I actually had the chance to see this codex when the museum reopened to the public a few years ago. Note taking, or any kind of image making, is forbidden by the curator. (Supposedly this is for the safety of the visitors: "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" etc.; more likely it's so that the museum can sell copyrighted images in its splendid gift shop.) But, while a docent was distracted, I managed to scratch out an awkward version of Von Brauch's manuscript map of the continent of Laent-a map which has never, as far as I know, been published. This sketch was used by the talented Chuck Lukacs to create the map that adorns this book.
But I can't, and don't wish to, deny that most of my knowledge of Von Brauch comes from the magisterial edition with commentary by H. N. Emrys (Amsterdam, 1967), the capstone of a career devoted to the Ambrosian legends. Emrys took some criticism for her agnostic approach to the so-called authenticity question-whether these legends represent an actual tradition of storytelling about Merlin's family or whether they were the mere inventions of a pseudonymous fantasist. (No principality of "Brauch" has been discovered on the map of Germany, and it looks as if Von Brauch, like many of those-who-know, operated under a nom de guerre.) Folklorists will long remember Corvino's searing review of Emrys' lifework, comparing her stance on the "authenticity question" to Jung's tacit endorsement of UFOlogy.
Emrys's vindication was a long time coming, but nowadays her agnosticism seems almost too conservative. With Gabriel McNally's publication of a rich selection of Khroic ekshal (Minneapolis, 2000), with translations and a theoretical framework of tonal notations, we can now be certain there are not only one but several independent traditions of storytelling about the Ambrosii. The "authenticity question" has now been replaced by the "historicity question"-that is, "Do the Ambrosian stories contain some core of historical fact (like the Trojan War legends) or are they purely imaginary?" It's an interesting issue, one I don't propose to address (since my interests are more mythographic than historical), except to point out how rare purity is.
The legendary material we have falls into three groupings, which naturally have some overlap:
1. Stories about Merlin Ambrosius, particularly before he becomes entangled in the history of Britain.
2. Stories about Ambrosia Viviana, and her rise to power over a significant portion of Laent. (Stories about Merlin and Nimue's other daughter, Hope Nimuelle, are less common, for obvious reasons.)
3. Stories about Morlock Ambrosius, the so-called master of all makers. It's this third group that is the most various and the most problematic. In some, he is a helpless drunk. In some, he is merely a cardboard villain-Richard III without the charm. In some, he is improbably (almost tediously) noble. The Khroi incorporated him into their malefic angelology. Old Danish stories tell about his confrontation with Wayland Smith. The Canterbury recension of Mandeville's Travels includes a description of his workshop which is as ingenious as it is implausible.
These stories may each work (or not work) on their own, but they don't work together. It's not a question of historicity-I again waive any discussion of whether the stories are "true." It's that they don't cohere. In a small way, the traditions about Morlock resemble those about Hercules: they can't be stitched together to create a mythic biography (as can be done for Perseus, for instance, or Hrolf Kraki, or Atalanta, or many another legendary hero). So, in representing some of these legends in fictional form, I am not attempting to create a prose epic about Morlock, a multivolume Morlockiad. (Folklorists will recall the sad case of C. Linwood, who hysterically insisted that no reviews be made of his "eikosapentalogy" based on the legends of Uthar the Great until the twenty-fifth and final volume of the work was complete. He died before the project was more than a quarter finished, and today the work is almost unknown.) I'm just trying to tell some of the Morlock tales that are interesting, in ways that suit the particular story (or set of stories).
In retelling the legends about Lord Urdhven's attempted usurpation (in Blood of Ambrose), it seemed best to use the form of a Bildungsroman or "education of a hero," especially since the scant stories we have about Lathmar VII the Rebuilder tend to illuminate apparently contradictory traditions about Morlock and Ambrosia. It's a familiar form, too-perhaps overfamiliar. As Gabriel McNally recently wrote to me, "You can't swing a dead cat in the fantasy section of any bookstore without knocking three or four of these pigtender-becomes-king books off the shelf." (I was intrigued by this image of the respectable philologist swinging dead carnivores in bookshops, but in later communications he insisted that it was just a thought experiment and that, anyway, the charges had been dropped.)
With This Crooked Way I turned to another venerable form in popular American fantasy, the episodic novel or "fix-up." Episodic novels have a bad reputation these days, and I don't think that's entirely undeserved. But this is a very traditional form in sf/f generally and sword-and-sorcery in particular. For some, that would be no recommendation at all. The past is dead. The future is now. The reason to jump off the cliff is that no one has done it yet. But when it comes to cliff jumping, I am not especially innovative. I like to look down and see a deep, soft carpet of my predeceased predecessors before I leap. In any case, the episodic novel meshes well with the segmented nature of the sources (which I have cobbled together from Von Brauch and McNally's translations of the Khroic song-cycles).
One of the reasons why I decline to involve myself with the historicity question is that it hinges on the material reality of Morlock's world and its relationship to our own. Opinions about this differ. Both the Khroic ekshal and Von Brauch's Gray Book refer to an area described (or named) as "the Sea of Worlds" (Mare Mundorurn in Von Brauch's Latin; in Khroic, Ver[tone IA]-Thel[tone 3B)- Tre[tone 7C]-Lor[tone 2ABC]). The Sea of Worlds is supposed to be an area between worldlines which can be navigated by those-who-know. As far as McNally is concerned, Von Brauch and the Khroi are independent witnesses whose testimony establishes beyond question the reality of the Sea of Worlds (and the worldline in which most of the Ambrosian legends are set). Doubting them is like "doubting the existence of the Ohio Turnpike, just because one has never driven on it." It's safe to say that most of his colleagues feel differently; the issue unquestionably played a role in his denial-of-tenure, a matter which is still under litigation (McNally v. the University of Mackinac et al.).
Nonfolklorists have proposed a "many worlds" hypothesis that might leave some possibility for Dr. McNally's controversial views. Thakurjeet Kaur, the eminent Indian-American physicist, spent her last years crafting a theory to accommodate the different models of quantum decoherence she considered valid, or at least potentially valid. Insofar as I understand it (which isn't much), she argued there was a probabilistic density that causes similar worldlines to collapse and merge, leaving a "world gap" that isolates and defines fundamentally dissimilar worldlines. This "world gap" might be functionally equivalent to the legendary Sea of Worlds. Whether it is navigable or not, or whether it even exists, is a question I leave to quantonauts more adventurous than myself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jann Eij 's fiction has appeared in Black Gate, Flashing Swords, and everydayfiction.com. He is an instructor of classical languages at a midwestern university.