The Legend of Broken

by Caleb Carr

  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 of 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, since both humans and animals who lack whole limbs attempt to behave as if they still possess them. —C.C.

  II: Fire

  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 yet lives” There is something strangely sad about the fact that Bede (who, 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 “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 people “mad,” through their pseudo-narcotic effect. —C.C.

  “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) than 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 seedpods 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 Pulsatilla 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.

  “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 most 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 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 ‘a 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 regarding 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 nations 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 Walke, 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.”