The Legend of Broken (112 page)

†
 
“… 
Muspelheim
”
A seemingly offhand phrase that in fact references an important element of Ancient German and Norse mythology. In the Dark Ages and before, many ores, such as iron, were often taken from sites where they could be easily harvested, such as bogs, marshes, and moss fields, and then worked in the kind of deep hill (or
pfell
) that served in many parts of the world as primitive smithies. So deep an impression did this practice make on the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes that it became enshrined in their mutual mythologies, and in one of the earliest Old High German epics,
“Muspilli,”
(a title that may or may not be etymologically related, but is certainly thematically connected, to the fiery pagan realm of
Muspelheim,
or
Muspell
); and, even though the poem attempts to Christianize many elements of the legend—perhaps becoming another of the nexus points between Christianity and the pagan world of the Germanic-Norse gods—a vivid portrait is painted of this cataclysmic inferno, which in pagan lore was the first of the nine worlds that existed under the world ash
Yggdrasill
. Out of the sparks of
Muspell
the stars were formed, and out of it, too, at the time of the Armageddon-like
Ragnarok,
the three sons of
Muspell
would ride, their way led by the fiery giant,
Surt,
who (according to which source one consults) is accompanied by a wolf who will swallow the sun. The Sons of
Muspell
shatter the great rainbow bridge to
Asgard
and make all earthly creatures and creations fragile or doom them altogether. The Bane, believing in the old faith, apparently also gave credence to some version of this tale; and their fear at what Caliphestros was creating seemed to clash with their excitement at the power they knew his work would give them, creating a state of general tension that was rooted in their childhoods. This anxious state of affairs apparently motivated Keera to find out all she could about the old man’s motivations, and could not have been helped by the constant presence of Stasi near the openings of the various mines: was she, rather than a wolf, the giant animal that would swallow the sun? —C.C.

‡
 
“… miraculous grade of steel”
What is given here is a very shortened account of the transformation of coal into coke, a fuel which, upon incineration, produces greatly increased temperatures in furnaces. Caliphestros would have learned his criteria for determining which coal would best suit for “coking,” once again, during his travels to the East on the Silk Path, as the process was used by the Chinese at least as early as the ninth century: but it may well have been another technological innovation that, while somewhat automatically credited to the Chinese empire, actually came out of domains in and near India even earlier. Certainly, Caliphestros’s knowledge of it would suggest so. —C.C.

††
 
“… the most fiery of the Nine Homeworlds …”
Another reference to
Muspelheim
, the most and by some accounts the only fiery underworld beneath the world ash tree,
Yggdrasill,
and the place from which the cataclysmic fires that both began the universe and would initiate its end, or
Ragnarok,
were generally expected to originate. —C.C.

†
 
“… other elements might be.”
The Bane smiths were not (entirely) exercising their imaginations, as trace amounts of other ores and elements did indeed make their way into the steel, affecting both the strength and the color of each batch. These could have included ingredients as varied as nickel, zinc, hematite, and, later, vanadium (another argument for the later composition of the Manuscript, as vanadium was used, informally, at the end of the periods under discussion, although only formally recognized in the West much later). When heated and worked, these ingredients could produce remarkable bands of color ranging from grey to red to brown to yellow, appearances that increased the reputation of the metal as some sort of “super” or “unnatural” steel. —C.C.

†
 
“… the realms of the East.”
This statement cannot help but bring to mind that supreme example of laminated, layered steel: Japanese samurai swords. Such swords were also, because of their combination of strength and sharpness, considered to have otherworldly powers: Westerners who encountered them said that they were nothing short of miraculous. It was said that there was one sword made that contained four million laminations (folding and refolding): and these are not thick blades. Whether or not this is true, the fact is that these swords could inflict devastating damage on all Western weapons, even rifle and small gun barrels. —C.C.

†
 
“‘… the dance of mating …’”
This is not poetic excess: among many species of bear, apparently including the Broken brown, the motions and noises that the male makes on encountering the female’s deliberately distributed scent is known as a “dance.” Keera’s reference to the area covered by that female scent as being too limited is also correct, as such females will spread their scent in as wide a range as possible to attract a mate. The only real question, soon to be hinted at, if not answered, is why this second fact should have been the case. —C.C.

†
 
“… primeval …”
In this case, we find an anachronistic term that helps us confirm the time of the
translation
of the Manuscript, rather than contradict it: contrary, once again, to common belief, “primeval” was a late-Enlightenment–early-Romantic notion, not a medieval one—a supposed rediscovery of how ancient forests were viewed in the Dark and early Middle Ages that had little to do with facts, and was only popularized because of the rise of industrialized society and man’s ability to control and indeed destroy such places, and therefore feel safe from their threats. Like the tired notion of the “noble savage,” whose nobility was attained only when he had been for the most part subdued, the primeval forest did not account for the absolute terror with which most people at the time of such legends as that of Broken viewed the wilderness: as, to repeat the earlier discussion of Davon Wood (note for p. 0), a source of terror and death, not Romance and a reconnection to an earlier and more fundamental way of life that would prove somehow cleansing to the spirit. —C.C.

