The Legend of Broken

NOTES

† Bernd Lutz, “Medieval Literature,” in A History of German Literature, Clare Krojzl, translator (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 6.

† “… seat of unholy forces and unnatural rites.” Gibbon did not live quite long enough to see his characterization of the mountain Brocken echoed by another great genius of the age, Goethe, who used the site in just the manner Gibbon describes — as a setting for unholy rituals — in his most famous work, Faust. The first of the play’s immortal Walpurgisnacht scenes, during which Faust meets unnatural creatures as well as characters from Greek mythology, takes place atop the supposedly cursed mountain. Because of the play’s great success and continuing influence, it both perpetuated and heightened the mountain’s notorious reputation. —C.C.

† “… the Bane.” Gibbon writes, “When we encounter the word ‘bane,’ here, we must understand it not as it is currently defined in English — that is, as a ‘spoiling person or other agent’—but rather in that sense in which it was originally intended throughout the Germanic languages: bani in Old Norse, bana in Old English, bano in Old High German (pronounced “bahn-uh,” and eventually spelled bane), which, in turn, translate as, ‘slayer,’ ‘murderer,’ and simply ‘death.’ Only in this way can we see how deep was the impression that this diminutive race made on the citizens of Broken.” [An IMPORTANT NOTE, here: The reason for the shift in vowel sound, and later spelling, that Gibbon cites in the third of these examples is the famous “vowel shift” of Old High German, by way of which vowels in almost all unstressed syllables were reconciled (or reduced, the vowel shift sometimes being called the “vowel reduction”) to a uniform short “e,” which then became the most common vowel sound in Middle High German and finally in modern German. Along with the famous “consonant shift” in the same language, which is more arcane and of less concern, for our purposes, the vowel shift was responsible for transforming, from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, a language that was more phonetically akin to ancient German — as well as to the cousins of that earlier tongue, Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Old Dutch, Old Norse, etc. — into one that was its own distinct branch of the Germanic family. That transformation would, in turn, eventually lead to modern German. —C.C.]

† “… still deem the destruction just …” Gibbon writes, “Here is the first of the puzzling temporal inconsistencies that seem either the careless phrasing of an undisciplined mind, or something far more mysterious: and any critical reader of the Manuscript who is possessed of even rudimentary insight will recognize and know full well that the narrator’s mind, while afflicted with many peculiarities, was far from undisciplined. Yet he speaks, in this statement, of destruction that is to come to his city and kingdom, and then of the destruction that ‘evidently’ has come to pass, leaving us to wonder how, if he is writing before that destruction, he can know not only that it will happen, but what form it will take, down to the smallest details. On this, I shall elaborate in later notes.”

† “… wars to the south …” Gibbon writes, “Just what the narrator means by the ‘wars to the south’ is made unclear by his continued temporal ambiguity: He speaks of Broken in both the present and past tenses, suggesting that he may have been a visionary priest or some such; or that he was a later historian, assuming a guise for dramatic effect (which is my own belief). At any rate, for all of the period he discusses, the Western [Roman] Empire was, of course, in varying but constant states of distress, disarray, and, finally, dissolution, making employment as an auxiliary uncertain and irregular. It seems that his only secure posting there must have arisen out of his loyalty to the famed general Aetius, who, after defeating Attila and his Hunnish horde at Troyes in 451 A.D., was murdered by the jealous emperor Valentinian. It seems also that the similarly employed Oxmontrot, after participating in the vengeful murder of Valentinian, journeyed east to serve under the Byzantine standard, finding employ in the wars between the Eastern Empire and its various enemies, most notably the Persians, but also Oxmontrot’s own Germanic ‘relations.’ After some fifteen years of such service, the founder of Broken returned home to oversee the building of his new kingdom.”

‡ “… my voyage … across the Seksent Straits …” Gibbon writes, “Here we may be more certain that the narrator is referring to a journey to either Celtic Britain, Celtic Scotland, or Ireland, the only places in Europe across any ‘Straits’ —certainly the Dover Straits, the narrowest point in our own English Channel and the most common point at which to cross from France to the British Isles, then as now — where he would have found monks capable of thus tutoring him. The contribution of British and Irish monks to the preservation of civilization during the period of Broken’s existence has always been underappreciated; cannot some one of your educated countrymen be prevailed upon to correct this injustice? Ah, but he should have to find a publisher in London, should he not? — and thus I answer my own question.…” One need only add that the term “Seksent Straits” takes its name from the Broken name for “Saxons,” who were considered the equivalent of peasants in that kingdom, despite the fact that, operating from their main base in the Calais region (the south side of the Dover Straits), the Saxons had already proved a formidable people, launching raids across the Dover Straits and into Britain, as well as in other directions; but they were still not, apparently, considered more than vagabond trash within the borders of Broken. Gibbon’s translator did not put the word “Seksent” in italics, here, perhaps because it was the proper name of a place. —C. C.

†† “Davon Wood” The name betrays a Germanic origin, though it cannot of course be taken literally, in the modern German sense: besides the fact that we know Broken to have had its own dialect (mainly a mix of Old High German, Gothic, and Middle High German, although at times, as we will see, this can be a gross oversimplification), one finds it unlikely that the place was called “Thereof Forest,” “thereof” being the standard contemporary meaning of davon. But there is a secondary connotation to the modern word that is much more interesting, especially as it seems to have fallen out of use — and would have been more likely, therefore, to have derived from one of the ancient Germanic languages, and thus to have formed a part of the Broken dialect’s vocabulary. That connotation is “therefrom,” suggesting that davon was used to denote a “source” of things, including and perhaps especially evil and dangerous things. When coupled with the use of the word “bane” (see definitions in the note to p. 0), this seems all the more likely.

Judging by its location relative to Broken (assuming that “Broken” and Brocken are indeed the same peak, which seems, as Gibbon says, almost irrefutable), it appears that Davon Wood was simply a different name for the vast Thuringian Forest (as Gibbon concludes in a later note). Its hundreds of square miles of thick, rugged woodland, covering mountains and valleys alike, as well as its sudden and frequent drops into cascading waterways, match the narrator’s description of Davon Wood precisely — or rather, it would have matched it precisely, during the period under discussion (from the fifth to eighth centuries), when the forest was still primeval, and large tracts had not been cleared for lumber and firewood, and afterwards reforested with secondary growth that, while still impressive, does not have the overwhelming dimensions of those portions of the ancient forest that have survived. If we accept the proposition that the Thuringian Forest and “Davon Wood” are one and the same, then we can further conjecture that the mountains which the people of Broken knew as “the Tombs” were the same range that today is known as the Erz, or “Ore,” Mountains. Situated on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic, the Erz contained (as the name makes clear) a wealth of mineral deposits and forbidding, icy passes that conform closely to the narrator’s description of the Tombs. —C.C.

† “marauders” This word, used repeatedly throughout the text, may of course be a generic term for all nomadic tribes; but the emphasis on their appearing from the east, “out of the morning sun,” along with repeated later references to “eastern marauders” who attacked with the sun at their backs in order to blind and confuse their enemies, seems to indicate that it is a term applied primarily to the Huns, who did indeed prefer such avenues of attack — and who, despite their reputation as fearless and undefeatable warriors, may well have elected to bypass a kingdom as relatively small and capable of defending itself as was Broken. — CC.

‡ “… with this limitation, as with so many …” It’s as well to establish early on that this sense of nostalgia on the narrator’s part for the “limitations” of the past fits with the nature of many Barbarian Age Germanic states. The word “barbarian” is often associated, in the popular consciousness, with a warlike, nomadic lifestyle, as well as with undefinable borders and anarchic governments; but the truth (or rather, what little truth we know) is that many if not most of the small, vanished kingdoms of central-northern and northeastern Europe occupied discrete, relatively well-ordered regions. This is particularly true of those kingdoms that, like Broken, retained heavy Gothic influences, although the Goths had long since moved on if, indeed, they had ever actually “invaded,” or were in turn invaded, which is one of those time-honored yet ultimately unproved theories of population migration that has of late been seriously questioned.

The standard notion of what has come to be known as (to use the phrase employed in one of the early twentieth century’s key works on the subject, written by the important if somewhat outdated British historian J.B. Bury) “the barbarian invasion of Europe” may represent less firmly grounded scholarship than it does the culmination of centuries of historical conjecture and pseudo-hagiography among academics across Europe, and even, eventually, in the United States, as well. But the central flaw in this notion of wave upon wave of non-agricultural, raiding tribes — pressed by the need to gain food for their people and forage for their ever-expanding herds of horses and ponies, as well as by a desire for wealth that they could not or did not wish to earn through settled hard work in trading towns and ports — has become suspect, in recent years (just as, during the same period, the supposedly irrefutable truth about the Indians of North America being the true “Native Americans” has been quietly called into question, as evidence of other, older inhabitants has emerged): in fact, the “barbarian hordes” theory may be a piece of propaganda that is far, far older than is that modern term for the deliberate deluding of whole populations. Indeed, it may be an unusually effective bit of fiction that dates back to imperial Rome itself, and especially to the western portion of that empire, which needed an explanation for why their proud legions were regularly repulsed and sometimes overwhelmed by the tribes north of the Danube and east of the Rhine.

Any emperor, much less a commander of a legion, who could allow himself to be fought to a standstill, to say nothing of defeated, by such barbarians would have had a great deal of explaining to do, both to the Roman aristocracy and to the larger group whose acronym the Roman legions bore into battle: “SPQR,” Senatus Populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the people of Rome.” Yet such defeats did occur, from time to time, especially at the hands of the Germanic tribes. In fact, the number of defeats only rose as Rome’s life as a republic became a distant memory and its transformation into an empire was consolidated. It became necessary, therefore, to concoct a more elaborate rationalization than the simple combat superiority of the Germanic tribes; and the theory of wave after wave of “barbarian invaders” may have been cut to fit this need. Such men (and women, too, for Norse and Germanic females often fought alongside the tribes’ male warriors) could be — indeed, had to be — portrayed as the worst of all possible dangers, if the indomitable reputation of the Roman legions was to be maintained on other frontiers. And so those tribes were widely declared to be not only every bit as wily as the leaders of those empires and kingdoms that lay beyond even Persia, but as treacherous as the Egyptians or the Carthaginians, and as savage as the crazed Picts in the northernmost reaches of Britannia — with the added attributes, of course, of being uncanny horsemen and expert seamen. Small wonder, then, that Caesar himself eventually declared that he would not campaign in or try to conquer Germania: to face “the Germans” became akin to engaging a semi-supernatural force, and the generally disastrous encounters that occasionally did take place, if they ended in temporary Roman successes, were characterized by punitive measures against German warriors and civilians alike that were unusually horrifying, even for such ruthless troops as the imperial Roman legions.

This inflation of an enemy in order to explain defeat or disaster is hardly an unprecedented or a unique tactic in world military history; indeed, it is all too common when governments need to rationalize not only failure but the enormous expenditures of blood and treasure that usually accompany such failures, as well as the cost of constantly manning a hostile frontier that ensues. The somewhat distinguishing feature, in the case of Broken, is that it was governed, not by the usual Germanic tribal elective monarchy, with its communal systems of farming and hunting, but by a theocratic hereditary monarchy in which property was held by specific individuals and families according to wealth and to rank that was determined by faithfulness to the kingdom’s deity, Kafra, and his representative in this life, the God-King. These were all attributes that tended to heighten the kingdom’s already strong (even by Germanic standards) tendency to exist in and defend its own form of exceptionalism and splendid isolation from the outside world. But the overriding point, here, is that the history of Broken’s not having fit into the larger story of the “barbarian invasions” of Europe may have been a fact less rooted in Broken’s never having existed than in the very strong possibility — most strongly put forward, in recent years, by Michael Kulikowski, in his recent and seminal account of “Rome’s Gothic Wars”—that the warriors the Romans faced when they crossed into Germania were fearsome precisely because they did not represent violent hordes from the exotic East, but rather because they were the longstanding inhabitants of those lands, as brave as the Romans and more determined to defend their homelands than the legions were to conquer them. The logical conclusion of all these considerations — that there was a limit to Roman military and imperial power — was a notion that the great empire simply could not see propagated; and so any reference to the kingdom of Broken, whether during Western Rome’s pagan imperial centuries, or during its early Christian era, was excised, explaining why we find no direct reference to it in the ancient annals of Roman history. —C.C.

†† “… they are not too small …” Before dismissing as poetic license the idea that many if not most of the Bane tribe were adult humans of exceptionally small stature (without, apparently and importantly, being characterized in the main by dwarfism), we should remember everything that modern science has learned about genetic inheritance and adaptive breeding, in humans as well as in other animals. The Bane, therefore, were almost certainly the product of interbreeding among people with certain distinct characteristics, exceptionally short stature evidently being first among them.

However … there is a possible and intriguing second explanation, not only for the existence of the Bane, but for the common appearance of diminutive peoples in many such stories and legends from the Barbarian Age, as well as from more ancient eras — stories and legends which have, of course, influenced many modern works of fiction based in those periods, as well as in well-known works of fantasy. This possible explanation has only become available through several contemporary discoveries in archaeological anthropology and zoology; and I must stress that the theory is, obviously, highly speculative (some will say fanciful) in nature; but it nonetheless deserves mention:

In recent years, a group of scientists have found what they claim is a new species in the genus Homo, Homo floresiensis, who seem to have been, in effect, “miniature people,” meaning that they grew to a height of no more than four feet or so, but were not characterized by dwarfism. To date, the fossilized bones of this “species” have been found only on the small Indonesian island for which they are named, Flores; and the claim that they represent an entirely new variation on our own genus has been challenged by scientific skeptics, who believe that these people were nothing more than members of Homo sapiens who were afflicted with microencephaly, a disorder in which the brain does not grow beyond a limited size, and the rest of the body follows suit proportionally. But what is particularly intriguing is the assertion that such “miniature humans” (nicknamed by their discoverers “hobbits,” for obvious if anatomically incorrect reasons) may also have been present in the Harz Mountains, a notion based on human migration patterns as well as the fact that fossils of “miniature dinosaurs”—close relatives of the brachiosaurs, but one-fiftieth the size of those familiar and enormous plant eaters — were discovered in the Harz range in 1998.

Could “miniature people” have existed in the same Harz Mountains as did these “miniature dinosaurs,” separated by the same interval that separates Homo sapiens from the larger dinosaurs? Again, such is no more than a suggestion that the narrator’s claims about the Bane are plausible, and an intriguing alternative to the more likely (but less innovative and, admittedly, less entertaining) explanation of genetic adaptation; although, at the same time, there is nothing to say that the two explanations are mutually exclusive. —C.C.

† “… Kafra …” Gibbon writes, “Their god Kafra is, as I have said, an interesting variation on such deities as Elagabalus [sometimes written Heliogabalus, in part to distinguish him from the Roman emperor Elagabalus] and Astarte, whose cults of worshippers became quite large and did indeed interpret physical perfection and material wealth as signs of divine favor. But in the case of Kafra, the evolution of certain of the more sensual and degenerate elements of those cults receives a decidedly Germanic treatment, with their elevation to a pragmatic and highly organized system of theocracy.” Kafra also demonstrates the generalized shift in the barbarian West away from religions that assigned a prominent place to a female figure (often a goddess of fertility), and toward both pagan and monotheist religions in which supreme authority was invested in a male figure. Certain superficial similarities between Kafra and Jesus are noteworthy (the facial features, the serene smile that is so often mentioned, and which purportedly reflects a benevolent nature), although Gibbon himself, ever anxious not to alienate Burke before the latter had even looked at the Manuscript, makes little mention of them. —C.C.

‡ “… the sacred Moon …” One fact concerning the identity of the Manuscript’s author, a fact that had apparently escaped Gibbon’s attention, is illuminating: in every instance, the narrator pays such respect to the word “moon” that the translator felt it appropriate to use the uppercase “M” throughout. The Broken dialect apparently had the equivalent of an upper case (although we, today, do not know what the written form of the language looked like), and it is possible that the narrator used it simply to show respect for the deity of the Bane, as modern publications use the upper case for the Christian “God” or the Muslim “Allah”; but it is not out of the question to hold that the usage means much more — means, in fact, that the narrator himself was likely a moon worshipper, a notion that presents intriguing possibilities as to his identity. —C.C.

†† “… the rocky Cat’s Paw.” Returning to the geography of the kingdom of Broken, we can infer that the somewhat smaller mountains north of the Tombs, unnamed in the Manuscript, are the Harz range, the highest point of which, as Gibbon says, is the mountain that has long been known as Brocken. This would make the river that the citizens of Broken called “the Meloderna” the modern Salle, the sources of which are in those same Harz Mountains. The middle and lower valley of the Salle was long surrounded by rich farmlands, although today (and we should perhaps be careful about drawing any superstitious inferences from this fact) much of the river is badly polluted, with the usual accompanying effects of industrial waste on the surrounding farmlands.

The sole remaining geographical mystery is the modern identity of the river referred to in the Manuscript as “the Cat’s Paw:” while there are several possible candidates between Brocken and the Thuringian Forest, it seems impossible to state with absolute certainty which of them the narrator is actually describing. —C.C.

† “… called the Groba …” On the surface, the connotation here would seem plain enough: groba is a Gothic term for “cave” as in a dwelling or den, and this council meets in just such a place, while its healers work in similar chambers, above. But when we come across such words (to say nothing of even more exotic personal and place names), we are also reminded of Gibbon’s statement that the language of the people of Broken, though basically a German dialect, had Eastern influences, the reasons for which we cannot be certan of, beyond noting the deep influence of Gothic, which apparently seemed “exotic” indeed — at least to Gibbon. And yet, the Groba system, structurally, is not exotic, at all; not for a Germanic tribe. Indeed, it more closely resembles the usual Germanic system of government — which most often featured elected officials, executives, and in many if not most instances, even elected kings — than does the government of Broken. The Groba also reflects, therefore, the type of traditional indigenous government that ruled the communities of the region between the Cat’s Paw and the Meloderna rivers before they were consolidated into Oxmontrot’s kingdom. In this way, we can see that words like “exotic” have very relative meanings, when it comes not only to the Manuscript, but even more especially to Gibbon’s comments. —C.C.

‡ “‘Ficksel!’” It is interesting to note that Gibbon did not choose to comment on this particular word: since there are vulgarities in modern German that closely resemble ficksel in both sound and meaning, one presumes that there must have been in Gibbon’s day, as well, and that the omission was made out of tact: a most peculiar tact, given both other accounts of various perverse behaviors that Gibbon seems not to have had any qualms about describing, and the general trend, in European literature of the late eighteenth century, toward the bawdiness and ribaldry that would provide much of the impetus behind the turn toward more reserved, even prudish, writing in the Victorian era.—C.C.

†† the names of the three Bane foragers Not for the first time, Gibbon speaks here of “the great frustration of not being given lingual tools sufficient to the task of picking apart the enormously colourful names of many of the characters in the Manuscript.” His inability was most often caused by the limited advances of scholarship in his day, but they were also, on occasion, the result of what Gibbon called “the almost unbalanced insistence of the man who translated the document and purveyed it to me [an interesting turn of phrase, since, especially in this context, it implies selling scandalous information of some sort] that he would not share his translational techniques, or part with the Broken Codex, for which I would gladly have paid as dearly as I did for the Manuscript itself.” But this rather peevish portion of his note is designed, one suspects, to make him look all the smarter for having come up with what he believed were solid explanations for the three foragers’ names: “It is essential to the drama to know all we can of these names,” he says truthfully, “as they are characters so very key to the story. The first, Keera, requires so little effort as to scarcely want mentioning; we still find the name in use (more often in the forms of Kira or Kyra) in the Scandinavian and Low Countries, as well as in Russia; and these nations took it, of course, from Greece, by way of Rome. The sole point of interest lies in the fact that it did not originate with the Greeks, but rather their longtime antagonists, the Persians; for it is but the feminine version of Cyrus, a name made most famous by Cyrus the Great, ruler of that people in the sixth century B.C. and the first to expand their state to truly imperial dimensions. The meaning of this storied name has been variously described as ‘of the sun’ and ‘far-sighted’: it seems, in this case, that the second of these interpretations was emphasized. And it is possible that Keera’s parents waited until she had begun to display her character and her several sensory gifts, before giving her a permanent name: various tribal cultures are known to practice such a style of naming (including, most importantly, several northern barbarian tribes), and even in our own nations of Europe, a name is not considered permanent until the child has been baptized, which most often occurs during infancy, but can occur later, a practice more common when names were thought to hold formative power over the individual offspring: a practice that Keera’s parents evidently embraced. These notions, of a northern influence on the name, and a delayed selection of the same, is supported by the styling of Keera’s brother, Veloc, although the thrust of this appellation is somewhat less apparent. Its first syllable seems to be a Broken approximation of valr, a term in Old Norse for ‘the dead’; whereas the second syllable is clearly (taken in context with the first syllable) the Broken styling of the old Norse demi-god, Loki (also Loci, Loge), half brother to Odin, master of mischief, shape-shifter, and sometimes noble friend to Man. It would seem that Veloc’s parents named him when they had already divined his dual nature, and either aimed to ward off the increasing influence of Loki on their son, or were paying homage to Loki in the hope that he would employ his benevolent side in assisting their troubling boy.”

But it is in trying to interpret the name Heldo-Bah that we observe Gibbon at his most imaginative, and even whimsical: “It is my contention,” he wrote, “that we [of the British Isles] may claim this remarkable little fellow as one of our own: not only because of the filed teeth, a practice not unknown among such primitive tribes as the Picts, but because he only reached Broken as a child-slave, and thus could have come from almost anywhere, including Britain. The first component of his name is clearly a Germanic interpretation of our English Hero (in modern German Held, or Helden, in the plural), a name that also comes to us from the Greeks, by way of Rome; and the dismissive-sounding bah, along with exclamations very much like it, were then already in use among Britons, Saxons, and Frisians alike — making it reasonable to assume that the boy was taken from Britain by seafaring plunderers from the North (quite probably Frisians, with whom the people of Broken apparently both fought and traded), and that these warriors took his given name of Hero and made of it a term of derision. And when the boy became a man, he likely kept the name, either because he had never learnt its meaning, or out of no more complex a cause than spite. The second of these explanations is the more likely; but the first displays a taste for irony among the Bane that we shall encounter again.” Gibbon is repeating a popular legend about the Picts filing their teeth (an idea picked up on by Robert E. Howard in his “Conan” stories), and could not have known that, if anyone filed Heldo-Bah’s teeth besides himself, it was likely those same northern captors, for Vikings, it has recently been discovered, often “beautified” their teeth in this manner. —C.C.

† “… Daurawah.” Gibbon writes, “The town of Daurawah, which served as a port for Broken traders, as well as for those foreign commercial vessels that brought goods to the kingdom, was certainly located on the Saale, the river referred to in the Manuscript as ‘the Meloderna’; and should one find it difficult to believe that so obvious a group of Bane as these three foragers could have entered such a town freely, one must remember the general air in and condition of Daurawah, at this time, which is clearly elaborated in a later chapter.”

† “… Hafften Falls—” See note for p. 00 concerning waterfalls in the Cat’s Paw.

‡ “… oozing …” As mentioned in the Introductory Note, the text contains many elements and words that have a vernacular quality that might make them sound relatively modern, to our ears, but that are quite appropriate to and consistent with the era — and “oozing” is an excellent example, being derived from a Dark Ages, Middle English term for “juicing.” Conversely, words with similar meanings that might seem more formal and therefore “older”—in this case, say, “seeping”—were only coming into use at just the time that the translator was at work on the Broken Manuscript in the late eighteenth century. This fits a pattern that will soon become well established, of many onomatopoeic words that sound familiar and contemporary to our modern ears actually having deeper roots than many other, seemingly more antique words; all of which reminds us that Old High German, one of the parent languages of the Broken dialect, was perhaps the first European tongue to inspire significant written works in the vernacular; whereas the notion that barbarian and early Middle Age tales are more naturally or authentically expressed in stuffy, florid language really originates with such late medieval “courtly” writers as Thomas Malory, and especially with such revisionist Victorian interpreters as Sir Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The number of modern authors who have followed in Scott’s and Tennyson’s footsteps is too high to list here, although notable exceptions — Robert E. Howard, for instance — do exist. Of course, there are also modern writers who have gone in the opposite direction, and who have characters speaking not only in the vernacular of either the actual medieval or fantasy-medieval eras, but speaking in utterly and anachronistically modern vulgarities; but they are not the concern of this study. —C.C.

† “… the mang-bana.” Gibbon writes, “The names of the various rituals of exile, mutilation, and execution cited in the text show the entirely cosmopolitan nature of life and language in Broken. Like some of the Bane curses, the phrase mang-bana contains elements of words that have both survived into modern German (we may translate this phrase, very roughly, as ‘the exile of the imperfect’) yet also display a distinctly Gothic influence — or so, at least, we may suppose, based on our limited understanding of that language, which shows us that these words contain elements quite common, not only to Gothic names, but to Gothic terms, as well. The remainder of the Broken dialect’s peculiar vocabulary was apparently made up of words imprinted with Eastern and far more obscure origins, many of which we shall doubtless never be able to trace or identify — considering the fact that entire dialects, and even languages, that were used in Barbarian Age Europe have disappeared entirely.”

† “… three weeks …” Although there was some variation in the number of months in the calendars of the people of Broken and the Bane, they would all seem to be broken down, as indeed were almost all calendric systems, into seven days. —C.C.

‡ Tayo The name of Keera’s husband is one of several intriguing examples of Bane names which have their roots firmly in more than one of the languages that first influenced the Broken dialect. In this case, the languages are Old High German and Gothic, and the meaning is almost certainly the same as our modern Theodor or Theodore, that is, “gift” or “gift of god”—or goddess, as in this case the reference was almost certainly to the Bane’s Moon deity. —C.C.

