The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  In the absence of any firm biographical facts, a gloriously apocryphal body of legends has entwined itself with his name. Klidsa means “Servant of the Goddess Kali,” and the fact that the -dasa suffix was thought pejorative by orthodox Hindus has been taken to suggest that he was a foreigner and convert. He was, by all accounts, very handsome, and some traditions claim he was also inordinately stupid as a child. They say he was seen up a tree, cutting off the bough on which he was sitting.

  He was inveigled into marrying a haughty princess, who had decreed she would only marry her intellectual superior. Some wags at court persuaded her to take part in a silent debate with Klidsa. She put up one finger, to state that “Shakti is one,” Shakti being the personification of primal energy, and the consort of the god Shiva. He thought she was going to poke him in the eye, so he put up two fingers, which she accepted as the answer “Shakti is in duality as well.” She extended her palm, to symbolize the elements earth, water, fire, air, and void. Fearful of getting a slap, he put up his fist. The princess agreed to marry him, as he had successfully shown that the elements constitute the body. When the ruse was discovered, he was banished, and, mortally ashamed, he offered his tongue to Kali, who in return made him a poet.

  Although the titles of five hundred Sanskrit plays have been recorded, only three can be attributed to Klidsa with any certainty. In addition he is known to have written the aforementioned lyrical poem, a meditation on the seasons, and “The Birth of the War God.” He also left unfinished an epic poem entitled Raghuvamam, or The Dynasty of Raghu, on the genealogy and descendants of Rama, comprising material also found in the Ramayana.

  It was principally as a playwright, though, that Klidsa became known in Europe. Sir William Jones translated his play as Sacontala, or the Fatal Ring in 1792, coining the epithet “the Sanskrit Shakespeare.” Goethe was deeply impressed when it was translated from English into German, and lauded it for “blending youthful blossoms with the fruits of maturity, uniting heaven and earth in one.” Goethe began his Faust with a debate between the author and the theater manager, after the model of Klidsa, such prologue scenes being a notable feature of Sanskrit drama.

  The Recognition of akuntala, to give it its original name, has many of Klidsa’s dramatic preoccupations: romantic misfortune, magical intervention, enchantment and disenchantment. It opens with King Dushyanta on a hunting expedition, meeting with the maiden akuntal. They marry in secret and he gives her a ring, but is called back to court, and promises to send for her. A curse makes him forget, and when the pregnant akuntal finally finds him, he cannot recognize her, nor can she prove she is his beloved, since the ring has been lost. It is found in the belly of a fish, and the couple are reunited.

  A synopsis can hardly do justice to the charm of the piece, nor can a translation ever capture the subtleties of alliteration, homonymy, and wordplay. Moments in another of his plays, Urvai Won by Valor, have the feel of an exotic, late-period Shakespeare: the nymph Urvai is won by the King Pururavas only after he descends into madness, and she must escape a curse that will turn her back into a celestial being at the moment she sees her child’s face. Given the scant nature of the Klidsa canon, alongside the undeniable problems of translation, it is unremarkable though unfortunate that he has also been misprized. Max Muller famously damned his work with faint praise, saying his “plays are not superior to many plays that have been allowed to rest in dust and peace on the shelves of our libraries.”

  Muller may well think so, but his opinion does not explain Klidsa’s high esteem by his native peers. An anonymous panegyric said, “Once, when the poets were counted, Klidsa occupied the little finger; the ring finger remains unnamed true to its name [the Sanskrit for ring finger means, literally, ‘without name’]; for his second has not been found.”

  His stature is confirmed by another weird story from the legendary accounts of his life. Klidsa died in Sri Lanka, supposedly murdered by a prostitute. The king, overcome with remorse that the greatest playwright ever should have been “annihilated from the round of births” under his jurisdiction, set himself on fire.

  Fulgentius

  {467–532}

  BISHOP FULGENTIUS, WHO opposed the Arian heresy, is sometimes considered to be the author of allegorical interpretations of Greco-Roman mythology, as well as one of the most curious works in the classical repertoire.

  (Ahem.)

