Grandma Duck

Mattias Hallin Mattias.Hallin at jurenh.lu.se
Tue Dec 7 13:02:41 CET 1993


Fredrik:

        I think you went off at the deep end this time: of course Donald has a
mother! According to Don Rosa, it's $crooge's sister Hortensia who eventually
marries Grandma's son Quackmore, and together they have two children: Donald
and his sister Dumbella (or just Bella); the latter is of course the mother of
HD&L. Where on earth did you get the idea that DON should be using the
non-sexual donaldo-genealogical theory?
(the "you-don't-have-children-you-have-nephews" theory, I mean).

To me, this makes perfect sense - much more so than the idea that Grandma
should be Donald's mother, and the grandma of HD$L. If that was the case, by
the way, there would be absolutely NO reason why she should be related to
Donald at all - she could equally well be the paternal grandmother of HD&L _
and there are no references whatsoever, not to my knowledge at least, that
indicates any blood-relations between $crooge and Grandma (apart from the
Italian comics of course, but I mean original references), so on the whole I
think that Don's ideas makes so much more sense (not to mention when you take
the next step, and try to include Gladstone and various other more or less
spurious relatives of Donald).

And regarding maternal/paternal uncles and the Swedish translations, I don't
see the problem. The Swedish translation of American Donald Duck stories are
NOT, repeat NOT a valid source to donaldo-genealogy, for the very simple
reason that they are translations made without the slightest concern for such
matters! And the Swedish word "farbror", meaning paternal uncle, is from a
purely literary/ideomatic point of view the CORRECT, or at least BETTER
translation of the non-genderspecific "uncle" than the Swedish "morbror"
meaning maternal uncle which would be the genealogically correct translation.
This is so for a very simple reason too: the word "farbror" carries the same
ideomatic meaning as "uncle", namely "elder male, held in some respect", or
just "elder male".

Well...

Quack, quack, 'n all that!

Mattias



More information about the DCML mailing list