The Legend of Broken (108 page)

The sole question that remains, then, is just what extraordinary creature we are discussing; and from the behavior, the extraordinary size and strength, and the markings, we can definitely say that we are dealing with the Eurasian Eagle Owl (
Bubo bubo
), a bird of immense size and power, as great or greater than its formidable cousin, the Great Grey Owl of North America (
Strix nebulosa
). The differences are mainly of appearance, the Grey Owl having an ovular or circular face and no “ear tufts,” the feathery “horns” that actually are no more than cosmetic, having nothing to do with hearing. The Eurasian owl is more like the North American Great Horned Owl (
Bubo virginianus
) in appearance, but the size of the Eurasian Eagle Owl is much greater. Needless to say, these creatures caused enormous fear among humans, because of the fact that, like all owls, their weight was and is amazingly light in comparison to their power: it is always remarkable to come upon a recently deceased owl of any type and feel its extraordinary lightness, in this regard—a lack of weight designed to assist their silence and agility in flight and the hunt. And they could take not only such normal prey as rabbits and other small mammals, but deer fawns; and it was therefore believed, quite logically and rightly, that they might do the same to important domestic livestock such as lambs, kid goats, and even newborn calves and foals (always a real danger), to say nothing of human infants and toddlers. —C.C.

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skutem
shields
Gibbon writes, “Having so closely aped so many of the most crucial Roman military customs, it is not altogether surprising that we here find the soldiers of Broken almost directly transposing the Latin word for shield,
scutum,
into their own tongue.” It is also true, however, that by the time Oxmontrot served as a foreign Roman auxiliary, the classic Roman
scutum
had changed in size and shape, becoming more ovular and slightly smaller; so it is possible we do not, in fact, know precisely what Broken shields resembled, just as we do not know the precise details of so much of their culture. —C.C.

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“… dance his deadly round.”
At this point in the general history of northern Europe, as well as many other parts of the continent, “dance,” as a form of recreation, still consisted almost solely of “dances in the round,” that is, the joining of hands and then unchoreographed movement to one direction, then the other, etc., rather than of the courtly steps and masques with which we associate the later and higher Middle Ages. The only other forms of dance commonly referred to were quite sinister, in both origin and meaning: there were the “dances” that were associated with severe illness, generally nervous—such as St. Vitus’s Dance, a name given to various forms of chorea—and there was (as is mentioned here) the “Dance of Death,” or
“Danse Macabre,”
which involved that entity leading the wicked or the sickly to a generally unhappy end in the hereafter, either through trickery or sheer power. The Dance of Death could often involve witchcraft, which was blamed for many disorders, especially after the rise of the monotheistic faiths: again, medicine was poorly served by the predominance of those faiths, except in the cases of those who took their piety with a grain of salt, and refused to let it interfere with reason. Even these last were largely preservative movements; that is, they kept existent knowledge that had been gleaned centuries ago from vanishing, rather than advancing or building on it: progress that would not begin again, after brought to a virtual standstill in the fourth and fifth centuries, until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries—a full thousand years or more that could obviously have been used to great advantage. —C.C.

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“… 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 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.

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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.”

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“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.

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“… 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.

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“‘… 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.”

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“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.

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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.

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

II: Fire

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“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.

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“‘… if he [Bede] yet lives …’”
There is something strangely sad about the fact that Bede (whom, 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.

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“‘a special beer’”
The beverage that we today think of as simple 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 young men “mad,” through their undeniably if mildly pseudo-narcotic effect. —C.C.

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 and
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“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) that 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 seed pods 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
Pulsitilla 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.