  Humanist authors assign to this bishop (or not) a singular work, to wit, his history of all things past and upcoming, which diachronously charts, from birth and youth to coffin and tomb, a living individual’s span. An ambitious topic by most authors’ standards, but our Latin wordsmith flung on his opus an astonishing constraint, viz., that in turn, from A at first to Z last, his books would forgo a customary graphic sign for a sound, cyclically; thus it was similar in its plan to that of Tryphiodorus, who, in his account of Calypso’s wily inamorato, had to miss out glyphs in a chain or, to put it simply (in contrast to this paragraph), his triumph (in common with this paragraph) was a lipogram.

  Enough already! Joseph Addison railed against the lipogram in The Spectator for Tuesday, May 8, 1711, denouncing Tryphiodorus’ Lipogrammatical Odyssey, where “the most apt and elegant word in the whole language was rejected, like a diamond with a flaw in it, if it appeared blemished with a wrong letter.” Fulgentius’ De Aetatibus Mundi et Hominislikewise omitted A from book I, B from book II and so on, a technical stricture preventing, for example, Adam from appearing in an account of Genesis. The work was to cover the entire history of the world. The Bible (except the Book of Revelation) is covered in the first nine books, followed by the reign of Alexander, the Roman Republic, the life of Christ, and the acts of the Apostles, and it ends abruptly with the lives of the Roman emperors up to Julian the Apostate in book XIV.

  Fulgentius’ preface says that the work should be twenty-three books long (the Latin alphabet doubling I and J, and V and U, and omitting W altogether). It would seem likely that a Z-less Apocalypse would end the book. Apart from finding synonyms for the tribe of Zebulun and the gemstone topaz, which makes up the ninth foundation of the New Jerusalem, it seems a less onerous task than the beginning.

  What, one is tempted to ask, is the point? For postmodernists, like the twentieth-century lipogrammist Georges Perec, the submission to an outrageous linguistic limitation may be an end in itself, though this is unlikely in this case. An early Christian writer must have had reasons other than a demonstration of dexterity. Fulgentius had a serious purpose. The truth will out, rough hew it how we will. His God was the God of St. John, the Word that was in the beginning. Language itself—not individual languages—was Godlike; eternal, creative, human, and yet beyond the encompassing of any individual. Adam was in God’s image most when he was allowed to name creation. If God was in the language and with the language, then whatever evasions, shenanigans, or willful schemes were thrown on Him, He would find a way to be expressed. Far from being an arrogant demonstration of creative superiority, Fulgentius’ linguistic game was a proof of his share in the divine, and a humbling before the eternally elusive, always present God.

  Widsith the Wide-Traveled

  {late sixth century C.E.}

  “WIDSITH SPOKE, UNLOCKED his word-treasury, he who of all men had most widely traveled among all the nations and peoples of the world.” The poem Widsith introduces the poet, Widsith, an Anglo-Saxon scop (or minstrel). The rest of the work narrates the various kingdoms and rulers he has performed before, a panoply of places and poetic subjects that Widsith has encountered.

  Despite the vague lineaments of a biography—he comes, apparently, from the Myrgingas, a Saxon enclave in Schleswig-Holstein, and has, in his time, received a golden torque worth six hundred gold coins from King Eormanric for his songs—we should not be so naïve as to suppose this poem is an accurate “About the Author.” Widsith claims to have journeyed from the lands of the Picts and the Scots to the Medes, Egyptians, and as far as India. He has sung before Caesar, as w
ell as for the chieftains of Huns, Goths, Swedes, and Geats. His travels are extravagantly cosmopolitan; even more surprising is his claim to have performed both for Eormanric (who died in 375) and the munificent Ælfwine (who was alive in 568). His name, Widsith, tautologically means “wide-traveled,” and similar epithets have been ascribed to Viking skalds as well.

  Widsith verges into the mythical. He might be an almost supernatural figure, like Orpheus, or a once-real poet onto whose life numerous contradictory stories have been grafted, like Homer. It is as fruitless to ascribe even the words in Widsith to Widsith as it would be to attribute papyrus fragments to the god Thoth.

