The Legend of Broken

Introductory Note

Some years ago, while doing research at one of our major universities on the personal papers of Edward Gibbon — author of the multivolume classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 to 1789—I came across a large manuscript in the collection, contained in an unmarked box. On further investigation, I discovered that the work was not entered in either the university’s card catalogue or its computerized list of holdings. Intrigued, I began to read the document, and soon realized that it was a narrative concerning the fate of a legendary kingdom said to have ruled over a portion of northern Germany from the fifth to the eighth centuries. The tale had never been published, during Gibbon’s lifetime or since; I only knew of the thing because I’d run across references to it in several unpublished letters that Gibbon had written to his countryman and colleague, the great Edmund Burke. Burke’s own masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, had appeared just as did the last volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; and, as a token of his esteem for what he had immediately recognized to be a seminal achievement on his friend’s part, Gibbon had attempted to present Burke with a copy of his latest discovery.

But Burke had subsequently returned the gift, and sent Gibbon a cordial yet sternly phrased warning against any attempt to publicize it.

At the time, I didn’t quite know what to make of the manuscript: although detailed in its descriptions, its provenance could not be immediately proved, and any tale that made such remarkable claims about a largely unknown and unknowable chapter of history (for northern Germany during most of the Dark Ages remains one of notable blank spots in the record of European civilization) required at least that much. I knew from Gibbon’s letters that the original document had been translated into English by a linguistic and historical scholar of impressive talents; but I also knew that this character had nonetheless chosen to remain as assiduously anonymous as had the manuscript’s original first-person narrator. Exploring his personal history would therefore be of no further aid in terms of verification. Certainly, the English vocabulary and idioms that he employed throughout the translation were consistent with the late eighteenth century, containing no anachronisms of the kind that would have quickly betrayed a fabrication or hoax produced during a subsequent era; yet something more was required.

Recently, that something more has begun to surface, in the form of documents dating back to the last days of Hitler’s Germany. These documents (which are only now in the process of fully emerging) apparently reveal that not only Hitler himself, but some of his most trusted advisors, as well, were aware of both the Broken Manuscript and the historical evidence that supported it: so aware, in fact, that they became determined to eradicate all trace of any written or archeological evidence of the kingdom of Broken’s existence from the record of German history.

Taken together with Gibbon’s statements, these facts are sound enough to demonstrate that the manuscript is quite probably factual; and I have therefore decided to present this, the tale of the kingdom of Broken, embellished with Gibbon’s and Burke’s original correspondence on the subject, as well the former’s footnotes to the text, to which I have added my own explanatory notes. (These notes are offered simply for clarification; the reader should not think that reading them is necessary to understanding or, hopefully, enjoying the manuscript itself; they can be read as one proceeds, reviewed when one has finished, or ignored altogether.)

As to the elements central to the manuscript’s actual story, I can only say this: there developed, particularly after first the Elizabethan and then the Victorian eras, a feeling that tales set in the Dark or Middle Ages must necessarily have a certain formality and fussiness, not only of style, but of subject. Yet, especially in the case of early medieval Germany, nothing could be further from the truth. The legends that emerged from that time and place were driven by both language and plots that we would today recognize as very similar to works of more recent eras: indeed, examples such as the Broken Manuscript could be considered almost modern. Certainly, by relying on such themes as obsessive kings, diminutive peoples of the forest, buried scrolls, and, ultimately, a vanished civilization (elements that would, obviously, become staples of certain schools of literature in our own time), as well as by relating these elements in the informal manner that it does, the manuscript contributes to a trend that Bernd Lutz, in his masterful essay on early medieval German literature, called “a monument to vernacular dialect.”†

— CALEB CARR

Cherry Plain, N.Y.