The Legend of Broken

Caleb Carr The Legend of Broken

Introductory Note

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during Gibbon’s lifetime or since; I only knew of the thing because I’d run across references to it in several unpublished letters that Gibbon had written to his countryman and colleague, the great Edmund Burke.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

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

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

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

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

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

— CALEB CARR

Cherry Plain, N.Y.

Part One: The Moon Speaks of Death

Are there reasons to count the central elements of the tale credible?

There are. First, the location of the small but evidently powerful realm of Broken can easily be calculated: the narrator’s mention of it as lying outside the northeastern borders of the western Roman empire place it somewhere in Germania, while his descriptions of the dramatic countryside call to mind not only the fertile fields of the Saale and Elbe River valleys, but, even more pointedly, the dense, timeless forests of Thuringia and Saxony, in particular the Harz mountain range — the highest point of which is a summit called Brocken (the “c” was evidently dropped in the Broken dialect, with the result that the word was pronounced much as it would have been, and is, in Old and Modern English). This mountain has ever been infamous as the supposed seat of unholy forces and unnatural rites,† and its physical attributes conform closely to the mountain atop which the city of Broken is said to have stood (particularly its summit of stone, which bears some resemblance to the Gallic stronghold of Alesia, although it was far superior from a military perspective).

As to the customs and culture of the people of Broken, they were certainly more developed than anything that can be found in central Europe between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D., the period during which the greater part of the kingdom’s history seems to have transpired. But this difference can, I believe, be accounted for by the unidentified narrator’s assertion that the kingdom’s founding ruler, one Oxmontrot, and several of his tribesmen once fought as barbarian auxiliaries for both the Western and Eastern regions of the Roman empire. Evidently this chieftain possessed not only a brutal sword arm, but a potent intellect, as well, which absorbed and made use of many of the most beautiful, noble, and administratively effective Roman traditions.

Unfortunately, he also legitimized the beliefs of his less perspicacious companions, who had been drawn into several of the most extreme Roman cults of sensuality and materialism that had been organized around such deities as Elagabalus [var. Heliogabalus] and Astarte, and who wished to form a similar new faith of their own. This longing took the form of a similarly secret and degenerate cult, one that was permitted by Oxmontrot to become the new faith of the kingdom of Broken, for reasons that will become clear. The faith was organized around what had, until then, been a minor deity in Rome’s eastern provinces, one called Kafra; and his dominance would lead to the second most important development in the early years of Broken, the creation of the race of exiles known as the Bane.†

— EDWARD GIBBON TO EDMUND BURKE,

November 3, 1790