  But the poem does allow us a glimpse into the repertoire of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Tacitus, in his survey of Germanic customs, said that the only poetry they had was a historical record of their great deeds, and this seems borne out by Widsith’s roll call of rulers. Among his catalogue of characters he mentions Finn Folcwalding, the ruler of the Frisians, Hnæf the Hocings, and Sæferth the Secgan. All three of these heroes appear in the epic poem The Battle of Finnsburh, of which only a few score lines survive. “Widsith” also mentions Hrothgar and Hrothwulf, who will be familiar to readers of the only extant Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, as well as their hall, Heorot, which is assailed by the monster Grendel. In total, “Widsith” mentions over sixty names, and, given that some of them are known to be the subjects of heroic lays, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that most of them are the heroes of lost works. As Christianity slowly converted Britain, the value of these old sagas was called into question. Alcuin, the director of Charlemagne’s educational program, berated the monks of Lindisfarne, saying, “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?” Ingeld, too, is mentioned in Widsith.

  The “Widsith” poet is keen to let the audience know the range of his materials, and how he was handsomely remunerated for singing the great deeds of wise leaders. The Widsith poem is a prospectus, a repository of well-known classics and the promise of future deathless songs. In its own way, it is the Dark Ages equivalent of a Frankfurt Book Fair Rights Guide.

  The Venerable Bede

  {c. 673–735}

  BEDE BECAME A Doctor of the Church in 1899. His reputation for holiness, however, was established nearly a millennium beforehand: within two generations of his death eminent theologians such as Alcuin were calling him “the Venerable.” In 1020, his skeleton was purloined from the monastery at Jarrow in Northumberland where he had spent most of his life and moved to the cathedral at Durham, to rest near the remains of St. Cuthbert. Durham, it seems, was keen to corner the market in English relics. But by the nineteenth century, despite all the necessary evidence of his exceptional goodness, it was as the “Father of English History,” rather than as a dedicated monk, that his name was known.

  Bede’s History of the English Church and People, completed in 731, surveys the establishment of Christianity, and its subsequent tribulations, in the British Isles, among the “perfida gens,” or “faithless people,” as he frequently castigated its inhabitants. So recalcitrant were the British that God found it necessary to punish them, even raising up a new scourge, Muhammad, in Arabia, to terrify them. Bede’s five books are a unique source for historians of the Anglo-Saxon period, Bede being as diligent in his researches as he was in his devotions.

  Thanks to Bede, the mists of anonymity disperse and the melancholy roll call of bards whose works have perished pauses. After glimpses of semimythic Widsiths and speculations about who might have written Beowulf, we reach a real name. Chapter 24 of book IV introduces Caedmon, the earliest English poet to be known by name and whose verse survives. In 680, Caedmon was an elderly shepherd, with no gift for the communal singing of his peers, until a visitation in a dream demanded that he sing. He demurred, saying that the reason he left the feast was his lack of skill; but the vision insisted. Caedmon then refused, on the grounds that he had no topic to sing about anyway. “Sing about the Creation of all things,” he was told. Caedmon sang:

  Now we must praise the Guardian of the heaven-kingdom, the might of the Lord and his mind’s wisdom, the work of the Father of Glory; he, the Eternal Lord, commanded the beginning of each wonder. He, the Holy Creator, first fashioned heaven as a roof for the sons of men; after, the Guardian of mankind, created the middle earth below, the world for men, everlasting Lord, almighty Leader.

  Bede gives only the “general sense” in Latin, and apologizes that poetry cannot be translated without losing its dignity and power. But another, anonymous hand thought fit to inscribe in the margins the actual words Caedmon used:

  Caedmon went on to compose a great deal more poetry, including, according to Bede,

  the whole story of Genesis . . . Israel’s Exodus from Egypt and the entry into the Promised Land, and many other events of scriptural history. He sang of the Lord’s Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the teachings of the Apostles. He also made many poems on the terrors of the Last Judgement, the horrible pains of Hell, and the joys of the Kingdom of Heaven.

  All he had learned Caedmon could turn into poetry, after reflection, “like one of the clean animals chewing the cud.”

