Читать книгу The Wolf Letters - Will Schaefer - Страница 10

“To build itself a hideaway high up in the city,

a room in a tower, timbered with art,

was all it aimed at …”

The Moon, a riddle from The Exeter Book, c. 970 AD

It took me nearly two hours to read, then re-read and translate the first document. The text was small, about a quarter of an inch high, and had been more difficult to read than I had hoped, even in the strong light. There was little space between each word, and almost no punctuation. My eyes were sore, and I had a slight headache. There was still the second document to go.

I gave my eyes a break from reading and examined my notes for the first two pages. The names in this document were all Anglo-Saxon, spelled in seventh or maybe eighth century fashion. Overall, the excellent quality of the Latin was surprising.

Latin, unlike English, does not rely on word order to convey the meaning of a sentence. The meaning of a sentence is inherent in the form of the words employed, and many words could therefore occur in different parts of any given phrase without confusing things. Great Roman writers like Virgil and Cicero masterfully exploited this aspect of the language. Prose from writers of this stamp read with musical precision, perfectly and exquisitely phrased.

This Ohthere was highly accomplished. He had a sound feel for each sentence’s ultimate rhythmic potential, and in every instance he had deployed his words accordingly. Although he wrote in superb Latin, he wrote it very much like an Anglo-Saxon bard might, crafting colourful word-combinations, playing with the pleasing music of the language.

The possibility that Ohthere wrote as many as eight hundred years since classical Latin - pure Latin - was the norm made his letter even more remarkable.

Some scholars are so proficient at dating documents from the calligraphy that they can confidently attach specific years, districts, monasteries - even individual scribes - to less than half a dozen words if the script is distinctive enough.

A colleague had recently told me about a learned Catholic priest from Ireland who excelled in this field. He’d had business at Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire one night, and lost in whatever he was doing, he’d worked right through until the early morning. Naturally, the visiting priest slept late, but he was woken by the monks, who were concerned that he might miss his train from York to Liverpool.

Since the priest was running late, the abbot arranged for one of the brothers to take the monastery car and run him into York, and they would have reached the station in time had they not been forced to turn back for the briefcase he had forgotten to pack in the morning’s panic. By missing the train he also missed his ferry back to Ireland, and was obliged to spend an extra night at Ampleforth Abbey.

After the monks’ evening prayers, the priest asked the abbot if he could inspect some scraps of parchment he’d seen in a drawer in the library the night before. The scraps were folio margins - all that remained of parchments that were cut square for cleaning and re-use during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s - and the abbot, although happy to oblige his visitor, was perplexed: there was nothing clearly legible on them.

But the priest was unperturbed. He gathered all the scraps from one drawer and set about fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. This took him several hours. When the abbot, who was up late, went to check on him, the scraps were on the main library table, arranged into rectangles like the pages of a huge book from which the text in the middle had been surgically removed.

The priest then pointed out to the abbot half-words like -pharsalama and Sennac-, and infrequent whole words like Bacchidem, in the scraps that formed one particular rectangle. From this he concluded that that the missing main text had been Chapter Seven of 1 Maccabees. The abbot was stunned. But the Irishman had even more to say.

The Maccabees scribe had a peculiar, round style of lettering, and tended to slow his quill at the top of his upstrokes, leaving just a fraction too much ink on them.

Some of the scraps indicated that he wrote very straight, taking care to space his words and lines with even gaps. But he was a terrible speller, especially of proper nouns: he had left the h out of Bacchidem just here … The priest said that this style was particular to the monk who transcribed Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s Life of St Oswald. How did he know that? Apparently the priest had recently worked with the manuscript in the Cotton Nero collection in the British Library, and had been impressed with its idiosyncrasies. The visiting priest thought that the monk wrote sometime between 1150 and 1175. And there was something else. The slightly less-evolved calligraphy suggested that the monk had probably written this document at the start of his career as a transcriber. Judging from the distinctive risers on the letters d and b, the transcriber had probably created the document in Worcester, which was popularising that style at the time. This meant that although the parchment scraps had been found in Ampleforth, they more properly belonged to Worcester, and the Ampleforth monks would have to keep it quiet if they didn’t want their rivals coming round and claiming this and other manuscripts that had belonged to them in the past. The abbot could only gasp at this remarkable display of scholarship.

* * *

When I gave the transcript and my notes to Nielsen, he started reading with alacrity. I looked at my watch again. Eight forty-five. Two hours on the first five sheets, probably under an hour and a half for a thorough translation of the remaining three, especially since they were in a larger, easier to read script. I reached for a fresh sheet of paper, and began.