Hogwarts Professor

Rowling’s latest Twixter page header is a Blue Oranda Goldfish. Two quick facts and one speculative leap about this beauty:

It grows to eight or nine inches in length, which means you need a big tank if you want it to feel at home. By ‘big,’ I mean at least 20 to 30 gallons up to a 300 gallon ‘bowl’ or a carp pond in the backyard. They can live as long as fifteen years, even twenty, so investing in the right living conditions and care has a pay off in longevity. The chief challenges in that effort are feeding them just the right amount, not too much, not too little, and keeping the tank clean. As big as the fish gets, it produces a lot of waste so the filtration system has to be carefully monitored and the water changed regularly, which, given the size of the tank, is a big deal.

They only exist in captivity and have been a status symbol for the wealthy for centuries:

Orandas, like all fancy varieties of goldfish, are not found in nature. 

According to recent genetic research, it’s thought that all modern goldfish are descended from a species of wild carp, Carassius auratus gibelio. These Prussian or Silver Prussian carp originate from Central Asia, specifically, Siberia, where the fish live in slow-moving or stagnant water bodies, such as ponds, ditches, lakes, and rivers, feeding on algae, plant matter, insect larvae, small crustaceans, and the like.

For hundreds of years, carp were raised as a food source. However, in the 1500s, the first ornamental goldfish were traded to Japan by Chinese breeders, arriving in parts of Europe in the 1600s and the US by the 1800s. 

Large, flat-bodied, brightly colored goldfish were originally kept as ornamental pond fish. However, fancy rounder-bodied varieties were later developed by Asian enthusiasts to be displayed in glass vessels as status symbols in the homes of the wealthy. 

The name ‘Oranda’ is, frankly, fascinating to anyone who took an introductory Latin course in high school. The word also has a meaning in Turkish and Asian languages that may be as relevant, but I’m useless on those scores.

Focusing on the Latin, oranda is a gerundive from oro, orare, the first conjugation Latin verb for ‘to pray, to beg,’ technically the future passive participle, almost certainly here used as a substantive adjective or noun.  Most of us know the ‘-nda’ form from two popular names for women, ‘Amanda’ and ‘Miranda.’ One of the uses or forces of a gerundive is a notion of obligation, hence the names: ‘Amanda’ is ‘a woman who must be or ought to be loved,’ and ‘Miranda’ a ‘woman about whom all must marvel or wonder.’ ‘Oranda,’ on this model, would mean ‘a woman who must be worshipped or begged.’

Oranda, though, is more famous in a slightly different form, as a gerund or verbal noun. The phrase Lex orandi which is so central to Christian teaching, means simply ‘the rule of prayer,’ better ‘the ruling principle of worship.’ [Lex is often translated as ‘law’ which naturally has a sense of force and obligation in it, but here that sense is more of a ‘natural law’ in the sense of the inherent rule or principle at work.] It is almost always used as the first of three gerund phrases, namely, Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi,’ which translates as ‘the ruling principle of worship is the ruling principle of belief which is the ruling principle of life,’ or, using the gerundive force, ‘How one must worship is how one must believe and how one must live.’

The Romans 1:20 principle evident in Orthodox Christian worship — the layout out of the church and principal place of the iconostasis, the chant, the iconography, the chiastic structure of the three primary services, and the choreography of the priest, choir, and deacons — are reflected in the neptic-hesychastic beliefs of Orthodox Christians and way of life practices of the faithful; the absence of this principle in Catholic and Protestant worship, the lex orandi, is the great and substantive divide between the ‘right believers’ or ‘Orthodox’ and the ‘other-believers’ or ‘heterodox’ in creed or thinking and way of life.

Back to the fish!

Oranda, and I’m guessing here, probably comes from the bumps on the head of the fish which resemble a crown. This is a reach, I know, but given the symbolic meaning of fish to Christians, ichthys being an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God’ and the ‘Jesus Fish’ being a cipher for the conjunction of two spheres, the meeting of heaven and earth in the God-man, a fun interpretation of oranda is ‘the fish who must be worshipped.’ See this post for the relevance of this symbol for understanding Rowling’s favorite painting and her own artistry. Given the discipline necessary to keep such a fish in clean water, maybe making those duties part of your prayer rule would be a good idea.

I have no idea, of course, if this has any correlation with why Rowling chose to include this Blue Oranda Goldfish in her twixter homepage header.

Beneath that header, Mrs Murray let her readers know that Hallmarked Man is still very much a work in progress. Even with the tease that Strike 8 will include the Strike fandom’s longed-for moment when “Strike and Robin finally fall into each other’s arms,” it looks like we won’t see the next installment in the series until well into 2025.

This time last year, we were just beginning to explore the depths (and the structure!) of Running Grave. It’s a bit unreasonable for readers to expect books of this length and quality to be produced on an annual basis. I’m going to assume, consequently, for my own mental health and in respect to the creative energy involved in writing these novels, that we will not have Hallmarked Man until next summer or even this time next year. An earlier publication date, holding to my new expectation, will only be a wonderful surprise.

Back to searching online for a 300 gallon Blue Oranda goldfish tank…