The Legend of Broken

Visimar bows, if only briefly. “I shall be honored, Yantek.” And with that his eyes turn to look down the mountain again, still hopeful for a last sight of the great philosopher he has been so proud to call friend.

“And so,” Arnem concludes, “he may be back, one day — but I shall try with all my being to ensure that there will be no cause. As for the Bane, our relations with them shall not only return to what they were prior to this crisis, but shall improve, now that at least two exceptions — the Baster-kin children — to the kingdom’s policy of exiling the imperfect have been made. And I intend to make those exceptions precedents. For, I confess, I ever found such rituals unnatural …” At that, the new supreme secular voice in the kingdom of Broken turns again to his wife and son. “Well, then? Shall we see how the rest of the children fare? I must inform Radelfer of his good fortune, as well.”

Pleased, for now, to have the moment of possible internal strife at last ended, Isadora and Dagobert gladly voice their agreement; yet it cannot be said that Lady Arnem is yet easy in her soul …

Visimar, for his part, scarcely seems to hear these remarks, so fixed are his eyes on the distance. Finally, however, he abandons the search; unfortunately, as it happens, for had he but waited a short while longer, he would doubtless have been most gratified to make out — emerging from the forests at the base of the mountain — the forms of two Davon panthers racing back toward their home within the Wood, with an aged and truncated human attempting with all his strength to keep to the shoulders of the larger and more brilliantly white of the two …

NOTES

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

PART ONE

† “… 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