Snapedom

“An aquiline nose (also called a Roman nose or hook nose) is a human nose with a prominent bridge, giving it the appearance of being curved or slightly bent.” (Wikipedia)

“ hook-nosed, beak-nosed, parrot-nosed, aquiline-nosed, Roman-nosed, crooknosed, crookbilled;” (Roget’s Thesaurus fourth edition, 252:8, Curvature)




So. We have descriptive terms with the same denotation but different connotations. In fact, various nineteenth century racists apparently argued among each other whether this nose shape was particularly associated with Southern European/Mediterranean ancestry—or peculiar to the Semitic “race”—or mostly found in noble savages like the Indians (on both continents)—or no, actually a mark of Teutonic descent. Similarly they argued about whether this nose type denoted decision or depravity.

As you may deduce, noses with prominent bridges may be found worldwide. Possession of such a nose has no necessary relationship to any specific ethnicity, nor, indeed, is it any particular marker of character, of intelligence, of disposition, or of value.

The words used to describe the nose shape, however, do have a relationship to the user’s value judgments about the person with the nose.

If you want to imply the person you’re describing is patrician, you’ll use the term aquiline. If you want to portray the same person as forceful and authoritative, the nose will be described as Roman. If you’re trying to bring up pejorative associations (especially anti-Semitic ones), you’ll sneer at the person’s hook nose.

*

A novel published by a best-selling author in 1970 includes a fateful first meeting between the book’s narrator as a boy and a man in a position of authority. On their first encounter the man gave the boy good reason to feel gratitude and respect; he restrained a pack of angry men from beating the boy (or worse) for stealing and listened to the boy’s rather implausible tale. Here’s the narrator, grown to an old man himself, describing his first impressions:

He would be at that time not much more than thirty years old, but I was only twelve, and to me, of course, he seemed venerable. But I think that in fact he did seem older than his years; this was a natural effect of the life he had led, and the heavy responsibility he had borne since he was a little younger than myself. There were lines around his eyes, and two heavy furrows between his brows which spoke of decision and perhaps temper, and his mouth was hard and straight, and usually unsmiling. His brows were dark like his hair, and could bar his eyes formidably with shadow. … His nose looked Roman, high-bridged and prominent, but his skin was tanned rather than olive, and there was something about his eyes which spoke of black Celt rather than Roman. It was a bleak face, a face (as I would find) that could cloud with frustration or anger, or even with the hard control that he exerted over them….

The man so described was a fifth-century British war-leader, the descendent of a Welsh princess and a Roman Legion commander who, local legend said, had left Britain to make himself Emperor in Rome. Readers subsequently discover that he’s the protagonist’s father, and that the son grows up to resemble him quite closely.

Here is the protagonist himself in the book’s first chapter being introduced by his loving paterfamilias, the South Welsh king his grandfather.

“Your sister’s bastard,” said the King. “There he is. Six years old this month, grown like a weed, and no more like any of us than a damned devil’s whelp would be. Look at him! Black hair, black eyes, and as scared of cold iron as a changeling from the hollow hills. You tell me the devil himself got that one, and I’ll believe you!”

“… She was whipped till the women said she’d miscarry, but never a word from her. Better if she had, perhaps—”

I remember how… my grandfather glowered under his brows, his breath coming harsh and rapid, as it always did when he put himself in a passion.

“… A sullen brat who skulks alone in corners. Doesn’t even play with the other boys, afraid to, likely. Afraid of his own shadow.”

… the gold flashed on his armlet as he swung his big hand up and knocked me flat to the floor as easily as a boy would flatten a fly.

“… I’m always being told that you will not play rough games that you run away from Dinias, that you will never make a soldier or even a man.”

We watch as the paterfamilias’s antipathy causes the protagonist to grow up ill-dressed and neglected, as the boy survives a murder attempt, and as he’s bullied by his unrestrained peers. The protagonist finally resorts to sneaking around and spying on the other boys to try to extort them into leaving him alone, and for him this works.

Meet Mary Stewart’s Myrddin Emrys, better known as Merlin Ambrosius.

One really, really has to wonder if Rowling has read—or maybe that’s read and forgotten—The Crystal Cave. Stewart’s Merlin tetrology was published 1970- 1983, and it was popular among readers other than confirmed fantasy nerds. One would have thought that its romantic tone and frequently-local setting might have made it a sensation at Wyedean School, where a certain Jo was Head Girl in 1982.

Rowling even gave her half-blood prince, like Stewart’s Ambrosius, the Roman name to go with his Roman nose.