† Sentek The founding king of Broken must indeed have served as a Roman auxiliary warrior, as Gibbon postulates, because the system of military organization he devised so closely resembles the basics of the late Roman imperial order (with numbers of men in each unit adjusted drastically downward, obviously, given the much smaller size of the kingdom of Broken): the rank of sentek is roughly equivalent to the Roman legatus, or legion commander, while yantek corresponds to praetor (although, having no true provinces, and with the Merchants’ Council serving the function of consuls, the rank becomes simply “supreme commander” in Broken); a linnet, meanwhile, seems no different than a tribune, while a pallin is a simple legionary. A khotor is, fairly obviously, the equivalent of a legion, though taking its name from the smaller Roman unit of a cohort, and made up, in Broken, of ten fausten (sing. fauste, or “fist”). There also appear to have been two ranks slightly beneath the linnet: “linnet-of-the-line,” commanding ad hoc subdivisions of an infantry khotor, and lenzinnet, “first lance,” a rank that anticipated the future, equating to a grade that would exist among certain formations of modern cavalry. But more importantly, here, both of these commissions are grounded firmly in Roman tradition, being less formal versions of that empire’s pilus prior, “first spear” (or, in the case of lenzinnet, “first lance”). The final proof of this theory of a Roman model for the Broken military is the apparently interchangeable nature, in the text (or so the translator apparently thought), of the words khotor and “legion.” —C.C.

‡ Sixt Arnem This is a wholly German name, the components of which have been passed down intact into modern times, further supporting Gibbon’s contention of the tale’s cultural and historical plausibility. The spelling is very often changed to Arnim, although it is unclear whether this is a mistake or a mere result of translation and dialect adjustment/confusion (in Old High German, Arnim would certainly have become Arnem, in keeping with the shift by which all vowels in unstressed syllables became the short “e”); and, although the family’s original associations were, not surprisingly, military, by the mid-nineteenth century we find what are by now the von Arnems and von Arnims (von denoting “of” or “from,” and used to indicate an honorific aristocratic connection to a family home or a location of some great achievement, in the same sense that the British aristocracy uses “of”) branching out into the humanities. The reason for this broadening of interests among the Prussian military caste (and most wise officers in smaller German states followed the Prussian example) is that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, it came under the increasing philosophical as well as doctrinal influence of Helmuth von Moltke, creator of the modern general staff system, military right arm of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, architect of the wars that would fulfill Bismarck’s dream of uniting the German empire, and, finally, a firm believer that officers, especially junior officers, should train themselves as he had: nearly as much in the humanities as in purely military studies. (Women shared in the German liberal humanist movement, and the von Arnems and von Arnims were no exception: by the early twentieth century we find the wife of one of them, an Englishwoman, becoming an established enough writer that one of her books, The Enchanted April, was sufficiently well received to become the basis of two film adaptations, one in the 1930s and another, nominated for several Oscars, in 1992.)

There were generals of consequence who bore the name von Arnim (still often spelled Arnem) in the Franco-Prussian, First World, and Second World Wars; the youngest of them played an important role in Rommel’s Afrika Corps, while the eldest even bore the Christian name Sixt. However, the meaning of the name itself is obscure, as there appear to be no provinces, towns, mountains, or battles of consequence (the usual determining factors for the von honor) in modern Germany that bear the name, whatever spelling one uses — and this raises the interesting question of whether the von was intended, in this case, not to imply the usual geographical connection, but instead as a link to a distant ancestor, Sixt Arnem. —C.C.

† “… unadorned steel plate helmet …” Remarkable as it may seem, little to nothing is known definitively about what “Dark Age warriors” employed for helmets and armor; and, while we know a little more about their weapons, it is only a little, forcing us to rely on the descriptions of these items in texts such as the Broken Manuscript — which, thankfully, is (as we shall see), unusually rich in its descriptions of these items, the crafting of which forms a very central part of the tale. We can divine, for instance, that this particular reference is to the basic helmet design of the early Middle Ages, which was developed among the Germanic tribes, called the Spangenhelm, spangen referring to the clasps of the metal framework of the helmet, to which varying numbers of steel plates were either welded or riveted. It became the basis for the similar Norman helmets (also unadorned, for the most part), as well as for the helmets of many other non-Germanic tribes, during this period, although just how many we cannot, of course say; but we can add that the number of plates often depended, not only on the shape of the helmet’s dome, but on how many metal “flaps” (movable parts that were tied during battle, and swung free at other times, alternately giving protection and allowing access to the neck, ears, cheeks, nose, etc.) were incorporated into the particular design. —C.C.

† khotor See note for p. 00 on the military organization of the Broken army, above. —C.C.

‡ Torganian Gibbon writes, “Surely this word ‘Torganian’ is little more than a dialectal cousin of Thuringian, being as the only modern forest which closely resembles ‘Davon Wood’ in scale, impassability, and proximity to Broken (or Brocken) is that which today gives the fabled region of Thuringia its name: a wilderness which, in the period under consideration, was likely far more vast than is the already enormous woodland that we encounter in the area today. ‘Torganian’ also suggests an interesting etymology in Middle (and likely Old High) German, some melding of the concepts of ‘gateway’ and ‘pass’ or ‘passageway’: geographic features that would have been much prized, in such a landscape. The Thuringian people are thought to have been displaced by Frankish tribes in the sixth century, but whether they or anyone else ever inhabited the deepest Thuringian Forest is unclear. We do know that, at the height of Broken’s power, the dislocation of the Thuringians by the Franks had occurred south of the Erz Mountains (‘the Tombs’), from whence the ‘Torganian raiders’ seem to have originated. Thus, even if the raiders herein described as attacking Broken by way of passes through the Tombs were Franks, it is logical and perhaps even probable that so isolated a society as Broken’s would have been unaware of the shift in populations, and would have assumed that the new invaders were simply the latest generation of their ancient enemy. Whatever the case, we can only marvel at how stalwart this Arnem must indeed have been, if he could rally his men to fend off such renownedly ruthless and capable warriors as the Thuringians and the Franks for an entire winter amid high mountain snows!”

† Herwald Korsar A particularly interesting name, korsar still being a German word for “corsair” or “pirate,” but Herwald being an archaic name, its meaning apparently lost to time along with its use. Following the common system for determining the origin of such appellations, especially in the early and high Middle Ages, we are forced to conclude that Herwald Korsar came from a family of river- or seafaring adventurers — but whether they acted on behalf of the kingdom of Broken, or were among the enemies who agreed to join the kingdom at the time of its unification under Oxmontrot, is a question that must remain, for the moment, unanswered. —C.C.

‡ Amalberta Korsar Gibbon writes, “The appearance of the name Amalberta is significant in helping us determine the various influences of surrounding societies on that of Broken. Amal, which appears with respectable frequency in early Germanic writings, is believed by some scholars to connote a representative of the eastern [Ostro-] Gothic royal family known as the Amelungen; whereas berta, of course, is simply another variation on the group of modern names centered on Bertha that imply ‘radiance,’ or ‘golden.’ Together, these components raise the rather interesting possibility that this wife of the supreme commander of the army of Broken — a woman who is acknowledged to be ‘foreign-born’—may in fact have been a Gothic princess of some importance.”

† “‘… some dog-bitten lunatic …’” This last word, when used by the soldiers and citizens of Broken, naturally has an especially pejorative connotation, its root almost certainly having been, in the Broken dialect as in English, luna, or “moon,” both based on the Latin lunaticus, or “moonstruck,” reflecting the ancient notion — which Kafrans would have highlighted, given the Bane tribe’s (as well as their own ancient) worship of that heavenly body — that the moon’s powers included the ability to cause mental illness. —C.C.

† “Home to the God-King …” Gibbon writes, “One cannot help but pay special attention to this idea of the ‘God-Kings’ of Broken, particularly given the location of the kingdom and the historical era during which it achieved its zenith of power: Germanic tribes of the Barbarian Age were well known for electing their leaders, whether they called them ‘kings’ or ‘barons.’ Such leaders, obviously, were not yet what we know as ‘divine right’ kings, nor was their power hereditary. Once again, then, the people of Broken anticipated European institutions and styles of rank by generations, if not centuries — no small accomplishment!”

‡ Oxmontrot Of the many interesting silences that punctuate Gibbon’s comments on the Manuscript, none is more eloquent than his apparent refusal or inability to even attempt to determine the origin of this name. The most obvious and literal explanation, if we make allowances for the influence of Gothic and Old High German on the Broken dialect — which, as we have already seen and will see many more times, often reverted to what Gibbon called “phonetic approximations”—is that Oxmontrot meant simply “man as strong as three oxen,” or perhaps “man as fast as three oxen,” although this last seems less likely, as oxen have never been renowned for their speed, but rather for their plodding pace and power. But if we allow other possible meanings of the name’s components to enter the question, we find that the first two syllables in Oxmontrot may originate with either the Gothic Audawakrs and its German counterpart, Odovocar, both of which mean “wealthy and vigilant”; or with the Old German equivalent of Old English’s Oswald, “the rule of God”; or, finally, with Oskar, the still-used German equivalent of Oscar, translated either as “deer lover” or “godly spear.” The determining factor would seem to be what meaning we ascribe to the third syllable. It may be descriptive, based in early German phrasings and spellings of rostrot, or “russet, auburn.” One immediately thinks of the crusader and Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich I, also called Friedrich Barbarossa, or “Redbeard,” although the likelihood of any inspirational connection vanishes when we consider that Friedrich did not rule until the twelfth century; still, Adolf Hitler thought enough of Friedrich’s zealous attempts to rid the world of the “racially inferior” Muslims to code-name his invasion of Russia “Operation Barbarossa”—and when one considers Oxmontrot’s policies in Broken, one cannot help but wonder if Friedrich’s name was not meant to recall, in some way, the founding king of Broken, and whether there is, therefore, a link between all three names. Or, the final syllable may relate to the more literal trott, a jogging pace. Lastly, trot may simply reach back to the early development of not only German, but to the Germanic languages of Saxon and Old English, as well, and translate as the number and quantity “three.” Why this should be significant, however, is obscure: much like the ruler himself. —C.C.

† Lumun-jan Gibbon writes, “We can be in no doubt that the ‘vast empire’ to which the narrator refers was Rome, despite the fact that the name Lumun-jan does not seem to appear in most Germanic dialects.” Gibbon could not have known, of course, that he was looking in the wrong place; if we turn to the Gothic vocabulary, we find that lumun is a root common to various terms for “light,” or in this case “lightning,” while jan is a suffix incorporated into many words which imply “protection”—especially “shield.” The tribes who eventually made up the kingdom of Broken before (perhaps long before) the fifth century included Goths as well as smaller groups, and all must have had some contact with Roman military detachments before Broken’s establishment: despite Caesar’s vehement warning that Rome should never try to conquer the region north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, some ambitious emperors and generals did dispatch scouting and punitive parties into those areas, usually with mixed or disastrous results. At least some of the tribes of those areas evidently came to associate Rome itself with one of the most effective and time-tested Roman instruments of war, the scutum, or large rectangular infantry shield, which was usually embossed with some representation of lightning bolts. Hence Lumun-jan, apparently a Gothic-based Broken term for “lightning-shield,” and Lumun-jani, or “people of the lightning shield.” Thus deriving a name for a people from a weapon that they commonly use is not unique in world history, or even in the history of the areas making up and surrounding Broken: perhaps the most famous example is the Saxons, who are believed to have been named after a comparatively small, if still fearsome, weapon, their characteristic seax, or single-edged combat knife. —C.C.

‡ “the Mad King” It should not strike us as strange that the people of such a kingdom would refer to their founding monarch as “mad,” nor is the case by any means unique, in history or in legend — and it was certainly not inspired, as we will see some of the kingdom’s officials try to state, by his apparently heretical religion alone. “Madness” was often equated with vision or genius of any kind, particularly in less intellectually developed societies, which Broken evidently was when Oxmontrot began his reign; and the fact that the term would later be used, at least by many, in a pejorative way does not change this fact. Nor does the frequent use of the phrase “Mad King” in countless popular works of legend, fiction, and history from later periods: whether the very real, as in the case of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, or in fiction, as in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Mad King. Indeed, there were apparently many in Broken, Sentek Arnem among them, who looked back on this supposedly “mad” king with great admiration — something they would certainly not have done, had they considered him simply insane. —C.C.

† Thedric This is another distinctly Gothic name, suggesting that Oxmontrot married a woman of those tribes. —C.C.

‡ Isadora Arnem Isadora is one of those rare Gothic names to have survived intact into the modern age. It is also a useful tool for helping us understand why the influence on Arnem’s wife of certain persons considered “exotic” would have been so frowned upon in Broken: like Amalberta Korsar, Isadora Arnem appears to have come from good Gothic stock, although in her case, the blood had definitely thinned, and the family had fallen on hard times, even before the deaths of her parents. But the notion that more northerly influences would have been viewed, in Broken, with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for persons from sunnier, more southeasterly lands is a noteworthy variation on the very old story of European distrust, prejudice, and arrogance. —C.C.

† Reyne Niksar Reyne appears to be either an archaic or a Broken dialectal spelling for Reini, the shortened version of Reinhold, or “counselor [to the ruler].” Niksar, however, is more obscure: it seems, at first, a variation on Nikolas, and therefore yet another obvious confirmation that the influence of classical antiquity on the society of Broken was pronounced, Nikolas being a Germanization of the Greek Nicholas, or “victory of the people.” But there may be an alternate meaning, as sar may have been the Broken dialectal version of saller, which means, literally, “one who dwells by a sallow,” sallow being a type of small willow native to Germany. —C.C.

† khotor and fausten See note for p. 00, for Broken’s military organization; in brief, here, fausten were, perhaps obviously, detachments of some fifty men, ten of which made up a khotor. Some may take issue with translating fausten to “fists,” because the spelling does not precisely match that of modern German; but then, it is not to be expected that it would, given the many influences on the Broken dialect that have already been discussed. —C.C.

† “at attention” Although this phrase did not come into common use, among armies, until the fourteenth century, there were and are generally analogous phrases contained in nearly every language, ancient and modern, all of which are descendants, not surprisingly, of the Roman command, which Oxmontrot would have known and respected; but, because the Broken dialect remains lost to time, the Broken Codex having disappeared with the translator, we will likely never know what the specific term was. —C.C.

† “… the Merchants’ Council.” The close identification of the patron god of Broken, Kafra, with the city’s merchant class and leaders reinforces Gibbon’s earlier point about the way in which the kingdom’s rulers and citizens gave a “decidedly Germanic treatment” to what was originally, in all likelihood, a mere cult of hedonism and materialism, turning it into “a pragmatic and highly organized system of theocracy”—a theocracy whose most visible and powerful underpinning was a determined merchant oligarchy, rather than the kind of warrior-based aristocracy that could be found in most barbarian states and tribes of the time. —C.C.

† “‘… let alone a sacred bull—’” Gibbon writes, “The close association of lunar worship with male cattle — or, indeed, horned animals of almost any kind — was common to societies as ancient as early Mesopotamia, and likely existed in the vicinity of Broken long before the city came into being. Animal horns were identified with the ‘horns’ of the crescent moon, and from this comes the mystical association with virility and sensuality that was, evidently, a part of Old Broken’s lunar worship, and which survived among the Bane long past the arrival of Kafra. Indeed, in many parts of the Far East even today, high prices are paid for the horns of exotic animals, which are ground to powder and form the ingredients of traditional virility tonics; only one of the many paradoxes afflicting such Oriental peoples as the Chinese, who are capable at once of great works, great learning, and yet absurd, even vicious and exterminating superstitions.” It remains only to be said that this traffic in the horns and other parts of endangered animal species, illegally, brutally, and immorally harvested, has only grown with time; and that various peoples of the world — but especially, as Gibbon states, those of the Orient — will pay unheard-of amounts of money for such “virility tonics,” the efficacy of which has been found to be absurd again and again by modern scientists. —C.C.

† “‘Blast it’” Etymologically speaking, the persistent use of various oaths based on the word “blast” is interesting — and again, adds plausibility to the Manuscript — as it is one of the few words to originate in Old High German that has survived intact, but into English (by way of Old English), rather than into modern German: thus it becomes, in a sense, one of the “ghost words” of a dead language. This may seem implausible, if one assumes that the expression is somehow associated, as it usually is today, with explosives; but in fact, “blast” is another example of a phrase that might seem an anachronism, on first look, but which dates back to the early Middle Ages, where “blasts” of wind or man-made air (as in horn-blowing) occurred long before Europeans had divined the secret of how to blow each other up with gunpowder. —C.C.

† “‘… your accursed city was built …’” Gibbon writes, “We ought not think that the Bane are speaking, here, in any but literal terms. As our great British explorers — most recently the late and much lamented Captain James Cook — have discovered, the exile of tribal members who have proved unable to contribute to the advancement of a given society, onto some neighboring island, or into some wilderness or other in a remote location, is a practice found the world over — as are societies formed by those same exiles. The fact that, in this case, the exiles appear to have taken on a distinctive physical feature — reduced height — ought not surprise us, either: we have only to look to advances in, say, the breeding of livestock within England itself to understand the physical ramifications, positive as well as negative, of the careful selection of mating partners. If the citizens of Broken deliberately bred their progeny to grow tall, strong, and handsome, it only stands to reason that those exiled from the city would produce a significantly smaller — and less attractive — race.” Thus did one of the great historians of his own or any era instinctively anticipate a major scientific principle. —C.C.

† “‘… our unfortunate new recruit.’” Gibbon’s claims about the cultural mimicry of the people of Broken continue to be borne out in small ways: use of the word “recruit,” rather than simply “warrior” (or some one of the many similar terms used by barbarian tribes in Europe at the time), further calls to mind a society in which military service had been highly systematized and regimented along Roman, rather than early feudal, lines — a theory confirmed by the fact that such service was not, evidently, compulsory, even for the lower classes. —C.C.

‡ “‘Hak’” It is impossible, of course, to determine if the original translator of the Manuscript has left this exclamation intact, or if he has approximated some similar sound from the original dialect of Broken; but its close resemblance to the still-common German Ach is noteworthy. —C.C.

† “… built for the healthy.” If the policy of “culling” weak members of those tribes that eventually made up the kingdom of Broken seems to contemporary sensibilities so drastic as to be mythical, we should remember that, even in Gibbon’s time (as he makes clear in an earlier note) there was awareness of societies great and small that had employed — that still employed — similar policies; although he fails to mention how often his own Britain did the same, to rid itself of those citizens who lacked financial sense or scruples (debtors and thieves, as well as other petty criminals, all of whom were sent to America, Australia, and other distant colonies).

Nor should we be smug about Gibbon’s deliberate blindness on this score: such practices have no more vanished from the twenty-first century world than they had from the eighteenth. Various tribes that are “indigenous” (a word that almost daily loses meaning, in a world increasingly marked by transient populations) to South America and Africa allow parents to have only the number of children that the tribe generally can support, killing off surplus numbers. The ancient Roman practice of weeding out physically deformed children by exposing them at birth to the tender mercies of mountainside wildernesses, meanwhile, is currently echoed both in the Chinese practice of selling or simply drowning unwanted female children — a “traditional custom” that occurs with regrettable frequency — as well as in the license that so many Muslim societies give to individual men and entire families to disfigure, murder and anathematize women who are perceived as having disgraced themselves and their families, often by “allowing” themselves to be raped. —C.C.

‡ “the Celestial Way” The appearance of the word “celestial” in the name of Broken’s main thoroughfare — assuming, again, that it is a literal translation, and not a whimsical choice of the translator — underlines the diversity of cultural influences on the city’s society as far back as its founding, “celestial” being a word that is far more commonly found in descriptions of Eastern palaces and potentates than in those of Western. —C.C.

† “The Denep-stahla” Gibbon writes, “These more serious rituals of mutilation contain one common element: the use of stahla after the hyphen, which may indicate that they are derived from the sacred instruments used to inflict the punishments, stahl being a modern German word for ‘steel,’ particularly as pertaining to ‘blades.’ The origins of the first parts of the phrases, on the other hand, are matters for sheer speculation: more they seem to have been adaptations of terms peculiar to the original cult of Kafra, and to have therefore been brought into Broken with that god and that faith. We do not know where, precisely, this religion originated, as I have said; but the physical manifestations of these strange words are made fully, indeed hideously, clear by the narrator’s descriptions of the rituals, and suggest an Eastern, even an Oriental, morality.” [Note: Gibbon is being, as was sometimes his tendency, openly prejudicial, here — it was, after all, the Western Romans who perpetuated such ancient and “progressive” punishments as crucifixion and being mauled to death in arenas by wild animals. —C.C.]

† “… narrowed to sharp points.” Here we find more evidence to support the contention that Broken’s first king, Oxmontrot, served as a foreign auxiliary in the Roman army: the style of military fortification and housing in Broken’s Fourth District is almost identical to those outposts and forts that Roman armies of occupation constructed, particularly in central and northern Europe, where tall, stout pine and fir logs were to be had in abundance. —C.C.

† “… the emblem of his rank and office” Again, the emulation of the Roman military by the soldiers of Broken is striking, even down to such small details as the baton of rank and authority that was carried by senior Roman officers — as well as the leaders of several other outstanding armies, most if not all of them imperial. In more modern times, it was bestowed on German field marshals during the Nazi era: indeed, as Gibbon occasionally notes, it almost seems that the society of Broken may have been something of a “missing link”—culturally, governmentally, and militarily — between Rome and those states of the modern West (especially but not solely Germany) that have had imperial pretensions and ambitions. —C.C.

† “… beyond the Meloderna, …” If we accept Gibbon’s contention that “Meloderna” was the name used in Broken for the modern Saale River, then the “river valley beyond the Meloderna” where this battle, presumably against the Huns, took place may have been the Mulde, although it seems far more likely that it was the Elbe. The latter represents the more significant barrier, in military terms (it was along the Elbe, of course, that American and Russian forces met to complete their fatal division of Germany during the Second World War), and is only some seventy-five to a hundred miles from the mountain Brocken—certainly within just a few days’ riding and even marching range of an army as organized and powerful as was Broken’s. —C.C.

† “detachment” Here is an example of the translator, while not necessarily taking a greater liberty, at least using a much more modern word (which had come into use among military forces only at the end of the seventeenth century) to stand in for whatever the original Broken phrase was. The most common modern German word for a military detachment, verband (pl. verbände) might suggest to some that the translator would have done better service had he translated whatever the Broken dialectal word was into English as “band”; but that is a far more vague term, militarily, than “detachment”; and, as we have already noted, we cannot rely on modern German, when speculating on the Broken dialect, to be anything save a partial descendant of what remains a lost language. —C.C.

† Kastelgerde This is the plural (as we shall soon see) of Kastelgerd, a word that Gibbon chooses to ignore, almost certainly because, again, experts of his day did not have the tools to interpret it; nor, indeed, can we say with any certainty that experts of our own time do. But, because of the great advances made during the last century in understanding both Old High German and Gothic, we can at least make a much more educated guess than could Gibbon: Kastel (a noun here, using the upper case, as most German nouns did then, and all do, today) is almost certainly a slight variation on the common German Kastell, a secondary and less frequently used term for “castle” (the more common being Schloss), while gerd is almost certainly a Broken variation on the Gothic gards, incorporating the vowel shift borrowed from Old High German, meaning “houses” as in important clan households. The purpose of the entire term is evidently to convey that these structures are “castles” as in palaces and family seats, not necessarily fortresses, although they seem to have had more of that utilitarian purpose early in the kingdom’s history. —C.C.

† “… service as a skutaar …” Gibbon writes, “The appearance of the word skutaar is another example of the bridge that Broken’s society formed between imperial Rome and Europe in the Barbarian Age: the word itself is doubtless derived from the Latin scutarius, or ‘shield-bearer,’ which is also the source of our own words ‘esquire’ and ‘squire,’ as well as several similar terms we find in other European tongues — the French esquier, for example.”

† “… the panther enters …” The legendary “European panther” is far more than a myth. In fact, there are two likely candidates for the “panthers” referred to in the Manuscript, both of which originated in the Pleistocene era and were, until recently, thought to have become extinct anywhere from eight thousand to two thousand years ago. The first example, commonly known as the “European jaguar,” is of interest because of its known preference for forests (although this preference has been challenged by recent research) and its solitary habits — as well as the fact that fossil evidence indicates that the last of its kind lived in Italy and Germany as little as two thousand years ago, and possibly far more recently. In fact, there have been unproved but insistent claims of sightings of the European jaguar up to, and even in, the present era. The second candidate, the “European (or Eurasian) cave lion,” is the great cat depicted in Europe’s famous Ice Age cave paintings, as well as ivory carvings and clay sculptures. Clearly, it played a vital role in the religions of those peoples, and one can easily understand why: It originated earlier than the European jaguar, and was a more massive animal. Males could reach a length of twelve feet and a weight of six to seven hundred pounds (females were about two thirds the size of males). They had the physical appearance to match the description of “Davon panthers” in the Manuscript: golden fur, short leonine manes, and tiger banding of varying hues. They could easily bring down the largest hoofed animals, including and especially horses, and therefore represented a significant problem for cavalry operating within Europe’s most ancient and thickest virgin forests, of which the Thuringian certainly was one, and in parts remains so.

Perhaps the most intriguing clue regarding both of these animals is their classification: like modern lions and tigers, and unlike the smaller wild cats that existed in Europe, they belong to the Panthera genus (the European jaguar is the Panthera gombaszoegensis, the cave lion the Panthera leo spelaea), making the Manuscript’s consistent reference to them as “panthers” not at all far-fetched. —C.C.

‡ “… the neck and shoulders …” Two additional facts about the narrator’s description of the “panther” are significant: he has apparently never seen a true “mane,” the male European cave lion having possessed only a short, wispy approximation of the version found on their African cousins (less, even, than the infamous cave lions of Tsavo, Kenya), and he consistently refers to the animal as “he” rather than “it.” This and other clues reveal that, if he was not a Moon worshipper himself, the narrator is for some reason very familiar with the customs of that faith, which included, as we have heard Keera say, deep reverence for the souls of animals, especially the Davon panthers. —C.C.

†† “… red velvet.” Here is an indication of how advanced Broken’s textile production, or its trade with other kingdoms to its south in Europe, or both, must have become: velvet had only just reached that continent from the Islamic empire at the time that the Broken Manuscript was most likely written (the late eighth to early ninth centuries) and was considered an enormously rare and valuable fabric, worn only by the elites of the countries it made its way into. —C.C.

