Truth is the Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time is a book that has a lot of really interesting ideas about how we define and preserve truth and history, or rather "truth" and "history". Throughout the book it's evident to the reader that regardless of whether Richard III was a villain or an unfortunately misrepresented king, the documents and information surrounding him are a blur of badly recorded stories.

Josephine Tey, undoubtedly knowing this after having done all of the researchherself, put a well chosen epigraph at the beginning of her book about Richard III and Grant's research. "Truth is the daughter of time." The quote has no author, cited only as "Old Proverb", which to me is in itself a succinct representation of one of the messages this book is trying to send; even this "old proverb" has no definite author to claim it, yet it is still in circulation today. Much like the rumors about Richard III.

Tey tells us many times in the book that the stories about Richard III are simply that: stories. They rarely if ever have sources or any kind of proof of their existence--save for his familial history, nothing truly SOLID is documented about Richard III.

A particular instance in the story says, "It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education." This touches on the bias of education, how if one had an idea of Richard III that could affect teaching and whitewash the necessity of proof. In another example, one of our protagonists Officer Grant (the other debatable protagonist being Richard III) asks who a source was quoting--the response he gets is, "Quoting? It wasn't quoting anything. It was just giving facts." Another example of how when a bias is strong or someone speaks with conviction, a source seems like an afterthought.

With regard to Richard III in particular, it is important to see where the original rumors started. In his case, many of them were created posthumously by his "worst enemy" and recorded by someone whose life barely overlapped with the ill-fated king's. Even the way/where he died was shrouded in doubt given the lack of evidence, until the recent discovery of his remains. A recent facial reconstruction from his skull resulted in this: video on reconstruction, there's a side by side picture at the bottom which I find really cool.

Tonypandy, which seems to be a hot topic of discussion when reading this book and discussing Richard III, is a good word to sum up the muddling of information and "facts". This book also raises a concern about how history was recorded, and the reliability of historical documents. However, unless a time machine is able to take us back so it is discernible first hand what happened to Richard III and his two nephews it will all be speculation and debate.