by Caleb Carr
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.” 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 this note), 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 afterward 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. —C.C.
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: 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 s
uch failures, as well as the cost of constantly manning a hostile frontier that ensues. But the specific point, here, is that 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 real possibility—most strongly put forward, in recent years, by Michael Kulikowski, in his 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 certain 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. —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 clo
sely 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.
Veloc 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 colorful 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. That of their leader, 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), either half or blood brother to Odin, as well as 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 by assisting their troubling boy.”