† “… the cavernous Temple.” Gibbon writes, “This description of the High Temple of Broken is revealing, and further confirms the notion that the city and state were something of a stewpot of cultural and aesthetic influences: while termed a ‘temple,’ the building has the evident design and attributes of a European — and Christian — church or cathedral. We know that, in the Eastern Roman Empire during this same period, rulers beginning with Constantine were devising ways to adapt the Christian faith to the pagan rituals of the various populations contained within the empire’s borders, and vice versa. Is it possible that the royal family of Broken was involved in some similar enterprise, or, even more intriguingly, in a precisely opposite undertaking, that is, in adapting Christian architecture and rites to their own faith of Kafra? Certainly, we cannot exclude the possibility — particularly as we know (and I myself have seen) that the ‘Broken Codex’ used by the Manuscript’s translator consisted of portions of the Bible written in the Broken dialect. It has been heretofore assumed that this was for missionary Christian purposes; but what if the intention was to alter the biblical text, and make it serve the purposes of the priests and priestesses of Broken?”

† “… a distant region of Davon Wood by the Bane.” Gibbon writes, “The narrator’s consistent references to the quarrying and mining activities of the Bane will not surprise anyone acquainted with the Harz mountain range, as they are rich not only in fine quality stone, but in silver, iron, lead, copper, and zinc; and although the exploitation of these deposits is generally thought to have begun on a systematic scale only in the tenth century, it is by no means overly imaginative to think that a people living in the mountain and forest wildernesses around Brocken during an earlier age should have developed the means to create a primitive series of mines and quarries, all evidence of which would have been overtaken by Nature in the centuries following Broken’s downfall.” What Gibbon could not have known was that, during the early Industrial Revolution (within, ironically, mere decades of the great scholar’s death), the mines of the Harz Mountains would rapidly be worked to complete exhaustion. —C.C.

† “… glittering, durable mortar …” This was likely either stucco or concrete — both of which were evidently used by Broken builders — mixed with reflective flecks of the many kinds of granite and quartz that were mined from the both the Harz and the Tombs (that is, the Harz and the Erz mountains) by the Bane. —C.C.

‡ “… every society that surrounds Broken.” As Gibbon writes, “The importance of this seemingly obscure detail of Broken craftsmanship cannot be overstated: the ability to maintain the production of glass windows throughout much of the Barbarian Age, when its secrets were thought to have been lost to all of Europe, was aesthetically, religiously, and governmentally significant.” Modern archaeologists and industrial historians agree that, while many barbarian tribes and nations maintained the skill of manufacturing glass beads and receptacles of various kinds, their ability to fabricate far more complicated window glass, whether clear, opaque, or colored, largely disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages, confirming the enormous role that the ability to produce such glass played in how the society of Broken “saw” both itself and the world around it. Cf., for instance, Macfarlane and Martin, Glass: A World History. —C.C.

† “… known across the Seksent Straits as ‘ermine.’” “For the first time,” says Gibbon, “we are given the impression that the narrator’s journey to our own region may have brought him into contact with persons more majestic than mere scholarly monks.”

† Grand Layzin Gibbon writes, “Again, we are forced to suspect a mere phonetic approximation in this word Layzin; for the sound is identical to the German lesen, ‘to read,’ but seems almost certainly to imply, in this more ancient form, a gerundial noun, ‘reader,’ for this appears to have been the Grand Layzin’s responsibility, as well as the source of his power: to read and give practical meaning to the thoughts and pronouncements of the God-King, as well as, presumably, to those of Broken’s god, Kafra. This ability — to translate divine intent into pragmatic action — was the source of authority for many similar pagan holy men (or what German scholars have taken to calling schamanes [shamans]), although few seem to have had the executive authority of Broken’s Layzin.”

‡ “… brocade mantle …” Here we get an idea of just how many intrepid foreign traders and raiders ventured to Broken’s ports and borders to sell their goods, and vice versa: brocade originally appeared in Persia during the Sassanid Dynasty (ca. 225–650 A.D.), and was evidently quite common in Broken by the time that the Manuscript was written (presumably the eighth century). It is possible that the techniques involved in producing brocade had been mastered by Broken textile craftsmen by this point, or that the city’s merchants were still bringing it up from the river Meloderna. Whatever the case, the fact that it is viewed by the narrator as an item worthy of remark only in reference to an important state figure is important. —C.C.

† “… his raiding sword …” The names given to weapons, among both the soldiers of Broken and the Bane, seem to have been determined either by the names of the peoples they borrowed their design from, or, more simply, the names and/or activities by which those foreign peoples were themselves known. Ergo, “short-sword” refers to the Roman gladius, a weapon that the Romans adapted from a Spanish blade, but which was often referred to among even Romans by the more descriptive and informal term — simply “short sword”—that the soldiers of Broken used. “Raiding sword,” meanwhile, seems to link the weapon to a people — in this case, to the early sea- and river-faring raiders that the modern world would come to know as Norsemen and Vikings. The straight blade of the “raiding sword,” along with its length (longer than the late-imperial Roman spatha, a weapon that was a compromise between traditional Roman and barbarian weapons), matches the simple yet devastatingly effective design that the Scandinavian tribes and nations employed for nearly the whole of their history. —C.C.

† Visimar Another solidly Gothic name, although the man’s assumed name, as we shall see, was not, suggesting that at some time, perhaps in the distant past, the Gothic- and Old High German — speaking peoples who inhabited the area that would become the kingdom of Broken lived in some unidentified (and now unidentifiable) state of animosity. —C.C.

† profilic and freilic Gibbon writes, “These words offer us some insight into the development of the Broken dialect in its later period. As at other points in the Manuscript, we find, here, words that are more Germanic than Gothic, and more like modern German than Old High or Middle High German; yet the suffix ‘ic’ may well be a holdover from Gothic, if we accept that the two terms refer, respectively, to flanking wings of cavalry (profilic) and the free-roaming (freilic). The former were units literally on the flanks, or ‘profiles,’ of the army, the latter those ‘free’ to reinforce weaknesses in lines of battle, as well as exploit openings in the enemy’s lines. Why the translator should not have been able to divine as much, I cannot say, save that his knowledge of things military seems to have suffered from severe limitations, as is often the case with deeply cultured men.” This analysis — and the questions regarding the translator’s apparent limitations — have endured, and time has affirmed Gibbon’s interpretation of the words; although it ought to be said that Gibbon’s notes reveal that he was another “deeply cultured” man who suffered (periodically, at least) from intellectual weaknesses concerning “things military”—especially as far as the military histories and cultures of the barbarian tribes in comparison to the Romans went. —C.C.

† “… Moon worshipper symbols …” We can reasonably assume that these symbols were more sophisticated variations on those found on the “Sky Disc of Nebra” (see note for p. 00, below), probably incorporating runic interpretations, and making up what little written language certain members of the Bane tribe employed. —C.C.

‡ the Ayerzess-werten Gibbon wrote of this term, “Both the names assigned by the Bane to particularly dangerous waterfalls in the Cat’s Paw River—Hafften Falls and the Ayerzess-werten—are as yet, for reasons which I have explained elsewhere, undecipherable to scholars of this region and period: an irritating fact, as they seem to have imparted some definite sense of Bane irony.” The statement is almost certainly an honest expression of true ignorance, since experts only began to gain anything like a detailed knowledge of Gothic toward the very end of Gibbon’s life, while any systematic understanding of Old High German was out of the question, given how few documents were available to serve the purpose that the Broken Codex served for that kingdom’s dialect. The discoveries of modern scholars, however, in addition to consultation with them, reveal first that the word Hafften is likely an early forerunner of the modern German verb anhaften, “to cling to”—which could be taken simply as a literal indication of what travelers were forced to do when they met with mishap while trying to cross the first of the named waterfalls. But examination of the second name, Ayerzess-werten, shows that Gibbon’s suspicions about Bane irony were well founded: both terms were, almost certainly, intended (in accordance with the narrator’s description) as a sort of black humor. Ayerzess-werten derives from a known Gothic phrase, airzeis-wairthan, which translates as the fairly pedestrian term “fall into error.” The double entendre created by the Bane when they applied the phrase to a sudden and steep gorge leading down to a deadly series of rocks and waterfalls is evident, and further demonstrates that the Bane were very much more than a tribe of uneducated and deformed criminal exiles. As for the change in spelling, it can be attributed to the influence of Old High German and the now familiar “vowel shift.” —C.C.

†† gneiss formations Gneiss is igneous rock of a quality inferior to granite, as well as a name for the second most common type of stone found in the Harz Mountains, granite itself being predominant. The name gneiss seems to date back to the first Saxon settlers; and while most of these tribes had, by the sixth century, moved out of the area that would soon become the kingdom of Broken, some members stayed behind, perhaps explaining why seksent was the Broken word for “peasant” (as earlier noted). —C.C.

§ “… the position of the Moon and stars.” It may seem strange that, up to this point in the story, the Bane appear to have a better mastery of time and navigation as measured and charted by the heavens than do the citizens of Broken — but we must remember that the earliest known European instrument used to determine the timing of the solstices specifically, and to measure the movements of celestial bodies generally, was the “Sky Disc of Nebra,” created no less than 3,600 years ago — in these same Harz Mountains. Indeed, one of the points of triangulation used in the famous Sky Disc was the mountain of Brocken itself. It would appear that there was a long-established tradition of such primitive scientific study among the people of the area; and it likely survived more intact among those tribes that maintained traditional belief systems (i.e., the Bane) than among those that pretended and aspired to greater scholarship (the subjects of Broken). See the explanation of Buhmann, Pietsch, Lepcsik, and Jede, “Interpreting the Bronze Age Sky Disc of Nebra using 3D GIS.” —C.C.

† and passim “gutting blade” Again, one cannot help but wonder, especially given the aforementioned general use of the seax among the Saxons, who took their name from the weapon, if these knives that the narrator persistently refers to as “gutting blades” did not in fact have a far broader and greater purpose, by design or by accident, than the name might suggest: if they were not, that is, like the seax, as close to a sword as a utilitarian knife, much in the manner of yet another such weapon, the Frankish scramasax, so close to the seax that the two words are often used interchangeably. The Bane evidently relied on gutting blades so greatly in situations involving close combat that one is led to the strong suspicion that the “gutting” in question must have included not only dead animals, but living humans, too, and perhaps even more so — indeed, to so great an extent that the narrator does not even consider it worthy of explanation. A wound to the gut of a man, then as now, was the next best thing to an actual kill, given that serious abdominal wounds are paralyzingly painful and usually fatal; and the death, being slow and agonizing, renders the unfortunate victim unfit for continued action. —C.C.

† “The hysterical woman …” Gibbon writes, “The phrase employed here, in the original Broken dialectal version of the Manuscript, apparently translated, literally, to ‘moonsick,’ which the translator of the work immediately associated with ‘hysteria.’ The two concepts do, indeed, have much in common, ‘hysteria’ being a feminine illness which arises out of the womb, and is generally supposed to be governed by the lunar cycle: hence, ‘moonsickness’ becomes ‘hysteria.’” We should not fault the great scholar for what may appear to us a ludicrous interpretation: in 1790, many if not most violent mental disorders in women were still considered forms of hysteria, which was indeed thought to arise from the womb (the ancient Greeks, of course, first came up with the idea, hystero- being the Greek root for “utero” and “uterine”), and to be governed, therefore, by the phases of the moon. What does seem odd is Gibbon’s failure to connect “moonsickness” to “lunacy,” both being illnesses attributed, obviously, to the moon (see note for p. 00). —C.C.

† “… to form a skehsel …” Gibbon writes, “Again, there remain, alas, several words and phrases, the precise meanings of which the purveyor the Manuscript could not, or would not, determine; and, even more irritatingly, he persistently refused to say why he could not. I have left these words and phrases in quotations [changed to italics here], and have tried to extrapolate meanings as best I can from context.” Skehsel was apparently not one of the words he could so extrapolate, and, as in the case of the names of the waterfalls, it appears in its original form because the scholarship of Gibbon’s time simply had not caught up to the Broken Manuscript. We can now speculate with reasonable certainty, however, that the word is some sort of an Old High German variation on the Gothic skohsl, the term for an “evil spirit” of neutral gender. Why the Bane should have feared such spirits above others (and they mention several) is unknown, but we can also speculate, based on the very high priority the Bane placed on the natural ordering of the world, their reputation as a highly sexed people among the citizens of Broken, as well as the frequency with which “gelding” is mentioned as among the worst of fates, that it is precisely the gender neutrality of the demon that so disturbed them. The Bane evidently believed, as did many Barbarian Age peoples, that humans could, as a course of last resort, mate with most spirits and other mythical creatures, as a means of appeasing them; the skehsel do not seem to have offered that option, and, as has always been (and still is) the case in traditional societies that are followers of certain pagan religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, the failure to produce offspring, any kind of offspring, implied personal annihilation. This may well have been true for the Bane, as well. —C.C.

† “… bested by Welferek …” Gibbon writes, “This man Welferek must, indeed, have held a position of importance among the Outrager ‘knights,’ for his name cannot but be a Broken-Germanic variation of the name we encounter in Old English as Wulfric, the ‘lord (or king) of wolves.’ Given the activities of the Outragers, such a title implies high honor and authority, as well as loyalty to the Priestess of the Moon strong enough to earn him the right to carry out the most sacred punishments — as he does in this case.” Since Gibbon’s time, the word “wolf” (or “wolves”), used in this connotation, has been identified as having the secondary, metaphorical meaning of “hunter(s)”; and it is almost certainly true that the knight Welferek was the Priestess of the Moon’s chief “hunter” as in executioner — or even assassin. —C.C.

† “‘… can only be the Halap-stahla …’” Gibbon writes, “Again, the peculiar formulation of the names of the rites of punishment and execution in Broken frustrate almost every attempt we can make to determine their origins. Whether the Halap in Halap-stahla has any basis in some early Germanic variation of halbe, itself a variation, in certain German dialects, of halb, or ‘half,’ or if it is derived from the Gothic halba, which shares the same meaning, or from some other term entirely undiscovered, we cannot answer with certainty — although it seems at least possible, given the ‘halving’ nature of the mutilation.”

† “… warriors will meet once more.” Gibbon writes, “In stating that many if not most of the tribes of the region surrounding Broken shared the faith that fallen warriors went on, in the afterlife, to a great hall where perpetual carousing and other indulgences were on offer, Arnem (and the tale’s narrator) spoke more truly — and presciently — than they likely knew, for it was not merely, or even especially, in Germany that this belief had taken root, by this time, and would become elaborated in centuries to come: Most schoolboys of our day are familiar with Valhalla, the Norse version of this myth; but, in truth, the idea pervaded many northern European ‘barbarian’ faiths, and not a few Eastern tribes, as well. On the other hand, there were also warrior cultures of the time that had little or no faith in an afterlife (for one example, consult the Beowulf Manuscript acquired several decades ago from Sir Robert Cotton during the founding of the British Museum), and which therefore placed all the more emphasis on a man’s achievements in this life, thinking that such was the only way to keep one’s name and spirit alive after death.”

† trouser “feet” During this period, it was common for European working classes to wear cloth pants that extended all the way down to encase even the toes, much like modern-day children’s pajamas with “feet,” to which these older garments have often been compared. Such covering obviated the need for “foot stockings,” or socks, but were often more vulnerable to wear and tear. —C.C.

† “‘the Lord God of the Lumun-jani’” Gibbon writes, “This is the first ambiguous reference to Christianity in the text. By the seventh or eighth century, nearly all the barbarian tribes, with the exceptions of a few small clans in discrete domains [including, evidently, Broken], had adopted what was by then the long-established state religion of Rome; and, as at least a few of the Bane must have come into contact with missionaries of that faith and other representatives of Rome — probably during their trading sessions in the Broken town of Daurawah — we can reasonably conclude that both Broken’s subjects and the Bane knew the general story of Jesus Christ, including the crucifixion, which is the subject of the Bane forager’s allusion, here.” Stated more graphically than Gibbon was apparently willing to do, we can assume that Heldo-Bah is declaring that Welferek’s being pinned to a tree with knives in a vaguely outstretched position resembles the most infamous ritual punishment inflicted on so many slaves and criminals by the Roman Empire. This underscores the point of how fluid the religious situation during the Barbarian Age was: as Gibbon says, Heldo-Bah would have been most likely to come across a crucifix in the Broken trading center of Daurawah, which the narrator has already spoken of his having visited. The fact that Gibbon let this remark go with only an explanatory comment was almost certainly a fruitless effort to keep Burke from reacting to the story in precisely the manner that he ultimately did. —C.C.

† “… patterns of profound complexity …” Again, we tend, today, to take the many uses that glass serves for granted; but if we remember that most of the tribes and kingdoms surrounding Broken had either lost the ability to create window glass, or, as in the case of nomadic tribes like the Huns, had never had any need for it, we can begin to get an idea of how little the narrator is exaggerating, here: light, in its various forms, was more than simply a source of illumination, during the period of Broken’s existence, and could, when cleverly used, inspire faith in one’s deity and confidence in the wisdom of one’s leaders. Oxmontrot would indeed have seen this process at work (in a number of ways) if he had been a mercenary in the employ of both the western and the eastern parts of the Roman Empire; and it is small wonder that he would have placed such emphasis on preserving and advancing the art of glassmaking in the kingdom that he founded. —C.C.

† “… a marble initiation font …” Gibbon writes, “The use of the words ‘marble initiation font’ may be taken by Christians less informed than yourself [that is, than Edmund Burke] as ‘proof’ that the Kafran religion was nothing more than a polluted form of their own faith; and, of course, certain similarities do exist. But, they are minor; and the more important aspect of the Kafrans’ use of ‘fonts’ and ‘altars’ is its reinforcement of the fact that, among the barbarian tribes of Europe during the Dark Ages, religion was in a state of near-constant turmoil and adaptation, a condition that saw Christians borrowing rites, holy days, and customs from pagans — and, more to the point (although far less popularly recognized), pagans doing the same with regard to Christianity. Thus, we can no more cite the existence of an ‘initiation font’ within the High Temple of Kafra as evidence of Christian influence than we can say that the original baptismal practices of early Christians were adapted from the ‘blood-baptisms’ of more than a few barbarian tribes, at least some of which took place in just such fonts and receptacles, which were often located in temples.” Gibbon, although attempting again to be tactful, cannot entirely suppress his own passionate feelings on the subject. Still, given his personal agnosticism and Edmund Burke’s repeated and public defenses of the Christian faith (even, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, of Catholic Christianity), the above statement is an admirable if unsuccessful attempt at restraint. —C.C.

‡ “A small, circular piece of brass …” It should surprise no one to learn that the metalworkers of Broken, as well as those of the Bane, were capable of producing such alloys as brass, bronze, and steel (although the Bane were, of course, laboring with far less advanced equipment than was available in Broken, and therefore were unable, up to the time of these events, to achieve the kind of alloys that were available to their enemies). The mountains of the area, as has been noted several times, are rich in all the ores necessary to produce these important materials, or rather, they were, at the time: again, the originally plentiful deposits were exhausted relatively early in the Industrial Age. —C.C.

† Atta Pass Gibbon would have been unable to do more than guess at the full meaning of this name, which is perhaps why it goes unnoted by him. Now, however, we can reliably translate atta as one of many Gothic terms for “father,” this one in the sense of “forefather”—but it may also have been intended, in the case of such an important and deadly physical location as this mountain pass, to carry a religious interpretation; and, while any reference to a masculine deity may at first make us think of Kafra, the state of religious flux that dominated Europe (even, to some extent, in and around Broken) at the time poses intriguing alternative interpretations, and suggestions of the Christian “Father” who is more familiar to us today — and whose faith was spreading throughout the Germanic tribes. —C.C.

‡ “‘… dwarfish exiles …’” Obviously, given the repeated explanations of the Bane’s height as having not been, in the main, a result of dwarfism, references on the part of anyone in Broken — especially Lord Baster-kin — to “misshapen dwarves” must be taken as a slur. They also offer consistent reinforcement of the fact that the Bane were not de facto dwarves, at least in the main: had they been, “dwarf-ish” would hardly have been such a common insult used in reference to them. We return, then, to the notion of “miniature” human beings, as well as the more likely question of genetic adaptation. —C.C.

† “‘… the Varisians with their longboats …’” Gibbon writes, “Once again, we must consider the words Frankesh and Varisian to be, like Torganian, mere phonetic approximations: the first for ‘Franks,’ or more precisely, the ‘Frankish,’ tribes who, as I have said, may already have driven the Torganians (‘Thuringians’) from the region south of Broken. Varisian, meanwhile, is clearly another such approximation, this one for ‘Frisian,’ a northern tribe notorious for their sea and river raiding.”

† “‘… our enemies.” It is important to understand that this discussion of torture, while it may seem anachronistic, is anything but, if one understands the history of warfare in any sort of detail. The torture of enemy combatants and noncombatants, and the question of whether any useful information gleaned by such methods outweighs the risk to the soldiers and people of the torturing side, is hardly unique to our own era: it is, in fact, at least as old as the Roman Empire, where it was debated in much the same fashion as it is today. The arguments have resurfaced regularly throughout Western history ever since; and we should therefore not be surprised to find it cropping up in these pages. Indeed, Gibbon himself is so familiar with it, apparently, that he does not even deem it worthy of mention. —C.C.

† the Lenthess-steyn Gibbon writes: “I must repeat, would that we had sufficient knowledge of the Broken dialect to comprehend the meaning of every phrase, particularly some of the most obscure yet revealing. One such is this place where the healers among the Bane, who appear to have been skilled in the use of herbs and the extracts of forest plants, did their noble and comforting work, and also, apparently, achieved advances in the knowledge of anatomy that religious superstition prevented in more ‘advanced’ societies and tribes — Galen himself [the father of Roman and, many believe, Western medicine] would have envied their freedom, in this regard!” Gibbon’s frustration over the lack of a precise translation perhaps prevented him from reasoning out the strange but appropriate meaning of the title of these caves. The phrase Lenthess-steyn can be pieced together from Gothic, Old High German, and Middle German (the usual mixture of the Broken dialect in its later phases): it seems to translate as “the Soft Stones,” implying caves in which the aged, the ill, or the wounded either recovered or had their journey to the Lunar afterlife eased, or “softened.” —C.C.

† “… effective in battle …” Before proceeding with any detailed discussion of the armor, helmets, and swords employed by the Bane and the army of Broken, one scholarly fact (best argued by Ewart Oakeshott in his Dark Age Warrior) must be reiterated, particularly regarding this region of northern Europe during the period under consideration: there are no definitive sources on the subject of just what “Dark Age warriors” employed for armor and helmets (and precious little concerning their manufacture and use of swords), and we must therefore judge largely by what we read in individual accounts — of which the Broken Manuscript is one of the most elaborate. Hence, we can infer, in this instance, that the presence of scale armor among the Bane is further evidence that Oxmontrot likely fought for the Roman armies of the eastern empire, as well as the western, since such “scale mail” was preferred by the formidable Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) armies. However, while the armorers of Broken appear to have been able to reproduce effective examples of this alternative to chain mail (an alternative that offered greater protection but limited range of motion), the Bane were apparently less able to do so. They likely had some quality examples (captured or stolen from Broken soldiers), but, as the narrator says, their craftsmen simply could not yet work in such detail, largely because of the quality of their iron — which, although about to improve, limited them to merely a few such suits, probably used more often for show than for combat.—C.C.

‡ “… the iron itself.” Again, the Bane were not, at this point, able to produce steel of a high enough grade to make the manufacture of truly quality blades and helmets possible, although they would soon gain the capacity to do so. This subject will be discussed in greater detail later in the story itself, but it does not spoil that story — and, more important, it is necessary — to note here that their swords were either of low-carbon steel, or steel laminated onto simple iron cores, as was common in barbarian Europe. Their helmets, meanwhile, were based very generally on those of the Broken army, which appear to have been within the family of Germanic adaptations of Roman helmets (and known collectively, as has already been discussed, as the Spangenhelm design) which included roughly conical or rounded helmets onto which were riveted or welded segments to cover the nose, cheeks, and sometimes the lower neck. The hinges in such designs were almost universally leather, save in the case of the highest-ranking soldiers, who could afford metal hinges. Without the latter two features, the Bane would have been left with something closer to the Norman helmet, a simple one-piece, conical design with a fixed nose guard as an organic extension, not a component: a sound enough protection, if the steel was of sufficient grade, which the Bane’s was not — a condition that was, again, about to be altered. —C.C.

† Ashkatar Here is a name that appears to have vanished completely, along with the society that gave it birth; and the best estimates of those experts consulted is that Ashkatar was an approximation, in the Broken dialect, of some altered or corrupted form of Augustus, the earlier name of Octavian Caesar, the famed architect of the Roman Empire during the bridging of the B.C. and A.D. eras. If so, this would indicate that Ashkatar’s ancestors had once been people of importance, perhaps quite close to Oxmontrot, for it would have been the Mad King and his fellow mercenaries who would have heard the story of Augustus during their years of campaigning for Rome. —C.C.

† the names of Arnem’s children The collection goes seemingly unnoticed by Gibbon, in all likelihood because they only offered him more frustration. Even today, one remains obscure: Dalin, which may or may not be some dialectal interpretation of the Gothic term for “share,” and may have been given to the boy at his mother’s urging precisely because of the child’s remarkable physical (and, apparently, behavioral) resemblance to his father, even at birth. We can be more sure, however, that the remaining names reflect either a general trend toward modern Germanic names in the kingdom of Broken, or a conscious effort by Sixt to emphasize his own heritage over Isadora’s apparently Gothic background (the Gothic tribes were, of course, “Germanic” in the broad barbarian and early medieval sense of the word, whereas “modern Germanic names” refers to those appellations belonging quite distinctly to the languages and dialects that would one day meld to form modern German.): Anje is a variation of Anna, Dagobert a fairly common medieval combination of the terms for “good” and “gleaming” (and the name of one of the great Merovingian Frankish kings, just before the period during which the Manuscript’s tale is almost certainly set, and possibly, therefore, borrowed by the worldly Arnem from those same Franks), while Gelie is a derivative of Angelika. The remaining name, Golo, seems to be some kind of variation on or nickname for “Gottfried.” It is still in use — as, indeed, are many of these names, in some form or another — but Dalin remains a riddle without a definite solution. —C.C.

