Ebekah.
- Yet when Josua tells Miriamele and Simon about his true parentage, he says that Camaris would have been regarded a young man back then - which is rather unlikely not only by the medieval setting.
- Isgrimnur:
- At one point he muses how he was with Prester John at Lake Clodu, when John was almost 50 years old already and Isgrimnur was »a young man, who had not yet inherited his father's duchy«. This was about 40 years ago.
- Another time he remembers sailing with John on the Kynslagh, when John was almost 70 and Isgrimnur was »a young man«.
There is about 20 years between these two events – too much to make Isgrimnur a "young man" in both. - Either way, Isgrimnur should be in his 50ties to 60ties for having "dangled both Elias and Josua on his knees when they were children".
For all the length that Miriamele, Simon and even Aspitis get on about the need to be pure as a woman or for getting married to the one you lay with (at least or especially in Miriamele's case), this idea of "no sex before marriage" seems to be one quite common in Osten Ard. If it is, Josua and Vorzheva obviously did not get the memo.