  Caedmon may have had some experience of translating before he worked biblical Latin into Anglo-Saxon verse. His name does not appear to be of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic origin; and it may be that the “first known English poet” was composing in his second language, not his mother tongue. When, much later, Anglo-Saxon scholars turned their attention to the Junius, Vercelli, and Exeter Manuscripts, it seemed a natural assumption that the poems on Genesis, Exodus, Christ II (on the Ascension), and the “Fates of the Apostles” were the very poems that Bede had attributed to Caedmon. But the nine lines remain all we can certainly attribute to him. Without rehearsing the arguments on dialect and date, a simple irrefutable proof denies two of these pieces of Caedmon: another poet signs the lines.

  Cynewulf lived more than a century after Caedmon. Four Anglo-Saxon poems contain his signature, always in the form of the runes that made up his name, and with the runes’ hieroglyphic significance embedded in the poem. As well as the aforementioned works, “Elene” and “Andreas” contain the distinctive, riddling sections, where cen (torch), yr (bow/trumpet), nyd (necessity), eoh (horse), wynn (happiness), ur (ox/our/strength), lagu (ocean), and feoh (wealth) are interpolated. Cynewulf adds a biographical ending to “Elene,” where he says he was a man of wrath before the Lord redeemed him.

  Playing with words, runes, and initials, it was clearly tempting to ditch the assumption that Caedmon wrote these poems and place all these works under the ascription of Cynewulf. But only four poems have the oblique moniker, and even these cannot have been actually put to parchment by the poet himself. “Christ I” and “Christ III” lack the mark, if not the talent. Despite the understandable desire to make Cynewulf the recognizable genius behind a whole tradition, we can only know for sure that he was the author of four poems.

  Caedmon was falsely given Cynewulf’s oeuvre, then Cynewulf was thought to have supplanted Caedmon as the Anglo-Saxon meistersinger, but neither misattribution nor misprizing obliterates Caedmon’s claim to fame. A predecessor might, and two candidates present themselves: Drycthelm and Aldhelm.

  Little is known about Drycthelm apart from his appearance in Bede’s History. The head of a religiously observant family in Northumberland, he died, and apparently came back to life after three days. During his temporary mortification, he had a vision of Heaven and Hell, which induced him to become a monk in Melrose. He spoke very little about the afterlife: a monk called Haemgils transcribed and stitched together an account akin to those of Dante and Milton; but Drycthelm was more concerned with the quality of his immortal soul than any temporary celebrity as a bard. He would frequently stand in the freezing river, singing psalms, as a bodily penance. When other monks marveled at his endurance, he responded tersely, “I have known it colder.”

  Aldhelm was much more famous. He was the abbot
of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherbourne, and wrote a Latin panegyric on virginity, which Bede says was “composed in a double form in hexameter verse and prose on the model of Sedulius,” as well as a treatise on metrics, illustrated by one hundred riddles. King Alfred stated that Aldhelm’s English poems were his favorites, though none at all has survived. The Gesta Pontificum contains the lovely story that he began writing verses as a response to his congregation’s aversion to sermons. The abbot would disguise himself as a minstrel outside of the church, and begin to perform, “mingling words of scripture among the more entertaining matter.” Drycthelm and Aldhelm show that there was an indigenous tradition of creative exposition of Christianity before Caedmon, and, even though William of Malmesbury could assert that Aldhelm’s work was still being recited in the twelfth century, neither writer’s English work has reached the twenty-first.

  Bede himself was more than just a historian. At the time of his death, he was translating St. John’s Gospel into Anglo-Saxon; it would have accompanied the impressive bibliography of his work that concludes the History. As well as the two books on The Building of the Temple, Thirty Questions on the Book of Kings, On the Book of the Blessed Father Job, and fifty-six other theological expositions, he wrote a Book of Hymns, a Book of Epigrams, On the Nature of Things, On Orthography, On Times, and an Art of Poetry, all of which are lost.

  The last title shows that Bede was a theoretician of poetry: he was also a practitioner. A letter from Cuthbert, one of Bede’s pupils and latterly the abbot of Jarrow, to his school friend Cuthwin narrates Bede’s final days. On his deathbed, he composed a poem: “Before setting out on the fated journey, no man is so wise that he need not reflect, before his soul departs, what good and evil he has done, what judgment he will receive after his death-day.” As with Caedmon’s verses, Bede’s English poetry is only preserved as marginalia to the Latin text.