†
 
“knucklebones”
Tacitus wrote of the German tribes’ passion for gaming—particularly, again, knucklebones (usually made of ordinary sheep and goat knuckles) and dice, during games of which young men would routinely bet their own freedom, if bereft of funds, and submit dutifully to enslavement if the result went against them. Indeed, said Tacitus, in
The Germania
and elsewhere, “What is marvelous [is that] playing at dice is one of their most serious employments, and even sober, they are gamesters.” As to losing their freedom, “Such is their perseverance in an evil course: they themselves call it honor.” Thus, gambling of all kinds was indeed a powerful part of the culture of the people of Broken, and of most of the tribes around them. —C.C.

†
 
Linnet Crupp
A name of which Gibbon would not have taken any note, but which, today, stands out for its similarity to that of the Krupp “dynasty,” Germany’s greatest steel and armaments manufacturers, who first came to prominence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and who were in fact based in the city of Essen, which was and is indeed “an ancient city to the west of” Broken. Was this Crupp a self-imposed exile from that clan, and has the spelling merely been changed by the Broken dialect, or were the two unrelated? The fact that both were concerned with the artillery of their respective periods is intriguing, but not conclusive, as the Krupp fortune relied on iron as much as armaments production. —C.C.

†
 
“… onset of rain.”
The connection between chronic pain syndromes (such as those suffered by people who have sustained wounds or broken bones) and the approach of rain has long since been established as more than an old wives’ tale, or a collection of purely aneċal experiences. The precise mechanism of the relationship is not yet understood in its details, but is believed to lie in the fact that drops in barometric pressure affect the balance of cerebrospinal fluid, changes which in turn immediately reach any abnormalities in the peripheral nervous system. Again, this was an area in which Galen the Greek and those who followed him could have done much good, had they not been driven into hiding, and their reliance on autopsies forbidden, by the major monotheistic faiths. —C.C.

‡
 
Bal-deric
Gibbon writes, “An intriguing name, another of those that must have come down from one of two directions, yet we cannot say which direction is the more likely: it could be a variation on the Norse
Balder,
the name of Odin’s most handsome and virtuous son, whose death, in that same set of myths, brings about the onset of
Ragnarok;
but it may also be the Broken version of the Germanic
Derek,
itself a variation of the Ostrogothic
Theodoric
.” The addition of an extra syllable in both cases, remains unexplained; but the combination of the two may be a further signal of the Broken dialect’s serviing as a melting pot of regional languages. —C.C.

†
 
“… steel wheels and wires …”
Aneċal accounts of prosthetic limbs have endured since ancient times, although it is not until the late-medieval– early-modern period that scientists began collecting actual examples—perhaps because, before then, they were not considered religiously acceptable and were, like most other scientific advances, destroyed; or, the earlier accounts may in fact be mythological. Certainly, this would not be the only area, as we have seen, in which individual scientists and inventors from Broken anticipated what most would consider a future development. —C.C.

†
 
Weltherr
Gibbon writes, “There is at least no great mystery associated with this name:
Weltherr
must have been the Broken cognate of the ancient Germanic
Waldhar,
which has come down to us in the fairly common form of
Walther
(or our own Walter), whose constituent parts translate roughly to ‘master of the army’: evidently, this fellow’s parents had something more ambitious in mind when they named him than the composition of military maps, despite the verity, proved century after century, that the army possessed of the better maps—both of locations and topography—enjoys a distinct advantage.”

†
 
3:{xi:}
For this final chapter of the Manuscript, we find yet another of the, for Gibbon as for, perhaps, many modern readers, maddeningly inconsistent styles of organization. Gibbon’s passion for uniform organization is well known: but it does willfully ignore the varied styles of most legends, sagas, eddas, etc., of the period, which often do not represent anything more than the manner in which these tales were told and retold (often by different authors, although not, it seems, in this case) down through the ages; and while the Broken Manuscript may be confusing, in this sense, it is entirely historically consistent. —C.C.

†
 
“… that same misty halo … until the end of time …”
Gibbon notes that, in his day, “this is indeed the case, much of the time, on the mountain called
Brocken,
although whether the ‘ring’ first formed during this march that saw an alliance between the Talons and the Bane is impossible, of course, to say.” We could as easily make the same remark today; however, in more contemporary times (even during Gibbon’s, although he does not mention it) this mist would add to the sinister reputation of the mountain, rather than connoting some divine blessing, as the narrator seems to imply. —C.C.

†
 
“… allied …”
This is another of those words that might sound anachronistic to many ears, because of its heavy association with the Second World War; but in fact, it comes to us from early medieval times, from Middle English, and its component parts stretch back farther than that. And certainly, the notion of allies and “allied forces” was known to the most ancient world, one of the first and most famous such having been the thousand Greek ships that sailed on fabled Troy. —C. C.

†
 
“ponies”
Gibbon writes, “Once again, I had no luck in persuading my translator to tell me what the original word for ‘ponies’ or ‘pony’ was, in the Manuscript, which is something of a pity, as it might have helped to clarify the origins of this subspecies of the horse, a ‘subspecies’ that may have a longer history than the ‘species’ itself, at least in northern Europe: for there are those who believe that ponies were animals bred and then abandoned by several migrating tribes that originated in Asia and were, like their ponies, smaller in stature than their conquerors, the Europeans and the contemptible Byzantines, with their enormous armored warhorses.” Gibbon’s disdain for the Byzantine Empire has already been noted; and although the actual word “pony” was just over a century old, in his day, the species or subspecies had many other, much older names in other parts of Europe. —C.C.