† “… two large, crow-like birds.” of Isadora’s clasp, Gibbon writes, “Without doubt, we are faced, here, with a representation of Odin, patriarch (or ‘All-father’) of the Norse gods, who traded one of his eyes for wisdom, and was attended by two ravens, one representing Thought, the other Memory. What is of particular interest is the fact that, while we now think of this mythology as quaint, it was quite vibrant, during the period that Broken existed, and was such a threat to the Kafran faith (as it was to monotheism generally) that those who worshipped the Norse gods were declared to be, not wayward primitives, but doomed heretics, in Broken — just as they were by the early Christian church.” Once again, Gibbon reveals his fascination with other-than-Christian faiths, although worship of the Norse gods can hardly have been considered a “cult” or “mystery” religion — whereas (ironically) the Kafran faith does indeed fit the mold of either a cult or one of what are known as the “mystery faiths”. —C.C.

† Nuen The name of the Arnem children’s nurse and, later, governess is ignored by Gibbon, probably because Nuen would have been a thorny problem for him to solve, scholarly works on Eastern history and culture being relatively few, in his time, and many if not most of those relying on the work of ancient historians. Presuming Nuen to be an ancestor of the modern Nuan—which, in Chinese, is intended to connote warmth and geniality — may seem a logical conclusion, save that the connection between the Huns (almost certainly the people from whom this woman emerged) and the Chinese has long since been effectively dismissed; and even the Huns’ relation to the Xiongnu (or, in the older form, the Hsiung-nu), a tribe of nomads that occupied northern and northeastern Asia (an area that included much of Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang) and may have given rise to some of the similarly restless peoples that sprang out of those regions, is a relationship that, while once considered likely, has recently come to be deeply questioned and in some cases dismissed. Thus the Chinese background of the name is unlikely, but we have few theories to take its place; and so we are forced, like Gibbon, to simply accept the name — although with greater, if therefore more frustrating, awareness of just why we must. —C.C.

† breck Further evidence, if any is needed, that Isadora’s ancestors were indeed Goths who interbred, over time, with other, “newer” Germanic tribes: the word that we know as “brook” winds its way back through most of the related languages of the region — German, Dutch, Middle English and Old English — until its earliest ancestor is found in the Gothic brukjan. The diminishment of the Gothic influence, added to the Old High German vowel shift and the few peculiarities of the Broken dialect that we can speak of with confidence, more than explain the specific form encountered here. —C.C.

† Gisa The name of Isadora’s guardian and teacher, the woman who raised her following the robbery and murder of her parents, is another tantalizing clue to the pattern of religious and social evolution in both Broken and northern Germany generally: although identified as an Old High German name, Gisa’s precise meaning has been lost. We can, however, fairly safely assume both that it was a shortened form of the Germanic Gisela, which connotes both “hostage” and “tribute,” and that it was therefore probably not her original name. Thus, given her activities, was this woman of Nordic extraction perhaps sold into servitude in Broken after being taken as a slave by some unknown armed force or band? And, if she was indeed a “hostage,” was she a person of some importance in her northern homeland? Many such hostages during this era (as today, in parts of the developing world) were never redeemed — a fact that would explain both her bitterness and her indoctrination of Isadora into what was, in Broken, considered a heretical cult, but which was already an established religion in the region, and perhaps a major one; certainly, it was one that would undergo an enormous revival when it was reasserted by the Nordic tribes, many of which blended it with various interpretations and narrative chapters of Christianity. —C.C.

† “… his saddle’s iron stirrups …” A detail that goes unnoticed by Gibbon reveals itself, in the modern era of military history (and military technological history, especially), as being of enormous importance: Broken’s mounted troops were using metal stirrups. The Romans had no such advantage, accounting for why their cavalry units were not the most feared parts of their armies: it was the bracing offered by stirrups that created the stability necessary for men on charging horses to drive spear and lance points into massed infantry, as well as the control needed for mounted archers to fire without gripping the horse’s reins. (There were Asian steppe and American Indian tribes whose warriors could perform this action by way of using their thighs alone to control their mounts, but such were highly exceptional troops, at this time, and relatively rare). Without the stability and control made possible by iron and steel stirrups, horsemen were relatively easily knocked to the ground; whereas, possessed of this seemingly simple advantage, they were very hard to dislodge from their mounts. Two questions concerning Broken’s cavalry, however, remain: If they were indeed using stirrups, why were their mounted units not larger, more heavily armed, or trained in the performance of massed shock tactics that the innovation allowed? Furthermore, from whom did they borrow the all-important advance in mounted technology, which would literally change the face and fate of Europe? Whatever the case, by failing, on the one hand, to increase the size of units that had been given drastically increased shock power, and, on the other, to arm them with the full range of weapons that heavy cavalry mounted with metal stirrups could employ, and by electing instead to maintain their imitation of the Roman model despite possessing a tremendous advantage, the Broken army committed an error of enormous magnitude. —C.C.

† “… elected officials …” It is worth underscoring the point that the Bane’s process of electing various governmental officials, including their chief, was in keeping with the “barbarian”—or at least the Germanic — norm of the Dark Ages. Indeed, Western democracy owes as much (or more) to the codes of these societies than it does to those of ancient Greece and Rome. The Bane’s granting of an at least occasionally preemptive right of fiat to the High Priestess of the Moon does reveal, however, as the narrator suggests, a paradoxical, simultaneous, and deep tie between the exiles’ government and that of the city out of which they had been cast. —C.C.

† “… raft of parchment documents …” Although both the people of Broken and the Bane could make parchment from the organs and hides of calves, goats, and sheep, “the Tall” were considered the more advanced of the two peoples, in this context, mainly because they preserved the technique of manufacturing parchment scrolls: long sheets of parchment wound around two rods, or batons, with “pages” being “turned” by unwinding one rod and winding the other. The Bane, for their part, relied on loosely bound sheets of parchment, the irony being that, today, the image of the scroll has become emblematic of the archaic: indeed, it is virtually synonymous with ancient and early medieval cultures, while the bound sheets of parchment that the Bane employed were of course the earliest forms of modern books, and were symbols, therefore, of progress.

† “… four-year-old Effi …” The names of Keera’s children, like those of Sixt Arnem’s, offer important clues as to the cultural drift of each society, Bane and Broken. Effi is a form of the modern German Elfriede, Baza is an Old High German variation of the Slavic Boris, while Herwin is related to the modern Erwin, which is itself a variation of Hermann, still a common enough name in contemporary Germany, despite its original meaning: “friend of the army.” In short, the Bane, for all their imagined “inferiority,” may have been more closely linked to the modern German people than were the subjects of Broken. —C.C.

† ackars Ackar is believed to be the Old High German word for “acre,” and the amount of land it represented was reasonably close to that which we continue to assign to the term today. Some premodern definitions of an “acre” can vary a little, since the word literally refers to the amount of ground an ox can plough in a day, and certain unscrupulous, land-hungry authorities used teams of two oxen to get an increased measurement. Then, too, not all ground is equally easy to plough; but despite these and other considerations, the differences between the several legitimate versions tend to be small, and come out somewhere near the modern number of 43,560 square feet. —C.C.

† Alandra Another Broken dialectal rendering, this time of the modern German Alexandra, which is derived from the older Alessandra. Like its male counterpart, Alexander, the name means “protector”—a fact that, in the case of this particular woman, will prove accurate in one sense, but far more ironic in another. —C.C.

† sukkar The Arabic term for sugar, Arab traders having introduced granulated sugar made from Indian cane into the West only in the early eighth century: very shortly before the events recounted in the Broken Manuscript took place. Gibbon may have let this usage go without comment simply because he found its meaning obvious. —C.C.

† “phrenetic” There are cases in which an archaic spelling for a word that we might think anachronistic goes a long way toward demonstrating how very old some seemingly “modern” concepts are, and I have therefore left them in their original form; “phrenetic” is one such example. —C.C.

† the newts The color and general appearance of these creatures, together with their living in northern Germany, mark them as almost certainly being Great Crested Newts (Triturus cristatus), whose range once included almost all of Europe, and who have been reduced in number in modern times only by the loss of their habitat due to human development, to the point that they are now a threatened species. Newts are not, as Isadora seems to indicate, precisely the same animals as salamanders: but both do make up the two classes of the family Salimandridae, and it is therefore likely that no distinction was drawn between them in the ancient world, or during the Dark Ages. In addition, while the differing feeding, mating, breathing, and breeding habits and techniques of the seventy-odd members of this family are impossible to completely detail here, both newts and especially salamanders did, indeed, possess certain very important mystical and spiritual properties, in certain religions and folklores of those eras: they were fire spirits, or “elementals,” just as undines (or, variously, ondines) were water spirits, gnomes Earth spirits, and sylphs spirits of the air. Elementals were thought to be actually composed of their basic element, and the human who could control such a creature could, at least temporarily, control that element. —C.C.

† Emalrec Though it passes unmentioned by Gibbon, this name contains a mild irony: if we account for the vowel shift of Old High German, it becomes the fairly common Amalrec, a variation of Emmerich, both of which connote “powerful worker”—hardly accurate, in this case, and perhaps an intentional comment upon the state of affairs in the Fifth District, and in Broken’s society generally. Berthe, meanwhile, is obviously an archaic form of Bertha, drawn from the root beraht, meaning “bright” or “famous”: also an irony. —C.C.

‡ “sackcloth,” “smock,” and “rough material” Gibbon continues to pay little attention to the questions of how, and to what extent (a considerable one), judgments concerning wealth and station were drawn from elementary statements about clothing, particularly among women, in Broken as elsewhere in “barbarian” Europe. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that we find still more proof, here, that a woman’s clothing and therefore station in life were signaled by, in descending order, material(s) used, the quality of needlework, and color (expensive dyes obviously being available only to people of means). “Fashion,” as we understand the word today, scarcely existed, even in one of the most advanced societies of the time. In the case of the unfortunate Berthe, for example, the flat statement that she wears “a simple piece of sackcloth … poorly stitched” (sackcloth being a material that, since the time of the ancient Hebrews, had been used by penitents and mourners, who wished to deliberately torment themselves) seems intended to fix her station, in our minds. And indeed it can, if we are aware that sackcloth was no more than the burlap-like substance used, as the name indicates, for making sacks to hold grains, cotton, root vegetables, and similar items; it cannot, in short, have been a comfortable garment, even if “well stitched,” especially not for a woman who was pregnant, and even less for one who had no “smock,” which, again, during this period referred to a simple robe, usually cotton, that women wore as an undergarment, if they could afford it. —C.C.

† “plague” If this seems a leap to a conclusion on Isadora’s part, we should remember that the bubonic plague was constantly on the minds of people throughout Europe, Asia, and especially northern Africa (where most outbreaks began) during this period. Its principal symptoms were widely known, and its details known enough for someone like Berthe to realize that if her husband’s sores had not developed into buboes, the near-black sores that gave the Death its name, the disease was likely not the plague. On the other hand, many other people were not capable of such discrimination, leaving open the possibility that Berthe’s ability was only a product of her association with Isadora, a gifted healer. —C.C.

‡ “rose fever” Variations on this term can be found in more than a few ancient and medieval manuscripts, as can the many other names given to what was almost certainly typhoid fever; but it is important to note that “rose fever” could denote several other mortal fevers and sicknesses that shared crucial symptoms. The most common of these was typhus, and the general inability to tell the difference between the two during ancient and medieval times — evident in the similarity of and relationship between names — was a problem especially pertinent to and within the Broken Manuscript, as shall be seen. Even Gibbon, given the extent of medical knowledge in his eighteenth century, was in no position to make such distinctions (indeed, it was only in the nineteenth century that typhoid fever and typhus were definitely identified as two different illnesses); and at the time during which the events in the Manuscript were taking place, the lines between pestilences were far more blurred, so that the term “rose fever” likely included several other candidates, as well. Today, we can be more discriminating, and try to accurately distinguish between what were certainly (as we shall soon see) two illnesses that struck at the kingdom of Broken and the lands around it at the same time, but that were labeled “plague” by the stricken peoples; and the most important differentiating factor, in terms of understanding the events that the rest of the Manuscript chronicles, lies in the methods of transmission of these illnesses: direct physical contact with the afflicted, breathing of the same air or drinking of the same water, and finally (as we shall soon see) eating the same diet, a practice that brings into the picture yet another widespread disease with certain similar (actually, more horrific, but, ironically, less virulent) symptoms, a further confusion that would make the situation even harder to analyze. Note: To say more of this last method of transmission at this juncture, however, would be to spoil the suspense that the narrator is working hard to construct, at this as at other points: it is enough that we note, here, that two diseases were actually at work in Broken, and that none of them was actually “the plague” or “the Death,” phrases generally reserved for the Black Death, or bubonic plague.

Finally, it also should be noted that this phenomenon of two diseases being identified as one was not at all unusual, during this historical era; in fact, it is in many ways typical, especially of how little medicine had been allowed to advance by the various monotheistic faiths (for whom dissection of the bodies of those killed by the afflictions was a sin), in the four or five hundred years since Galen. —C.C.

† Bohemer and Jerej Both Slavic, and probably Slovak (given the geography), names, of which Gibbon comments, “We know the Slavs to have followed earlier invader tribes into central Europe by the beginning of the sixth century, and we must concern ourselves here with one of the principal groupings of this race, the Bulgars, whom we know to have undergone, by the late seventh century, a fractious division into two or more ‘empires’ of ‘great khans’—neither of which ‘empire,’ we should note, was as powerful or even as large as Broken. One of the chief factions thus produced moved east to the familiar ground of the Volga, while the other pushed on to establish itself upon the lower Danube; and from this forcefully acquired territory, the second group immediately commenced raiding the settlements, not only of the Byzantine [or Eastern Roman] empire to the south, but of other barbarian tribes in other directions. It therefore seems entirely credible that, by the moment of Broken’s crisis two centuries later, superfluous, criminal, or merely adventurous members of this empire — which had by then become firmly entrenched — might have struck out on their own, to find their fortunes in such famously wealthy kingdoms as Broken. Or, they may have been prisoners of war — or perhaps they even entered Broken, like Heldo-Bah, under the rather sinisterly ingenious policy of indentured servitude that allowed flesh-dealers to cheat Broken’s laws concerning slavery.” The two names, like the two servants, have rather contradictory natures, each being Broken dialectal versions of Slovak names, in the first case for “god of peace,” the second, “worker of the earth.” —C.C.

‡ bulger Gibbon writes, “While we have no specific justification for believing as much, it seems plain, given the information gleaned thus far, that this adjective is connected to a name: ‘Bulgar,’ which remains the shortened form of ‘Bulgarian.’ But there is a matter of interest here that makes the word, perhaps, more than just another Broken adaptation of another people’s name: when the narrator refers to the Frankesh (‘Frankish’) or to the Varisian (‘Frisian’) tribes, the first letter of each name appears in the upper case, as a measure of respect, one not accorded to such tribes as the seksents (Saxons), a name which, as we have seen, the subjects of Broken likely equated with ‘peasants.’ Apparently their attitude toward bulgers was similar; indeed, it is possible that this little piece of the Broken dialect contributed to one of the modern German terms for ‘vulgar,’ vulgär, as much as did the commonly-cited Latin vulgaris.” [It should be noted, here, that Gibbon is indulging his sometimes wild taste for speculation. —C.C.]

† Isadora’s “makeup” Ignored, perhaps not surprisingly, by Gibbon, are these examples of ancient and medieval cosmetics from opposite ends of the safety spectrum: rose water (produced when rose oil is creating through the steam distilling of rose petals) was used then much as it is today, for harmlessly scenting and softening the skin, while galena is the naturally occurring form of lead sulfide, with all the toxic implications that the term implies. Fortunately, Isadora is using it, as did many, as eye make-up alone, which would limit the area of application, diminishing absorption through the skin and making accidental interaction with the eye the only real danger. “Lip paint,” in which flower or berry juice was used for tinting, usually had a beeswax base, making the only possible toxic reaction in this case the effect of the poppies themselves: not a concern, as the plants had to have flowered to produce petals for tinting, whereas opium is derived from first scoring the immature seed pods of the plant, then harvesting the thin latex that oozes from the cuts, and finally processing it. —C.C.

† “surcoat” Both Old Saxon and Old Low German had terms that contributed to the word “coat”; and so, while “surcoat” itself is derived from the French and is also a term that came into use in a later period, there was almost certainly an analogous concept in the Broken dialect. The more interesting question here is not one of etymology, but of the object itself, since surcoats bearing heraldic figures are not even thought to have been in use in Europe until well after the eighth century. Yet, because the crest that appears on the surcoat in question — the rampant bear of Broken — involves the emblem of a kingdom, instead of a family or an individual knight, it is consistent with the development of European heraldry, which was still using such crests as most ancient peoples (particularly the Romans) did: to connote national, imperial, or individual military unit identity, rather than family or personal distinction. —C.C.

‡ “… best marauder sword …” The debate over which Eastern “marauding” tribes — that is, those who raided into Europe, such as the Huns, Avars, and Mongols — as well as which Muslim armies (or, more precisely, which parts of which Muslims armies) carried the kind of curved blade that Dagobert is said to be girded with, here, is one that has persisted for well over a hundred years. Some authorities claim that there is a widespread misperception — largely created by fiction and Hollywood — that such “exotic” or “Oriental” peoples as the Muslims and the Huns used curved, single-edged sabers and scimitars, in keeping with their non-Roman, non-Western appearance. But in fact, while there is strong reason to think that raiding peoples may have adopted such a weapon during the period under discussion for their cavalry units (curved blades being easier to withdraw from an enemy’s body at high speed), those marauder and Muslim soldiers who made up their infantry arms almost always copied the enormously successful double-edged, straight weapons of the Sassanid Persian Empire. As is so often the case, in such debates, one can scarcely do better than to go back to the remarkable archaeological work done by the famed traveler, adventurer, and “Orientalist,” Sir Richard F. Burton, contained in his The Book of the Sword, originally published in 1884, but wisely kept in print by Dover in an only slightly edited and abridged edition of 1987. —C.C.

† “… skulls piled as high as mountains …” Gibbon writes, “This mention of the infamous piling of enemy skulls, usually associated with later leaders such as Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine is of use in dispelling those same legends: it demonstrates that the notion of enormous piles of skulls is a far older bogey for children than has previously been imagined, thus weakening the idea that it was ever anything other than a useful nursery tool.” In fact, the exact truth may never be known about such infamous and dramatic tales concerning the warriors of the East and their kings, caliphs, emirs, and emperors; but since, in this same passage of the Manuscript, we find mention of another legendary practice for which there is actually a good amount of reliable evidence — the cooking of meat between the legs of Eastern riders and their horses’ backs — we cannot agree with Gibbon’s skepticism too quickly, simply to obey the imperatives of political correctness or a more basic revulsion at the very idea. Certainly, for instance, the great Turkic Emir Timur (or “Timur the Lame,” often contracted, variously, to Tamerlane or Tamburlaine, A.D. 1336–1405) had his own spies disseminate rumors of “mountains” built of tens of thousands of skulls among populations he hoped to conquer, as a way to weaken resistance and sow panic, a trick practiced more than two centuries earlier by Genghis Khan; and in both cases, we have reliable accounts to prove that these men at least sometimes made good on their threats — as they must have done, in order to be sure that the threats themselves carried weight. “Mountains” is doubtless an exaggeration; but a pile of human skulls numbering in the tens of thousands must surely have seemed a mountain, to horrified onlookers. —C.C.

† Allsveter and ‡ Wodenez Two of the most common terms used to describe the deity whom Gibbon has already and correctly (but not adequately) termed “the patriarch of the Norse gods,” Odin (also known, as in Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, as Wotan). He had even more obscure names, among the Germanic tribes, since their adherence to this faith (again, contrary to much popular and even some scholarly opinion) predated the arrival of the Norse invaders, perhaps and importantly explaining the German people’s consistent fascination with the myths. For the purposes of these examples, however, Allsveter is almost certainly the Broken dialectal term meaning “All-father,” or “Father of all,” a concept that, we should note, is not, in any of its variations, synonymous with “all-powerful” or “supreme being,” as in the Christian sense of God: Wotan, like all the other great polytheistic patriarchs, had challengers, mistresses, and weaknesses; could suffer defeats; endured not only self-doubt, but regrets; and enjoyed the distinction of having been the only pagan patriarch to endure facial disfigurement, when he traded one of his eyes for Wisdom. —C.C.

†† “‘… the runes …’” Evidently, Gisa taught Isadora not only the practices of a skilled healer, but other talents, as well, talents that, under the old, traditional faith of Broken, would have gone hand in hand with healing: those of a seeress, a woman (and such divining figures were almost universally women, among the Germanic tribes) who could cast runes — anything from collections of bones and sticks to chosen stones carved with runic symbols — and gain, not specific details of the future, but an idea of general trends, most importantly for her tribe. —C.C.

† “… the family’s modest litter …” Gibbon writes, “Although this was doubtless another of Oxmontrot’s attempts to ape Roman customs, it also served, as so many of his policies did, a secondary and pragmatic purpose: Romans rode litters borne by slaves, as opposed to horses, as both a mark of status and as a method of limiting the amount of horse dung and urine that cluttered their already narrow and foul streets. The imperative for the second of these purposes in a city of stone, built upon the summit of a lone mountain some three and a half thousand feet in elevation, would have been even greater.”

† Selke and Egenrich Although evidently inscrutable in Gibbon’s day, the names of Keera’s and Veloc’s parents can now be traced more certainly: Selke—like Elke, in Frisian, from which the name was derived — is apparently a Broken “pet name” for the Germanic Adelheid (or Sedelheid, in the Broken dialect), the usual meaning of which is “kind and noble.” But in the Broken version, “noble because kind” would be closer, and the fact that Selke appears to have been a name used only by the Bane reminds us that compassion was a quality found in greater abundance among the exiles in Davon Wood than in Broken. Besides being a virtue, for the Bane, compassion was also good sense — it kept the tribe open to new outcasts, who thus increased their numbers, brought new blood into the breeding pool, and increased the Bane’s strength and good fortune accordingly. Egenrich, meanwhile, is the Broken version of the very common German name Heinrich, by way of the Old High German version, Haganrich, all three of which mean roughly the same thing, “strong ruler.” Thus, the couple together stand for “compassion and strength”: not only the highest of Bane virtues, but an apt description, to judge by their actions, of the role they played in the lives of their two natural children and their one adopted (if wayward) son. —C.C.

† the title “Interlude: A Forest Idyll” It is unclear whether Gibbon detected any note of either irony or outright sarcasm in the title of this section of the Manuscript: whatever the case, while the subject matter broadly resembles what we would expect to find in a typical “idyllic” pause between more narrative episodes, and while the central relationship between the two characters introduced in these pages would certainly seem to justify such a label, each of the histories of those characters is so marred by tragedy and violence, the examples of which are so carefully, indeed graphically phrased (and with so little concern for the elements of poetics or aesthetics), that it seems probable that the narrator, rather than attempting a true idyll, is attempting an earnest — indeed, a grim — broadside against some of the most fatuous popular misconceptions and literary foibles of his time. —C.C.

† “… the forces of revolutionary destruction …” Gibbon refers to the growing Romantic movement, and particularly to that school most obviously represented by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose theories centered on the Natural World, the “Social Contract,” and what is perhaps unjustly dismissed as the theory of the “Noble Savage.” Rousseau’s views on social and societal relationships among humans were indeed twisted and prostituted to the cause of excessive, unchecked violence during the French Revolution, as well as other unsavory episodes during that period and others to come. The most sensible of Romantics recognized the limitations of the philosophy, to say nothing of its dangers, during the French Reign of Terror; but many held on to the ideas tenaciously, rationalizing brutal behavior among human societies that any animal species would certainly have disdained. —C.C.

† neura Gibbon writes, “This is, of course, a term taken from Greek antiquity, one originally employed by [the fourth century B.C.] physician Praxagoras of Cos to describe what he thought were a special set of arteries that transmitted the ‘vital force,’ or ‘divine fire’ which all progressive Greek medical minds called pneuma, an invisible substance in the air that is inhaled and traveled from the lungs to the heart, vitalizing the blood that was to be sent to the various appendages and organs of the body, making function and animation possible. However, Praxagoras’s student, Herophilus of Alexandria [335–280 B.C.], building on his teacher’s work yet pushing well beyond it, realized that the neura were in fact not arteries, but instead represented an entirely separate method of transmitting the pneuma. In the modern age, of course, when we have learned through the work of the chemists Lavoisier and Priestley that it is oxygen that in fact fulfills the role assigned to the pneuma, such opinions may seem quaint; but we ought not underestimate their importance as steps along the way to the truth.” One need only add that we ought, too, to recognize that the work of the ancient Greeks is remembered in the name eventually and correctly given to that other “special set of arteries,” the nervous system, or nerves, the adjectival root for which is, of course, neural, and whose basic units of signaling all sensations are neurons using electro-chemical transmission. —C.C.

‡ “the thirl” A term used by various northern tribes — including, apparently, the old man’s unnamed steppe horse people, who were likely from the Ukraine or some other pseudo-European area — in the same sense that we use the word “thrill” today. Indeed, there is an obvious etymological connection between the two, and a behavioral one, as well: the old man’s tribe, like many modern people, actively sought such experiences. —C.C.

† “… the endless steppes …” The background of this character (prior to his becoming a traveling scholar, apparently well known throughout what we today call the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and even parts of India for his expertise in fields ranging from medicine to warfare) remains obscure, although certain logical conclusions may be reached that are important to the tale, as it contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the old man’s character and behavior. We can safely rule out any chance that he came from one of those known horse peoples who dominated the critical southern and central regions of the Pontic-Caspian steppe well before and then through the early Dark Ages: the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Goths during the Roman era, as well as the Huns and Alans from the fourth to the eleventh centuries A.D. None of these were noted trading tribes; farther north, however, there were peoples who not only better matched the old man’s physical description, but whose history at this time accounts for the his ancestors having become apparently changed from horsemen to successful tradesmen, with ships and caravans that visited the Mediterranean basin and northern Europe, as well as the Middle and Far East, in the latter case using what was already being called, in the old man’s time, the “Silk Path” (later the Silk Road), the only known land route to China. Now referred to as “proto-Balts” (possibly of Finnish origin), in their earliest incarnation these tribes were Indo-European peoples who had, by the eighth century, been pushed into concentrated communities, first inland, to protect themselves from coastal raiders, but, when they grew strong enough, on the Baltic Coast itself. The exact nature and range of goods available in these important ports and towns — known as “emporiums”—is not known, but it was certainly extensive: soon after the establishment of the Islamic empire during the same era, for example, Islamic silver was being traded in Baltic ports, marking their inhabitants as distinctly different from the Slavic tribes that were coming to dominate the areas to their south.

