The Legend of Broken (107 page)
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“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.
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“‘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.
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“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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.’”
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“‘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.
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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.
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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.’”
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“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.
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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.