Among the most noteworthy Baltic peoples were (and in many cases remain) Lithuanians and Latvians to the east, as well as Pomeranians and Prussians to the west. These last two regions are of special interest in determining why the old man may have found Broken such a congenial home: Saxony (the German region in which Brocken was and is located) was close by, and may also have been “close,” in environmental characteristics and general feel, to those places where the old man’s family and tribe had been forced to go when they were pushed away from the great steppe, and became tradesmen rather than a horse people. —C.C.

‡ “… still understood and respected …” Here is the first solid reference on the part of the narrator to the notion that scholarship and learning have been disappearing in the “known” world, suggesting that he is writing toward or after the end of Broken’s history (ca. the early eighth century), rather than toward the beginning (sometime in the fifth century): while the fifth was certainly not a century renowned for scientific advances, it would still have been too soon for a scholar to declare the onset of a long “dark age,” whereas by the early eighth century, that pattern was clear and unarguable, and had not yet been reversed by the establishment of the great Islamic centers of secular learning in Spain and Iraq. —C.C.

†† Herophilus, Galen, and Bede The fact that Gibbon feels no need to identify these characters both demonstrates the high level of even a “basic” education among the “educated classes” of his day, and is a special tribute to the historical awareness of Edmund Burke: Herophilus is explained in the note to p. 000, above, while Galen (A.D. 129–216) was the most important figure in medicine between the legendary Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370 B.C.) and the advent of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. True, Galen based his work on the humoral system: the idea that the body had four primary organs of importance — heart, liver, spleen, and brain, the last considered directly tied to the lungs — that produced four basic fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), the harmonious balancing of which was the definition of good health. But he also made leaps and strides concerning anatomy and other areas of practical medicine so significant that he became the only doctor by whom more than one Roman emperor would consent to be treated. In addition, by telling us that Galen wrote his famous work on dreams “nearly five hundred years before the old man’s time,” the narrator would seem to be making an unusually definite statement that the old man lived during the early eighth century (although he may have been born in the last years of the seventh), which fits with all other actual chronologies in the Manuscript.

Bede, in the meantime, often called “the Venerable Bede,” was a monk who was indeed born in the important monastery of St. Peter at Wearmouth, in the present British county of Durham, in A.D. 673. However, although often identified (as he is by the Broken Manuscript’s narrator) with that institution, he completed his adult works — most importantly his History of the English Church and People, (A.D. 731) — in nearby Jarrow, at the newer monastery of St. Paul, which one expert (Leo Sherley-Price) identifies as a “joint-foundation” with St. Peter’s. The library apparently shared by the two monasteries was one of if not the most extensive in Britain, and Bede played an important part in translating and critiquing great authors of the past, particularly those of Greece and Rome, and he had a mastery of subjects ranging from music to medicine. He was at the height of his powers when he would have received the visit from the Manuscript’s old man, who had been roaming the Far East, North Africa, and Europe; it is possible, in fact, that the old man crossed the “Seksent Straits”—again, almost certainly the English Channel at its narrowest point, between Calais and Dover — with the specific purpose of seeking out both Bede and the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow. —C.C.

† “Galen the Greek” Apparently unnoticed by Gibbon (or perhaps, again, deliberately ignored, so as not to call attention to an apparent inconsistency in the Manuscript) is the use of “Greek” here, rather than what we will soon discover was the Broken dialectal term, Kreikisch. This sort of shift occurs too repeatedly, throughout the “Idyll,” to be mere accident — it seems, instead, to clearly indicate a desire on the part of the narrator to display the far more learned, cosmopolitan background and personality of the old man. —C.C.

‡ “… from their dreams.” It is both amazing and frustrating to note how very close such early scientific minds as Galen’s and the old man’s came to unlocking the secrets of dreams, and thus stealing Sigmund Freud’s (as well as Carl Jung’s) thunder, at least a thousand years before those pioneers of psychiatry, psychology, and dream interpretation completed their work on the subject: had those earlier authorities only been able to realize that dreams are particularly revealing symptoms of mental and physical disorders, rather than analogous identifiers of disease, one is tempted to wonder how much earlier the development of Western psychology would have commenced, and thus how very different the course of Western history would have been. —C.C.

† “Roma” Again, the use of the proper Latin name for the eponymous capital of the Roman Empire raises questions about when exactly the narrator chose to use particular forms of words, and in what languages, to achieve desired effects: that effect once more being, here, to underline the great learning of the old man. —C.C.

‡ “the Cilician Dioscorides” The narrator refers to the eminent first-century pharmacologist, Pedanius Dioscorides, author of the five-volume On Materia Medica. Thought to have lived between about A.D. 40 and 90, Dioscorides traveled throughout the world known to Western scholars, gathering samples of botanical, mineral, as well as what we would today call animal-based homeopathic remedies, although it is as a medical botanist that he was chiefly known and would be remembered. To provide practical tests of the various cures he either discovered or compiled, he sometimes campaigned with (and may actually have served in) the Roman army. His monumental work, published in about A.D. 77, was definitive enough to remain what Vivian Nutton, in his Ancient Medicine, calls “the bible of medical botany,” one that was still in use “well into the seventeenth century”; and, as we shall see, Dioscorides’ life certainly served as an example for the old man, just as Galen’s did; but the old man was able to include, in his own (unfortunately lost) pharmacopoeia, plants gathered in both Afghanistan and India that Dioscorides had heard tales about, but never encountered. —C.C.

†† the “museum” Gibbon writes, “The ‘museum’ at Alexandria was, in fact, a building that reflected the early and literal meaning of the word, which is to say, a structure dedicated to the Muses, or to artistic and scholarly endeavor. It would be flattering to think that our own ‘museums’ have retained this character; plainly, it is not always or even usually so.” Yet this note does not seem aimed at Edmund Burke, who likely knew the classical meaning of “museum” as well as Gibbon did; and it’s therefore hard to shake the feeling that Gibbon was at least considering publishing the Manuscript, before he received Burke’s reply. —C.C.

† “the patella” Gibbon writes (with the possible end, as stated in the next note, of distracting Burke’s attention from the horrors immediately following), “Here is proof, validated by the off-hand nature in which it is mentioned, that both the narrator and the priests of Kafra knew far more of human anatomy than we today associate with those ages we call ‘dark’: the patella is the Latin classification of the ‘knee-cap,’ a fact that the narrator of the Manuscript — whose expertise does not seem to have extended into medical realms — nonetheless seems to have taken as commonly understood.”

‡ “Roma … gangraena … crurifragium …” As extraordinary as the horrifying detail (both historical and anatomical) provided here may be, Gibbon’s silence on the subject is almost as shocking. He likely maintained it because of how close the narrator comes to describing the Passion of Jesus Christ: Gibbon probably felt (and if so, correctly) that Burke would have already been inclined to view this brief description as near-blasphemous, without any further elaboration on his own (Gibbon’s) part.

Textually, we again encounter the use of Latin, apparently employed, here as elsewhere, not only to further convince us of the old man’s knowledge and erudition, but out of disdain: the narrator’s own contempt for the sadism of Roman punishment rituals is obvious and palpable, and is echoed in the translator’s sudden use of what we now suspect to have been the bitter and perhaps pejorative title for Rome, Lumun-jan. Gangraena, meanwhile, is again the Latin (and therefore, in Barbarian Age and medieval Europe, the official medical) term for gangrene, clearly meant to display the old man’s great medical knowledge; while crurifragium refers to a little-known detail of many Roman crucifixion rituals. Victims of this already nightmarish torture often lived — like Jesus — for a day or even two on the cross, in almost unimaginable agony: as the text here says, almost every joint, especially in the upper body, was nearly torn apart. The only “relief” that the unfortunate prisoner could even try to get was offered by the block of wood placed beneath his feet, which he could use to hoist himself up by his feet and legs. But after enough time, and as much out of tedium and the need to return to more important duty as out of any sense of mercy, the Roman guards supervising the ritual would use a mallet to break the victim’s shins: which, as anyone who has ever broken or witnessed someone who has broken these bones knows, is a particularly painful fracture to endure. The victim would either die instantly of the shock of this final outrage, or, being as he was unable to further support himself, quickly suffocate, the position of his arms having already badly constricted his breathing.

Again, any suggestion that such Romans had anything to learn about torture from “the East,” as Gibbon elsewhere implies, is quite clearly revealed, here as always, to be fatuous; while what the narrator calls the “fiendishness” of the Kafran religion — so clearly embodied in the at least partial ligature and cauterization of both the flesh and the arteries and veins (mainly those descending from the vital femoral, the popliteal and tibial) of the severed legs, which was, as the text says, intended to avoid their victims’ bleeding out too quickly — cannot realistically be contested: this point alone would have been enough to justify the stridency of Burke’s reaction in his letter to Gibbon. —C.C.

† “… derived from … opium and … Cannabis indica …” We never learn the old man’s precise methods for such derivation, although we know in modern times that such strengthened alkaline drugs (as opposed to their chemical imitators) are their most potent and least dangerous forms. Opium, of course, leads most immediately to heroin and morphine, the latter almost certainly what is meant in the Manuscript when “opium” is referred to, as its uses are always medicinal rather than recreational; as to Cannabis, prior to the twentieth century, Cannabis sativa, our own marijuana or hemp plant, was not only used in the production of rope (the fibers of its stalk being particularly strong), but was commonly available from druggists and pharmacies (no prescription required). This was true going back to the ancient world: the ostensible use of the drug was as a sedative and narcotic painkiller but, then as now, there were many people who used (and abused) it recreationally. The subspecies indica, which came from, among other places, the mountains of what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, was preferred in the West precisely because of its hardy nature, which allowed it to survive in the climates and mountains of northern Europe (and North America) as easily as it did in warmer climes; but indica was also considered by doctors and folk healers as superior to other subspecies of Cannabis for medicinal reasons, because it supposedly produced greater pain and anxiety relief with fewer of the “druggy” side effects. For this reason, it was often reduced to its resin form (what we know as hashish, the Arabic word for the resin), which doctors in the West would eventually market — as they did morphine, cocaine, and other narcotics — as a commonplace medication that could be eaten or drunk as a tincture, thus avoiding the telltale signs and physical dangers of smoking or injection. Whether the claims that indica was less stupefying than, say, the other sativa subspecies has, however, long been in doubt; and some drug researchers have argued for the formalization of indica as its own species of Cannabis.

It is also worth noting that, from ancient times to the late nineteenth century, such unregulated drug use did not produce greater numbers of addicts and “fiends”; whereas the illegalization of such substances (like the prohibition of alcohol) created an entire “subspecies” of violent criminals. The society of Broken was an excellent example of this: Cannabis was one of the only crops the Bane could grow in the harsh wilds of Davon Wood, and was one of their most prized trading crops (cultivated land within Broken itself being used exclusively for subsistence agriculture); yet the Bane themselves showed no signs of having been a race of marijuana abusers. —C. C.

† “the dauthu-bleith” Gibbon writes, with the same frustration we have seen elsewhere, “Here, once again, the influence of Gothic upon the dialect of Broken is hinted at, for this term almost certainly arises from that language: although we do not yet have the capacity to translate it literally, the spellings and word combinations are far more indicative of Gothic than they are of Old High German.” Developments since Gibbon’s time have allowed linguists to corroborate Gibbon’s speculation, and to more precisely translate this phrase as akin to a Gothic “coup de grâce.” It had originally been translated simply as “condemned [or sentenced] to death,” but bleith is one of several Gothic terms for “mercy”; and, as the original meaning of coup de grâce is a “merciful” as much as a “finishing” blow, it seems that the most recent translation relates the true intent more clearly. —C.C.

† “… his new, insulted form …” The word “insulted” is used in one of its archaic forms, here, to mean “assaulted,” “injured,” or “demeaned”; Gibbon makes no note of it, as it was still generally used in this sense during his own time (as opposed to being specifically used in the verbal or medical sense, as is the case today). —C.C.

† “… prevent festering and control fever.” Here we get a good idea of the old man’s pharmacological skills: despite the above average medical knowledge that Gibbon had gleaned through coping with chronic physical problems of his own, the extent of the old man’s understanding of the medicinal power of plants remained a mystery to the later scholar, as it would have to most people (even most doctors) in the eighteenth century. Hops represent an excellent case in point, particularly the wild hops that the old man would have found growing in the mountains that became his refuge: long before they were first cultivated as an ingredient in beer in the eleventh century, hops were recognized as having very real “anti-festering,” or antibiotic and antibacterial, powers, as well as narcotic effects (although this particular label was almost certainly unavailable to Barbarian Age healers). Similarly, honey was used (as it continues to be used, by some homeopathic and tribal healers) as an agent against sickness and infection, although many of the people who made or make such use of it did and do not realize that the human body metabolizes honey as hydrogen peroxide. Citric acid taken from fruit, meanwhile, can kill bacteria in both wounds and on food, as well as in the digestive tract (which is the original reason that lemon was used as a condiment on raw oysters). The extract of certain willow barks (as is more popularly known) provides a naturally occurring form of aspirin, and it was and is sought as an analgesic. The roots and flowers the old man initially used are not mentioned specifically, but we can imagine that they must have included wild species of such families as nightshade, or the Solanum genus — which, in uneducated or evil hands, had long been sought as the poison “deadly” nightshade, or belladonna, but which were also used (more carefully) as hypnotic anesthetics. In short, given the old man’s situation at this key point in his recovery, he could scarcely have assembled a better set of ingredients to use as both poultices and infusions, and there is no contesting that his knowledge was extensive, indeed. —C.C.

† the guttural sounds Given the conjectures already made about the old man’s possible origins, we’re faced with several candidates for this language of “guttural” sounds: certainly, it could have been a proto-Baltic tongue, but it could just as easily have been one of the early German dialects, including Broken’s own. —C.C.

‡ laboratorium Gibbon writes, “You may be tempted, my friend, here as elsewhere, to think that this use of a later form of a Latin term (this for ‘place of work’) is a contrivance of the Manuscript’s translator — yet he assured me that the term appeared in just this form in the original text. As to why, or even how, the narrator of the tale should have been aware of that later form, hints again at his temporal inconsistencies; and, things standing as they do in the narrative, we can but note it, and press on.” Unfortunately, we can offer no deeper insight today: unless the narrator was the first to use this original version of “laboratory,” or the old man himself was, we are hard pressed to say how it made its way into the document. —C.C.

† “Bactria, and from India beyond …” Bactria was the fabled and very independently minded province, or satrapy, of the Persian Empire in southwest Asia. Most Bactrian territory comprised lands that today form much of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Conquered but never really pacified by Alexander the Great, these ruggedly fertile hills, mountains, and valleys continue, in our own time, to produce some of the most potent opioids, as well as other narcotics, in the world — and have also continued to be a thorny problem for would-be Western conquerors or liberators, as American soldiers have recently spent over a decade discovering. —C.C.

‡ “wild Davon sheep” The phrase is evidently taken at face value by both the translator of the Manuscript and Gibbon, despite the fact that for “wild” sheep to have existed in the lands between the Erz and Harz mountains, they would almost certainly have to have been domestic sheep that had become feral; and, while such a development is certainly possible — there were several places in Europe where flocks of sheep were known to have undergone just such reversion — it would have represented a new phenomenon for Barbarian Age or medieval Germany. In addition, the fact that the old man is said to have “harvested” the wool suggests that these sheep were either of a variety that simply shed their fleece during warm spring and summer months (certainly, he could not have captured and shorn them) or that his companion hunted them and brought them back to the cave for meat. The latter seems by far the most likely explanation, since, while “shedding” of fleece is not unheard of, especially among feral sheep, it is not a common occurrence, and would likely not have yielded the quality or quantity of wool that the old man required. —C.C.

†† metallourgos The Greek root of “metallurgy,” and seemingly left untranslated, again, to give us some idea of the breadth and depth of the old man’s knowledge: if he wrote Greek, we can logically assume that he spoke it, at least enough to conduct technical conversations with the most advanced scientific minds of his age. —C.C.

† “alchemical sorcerer” The fiction that alchemy was purely or even primarily a science devoted to vain attempts to turn lead into gold persists into our own day, and certainly dominated in the periods leading up to Gibbon’s: perhaps the greatest scientific mind of his own or any age, Sir Isaac Newton, was deeply fascinated by alchemy, but had to work hard to keep his experiments a secret, one that would keep him from the often-gilded gallows reserved for those convicted of the supposedly black art.

The truth is that alchemy and metallurgy were, in ancient times, almost indistinguishable: after all, when a man could turn rocks into such precious metals as iron, and then iron into that supreme (along with gold) utilitarian metal — steel — the transformation did seem otherworldly, indicative not only of the possibility of changing one metal into another, but of attainting some superior mystical and perhaps spiritual state. Certainly, what the old man was doing and experiencing in Davon Wood during the period described in this section of the Broken Manuscript more than fits under these scientific and spiritualistic rubrics. —C.C.

‡ the “books” and their authors First, it’s important to remember, here, that the word “book,” in the pre-Gutenberg Dark Ages, was a very transitional term: it not only included early, bound stacks of parchment (often called folios), but also more informally fastened collections of parchment, such as the old man was producing during his time in Davon Wood; and finally, it also referred, very often, to “books” in the sense that the Romans knew them, volumen (obviously, the precursor of the modern “volumes”), which were the rolled parchment scrolls of which mention has already been made.

As to the specific books mentioned in this list, most speak for themselves; although perhaps the most interesting feature of the collection is the inclusion of the Strategikon, a Byzantine military manual concerning, in the main, cavalry tactics (heavy cavalry being the mainstay of the Byzantine army) but also dealing with other important issues, such as discipline in an army and how best to achieve it (as well as what punishments to mete out for infractions), and what would today be called “military anthropological” studies of the peoples that made up the main enemies of the Eastern Roman Empire (although the emperor Maurice, the compiler and main author of the work, ambitiously spoke of the Roman Empire as unified under his rule). The Strategikon, like the work of China’s Sun Tzu, is a work of a startlingly enduring nature, with impressive implications for modern military organization and conduct, both on the battlefield and off; but Maurice has enjoyed none of Sun Tzu’s modern vogue, a new edition of the Strategikon having only recently appeared, after a long absence from bookstores in the West. This new enthusiasm likely has to do with the important comments Maurice and the other writers who contributed passages to the work made concerning styles of warfare between large states and non-state enemies, what we would today call counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Certainly, by applying the precepts included in the book to the intellectual wasteland that was Western European military doctrine and practice during his own lifetime, the old man could indeed have presented himself in any court as a near “sorcerer” of war — a fact that would have brought him renown and wealth, while placing his services in high demand, thus explaining why he was so consistently welcomed in courts throughout the region, and was also allowed, during his sojourns in such places, to pursue medical experiments — notably dissection — that, while once common in cities such as Alexandria, had become ghoulish anathema to Christian and Muslim nobilities and leaders.

As to the remainder of the authors cited, only one statement by the narrator may seem questionable, because of its seeming political incorrectness: the claim that Procopius and Evagrius had determined that most if not all outbreaks of the bubonic plague—Yersinia pestis and its related disorders — originated in “Ethiopia.” Historical research, however, has proved the theory that the disease most often known simply as “the Death” originated in that region: the rats who carried the fleas that were and remain the initial spreaders of the contagion (which has never entirely disappeared, a vaccine against it never having been developed) apparently boarded Nile trading ships, and reproduced wildly, as did their fleas, in the granaries of Egypt, whence they took ship for all the major ports of Europe. Further genetic research on the subject remains to be done (see the masterful volume edited by Lester K. Little, The Plague and the End of Antiquity), but it seems altogether likely that, whether politically correct or not, the Justinian Plague of the old man’s era (the outbreak having occurred sporadically during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, taking its name from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who was struck down by it, but survived) did indeed follow this geographical contagion pattern. —C.C.

† “pains” Gibbon validates this account of the old man’s experiments with soldiers, as well as his self-diagnosis, by remarking that “such pains are a thing which almost anyone who has known a soldier, sailor, or ordinary citizen who has lost a limb to war, mishap, or disease can confirm, and in which many scholars who were also medical professionals or simply possessed medically inclined minds took an interest. [René] Descartes [1596–1650] himself took welcome time away from his syllogistic aphorisms to investigate the subject, although praise for its initial identification rightly belongs to an earlier Frenchman, the surgeon and anatomist Ambroise Paré [1510–1590], royal physician to no less than four French kings, who described patients who had undergone amputation feeling continued pain, not at the sight of the severing, but in the missing limb itself. He noted, as well (further agreeing with our as-yet anonymous friend in the Manuscript), that this pain could be heightened with the onset of certain atmospheric conditions — what we have come to know as rapid changes in barometric pressure — as well as by the aggravation of the general state of agitation in which the patient lived: the root of this last assertion being that drugs which had sedative but no analgesic effects proved to be of use in reducing the distress. Many other, lesser lights have studied the phenomenon, but we are no closer to understanding it than was the former court physician of Broken.” Today, the psychogenic distress experienced by amputees — which was given its popular name of “phantom pain” by the American physician and surgeon Silas W. Mitchell, who, working in the 1860s, was provided with no end of subjects for study by the American Civil War — is better understood; but the entire subspecialty of neurology that deals with such problems as severed nerves, neural entrapment in scar tissue, etc., remains one of the most challenging fields in medicine, as the persistent distress caused by the cutting of nerves (which can be a result of surgical malpractice or even surgical routine, as much as or more than by amputation or accident) endures as a principal cause of chronic pain syndromes. —C.C.

‡ “… than logic might lead one to suspect.” Counterintuitive as it may seem, doctors have discovered that gentle massaging of the parts of the body affected by an amputation does indeed afford many patients some mitigation of pain; and, as we will see, the particular way in which the old man’s companion “massaged” the stumps of his legs was quite unique, and generally successful. —C.C.

† Stasi A shortened version of Anastasiya. The full and pointed meaning of that longer name is explained in the text, as well as in the following note; but there is an additional and fascinating coincidence (or is it mere coincidence?) concerning this particular nickname in connection with the modern uses of the mountain Brocken that causes one to wonder if the narrator did indeed possess genuine gifts of foresight and prophecy:

As has already been noted several times, Brocken was, prior to the twentieth century, popularly considered the most sinister mountain in Germany and perhaps all Europe, the meeting ground not only for human witches and warlocks, but for the supernatural demons and other unholy creatures with whom those humans cavorted, as well. It is perhaps fitting, then, that after the assumption of national power by Adolf Hitler in 1933, the mountain found particular use to the propaganda machine of his Nazi party — as the site of the world’s first long-range television broadcasting tower. It was Brocken’s tower that broadcast the 1936 Summer Olympic Games to a very large (by the standards of that day) area of northern Germany: the first time the Olympics had appeared on television anywhere. A weather station and hotel had also been constructed; but Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, preferred radio to television, as a tool for indoctrinating the German people (and when one considers the physical peculiarities, not only of Goebbels, but of nearly all the Nazi leaders, one can understand why); all activity on Brocken, along with broadcasting from the television tower, was therefore suspended during World War II. The mountain was bombed by the Western allies at the very end of the European war (April 1945). Although the hotel and the weather station were destroyed, the television tower miraculously survived; and when American troops occupied the mountain, they rebuilt the weather station and used the television tower for their own propaganda purposes. But when Brocken fell into the Soviet zone of occupation in 1947, the Americans disabled both the tower and the station before relinquishing control of the mountain.

During the early decades of the Cold War, Brocken comprised a “security zone” for the Communist government of East Germany: it was the site of an enormously ambitious fortification project, one that recalled the achievements of the “Mad King” Oxmontrot some thirteen hundred years earlier. Recognizing both Brocken’s continued suitability as a site for a television tower and, even more importantly, the mountain’s larger strategic significance (in the wrong hands, Brocken could have proved a strong threat to the advance of East German and Soviet troops into West Germany along the route that eventually leads through the Fulda Gap to the southwest, popularly considered the primary path of entry for such an invasion by Western military leaders), the East Germans and their Soviet “protectors” in 1961 declared Brocken a top secret security zone. Large numbers of troops began using the area just as the army of Broken had once done, as a location in which to train for what seemed an inevitable war. The summit of the mountain was once again turned into a fortress, this time for the use of the East German and Soviet militaries; and construction soon mushroomed into one of the most ambitious Cold War building projects ever undertaken:

The military installation was enclosed by a massive concrete wall, built of 2,318 sections, each of which weighed two and a half tons, and the whole of which was of a scale almost equal to the natural stone walls of Broken. Within the new walls, the mountaintop became the site of a major Communist listening post, from which were monitored any and all broadcasts in West Germany, private and public, military and civilian — an operation that was controlled by the Soviet KGB and the East German Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (the “Ministry for State Security”), or secret police, whose popular name was the Stasi.

German reunification occurred before the long-expected invasion of Western Europe through the Fulda Gap by the forces of Eastern communism, and the massive concrete walls atop Brocken were dismantled along with the more famous wall in Berlin; the television tower now broadcasts one of the television stations run by the democratic government of the unified Germany. Tourism has come to the mountain, its former secret status having made it a haven for rare species of flora and fauna, and it was included in the Harz National Park in 1990; but memories of the Stasi remain burned into the memory of the people of East Germany — hardly what the old man had in mind when he named his savior and companion. —C.C.

‡ Anastasiya Gibbon provides no explanation of this name, and little need be added to that in the text, except to say that the name was and remains ubiquitous among Baltic, Nordic, and Slavic peoples, in many slightly varied versions, and that it long ago entered English as Anastasia. Other than that, the narrator’s interpretation of its meaning is quite accurate; although we may pause in wonder at how many times it has been the name of females destined for remarkable feats of survival in fact, legend, or both. The most obvious of these cases, of course, is the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, famous in legend as the sole child of that country’s last tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra, to have (purportedly) survived the family’s savage massacre in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural district, in 1917: even if this “survival” is wholly apocryphal, it only underscores the resurrectionary associations of the name. —C.C.

† “… companion …” It is worth noting, here, the true meaning of the word “companion” in the Manuscript (and indeed the English language), especially as it relates to the old man and his great cat. Because of one of the many misapprehensions popularized by Dan Brown’s engaging yet nonetheless terribly misleading The Da Vinci Code—this one claiming that the word “companion,” from before the time of Christ to well after it, could indeed imply “wife” (as Brown claims was the true meaning of biblical and Gnostic gospel references to Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s “companion”) — one might be tempted to assume that some sort of bestiality was occurring inside the great panther’s cave. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, and a list of experts too long to list here, such a connotation only applied retrospectively: in other words, a man’s or woman’s “companion” (say, in the phrase “companion in life”) could indeed be their legal spouse — but only if they were established as being in such a relationship. It did not mean, in other words, that companion was always an alternate word for “legal spouse,” if the couple in question had not already been legally joined. This point needs to be stressed because Stasi is so often referred to as “the old man’s companion,” and because her very intimate — but, of course, platonic — relationship with the old man was used by the rulers of Broken (and even, at first, the Bane) as further evidence that he was actually a sorcerer. —C.C.

† “… traces of those markings …” Although he could not have known it, the narrator is describing both the metallurgical formula and the color associated with the gold amalgam that would gain great popularity, in the 1920s and thereafter, as “white gold.”—C.C.

‡ “… the long, dipping spine …” Gibbon, again, dismisses the panther’s dimensions, since fossil evidence that such massive creatures existed so comparatively recently in Europe was either unknown or seriously misunderstood during his era. Regardless of whether this particular specimen was a representative of what is today known as the European jaguar or the European cave lion (the latter being somewhat older and larger), we cannot help but be struck once more by her amazing — and yet, for her species, apparently unremarkable — size: with a nine-foot body (excluding the tail, meaning nine feet from nose to rump) that stood roughly half that at its spine, this is an animal more than capable of all the remarkable feats attributed to her in the Manuscript. The “white” fur was not, if we are to judge by the color of both the eyes and the dark “eyeliner” around them, an indication that she was either an albino or a separate species or, indeed, truly white; rather, it is a color that still appears, occasionally, in lions and other great cats around the world, which is very nearly white. (The faint, light markings also confirm the presence of pigmentation.) We also can see, with the revelation that the “warrior queen” was in fact a great cat, why the old man’s medicines and poultices would have been so helpful to her: his treatments appear to have been grounded in opiates, willow bark (the “natural aspirin”), and naturally occurring antiseptics, none of which are or would have been toxic to cats, as so many other, seemingly milder, drugs are. Acetaminophen, for example (most popularly known by its major brand name, Tylenol) is generally considered an extremely benign drug, among humans — but it is fatal to cats, even in very small doses.

†† “… against his nose and face …” It will not need stating or restating, to those who live with and/or work with cats, large and small, that this delicate touch is their most intimate indication of affection, and of the granting of their trust — usually not easily gained (particularly in areas like northern Europe, the nations of which, especially France, have a long history of believing cats the familiars of witches and creatures of Satan). —C.C.

† “the Northeastern Sea” Gibbon writes, “Having reliably determined that the ‘Seksent Straits’ to which the narrator refers is our own Channel, we may infer that this ‘Northeastern Sea’ is that which lies in the direction indicated, relative to the position of the mountain Brocken—in other words, the Baltic Sea. Yet, even if this is so, we can draw few conclusions from the fact, little as yet being known of the tribes who inhabited the Baltic coast during this period.” We are, as already noted, at no such disadvantage today, however, and this interpretation only reinforces the notion that the old man came from the trading peoples who had been pushed to the Baltic coast by larger and more warlike tribes like the Huns. —C.C.

† “… should stir disbelief …” Gibbon writes, “While we may indeed, as the narrator suspects, scoff at the further idea of a crippled and bleeding old man being taken in and cared for by so carnivorous a beast as a panther, aneċal Natural History is too full of tales of humans thus cared for by various animal species (for what reasons, we may never know) to permit our immediate dismissal of this part of the tale.” Indeed, the fact that the panther had very recently lost her cubs in the most traumatic manner possible actually reinforces the Manuscript’s account, according to the results of recent experiments on animal brains ranging from our relatives, the apes, down to the tiny wasp and bee: it has been discovered that the brains of every species of animal life contain that core region — the amygdala — that both feels and preserves emotional trauma. Thus, as Gibbon suspected, we have no good reason to reject the narrator’s account at face value; rather, we have sound cause to accept it, most recently, the case of the “lion man” of modern Africa, George Adamson (foster parent, along with his wife Joy, of Elsa the lioness, in Born Free), who lived among and was protected by lions until his tragic death at the hands of poachers. Indeed, the story of Caliphestros and Stasi has many elements that closely resemble the tale of Adamson and his lions, too many for us to be able to dismiss the former as mythological. —C.C.

† “legitimate legislature” Gibbon refers to the French Revolution’s second phase, during which the National Assembly that had sworn the famous “Tennis Court Oath” became, in response to the persistent refusal of the royal, aristocratic, and clerical sectors of the ruling class to evolve with anything like real alacrity, the National Constituent Assembly, which issued the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” and declared as its noble purpose the official abolition of feudalism and the formulation of a French constitution. Unfortunately, the makeup of this Assembly also saw the emergence of wily leftist members who sought to prostitute the Revolution to their own ends — chief among them such characters as Honoré Mirabeau, a particular target of Gibbon’s ire in other letters, and the chief “manipulator” of whom he speaks here, as well as far more radical revolutionaries (Gibbon’s “basest scoundrels”), the most extreme of whom, of course, was the man whose name would all too soon become synonymous with the “Reign of Terror,” Maximilien Robespierre.—C.C.

† “cuirass” Another encounter with a word that, while it has a modern story (cuirass being a fifteenth-century French term), also puts us back in the largely unknowable realm of the armor employed by Dark Age warriors. We are left to wonder just what concept it was that the translator felt comfortable denoting with the immediately recognizable “cuirass”: it might have been anything from the Greco-Roman bronze pieces that covered the front and back of the torso (although we have no other indication that either Broken soldiers or the Bane still employed Bronze weapons in the field), to the steel and leather cuirasses of the Chinese and then the Persians. Again, we must rely on the text, and on the original translation, to supply details. —C.C.

† quadrates Gibbon writes that this formation is “easily identified, by those with even a basic knowledge of Latin, as growing out of that language’s quadratum, or ‘square’; and we can safely assume that these ‘squares,’ whether composed of the smaller fausten (‘fists,’ fauste being the singular, ‘fist’) or the larger khotors, were rooted, not in imitation of the closely ordered, distinctive checkerboard pattern of the Roman quincunx, but out of the imperatives of the traditional, even ancient, German military doctrine of expecting attack from all sides. Apparently, Oxmontrot at this moment saw, for the first and perhaps only time, something in the Roman military model that he (rightly) did not believe suited his Germanic legions, and that he believed he could improve upon; and in organizing Broken’s marching and defensive order-of-battle formations, he altered the Roman pattern to a prototype of what would come to be identified as both a modern German and an Anglo-Saxon way of war — for in modern times, it would remain both a characteristically Prussian/German, and then British, trademark: the famed square.”

‡ “… the chaos of conflict.” The effect of madmen on troops in the field is a recurring tradition in various traditional cultures, and so the Talons would have been far from alone in their belief that somehow a madman or madwoman could divine present and future order in what was (and very often remains, to the average soldier) the incomprehensible context, purpose, and results of battle. The first Muslims, the Vikings, and certain American Indian tribes were only a few examples of early peoples who sought the counsel of such characters at such moments (ascribing to it varying levels of importance); and it cannot be denied that the results were often remarkably productive. —C.C.

†† seksents As explained earlier, this appears to have been the Broken dialectal word for “peasant,” an interesting fact, in that it has a clear phonetic (and likely etymological) relationship to “Saxons,” a tribe who may well have first entered Broken, not as fierce, proud conquerors, but as peasants, in many if not most cases “indentured” peasants, who thus occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of Broken’s fairly unique social hierarchy. —C.C.

† “linnets-of-the-line” Now that we are on the march with Arnem and his men, it is appropriate that we are introduced to this slightly junior grade of the linnet rank, men who apparently served as something between our own sergeants and lieutenants, in that they had the duty of actually supervising subdivided units of each khotor and fauste. This appears to be yet another rank that Oxmontrot adapted from the Roman model, as it has an obvious Roman counterpart in the pilus prior, or “first spear.” —C.C.

† “thatch-roofed … forges and smiths …” Gibbon writes, “We have become so accustomed, in our own age, to tales of thatched roofs put to the torch, or set alight by some ordinary household mishap, that we forget that there ever was an era when thatch was viewed as progress. But, at the time of the events described in this narrative [the late seventh and early eighth centuries], thatch was only beginning to appear in northern Europe, and was an expensive technique that was also far more advanced, pleasant, and efficient than were the mud, sod, and mere tree-limb roofs that set the dubious standard for most of the era’s dwellings.” As for the “forges and smiths,” while, as always, it is impossible to say with anything like certainty, the description of the bustling town called “Esleben” in the Manuscript, along with its approximate position on the map, create at least the possibility that it might have been some early forerunner of the town of Hettstedt, which became famous for just such a variety of commercial activities, from the agricultural to the proto-industrial. —C.C.

† Linnet Akillus Gibbon writes, “Here is further proof of how great the influence of Classical Greek and Roman culture was on Broken, having made its way in, again, through the experience of the ‘Mad King’ Oxmontrot and his comrades, who served in the Roman legions as foreign auxiliary troops (which, by the later imperial period, comprised the bulk of the ‘Roman’ army). Although the epithet ‘Greek’ or, in the Broken dialect, Kreikisch was, as seen elsewhere, employed as a thinly veiled insult, there nonetheless appears to have been ample knowledge of and respect for ancient Greece’s heroes. We may infer this, not only from the fact that various counterparts to such names (in this case, ‘Achilles’) made their way into both Gothic and the various ancient and modern Germanic dialects, but by the already-demonstrated and crucial fact that the Roman — and, thereby, at least some of the Greek — military systems were studied and emulated in Broken, and even improved upon.” Today, there remain Germanic and Nordic counterparts to the name Achilles in various countries, although they are used infrequently, in keeping with the very un-martial societal values and national narratives that such societies have at least tried to project in the “postmodern” age. —C.C.

‡ “lad” Gibbon writes, “My translator did inform me that the Broken grammatical form for ‘children’ was remarkably close to the modern German kinder; however, while it has always been something of a tradition for German commanders to refer to their men as such, the same effect is not achieved in English, ‘children’ sounding far more condescending than any military officer would wish to. He therefore chose ‘lad’ or ‘lads’ when he encountered the word, which seems fitting.”

†† Lenzinnet Gibbon notes, “A typically German compounding of the rank of ‘linnet’ with what, it would seem, was the Broken Dialectal term for the modern German Lanze, or ‘lance.’ Hence, the term is another with a distinctly Romani, or Latin, influence, analogous to the ‘first spear’ [again, pilus prior] rank of the Roman infantry, but transplanted to the cavalry, where it anticipated the later European terms ‘first lance’ and ‘lancer.’”

§ “ball-headed spurs” An interesting detail that may reveal something of the people of Broken’s earliest history and attitude toward animal life during their pagan era. Spurs had been in use at least since the Roman Empire, yet the Romans almost exclusively used a “prick” or “spike” spur, a simple, straight piece of iron tapered to a sharp point, and meant to inspire their mounts to obedience and speed, like most spurs, through pain. The ball-headed (or, in the parlance of modern dressage, the “Waterford”) spur, however, has persisted among various riding cultures as something of a counterargument to the belief that horses will respond only to discomfort, for the small, spherical piece of metal used causes little pain and no bloodletting, and has sometimes been called an instrument of cooperation rather than absolute command. One can find advocates even today of both types of spurs — a fact that indicates that the ball-headed model is at least as effective as the elaborate forms of pricking and cutting spurs that have been developed since the Romans, particularly in the American West, Latin America — and, of course, nowhere more so than in that homeland of animal extermination and abuse, Texas. —C.C.

† “… cavalry sword …” By the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the various styles or “models” of the classic gladius, the Roman short sword (which had been “borrowed” from Rome’s Spanish Celtic enemies), the shape and image of which are closely identified in the popular consciousness with the Roman legions to this day, had been largely replaced by a somewhat longer blade of lesser width (or, in some cases, simply greater tapering), the spatha, which fell somewhere between the gladius and the various, classically medieval blades, most notably those Viking models referred to in the Broken Manuscript as “raiding” swords; especially popular among horsemen, this is likely the version of the “Broken short-sword” that Arnem and his mounted troops carried. —C.C.

† “The scouts shrug” There truly are moments in the Manuscript when any reader will find his or her own credulity at the choice of words strained past belief; and the use of the word “shrug” is certainly among them. However, research reveals that “the raising and contracting of the shoulders to express uncertainty or indifference” (in the nearly identical language of several prominent dictionaries) has been going on since at least the fourteenth century, when Middle English gave us the shrugge. Why note such examples? Because they continue to demonstrate, first, the surprisingly direct and “modern” sound of so many texts from the early Middle (or Dark, or Barbarian) Ages, and, second, the extent to which the florid language that we so often associate with those epochs was the invention of later authors who were anxious to propagate a mythic chivalric code that had supposedly existed since ancient times, and had been passed down directly to modern European nobility. —C.C.

† “‘an easy gallop’” A moment of validation for the Manuscript, and for its translator: some may wonder why Niksar does not order the men to ride at a canter, which is actually defined as an easy gallop; but the word did not come into use until the mid- to late eighteenth century. —C.C.

† “fire-wounds” Gibbon writes, “The modern German term for ‘gangrene,’ Wundbrand, must have closely, if not precisely, matched the Broken dialectal term, Wundbrend, meaning, as it does, ‘wound of fire’ or ‘fire wound.’ This burning sensation, which nearly always originates in the extremities, is one of the first, but hardly the most horrifying, of the symptoms of gangrene. And, as Visimar himself notes, his initial term for the illness, Ignis Sacer [‘Holy Fire’], was indeed the popular Latin term for the terrible malady that, into our own age, features gangraena [gangrene] as one of its principal (and fatal) properties, but is not ‘true’ or ‘pure’ gangrene. The Holy Fire, I am told, is still imperfectly understood; but we can say with confidence that it was the same malady that eventually took on the rather more colourful title of ‘St. Anthony’s Fire’ (St. Anthony, as you know, being the patron of the victims of pestilence).” St. Anthony [ca. A.D. 251–356] was an Egyptian Coptic Christian, and the patron of an extraordinarily large range of diseases, infectious and otherwise, having spent much of his life working among their victims. Prominent among these illnesses was the “disease” which Visimar here describes, which was indeed and actually not gangrene proper, but a form of poisoning, ergot poisoning (or “ergotism”), which results in gangrene, but is not identical with the form of gangrene that Arnem associates with battlefield wounds; the first is caused by alkaloid agents, and is accompanied, as well, by other, often outlandish symptoms (hallucinations, convulsions, loss of feeling, rotting flesh, and miscarriages, the last so often that ergot was often deliberately employed as an abortifacient), while the latter is the “simpler” result of festering wounds. Not a few experts think that many mass outbreaks of delusional madness throughout history and the world have been the result of the first malady, ergotism: the deranged behavior surrounding the seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials are a celebrated, but by no means the only or strongest, candidate (for an even more widespread, calamitous, and recent possible outbreak, see John G. Fuller’s classic in the field, The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire, which describes the near-self-destruction of a small French town in 1951—possibly due to ergot, possibly to mercury poisoning). Ergotism was also destructive and globally widespread enough to be one of the few such diseases to receive particular mention in the medical texts of nearly all ancient and medieval societies — Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Western.

An important point that must be reemphasized: Both the narrator and Visimar have by now suggested that two diseases are at work, in the kingdom of Broken; yet we will see that they were often lumped together — by average people ignorant of even the limited medical facts available to them at the time, as well as by Kafran healers and physicians little better informed — under the heading “a plague” or “a pestilence.” This was not an uncommon occurrence; indeed, it is not unheard of, in our own time. The desire of doctors to explain a constellation of symptoms by finding one malady that covers them all has long been entrenched in medical minds; and is often as responsible as blatant ignorance for incorrect treatments. —C.C.

† Wildfehngen Gibbon writes, “Although many, if not all, military commanders of high rank engage in some similar practice, German commanders especially have ever employed idiosyncratic terms of affection, when speaking of and to their rank-and-file soldiers: terms which, when translated literally, simply lose much of their weight and meaning. These range from the relatively simple meine Jungen and meine Kinder [‘my boys,’ ‘my children’] to the host of more esoteric names of which this Wildfehng (or the plural, Wildfehngen) seems to be an ancestor (for we find a very similar word still in modern German, in the form of Wildfang, which may imply anything from a madcap male ‘wild child’ to a female ‘tom-boy,’ that is, a particularly boyish and boisterous young girl). English commanders, like all others, share such terms of affection for many of their troops, but it is really in the ancient warrior culture of Germany that we find the practice at its most elaborate, profound, and sometimes paradoxical: for however ‘wild’ such troops may have been or may be, they were, have been, and are expected to obey strict codes of honorable conduct, the breaking of which can bring punishments that make even the justly notorious extremes to which our own British naval officers often go when dealing with disciplinary infractions seem rather mild in comparison.”

† Gerolf Gledgesa The name is the sort of mix that we can now identify as fairly common: Gerolf is clearly Germanic (implying a combination of the often-used roots “wolf” and “spear”), while names or terms close to Gledgesa are found only in Anglo-Saxon, suggesting the possibility of this character’s having come from Saxon Britain. The surname connotes “fiery terror,” and the justification for it becomes clear, as his personal history is recounted; but its ultimate irony will only grow apparent later. —C.C.

‡ Ernakh Significantly, Gibbon makes only a few references to the Huns — doubtless among the principal peoples identified by the rulers and soldiers of Broken as “eastern marauders”—in his six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and, in this particular case, he evidently did not know (or did not think it worth noting) that Ernakh was originally the name of the third son of that greatest of all Huns, Attila. Whether the nurse/housemaid Nuen had this fact in mind when she named her own offspring, or whether Ernakh was merely a traditional and perhaps common Hunnish name, we do not know. —C.C.

† Donner Niksar Gibbon writes, “We will discover soon enough just what this noble yet unfortunate young son of Broken’s achievements were; what should concern us, for the moment, is the form that the spelling of his Christian name takes. One finds, in the few bits of Germanic documentation that survive in their various dialects as well as in the many Norse sagas, nearly every spelling possible of every aspect of the name and life of Thor, son of Odin, god of thunder, and paragon of youthful Germanic-Norse virtues, who spent nearly all his time aiding other gods, demi-gods, and humans with his great strength, command of thunder, and magic hammer, Mjolnir. The important element, however, for our purposes, is that his name in Old High German appears to have been spelt Donar, which would have been pronounced ‘Donner’—the same form we find here in Donner Niksar. The variations of the names are all of little importance, of course, as they are mere variations on the dialectal terms for ‘thunder,’ although it is interesting to note that the modern German word for that phenomenon, donner, has hewed so closely to at least one ancient version: Broken’s. Thus, there is the strong suggestion not only that the myths of the supposedly ‘Norse’ gods were likely those of the entire Northern European region, but that they may well have originated with those Germanic tribes who inhabited the area we today consider Germany, calling at least some of the aspects of the Norse domination of civilization in that region into question.” Without realizing it, of course, Gibbon is anticipating the notion advanced most forcefully in our own time by Michael Kulikowski, and discussed at length earlier in these notes: that the myths of the Gothic migrations and the Norse invasion and cultural domination of northern Germany may have been largely just that: myths. —C.C.

† “the Krebkellen” Gibbon writes, “The practice itself is explained in the text; we pause only to reassert the fact that Oxmontrot, its creator, considered not even the most fundamental Roman tactics to be above improvement. The practice of the Krebkellen, which we may confidently translate as ‘crab colony,’ certainly takes its inspiration from the Roman testudo, or ‘tortoise,’ the tactic which had long proved successful by enabling Roman soldiers to form a sort of shell out of the interlocked protection of their great convex shields, or scuta, to their fore, back, sides, as well as over their heads; but again, this tactic, while ingenious, could also be clumsy, designed as it was to mirror the essentially steady, deliberate movement permitted by the formation of the quincunx—that is, a primarily frontward-and-rearward motion — to say nothing of the continued relegation of the role of cavalry as essentially support troops for those infantry formations. The contrast with Broken’s Krebkellen, on the other hand, can indeed be likened to the difference between a tortoise and a crab — or, to complete the terminological explanation, a ‘colony of crabs,’ in which such creatures are known to live and defend themselves. While both species use their external shells for protection, as both infantries used their shields for interlocking protection, the Broken troops sacrificed some strength of defense for speed, maneuverability, and, hence, offensive potential, the last especially embodied in the cavalry units, which acted as the faster-moving ‘legs and claws.’”

‡ “‘a … worthy of our claws’” Gibbon lets this part of the discussion go without remark, perhaps because it’s unclear whether Akillus is talking about the “claws” of the Krebkellen, or is referring to the pride that every man in the Talons took in the raptor’s claws that adorned his cloak. It makes very little difference to the ensuing action. —C.C.

†† the “aptly named fellow,” Taankret An obvious source for what would become the famous chivalric name of Tancred, the word itself is combined of elements implying “thinking” or “thought” and “counsel”—and is, indeed, suited to its man, as so many names in the Manuscript seem to be. —C.C.

† Fleckmester Gibbon writes, “Here is a name that, given all the guidelines we have established for the Broken dialect, is not difficult at all to understand: ‘fleck’ is an ancestor of the modern German pfeilmacher, counterpart of our own ‘fletcher,’ or arrow-maker, while mester is plainly the some Old German variation of meister, or ‘master.’”

‡ “longbow” As is perhaps apparent, this use of the word “longbow” simply implies a greater length than the bows used by the Bane — it is not, apparently, an anticipation of the later English invention that would famously carry the day at battles such as Agincourt. —C.C.

† Nerthus Gibbon ignores the name, perhaps because scholarship in Germanic and Norse mythology had not yet reached the point that the Germanic goddess of fertility could be identified precisely; this would be a very strange omission, however, for it is one of the goddesses that Tacitus actually names, using this same spelling, in his Germania (pub. ca. A.D. 98), placing her firmly in the original pantheon of ancient Germanic, rather than Norse, deities, and supporting the theory that a very great deal of what we still think of as “Norse” culture and mythology was actually taken from Germanic traditions. Indeed, one senses that Gibbon is reluctant to give so much credit to the Germanic tribes (perhaps because of their repeated thrashings of the indomitable Roman legions), but, being even more hesitant to go up against a scholar of Tacitus’s standing, simply passes the name over, as he does so many uncomfortable subjects.

The sole question that remains, then, is just what extraordinary creature we are discussing; and from the behavior, the extraordinary size and strength, and the markings, we can definitely say that we are dealing with the Eurasian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo), a bird of immense size and power, as great or greater than its formidable cousin, the Great Grey Owl of North America (Strix nebulosa). The differences are mainly of appearance, the Grey Owl having an ovular or circular face and no “ear tufts,” the feathery “horns” that actually are no more than cosmetic, having nothing to do with hearing. The Eurasian owl is more like the North American Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) in appearance, but the size of the Eurasian Eagle Owl is much greater. Needless to say, these creatures caused enormous fear among humans, because of the fact that, like all owls, their weight was and is amazingly light in comparison to their power: it is always remarkable to come upon a recently deceased owl of any type and feel its extraordinary lightness, in this regard — a lack of weight designed to assist their silence and agility in flight and the hunt. And they could take not only such normal prey as rabbits and other small mammals, but deer fawns; and it was therefore believed, quite logically and rightly, that they might do the same to important domestic livestock such as lambs, kid goats, and even newborn calves and foals (always a real danger), to say nothing of human infants and toddlers. —C.C.

† skutem shields Gibbon writes, “Having so closely aped so many of the most crucial Roman military customs, it is not altogether surprising that we here find the soldiers of Broken almost directly transposing the Latin word for shield, scutum, into their own tongue.” It is also true, however, that by the time Oxmontrot served as a foreign Roman auxiliary, the classic Roman scutum had changed in size and shape, becoming more ovular and slightly smaller; so it is possible we do not, in fact, know precisely what Broken shields resembled, just as we do not know the precise details of so much of their culture. —C.C.

† “… dance his deadly round.” At this point in the general history of northern Europe, as well as many other parts of the continent, “dance,” as a form of recreation, still consisted almost solely of “dances in the round,” that is, the joining of hands and then unchoreographed movement to one direction, then the other, etc., rather than of the courtly steps and masques with which we associate the later and higher Middle Ages. The only other forms of dance commonly referred to were quite sinister, in both origin and meaning: there were the “dances” that were associated with severe illness, generally nervous — such as St. Vitus’s Dance, a name given to various forms of chorea — and there was (as is mentioned here) the “Dance of Death,” or “Danse Macabre,” which involved that entity leading the wicked or the sickly to a generally unhappy end in the hereafter, either through trickery or sheer power. The Dance of Death could often involve witchcraft, which was blamed for many disorders, especially after the rise of the monotheistic faiths: again, medicine was poorly served by the predominance of those faiths, except in the cases of those who took their piety with a grain of salt, and refused to let it interfere with reason. Even these last were largely preservative movements; that is, they kept existent knowledge that had been gleaned centuries ago from vanishing, rather than advancing or building on it: progress that would not begin again, after brought to a virtual standstill in the fourth and fifth centuries, until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries — a full thousand years or more that could obviously have been used to great advantage. —C.C.

‡ “… the Great River … Hel …” The name of the river over which one crossed, in Germanic/Norse mythology, to get to the underworld, was never so important as the route one took to reach its complementary and unique paradise, Asgard, home of the gods and fallen warriors, or the figure who guarded that loftier route. The famous “rainbow bridge” connected Asgard to Midgard (our Earth), and was guarded by a figure variously known as Heimdall (usually in the Norse) or Geldzehn (literally, “gold teeth”) in Germanic tongues, who made sure that those who died less-than-glorious deaths in battle on Midgard were consigned to the realm of Hel. This last was one of the evil children of Loki, the most mysterious and shifting of the gods and demigods in this tradition, but basically half-brother to Thor, the god of thunder, and himself the god of mischief. Hel had been banished by Wotan (Odin, Wodenez, the Allsveter referred to earlier) to rule the closest thing to a traditional netherworld that appears in the Germanic-Norse pagan faith. The name of that netherworld and of its ruler became one, over time, giving us “Hell,” a place that was said to lie across various rivers (depending on the version of the tales one reads), but which, in each case, seemed to fill roughly the role of the river Styx in Greek mythology, although the reasons why one would be consigned to this dark world in the Northern pagan system were based almost purely, not on the nature of one’s life, but of one’s death, that is, whether one was a warrior (which often included, it should be remembered, women) and died fighting. Hel, therefore, claimed not simply “evil” souls, but the spirits of people who had died of anything from disease to mere accident: an arguably unjust system that reveals much about Germanic and Scandinavian values. —C.C.

† ballistae Gibbon writes, “Here is a either a particularly clear demonstration of the influence of Rome upon Broken, by way of Oxmontrot and his subordinates, or one of the greatest linguistic mysteries of the entire Manuscript. At first suspecting a third answer to the question — simple laziness on the part of the translator — I pressed him particularly hard upon the matter. Had he found a description of something that, in his mind, closely matched the mainstay of Roman offensive war machines, I asked, and simply borrowed the name? [Ballistae were, in effect, close to catapults — which the Broken army also, apparently, possessed — save with greater power: if a catapult resembled a giant slingshot, ballistae could be seen as enormous crossbow, in an era, of course, before crossbows existed. —C.C.] But he was adamant that he had found the word intact, and used it for that very reason. It is therefore possible that many, if not most, Broken troops used the term without knowing anything of its origins, or of the significance of those origins, in terms of cultural transmission.”

† “artillery” The word may surprise some, in this context, but the fact that Gibbon does not even think it worth mentioning shows that, even in his time, “artillery” was still understood to encompass any weapon that hurled what men could not over great distances: for the purposes of the Manuscript, primarily ballistae (sing. ballista) and catapults. The arrival of gunpowder simply added a new dimension to this phenomenon; but the term had been in use since ancient times, and indeed, purely kinetic artillery — especially the high Medieval trebuchet—could hurl heavier shot faster and harder than almost any of its gunpowder-based competitors of the time, though admittedly, the engines themselves were far larger and more difficult to maneuver. —C.C.

† “… a sheet of white silk …” The white flag was already the well-established signal of surrender, as it had been since the early anno Domini period. —C.C.

† “‘… exchanged for molten metal …’” Gibbon writes, “In the ancient and early medieval periods, it was not unusual for patients who suffered the kinds of disease under discussion, here, to suffer from the delusion that their blood had become some kind of ‘molten metal,’ absurd though the notion may seem to us.”

† “plainsong” Obviously, in this case, the word is being used in its most basic sense — that is, to describe a simple, unembellished melody, often heard in the countryside — and not to connote the more formalized and elaborate version developed by the Catholic Church; a distinction understood well enough during Gibbon’s time that he felt no need to explain it. —C.C.

‡ Weda The name of Gerolf Gledgesa’s daughter is of obscure origin, having only a surviving male counterpart, one that is associated with “wood,” although in what sense it is difficult to say. It may have been only a matter of pronunciation, for in German dialects of almost any age, it would have been — indeed, today would still be — pronounced “Vay-da,” an unusually pleasant-sounding (if, again, difficult to define) name for girls and women. —C.C.

† “‘… she feels no pain!’” This is, indeed, a common feature of the last stages of the gangrene that results from ergot poisoning, and one of its most pathetic symptoms, as both humans and animals who lack whole limbs attempt to behave as if they still possess them. —C.C.

† “thud” This is another of the words that are often mistakenly considered “modern” and onomatopoeic, but which in fact are medieval in origin; and it is the imagined need, on the part of many writers and translators, to come up with terms more genuinely “old” with an “e” (ye olde) that accounts for much of the stuffiness of modern renderings and/or imitations of what were already, by the eighth century, an athletic set of northern European languages. Indeed, in this case, “thud” is not even thought worthy of comment by Gibbon, familiar as he likely was with Middle English’s thudden and Old English’s thyddan, the parent terms of “thud.” —C.C.

† “‘… if he [Bede] yet lives …’” There is something strangely sad about the fact that Bede (whom, as was noted earlier, Caliphestros knew, from having spent time in Bede’s home, the Monastery of St. Paul near Wearmouth) had almost certainly died by the time that the events described in the Manuscript were taking place. From the many historical, cultural, religious, and scientific references mentioned, it is possible to place those events at circa A.D. 745; whereas “the Venerable Bede,” a man of faith who nevertheless did honest and solid work in the cause of scholarly history (and, it should be said, legend, as well), died some ten years earlier, in 735. Caliphestros evidently had great respect and affection for Bede; and his never learning of his friend’s death seems not only melancholy on its own merits, but a stark underscoring of just how isolated the “sorcerer” had been during his ten years in Davon Wood. —C.C.

† “‘a special beer’” The beverage that we today think of as simple beer could in fact only have started to be made in Europe, at this time, because the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries saw the first domestic cultivation of hops, although most sources say this was for medicinal purposes, and that hops were not used in beer until the eleventh century. Thus, Broken appears to have been ahead of the European world around it yet again; for, while other forms of beer had existed since ancient times, it is the use of such hops (which originally grew wild in the mountains) that gives “modern” beer the capacity — as Keera asserts — to drive young men “mad,” through their undeniably if mildly pseudo-narcotic effect. —C.C.

‡ and †† “woad” and “meadow bells” Woad (Isatis tintoria) is a plant that did indeed produce a popular blue dye (and as a result, is often confused with indigo). But it has recently been learned that, taken as a medicine, woad may contain twenty to thirty times the amount of glucobrassicin (a powerful cancer-preventing agent) that is found in broccoli, the modern vegetable most commonly cited in connection with preventing and fighting cancer. And scoring or bruising the leaves of woad can heighten its powers along these lines many times over (much as scoring opium poppy seed pods intensifies the amount and power of opium produced); thus, Keera’s claim that woad is effective against growths, “especially inside the body,” almost certainly refers to some power to inhibit or shrink tumors. What she calls “meadow bells,” meanwhile (by which informal name modern Germans still know Pulsitilla nigricans) was another herbal wonder drug, used for a long list of purposes and problems, ranging, as Keera says, from menstrual pain to the invigoration of the uterus during pregnancy to, most commonly and importantly, counteracting the causes of what were then simply dismissed as life-threatening “fevers.” It could and can also be used (according to which source one consults) to treat everything from hemorrhoids to tooth- and backaches. Was it a kind of Barbarian Age snake oil? It seems unlikely, since it is still used in various traditional medicines today, with effect; although the complete list of problems it is said to affect is implausible. —C.C.

† “‘Alchemy! … metals to gold … tiny men like vegetables …’” Heldo-Bah speaks of the ancient alchemical “arts,” as they were known by both their practitioners and their detractors: for even the most enlightened of its practitioners did not treat alchemy as a pure science. Like so many areas of learning during the Dark and Middle Ages (and not unlike certain fields of science today), alchemy became more famous — or infamous — for the more extreme and even nonsensical of its practices than it did for its very real, but less dramatic, contributions to science, medicine, and philosophy (and through philosophy, as Carl Jung later explained, to a kind of proto-psychiatry and psychology). Heldo-Bah names two of these more extreme activities, the attempt to turn base metals into gold (the most famous, of course, of alchemical efforts), as well as the peculiar desire of some practitioners to create a miniature human called a “homunculus,” basically by nurturing sperm (in which, it was thought, all of the elements that eventually became a human being resided) in some place other than a woman’s womb. Many but not all alchemists saw the womb as nothing more than a nutrient-rich, protected sack, one that could be imitated, preferably in the Earth, thereby removing what post-tribal medieval thinkers often called the “pernicious influence of the feminine” from the life produced.

What is worth noting about alchemy, for the purposes of understanding the importance of the Broken Manuscript, is that many alchemical undertakings became very valid advances in fields ranging from metallurgy to chemistry to common household applications such as cosmetics, dyes, glasswork, and ceramics. But its most important achievements were those centering on military chemistry: alchemists would eventually discover gunpowder, as well as that most mysterious and elusive weapon of all military history, Greek fire (about which the Broken Manuscript will soon have a great deal to say); and the effort to refine base metals — the pursuit behind the famous “lead into gold” legend — led to the creation of ever-stronger and more sophisticated forms of steel out of “base” iron ore and carbon. —C.C.

‡ “‘… quietly stream away …’” Caliphestros seems to be intentionally playing on the unnatural fear of and prejudice against most cats, great and small, that has haunted European and Asian history since Roman times. And the especially irrational reaction to big cats (whether tigers in India, lions in Africa, or even leopards in South America) malevolently turning into “man-eaters” displays this ignorance and fear at its clearest and worst: after all, wolves and other dogs have been hunting men down since the dawn of time without being invested with the particularly and peculiarly evil intentions that are given so readily to “man-eating” cats. The result, however, is that great cats have been hunted to the point of, or into, extinction everywhere in the world, yet at the same time have become the object of fascination and ownership for such people as wish to prove that they can either master or (seemingly more benignly, but in fact just as destructively) “tame” these wildest of wild animals: today, for instance, there are more tigers owned by private individuals in the United States (and usually kept in abominably cruel circumstances) than in all the jungles of the world.

Anyone interested in exploring an organization and center that does invaluable good in the cause of offering such animals rescue and homes, while simultaneously educating Americans and anyone else concerned with (or merely inquisitive about) this problem should contact Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida; their website can be found at www.bigcatrescue.org. —C.C.

† “… Davon dog-owl” Keera’s initial skepticism is justified: nearly all large, “hooting” owls are capable of making “dog-like” sounds (John James Audubon called the American Barred Owl “the barking owl”), whereas very few can do what it is claimed the bird mentioned here has and will, making the European cousin of the barred owl an unlikely suspect. In all probability, the mysterious bird in question is the Eurasian Eagle Owl, and probably the same “Nerthus” we have already encountered, explaining why Caliphestros would be evasive on the subject, at this point: his trust of the foragers is not yet complete. —C.C.

† Heldenspele Gibbon writes, “Here we encounter a phrase, the meaning of which can only be half-interpreted with any certainty. Clearly, we have the word that has survived to the modern German, Helden, or ‘hero’; but as to spele, we can but posit educated guesses. Does it have some Gothic or other Barbarian root? Or should we take it as an early form of the German Spiel, or ‘play,’ or spielen, ‘to play’? All we can say with certainty is that Veloc intended to compose some sort of heroic, spoken tale.” Once again, Gibbon has been stymied by the limited scholarship into Gothic of his day: if he’d had the advantages we now do, he would certainly have identified spele as the Broken dialect’s synthesis of Spiel and spill, the latter the Gothic term for ‘tale,’ especially in the sense of ‘heroic tale,’ or thundspill. —C.C.

† “‘… the ash tree of the Frankesh thunder god …’” Perhaps the most enduring legend to emerge from St. Boniface’s time among the Germanic barbarians was his famous cutting down of a tree supposedly favored by Thor, the Nordic-Germanic god of thunder, after calling for Thor to stop him by striking him dead, if the god truly could. After Boniface dealt the tree a few blows, this legend goes, a great wind rose up and uprooted it, blowing the thing over, at which the local tribesmen converted to Christianity and built a chapel on the spot where the tree had stood.

But Heldo-Bah, repeating a mistake that many before him had made, and would continue to do in ages to come, confuses the type of tree, in his telling: it was Thor’s Oak that supposedly fell to Boniface’s divine wind, whereas Heldo-Bah is doubtless substituting the Ash of Life in Norse-Germanic mythology, Yggdrasill, the roots and branches of which supposedly encompassed all of the nine worlds in that religion’s mythological system. —C.C.

† “‘… Vat of Turds!’” As Gibbon points out, “Yet again, we encounter evidence of just how much of a link the Broken dialect must have been between various older, even ancient, Germanic dialects and modern German — for the homonym discussed here remains very similar today, the German Bohnen meaning fecal ‘droppings’ (and also ‘beans’), while Fass, although the letters themselves appear as parts of many other words, on its own does indeed connote a ‘vat.’ Yet this ribald connotation has not survived in any other of the many accounts and legends concerning the life of St. Boniface [A.D. 672–754] and his long career of converting the Germanic peoples to Christianity, possibly because, after being renamed ‘Boniface’ by Pope Gregory II in A.D. 719, the man in question often continued to travel under the name ‘Winfred’—although apparently not in Broken.”

‡ “‘… what became of him, if he did.’” St. Boniface did, indeed, enjoy great success in converting the Germanic tribes to Christianity, and he attempted to carry that success over to the raiding tribes of more northerly regions; however, his luck ran out during the latter endeavor. Although still alive, in all probability, when the events in the Broken Manuscript took place, he was eventually killed by pagan raiders, in A.D. 754, and if we accept Gibbon’s contention that Varisian was the Broken dialectal term for “Frisian,” then Heldo-Bah’s skepticism here is justified, as it was Frisians who did the missionary in. —C.C.

† “‘… the river Nilus …’” Again, Caliphestros uses the Latin term for a place or thing (in this case, the Nile river), and both the narrator and Gibbon’s translator leave it in that form, forcing us to wonder why; but, as the reference in that tongue seems important (and the meaning is fairly obvious), I, too, have left it alone. —C.C.

‡ “‘… the rats that infest those same grain ships …’” Caliphestros once more mentions a notion that is tantalizingly close to being the truth: the Black Death did indeed travel the grain routes from the upper Nile to the ports of Egypt, and from there to Europe — carried by the rats who bore the fleas that were responsible for spreading the infection. He saw the connection as metaphorical; yet if he’d had the time and the instruments, it is more than likely so perceptive a scientist would have found that the connection was actually causative. —C.C.

† “‘… bedding her own brother?’” Gibbon writes, “No one familiar with Norse and Germanic mythology will be surprised by this remark, for the tales of their gods, like those of nearly all pantheons in the known world, contain important instances of the incestuous coupling (knowingly and otherwise) of brother and sister. And in those Northern tales, specifically, is contained one of the most famous among such myths, that of the hero who, in Germany, was known as Siegmund, and his sister, Sieglinde.” Unfortunately, Gibbon lived just over half a century before the appearance of perhaps the most famous reinterpretation and retelling of this myth: that contained in Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, second of the four installments in his monumental Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle. The opening installment of the work, Das Rheingold, would be sprung upon an unsuspecting public in 1869; and, when completed, the Ring cycle would quickly become one of the most successful works of operatic literature, albeit an endlessly controversial one. —C.C.

‡ Alandra, here and passim Gibbon writes, “The reference here would seem to be to the siege of Troy, Alandra being, apparently, the Broken variation on the name Helen. Whether it would have been possible that the rulers and people of Broken would have had knowledge of the Trojan War, based on a translation into their own dialect of (in all probability) a Latin text of Homer’s Iliad, is far more difficult to prove, names often traveling where their context does not. Certainly, it is possible that Caliphestros himself created such a translation, although this Alandra was already a child of some seven or eight years by the time he arrived in Broken, leaving out the possibility that he had suggested the name in the first place. In addition, one can easily anticipate the difficulties that would have accompanied propagating such stirring foreign legends in as closed and self-admiring a society as Broken’s, thus making it far more probable that Caliphestros did not translate the work, and that the name made its way into the kingdom with some earlier emissary — quite probably, that greatest admirer of Hellenic and Roman culture upon the stone mountain, Oxmontrot himself.”

† “‘… Kreikisch … Graeci …’” The first open statement — ignored, at this point, by Gibbon, of the Broken dialect’s term (often derogatory) for “Greek” is accompanied by the second word, the Latin term for the same people. Caliphestros himself explains the reasons for the different uses — perhaps the reason Gibbon ignores them. —C.C.

‡ “… can actually taste scent …” This is an extraordinary statement for Caliphestros to make, and it seems obvious that it was rooted in his anatomical, which is to say his dissecting, work earlier in his life: certainly, no one among either the Bane or the Tall could have been aware, based on their levels of scientific advancement and their terror of the Davon panthers, of such a relatively arcane aspect of the feline sensory system, which is found throughout the feline tree, from housecats to their great relatives. The reference is also further evidence of how frustratingly close scientists came, during the eras before and during the rise of Christianity and Islam, to a truly modern understanding of anatomy and medicine, even veterinary medicine: for cats do, indeed, have unique sensory organs inside their mouths, but they do not “taste” scent with them. Rather, they smell with their mouths, adding considerably to their ability to detect scent, often from amazing distances. —C.C.

† “roseberry” Almost certainly a precursor of “raspberry.” The thickness and slightly thorny aspect of the bushes suggest as much, while raspberries are indeed a branch of the wild rose family. —C.C.

† “‘… plum brandy … Slivevetz …’” Gibbon takes this claim at its face value, either because he is unconcerned with the history of particular forms of alcohol or because he has no reason to dispute the claim. In more recent times, however, it’s been postulated that brandy (or “brandy wine”), the distilled form of wine, was not invented until after the turn of the first millennium, despite references to it in various Dark Age histories and heroic tales (which, as has already been discussed, were often the same thing). This discrepancy may be accounted for by the possibility that brandy was being made long before its recipe was written down and formalized by the monks and other vintners of the French province of Cognac; or it may be one of many proofs that minor as well as major inventions were little noted until they appeared in one of the “great” European states, among which the kingdoms of the Balkan region — the original home of plum brandy — were certainly not ranked, at this time as during our own era. Interestingly, however, Heldo-Bah gives a name for the drink, slivevetz, that, once we account for the vowel shift of Old High German, is very close to one of the many Balkan variations on the name of the libation, slivovitz, derived from sliva, the Slavic word for “plum”; and anyone who has encountered that drink today (particularly in the immensely potent forms that its not-for-export variations take) can attest to the continued and rather shattering power of what has formally become the national drink of Serbia. —C.C.

‡ napthes More on this subject will follow; for now, it is safe to say that napthes was an archaic German (perhaps Broken) dialectal term for naphtha, which, particularly in its early days, could take the form of anything from mineral spirits to low-grade gasoline; and that Caliphestros’s future statements about it may well contribute to unraveling one of the great riddles, not only of Broken’s history, but of military history, more generally. —C.C.

† “‘Ther is moore broke in Brokynne, thanne ever was knouen so.’” Gibbon’s lack of any explanation for the appearance of what is the solitary sentence written in Middle English in the entire Manuscript may be a demonstration of the level of scholarship during his era; we simply don’t know. Fortunately, the meaning of the phrase is quite clear. —C.C.

† “‘… evil vapor or bad air …’” Gibbon did not bother refuting or moderating such references, of which there are several in the Manuscript, because he couldn’t — the science of infectious disease in his time did not yet allow him to. —C.C.

† Radelfer One can’t say with any real certainty (and, perhaps because of that, Gibbon makes no attempt at all), but this name appears to arrive from another ancient popular Germanic name denoting at once “counselor” and “wolf”—an entirely appropriate connotation, given the role this Radelfer played in the Baster-kin family, and especially in the life of Rendulic Baster-kin. Indeed, it is entirely possible that he changed his name, or that it was changed for him, when he was chosen from the ranks of the Talons to watch over the scion of the Merchant Lord’s family. —C.C.

† megrem The youthful Rendulic’s condition can be readily identified as “migraine”: megrem is evidently some sort of precursor to Middle English’s megrim, the word used to identify what had been, since ancient times, a well-known and extensively described condition. Gibbon’s failure to take note of this passage may have grown out of his considering its explanation obvious, although it seems more likely that his silence was caused by his aversion to discussing chronic ailments — a habit that grew out of his self-consciousness concerning his own incurable condition, hydrocele testis, a swelling of one or the other testicle that, in an age when the fashion was tight-fitting trousers, was not only painful and serious but the source of enormous embarrassment for him. —C.C.

† “… a healthy manhood …” Before anyone thinks all this some kind of witchcraft or fanciful explanation, we should note, as Gibbon was in no position to do, that for hundreds of years, traditional healers had been successfully treating the terrible symptoms of migraine with a combination of strong opiates, willow barks, and “nutleaf,” a translation, in this case, of the German Mutterkraut, the term for the flowering, daisy-like plant we call “feverfew”: Tanacetum parthenium, or, variously, Chrysanthemum parthenium, an anti-inflammatory still in wide use by homeopaths, and of interest to Western doctors for its possible efficacy in inhibiting cancer cell growth. —C.C.

† Healer Raban This is apparently an ancient Germanic name denoting “raven”—not the most propitious association for a healer, but not an uncommon sort of appellation, either: it was often popular to give healers of the time, who were seen primarily as ghoulish tormentors whose successful remedies were dependant on unseen forces far beyond their own control or ken, names and macabre accoutrements that matched their miserable systems of knowledge and rates of success. Healers whose work actually could approach systemization and higher rates of success, at the same time, were treated even with even more distrust; for their every advance inevitably called into question some central tenet of one of the new monotheistic faiths (as the cases of Gisa, Isadora, and most of all Caliphestros demonstrate). —C.C.

† Klauqvest As was often the case with some of the more arcane or titillating, yet academically inexplicable, aspects of the Manuscript, Gibbon touched on this name only obliquely: he seems to have been convinced that further explorations into the Gothic tongue would one day show that Klauqvest was a name given by the man’s parents to reflect their reaction, not only to the disease from which he suffered all his life, which seems to have been leprosy — and, probably, something even more devastating, for he clearly lacks the immunity to superficial pain that marked so many lepers — but also an apparent deformity of the hands, almost certainly in evidence since birth and not at all uncommon within the annals of medicine. The fusion of the skin and muscle, and sometimes even the bone, of the fingers, so that the hands resemble the claws of crustaceans — a disease known as ectrodactylism—was documented long before discovery of this Manuscript, and before Grady Franklin Stiles (1937–1992) became the popular freak show performer “Lobster Boy.” And, since klau can be easily identified, in many German dialects, as meaning “claw,” we can be sure of the meaning of the first syllable, while the second, qvist, is easily conjectured — or so, apparently, said Gibbon’s translator: “To those who have labored to understand Gothic,” Gibbon wrote, “it is the root of a term denoting ‘destruction,’ the inserted ‘v’ being a misread ‘u,’ which would nearly always have been paired, as it still is paired, with ‘q’ in Germanic-Anglo-Saxon languages, giving us a name implying some sort of ‘destruction’ or ‘death’ by ‘claw’—ultimately an ironic, to say nothing of cruel, name to have given this unfortunate fellow.” —C.C.

† “… bearing a towel …” The latter is yet another word that may strike the modern audience as being anachronistic and contemporary, but which, it is worth noting, not only is in fact quite old, but has roots in the two languages that Gibbon and his translator of the Manuscript were both convinced made up the principal influences on the Broken dialect: Old High German (the antecedent word being dwahilla) and Gothic (thwahl). —C.C.

† Loreleh This is a variation on the ancient Germanic name Lorelei, the alteration in its final syllable accounted for by the vowel shift of Old High German. It connotes a “luring rock,” and is the Germanic variation of the Sirens’ Song, referring to a beautiful female spirit or spirits who sang from a rocky point in the Rhine, luring ships and sailors to wreckage and death. —C.C.

‡ “‘… is clubfooted …’” Most will be familiar with this condition, which is now quite correctable through surgery, but was once the incurable source of enormous humiliation, even for the great and admired, from the Roman emperor Claudius to Lord Byron. The Latin name for the condition—talipes equinovarus—is still the medically technical term, strangely, for it means “horse foot,” or “foot (and ankle) like a horse,” as it causes the ankle to be drawn upward like a horse’s foot, while the rest of the foot is bent inward, sometimes in an unsightly enough manner that it could be cause for severe mockery and even persecution in ancient and medieval societies. —C.C.

† Chen-lun As stated earlier, we can do little more than speculate as to any Hunnish names across which we run, explaining why Gibbon ignores the name. But if we do engage briefly in such speculation, we find that Chen-lun suggests some sort of Chinese influence, turning us back to the ancient theory of the relationship between the Huns and their supposed ancestors, the Xiongnu (against whom, primarily, the Chinese built their Great Wall). If we were forced to translate it into a modern Chinese dialect, for example, we would find a general meaning along the lines of “morning flower” (or “bright orchid,” more particularly); whereas, if required to translate the name into one of the principal modern Western descendants of Hunnish (or Hunnic) — for instance, Hungarian — we draw an almost complete blank. And, since “Morning Flower” and “Bright Orchid” are both suitable names for a princess drawn or descended from an important family, it seems safe to go with such a translation, for the purposes of understanding not only this particular mystery of the Manuscript, but also for the question of why Chen-lun seems to have features that are neither particularly Hunnish nor Chinese. In fact, we may well glean more from certain details of the “handmaiden’s” appearance, as explained in the text, than we do from her mistress’s name. —C.C.

‡ “… properly brewed wild hops …” There is much speculation that hops, having pseudo-narcotic properties, as explained earlier, were used first for medicinal purposes, and only later for beer; this would doubtless have given their original purpose a “proper” connotation, and aided in the understanding of the behavior of young people who imbibed great quantities of beer made with hops. —C.C.

† Ju The name of Chen-lun’s “handmaiden” (actually, one gets the feeling, her bodyguard) is another that appears — not surprisingly, by now — without note from Gibbon, and faces the same translational problems as that of Nuen and Chen-lun. Indeed we can learn more about this woman from the weapon she carries than from the name itself; for the only definite result we can find for the name Ju is a Chinese girl’s name connoting “chrysanthemum”: not a particularly apt term for this woman. On the other hand, it is true that combat knives of the type carried horizontally, as here, were specific to the “Black” or Western Huns who invaded northern Europe (in contrast to the Hephthalite or Eastern Huns, who relied more often on a single sword as they moved into areas to the south, regions we know as Turkey, Iran, and Hungary, among others). The appearance and names of both Chen-lun and Ju, therefore, are perhaps less important than this lone dagger — C.C.

‡ “… Lady Baster-kin’s shadow …” Here, Gibbon writes, “In more than one ancient culture, we find reference to the closest of servants, especially a woman’s, referred to as a ‘shadow,’ a term that evidently included some sort of protective role, and could be either a man or woman, though most often, of course, the latter.” This may or may not have something to do with our own familiar modern term — usually, now, a verb — to “shadow” someone, which originally was used in a protective, as well as a detective, sense. —C.C.

† Adelwülf Gibbon writes, “It is perhaps surprising, given how much they were feared — particularly in those northern European regions where the scarcity of food in winter has always made them a particular threat — that wolves have always figured prominently in the mythologies and nomenclatures of tribal-based nationalities. Adelwülf, for example, is plainly the Broken dialectic form of a name, common to all such areas, which translates as ‘noble wolf.’” What Gibbon could not have known was a stigma would eventually be attached to the modern form of this name, due, obviously, to a quite modern man who was enormously preoccupied with likening the troops and sailors of his fatherland to wolves, in the most sinister sense: Adolf Hitler. —C.C.

† “… alps …” Here is an ancient Germanic variation on a supernatural character that appears in almost every culture’s mythology since the beginnings of civilization, and that, in the West, is usually known by some variation on the Latin term incubus. The word alp itself is thought to be a German variation of “elf,” and indeed, the first legends concerning the alps told of creatures carrying out such mischief as was usually attributed, in Anglo-Saxon-Celtic mythology, to various kinds of elves, although very powerful and sinister kinds of elves. The emphasis here on a sexual component, on lying with human women and producing half-breed offspring, is where the alp myth swings back to the incubus model: one of the most famous half-human, half-spirit creatures in Western mythology, for instance, was and remains Merlin, the Arthurian sorcerer, who was said to have been fathered by an incubus. As for the alp and incubus myths themselves, their origins are obscure; but they are generally said to have been concocted to provide explanations for everything from “mystery” pregnancies (often the results of illicit sex, incest, or rape) to sleep apnea and night terrors.

A female form of the alp, the mareh (or mara, or mare, in other dialects), also existed; it is considered by some one root part of the word “nightmare.” —C.C.

† “‘marehs’” See note for p. 000, above. —C.C.

† “The Great Imitator” Caliphestros is employing terminology and classifications of illness that were well in advance of their use in the rest of Europe, likely due to his extensive travels: syphilis was indeed called “the Great Imitator” in many parts of the world, and for the reasons he cites. The great dangers associated with pursuing scientific investigation during his era in Europe would cost other scientific visionaries harsh treatment at the hands of the Catholic Church: small wonder so many advanced thinkers in these fields would either seclude themselves in monasteries and remote cities such as Broken, or would pursue the hermetic life in the wilderness. —C.C.

† the mang-bana See note for p. 000 —C.C.

† the Rhein The correct and ancient (as well as modern) Germanic spelling of “the Rhine,” the most famous river, along with the Danube, in Germany, not least because they made up the two borders, eastern and northern, across which Julius Caesar advised Rome never to try to send military forces: the great conqueror considered the land and the peoples too primitive to be worth any such ventures. (And, indeed, nearly all Roman emperors who disobeyed Caesar’s warning paid dearly, starting with the very first of them, Julius’s nephew and adopted son, Octavian, called Augustus when he took power.) This spelling of Rhein would have been so well known to scholars in the late eighteenth century that Gibbon thinks it unworthy of comment, for various dialects of German, and certainly the modern form, were languages almost as important as Latin for those who studied the history of ancient Europe. —C.C.

† heigenkeit Gibbon writes, “Here we again come upon a particularly striking example, not only of the linguistic inventiveness and adaptability of the Broken dialect, but of its rapid development and refinement from generation to generation, as well as of the attention paid by the rulers and responsible subjects of the unique kingdom to some of what were then the most advanced scientific and social concepts, especially in northern Europe. The closeness of the first portion of the word to our own ‘hygiene,’ which is based, as heigenkeit almost certainly was, on the name of the Greek, and later Roman, goddess of health, cleanliness, and sanitation, Hygieia [or, variously, Hygeia] demonstrates that Oxmontrot was deeply impressed by the attention Roman city planners paid to such matters, and was determined that his mountaintop city would embody the most advanced techniques and practices that he witnessed in the ‘empire of the Lumun-jani.’ But there is an additional detail, in the development of Hygieia’s myth, that may supply the clue to why ‘the Mad King’s’ reaction to what she stood for seems to have gone beyond the responsibility of a ruler, and to have been almost personal: in the later eras of her worship, Hygieia also became the Roman goddess of the Moon. It is not beyond question, in other words, that Roman principles of public and private hygiene were interpreted by Oxmontrot (a Moon worshipper by birth and choice) as not simply a wise but a sacred policy, in Roman paganism, certainly, but more importantly (as Roman paganism was dying, by the time he became an auxiliary in their armies), in his own Moon faith. One of the many tragedies that resulted from the eventual domination of Broken by the cult of Kafra, is that this intimate connection between public hygiene and religion was lost, with, as we shall see, cataclysmic results.”

† obsese Gibbon writes, “Of this term the only immediately recognizable variation is, of course, obsessio, being an actual Latin term for a ‘siege.’ The adaptation of that term, however, to the meaning implied here — that is, the connection to a person who suffers from what the latest psychological writings of our own day would describe as (in words that reflect a Greek as well as a Latin etymology) an hysterical mania—is fascinating, and surely something we do not expect to find in a barbarian Germanic kingdom. And yet this is hardly the sole point at which we find discussions of either the primary (that is, the empirical) or the secondary (the theoretical) implications of such ideas, which have received a title for the collected activities they have inspired—psychology—some eight or nine hundred years after the period under consideration in this tale of Broken.” Gibbon does not indulge his frequent penchant for overstatement, here: like the earlier reference to Galen’s attempt to discover the medical meaning of dreams, this citation suggests a complexity of thought in Broken’s intellectual community — particularly before the death of the God-King Izairn — that was unique, and, obviously, far ahead of its time. —C.C.

† Plumpskeles Gibbon writes, “This is, according to my translator, a man of broad experience, simply a more colorful word for ‘latrines.’” We can only suppose that Gibbon knew the effect that the apparently literal translation of the word would have on the somewhat staid Burke: for Plumpskeles is another transitional word between Old High and modern German, the latter possessing Plumpsklos, or, quite literally, “shitholes,” as in holes cut for toilets, which for some reason were/are apparently referred to in pairs; hence the plural used by Isadora, as we have seen four latrine holes in the yard behind Berthe’s house. —C.C.

† Kriksex Gibbon writes, “Here is a name that must have been utterly idiosyncratic, even within the Broken dialect. Although it exhibits pieces and aspects of elements common to both various forms of German as well as Gothic, we can make no sense of it, given the present scholarship — a fact which I note only because it seems, somehow, fitting.” As, indeed, it does, given the character’s nature and role; and modern scholarship hasn’t helped us very much more, if at all more, than did that of Gibbon’s era. —C.C.

† Gerfrehd The name of this sentek of the regular army evidently was judged unworthy of Gibbon’s time to explain, perhaps because it is one of those compound Germanic names that often seem oxymoronic: it is almost certainly the Broken dialectical version of Gerfried, often translated as “spear of peace.” But it becomes more comprehensible when we consider that its original meaning is probably more general, a “guardian of peace.” (And given our general ignorance of the Broken dialect, we may never know what this version means, precisely — but if it were “guardian of peace,” it would be a uniquely suitable name for a man whose role seems ultimately to have become the patrolling of what would prove the key section of the city walls.) — C.C.

† “M. Rousseau” Burke speaks of one of the most famous philosophers of the time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom he had little but contempt. Burke thought Rousseau’s theories on Romanticism and introspection to be nothing more than vanity and self-promotion, and his theories on society to be dangerously destabilizing. But Burke’s vindictiveness toward Rousseau, whom he never met, was extreme and admittedly ad hominem, much of the time, although, to be fair, Rousseau drew sharp attacks from far more liberal corners than Burke’s: the fledgling feminist movement, for instance, led by such pioneers as Mary Wollstonecraft, could not forgive Rousseau’s relegation of women to a completely domestic role in his description of the ideal society. —C.C.

‡ “… the time at which he composed the thing …” Burke did not necessarily believe that the confusion over the time at which the narrator composed his tale, which Gibbon considered a literary device of some kind, was necessarily anything of the like: he was bothered by the fact that, while it might have been an important personage looking back, it might also have been one looking forward, not, as Gibbon says, with prophetic pretensions, but with the gift of prophecy — and he makes it clear that his candidate for who this latter person would most likely have been was Oxmontrot, whom Burke would have found (unlike, say, the soldiers of Broken) genuinely mad. All this accounts not only for Gibbon’s aforementioned “temporal ambiguity,” but for the sense of responsibility that the narrator feels early on: for the future rulers of the state were his descendants, and the city’s important ministers, such as Lord Baster-kin, their choices. —C.C.

† “… Competing Religions, … strict and sometimes Cruel Fathers, and … perverse hedonism” Burke strikes with intent, here, for these were three of the most tender subjects in Gibbon’s life, the first and second having to do with his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism and back again, the last due to his father’s threat to disinherit him. But formal, popular religion in general held no interest for him, and his attraction to “perverse hedonism” was caused in part by this fact, and in part by the solitary life inflicted on him by his hydrocele testis, or badly enlarged testicle, which became so embarrassing that he endured three cruelly ineffective surgeries to try to correct it, eventually being killed by the last surgeon’s infecting him with peritonitis: it is not difficult to see, in all of this (just as Burke says) the origins of Gibbon’s reasons for being so compulsively attracted to the “legend” of Broken.

† “… squirrels and tree kittens …” The word “squirrel” descends from the Greek and Roman through an identifiable sequence of Romance languages, as well as through early Germanic and Norse terms, and was likely used as a familiar and convenient term by the Manuscript’s translator, the modern German term being Eichkätzche, or “tree kitten” (really “oak kitten,” so named because of the well-known proclivity of squirrels for acorns). The remaining question becomes why did the translator use the phrase “squirrels and tree kittens” [my emphasis]? Was there a distinction that the Bane drew, perhaps between two different species of squirrel? Or did another creature exist at the time, one that has since disappeared, a loss far more tragic than that of a dead word? Such are the types of questions raised by the disappearance of words and languages: questions that can, unfortunately, never be answered. —C.C.

† “… tufts of feathers …” It is one of the enduring mysteries of zoology that we still do not know why some species of owl have this feature. It seems definite that it is a defensive ruse of some kind, as the tufts become heightened and more pronounced at moments of challenge and danger; but whether they are intended to make the owl appear more “mammalian” to other predators, or whether they are intended as camouflage, designed to allow the owl to blend into tree trunks and limbs more effectively, is an ongoing debate. —C.C.

† “… Muspelheim” A seemingly offhand phrase that in fact references an important element of Ancient German and Norse mythology. In the Dark Ages and before, many ores, such as iron, were often taken from sites where they could be easily harvested, such as bogs, marshes, and moss fields, and then worked in the kind of deep hill (or pfell) that served in many parts of the world as primitive smithies. So deep an impression did this practice make on the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes that it became enshrined in their mutual mythologies, and in one of the earliest Old High German epics, “Muspilli,” (a title that may or may not be etymologically related, but is certainly thematically connected, to the fiery pagan realm of Muspelheim, or Muspell); and, even though the poem attempts to Christianize many elements of the legend — perhaps becoming another of the nexus points between Christianity and the pagan world of the Germanic-Norse gods — a vivid portrait is painted of this cataclysmic inferno, which in pagan lore was the first of the nine worlds that existed under the world ash Yggdrasill. Out of the sparks of Muspell the stars were formed, and out of it, too, at the time of the Armageddon-like Ragnarok, the three sons of Muspell would ride, their way led by the fiery giant, Surt, who (according to which source one consults) is accompanied by a wolf who will swallow the sun. The Sons of Muspell shatter the great rainbow bridge to Asgard and make all earthly creatures and creations fragile or doom them altogether. The Bane, believing in the old faith, apparently also gave credence to some version of this tale; and their fear at what Caliphestros was creating seemed to clash with their excitement at the power they knew his work would give them, creating a state of general tension that was rooted in their childhoods. This anxious state of affairs apparently motivated Keera to find out all she could about the old man’s motivations, and could not have been helped by the constant presence of Stasi near the openings of the various mines: was she, rather than a wolf, the giant animal that would swallow the sun? —C.C.

‡ “… miraculous grade of steel” What is given here is a very shortened account of the transformation of coal into coke, a fuel which, upon incineration, produces greatly increased temperatures in furnaces. Caliphestros would have learned his criteria for determining which coal would best suit for “coking,” once again, during his travels to the East on the Silk Path, as the process was used by the Chinese at least as early as the ninth century: but it may well have been another technological innovation that, while somewhat automatically credited to the Chinese empire, actually came out of domains in and near India even earlier. Certainly, Caliphestros’s knowledge of it would suggest so. —C.C.

†† “… the most fiery of the Nine Homeworlds …” Another reference to Muspelheim, the most and by some accounts the only fiery underworld beneath the world ash tree, Yggdrasill, and the place from which the cataclysmic fires that both began the universe and would initiate its end, or Ragnarok, were generally expected to originate. —C.C.

† “… other elements might be.” The Bane smiths were not (entirely) exercising their imaginations, as trace amounts of other ores and elements did indeed make their way into the steel, affecting both the strength and the color of each batch. These could have included ingredients as varied as nickel, zinc, hematite, and, later, vanadium (another argument for the later composition of the Manuscript, as vanadium was used, informally, at the end of the periods under discussion, although only formally recognized in the West much later). When heated and worked, these ingredients could produce remarkable bands of color ranging from grey to red to brown to yellow, appearances that increased the reputation of the metal as some sort of “super” or “unnatural” steel. —C.C.

† “… the realms of the East.” This statement cannot help but bring to mind that supreme example of laminated, layered steel: Japanese samurai swords. Such swords were also, because of their combination of strength and sharpness, considered to have otherworldly powers: Westerners who encountered them said that they were nothing short of miraculous. It was said that there was one sword made that contained four million laminations (folding and refolding): and these are not thick blades. Whether or not this is true, the fact is that these swords could inflict devastating damage on all Western weapons, even rifle and small gun barrels. —C.C.

† “‘… the dance of mating …’” This is not poetic excess: among many species of bear, apparently including the Broken brown, the motions and noises that the male makes on encountering the female’s deliberately distributed scent is known as a “dance.” Keera’s reference to the area covered by that female scent as being too limited is also correct, as such females will spread their scent in as wide a range as possible to attract a mate. The only real question, soon to be hinted at, if not answered, is why this second fact should have been the case. —C.C.

† “… primeval …” In this case, we find an anachronistic term that helps us confirm the time of the translation of the Manuscript, rather than contradict it: contrary, once again, to common belief, “primeval” was a late-Enlightenment — early-Romantic notion, not a medieval one — a supposed rediscovery of how ancient forests were viewed in the Dark and early Middle Ages that had little to do with facts, and was only popularized because of the rise of industrialized society and man’s ability to control and indeed destroy such places, and therefore feel safe from their threats. Like the tired notion of the “noble savage,” whose nobility was attained only when he had been for the most part subdued, the primeval forest did not account for the absolute terror with which most people at the time of such legends as that of Broken viewed the wilderness: as, to repeat the earlier discussion of Davon Wood (note for p. 0), a source of terror and death, not Romance and a reconnection to an earlier and more fundamental way of life that would prove somehow cleansing to the spirit. —C.C.

† “knucklebones” Tacitus wrote of the German tribes’ passion for gaming — particularly, again, knucklebones (usually made of ordinary sheep and goat knuckles) and dice, during games of which young men would routinely bet their own freedom, if bereft of funds, and submit dutifully to enslavement if the result went against them. Indeed, said Tacitus, in The Germania and elsewhere, “What is marvelous [is that] playing at dice is one of their most serious employments, and even sober, they are gamesters.” As to losing their freedom, “Such is their perseverance in an evil course: they themselves call it honor.” Thus, gambling of all kinds was indeed a powerful part of the culture of the people of Broken, and of most of the tribes around them. —C.C.

† Linnet Crupp A name of which Gibbon would not have taken any note, but which, today, stands out for its similarity to that of the Krupp “dynasty,” Germany’s greatest steel and armaments manufacturers, who first came to prominence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and who were in fact based in the city of Essen, which was and is indeed “an ancient city to the west of” Broken. Was this Crupp a self-imposed exile from that clan, and has the spelling merely been changed by the Broken dialect, or were the two unrelated? The fact that both were concerned with the artillery of their respective periods is intriguing, but not conclusive, as the Krupp fortune relied on iron as much as armaments production. —C.C.

† “… onset of rain.” The connection between chronic pain syndromes (such as those suffered by people who have sustained wounds or broken bones) and the approach of rain has long since been established as more than an old wives’ tale, or a collection of purely aneċal experiences. The precise mechanism of the relationship is not yet understood in its details, but is believed to lie in the fact that drops in barometric pressure affect the balance of cerebrospinal fluid, changes which in turn immediately reach any abnormalities in the peripheral nervous system. Again, this was an area in which Galen the Greek and those who followed him could have done much good, had they not been driven into hiding, and their reliance on autopsies forbidden, by the major monotheistic faiths. —C.C.

‡ Bal-deric Gibbon writes, “An intriguing name, another of those that must have come down from one of two directions, yet we cannot say which direction is the more likely: it could be a variation on the Norse Balder, the name of Odin’s most handsome and virtuous son, whose death, in that same set of myths, brings about the onset of Ragnarok; but it may also be the Broken version of the Germanic Derek, itself a variation of the Ostrogothic Theodoric.” The addition of an extra syllable in both cases, remains unexplained; but the combination of the two may be a further signal of the Broken dialect’s serviing as a melting pot of regional languages. —C.C.

† “… steel wheels and wires …” Aneċal accounts of prosthetic limbs have endured since ancient times, although it is not until the late-medieval— early-modern period that scientists began collecting actual examples — perhaps because, before then, they were not considered religiously acceptable and were, like most other scientific advances, destroyed; or, the earlier accounts may in fact be mythological. Certainly, this would not be the only area, as we have seen, in which individual scientists and inventors from Broken anticipated what most would consider a future development. —C.C.

† Weltherr Gibbon writes, “There is at least no great mystery associated with this name: Weltherr must have been the Broken cognate of the ancient Germanic Waldhar, which has come down to us in the fairly common form of Walther (or our own Walter), whose constituent parts translate roughly to ‘master of the army’: evidently, this fellow’s parents had something more ambitious in mind when they named him than the composition of military maps, despite the verity, proved century after century, that the army possessed of the better maps — both of locations and topography — enjoys a distinct advantage.”

† 3:{xi:} For this final chapter of the Manuscript, we find yet another of the, for Gibbon as for, perhaps, many modern readers, maddeningly inconsistent styles of organization. Gibbon’s passion for uniform organization is well known: but it does willfully ignore the varied styles of most legends, sagas, eddas, etc., of the period, which often do not represent anything more than the manner in which these tales were told and retold (often by different authors, although not, it seems, in this case) down through the ages; and while the Broken Manuscript may be confusing, in this sense, it is entirely historically consistent. —C.C.

† “… that same misty halo … until the end of time …” Gibbon notes that, in his day, “this is indeed the case, much of the time, on the mountain called Brocken, although whether the ‘ring’ first formed during this march that saw an alliance between the Talons and the Bane is impossible, of course, to say.” We could as easily make the same remark today; however, in more contemporary times (even during Gibbon’s, although he does not mention it) this mist would add to the sinister reputation of the mountain, rather than connoting some divine blessing, as the narrator seems to imply. —C.C.

† “… allied …” This is another of those words that might sound anachronistic to many ears, because of its heavy association with the Second World War; but in fact, it comes to us from early medieval times, from Middle English, and its component parts stretch back farther than that. And certainly, the notion of allies and “allied forces” was known to the most ancient world, one of the first and most famous such having been the thousand Greek ships that sailed on fabled Troy. —C. C.

† “ponies” Gibbon writes, “Once again, I had no luck in persuading my translator to tell me what the original word for ‘ponies’ or ‘pony’ was, in the Manuscript, which is something of a pity, as it might have helped to clarify the origins of this subspecies of the horse, a ‘subspecies’ that may have a longer history than the ‘species’ itself, at least in northern Europe: for there are those who believe that ponies were animals bred and then abandoned by several migrating tribes that originated in Asia and were, like their ponies, smaller in stature than their conquerors, the Europeans and the contemptible Byzantines, with their enormous armored warhorses.” Gibbon’s disdain for the Byzantine Empire has already been noted; and although the actual word “pony” was just over a century old, in his day, the species or subspecies had many other, much older names in other parts of Europe. —C.C.

† “… the Kreikisch called the fire automatos?” Gibbon writes, “The translator used, no doubt for the benefit of his contemporary readers, the most recent form of the Greek word for ‘automatic,’ while remaining with the Broken dialect’s term for Greek itself, Kreikisch, since we have seen it before. There is no point to explaining too early what the term ‘automatic fire’ implies, as the text will do as much; but as to the question of whether or not it was a myth, it is sufficient to say that chemists have attempted to re-create this most mysterious subcategory of ‘Greek fire’ without success, although various other formulas for Greek fire have been tested with far happier results; and, as Caliphestros’s represented a particularly volatile form of the substance, we must continue to wonder, until some chemist can prove or disprove the notion, whether or not this part of the story is indeed legend, or mere myth.” While it would be unfair, yet, to say why Gibbon’s assessment is wrong, we should at least note that it is, and state that what “the sorcerer” Caliphestros was brewing was a weapon familiar in both its component parts and its assembled whole to modern armies, especially the American; and that the fact that it had disappeared from the world for almost a thousand years, in Caliphestros’s time, and would do so, following Broken’s history, for another twelve hundred ought not shock us: if there is one lesson to be learned from the Manuscript and all the details of the history of Broken, it is that the trend of civilization, as we are learning once again in our own time, is not always upward or forward. —C.C.

† “… Kafra’s infernal piss …” Here is an entry about which Gibbon could have known little, even aneċally, and even less scientifically; yet he, not atypically, chose to comment upon it because nearly every report of the scientific composition of the “fire automatos,” or automatic fire, had and has come down to us through Byzantine sources, and would therefore would have roused the great scholar’s prejudiced ire to no small extent. Thus, when he says that “this aspect of the tale of the invasion of Broken must be viewed with jaundiced eyes, to say the very least, as the types of ‘authorities’ upon which it is based spring from a society well-versed in both exaggeration and mendacity,” it is far less a statement of true fact than of those same personal prejudices. It was the Byzantines, after all, who would devise new forms of Greek fire so devastating that their use influenced battles of immense importance: see, for example, J. R. Partington’s excellent A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder.

Within such authoritative texts, as well as within the Broken Manuscript, we find not only effective refutation of Gibbon’s willful ignorance, but tantalizing evidence as to what it was that the mysterious “missing ingredient” that separated automatic fire from more common forms of Greek fire might have been. And in this context, the account in the Broken tale is not only not to be viewed “with jaundiced eyes,” but is in fact to be taken quite seriously. For not only do all the other elements involved in the substance’s creation — everything from naphtha to asphalt — match the description that the narrator gives of the stench given off by Caliphestros’s creation, as well as of its consistency, but the manner in which it was said that those elements must be transported — in brass containers — conforms to reality as well. But it is several other aspects above all — the description, violence, and action of the flame produced — that give us an additional and, perhaps, key revelation: for the fire automatos used at Broken is described as burning primarily “white,” not the usual range of fiery colors, at the time, and as doing so into, not atop, its target. This is extraordinarily reminiscent of what we today know as “white phosphorous,” a controversial twentieth-century weapon (particularly, again, regarding its use by the United States in Third World countries), the antecedent of which, carbon disulfide, was known to have been used on more than one historical occasion: in an Irish nationalist attempt to destroy the Houses of Parliament, among others. Fire created using such elements can indeed be ignited by water, and made to burn fiercer the more one throws water upon it; and European chemists at work before science’s great suppression at the hands of the Catholic Church would have been very capable of mastering the creation of such a substance. Did they? The Broken Manuscript certainly suggests as much; and it is therefore, again, typical that we are suspended, in this key aspect, between what we read, what Gibbon originally thought of it, and what modern military history and science tell us might have been possible, if viewed without prejudice. —C.C.

† “… sarbein …” Neither Gibbon nor his translator could make sense of the origins of this Broken dialectal term; however, the great scholar was wise enough to draw a correct (although perhaps obvious) conclusion from its use: “Neither the translator of the document nor I could make sense of this term, save that, placed in context, it seems apparent that it refers to ‘greaves,’ those armored leggings worn for centuries by warriors in both the East and the West, from the age of bronze to that of iron and steel; although how the Broken dialect should have formed such a unique term for them remains a mystery.” And, again, we confront that fact that, in Gibbon’s day, very little scholarly work had been done into either Gothic, or the various manners in which Gothic and German could and did become hybridized: bein being even the early German term for “leg,” and sarwa the Gothic plural for “armor.” Thus, we can now fairly confidently solve another problem that frustrated Gibbon, who knew both the question and the answer, but not how the two were connected. —C.C.

† “… the basic rules of Broken infantry training …” Here, Gibbon is not at all confused, and one gets the feeling that this fact gives him some relief: “The exchange outlining how Arnem and his son will meet attackers who lack formal military training not only gives us some idea of why the Broken Army was so feared, but once again of how much to heart the kingdom’s founder, Oxmontrot, had taken the better elements of Roman military tactics. Any late Roman commander would have been pleased and proud to have men willing to form up in such seemingly close and perilous, but ultimately fearsome and victorious, formations; it was, indeed, the inability of too many Roman commanders to convince (or even try to persuade) their men to muster the courage to carry on the close-order tactics of the early empire — tactics that had allowed Rome to establish her dominance over so much of the Western world — that was a contributing factor to the downfall of the great empire.” Nothing needs to be added to this explanation, save another reminder of how Oxmontrot, unlike so many “barbarian” tribal leaders in northern Europe, did not view the way the Romans fought as alien and even inhuman, but sorted through those tactics to pick out the pieces that would best serve his new kingdom: an impressive accomplishment, to say the least. —C.C.