"Jo Walton - Kings Peace 02 - The King's Name" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

The middle volumes of the White Book consist largely of uninteresting Vincan poetry of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and it was generally believed that there was no more of interest in the work. The
publication of Professor Malaki Kahn's Vincan edition of The King's Peace: An Extract From the White Book
in 2658 came as a complete surprise to everyone.
What was not surprising was that Kahn chose to publish his edition in Vincan. The text, which contradicts
almost all known facts about King Urdo and many about the Early Insular Church, could not at that time have
been published in Yal-nic. Even in Vincan it was immediately denounced by many as a forgery. Professor
Kahn's application to excavate at Derwen was greeted with derision, and it is true that it would require the
destruction of large parts of what is now an attractive twenty-first-century port to discover the
thirteenth-century home (and possibly the original manuscript) the author of the "Sulien Text" describes.
From stylistic and scribal evidence in the White Book itself it appears that the "Sulien Text" was copied in
the mid-twentieth century, probably either at Thansethan or at Thanmarchel, and at the request of the Haver
family of Scatha, who commissioned the White Book. The scribal note states that it is a copy of an earlier
copy which was certainly made at Thansethan, very probably for the Great King Al-ward. This would be the
sixteenth-century Alward of Munew who reunited the whole of Tanager under his leadership while holding off
the Norlander invasion. He was a great scholar and may well have been interested in the life of Urdo. There is
no intrinsic reason to disbelieve that the White Book scribe told the truth as he knew it. (See Jeyver, The
Scribes of the White Book, 2723.)
It is to Alward's sixteenth-century scribe that we owe the chapter division of the work as we have it, the
commonly used title ("I found in the library of Thansethan a work on the King's Peace" the scribal note
begins) and also the quotations which are used to head each chapter. Some of these quotations have been
described as "of more value than the text itself." (Prof, bint Kerigan, "The Poetic Fragments of Anirin ap Erbin
From the So-called Sulien Text") These fragments have been attested by many scholars as undoubtedly
genuine. Some of them are very well known while others are not found elsewhere. They, at least,
unmistakably date from the age of Urdo, or not long after.
Those who claim that the text is a modern forgery, especially those who attacked Prof. Kahn's religious or
other motives, are no less than delusional. The manuscript exists and has been extensively studied in
modern conditions. While there would have been many reasons one could imagine for someone to forge an
account of Urdo's life—especially one as different from the accepted version and as pro-pagan as Sulien's
account—there would have been little purpose in doing it without circulating it and stirring up difficulty. "If
someone went to the trouble of forging this book, why did they then not go to the further trouble of
disseminating it?" asked Dr. Enid Godwinsson. (In "The Sulien Text: Whose Agenda?" in Journal of Vincan
Studies, Spring 2749.)
This is not to say that the text is indeed the work of the shadowy Sulien ap Gwien. Very little is known about
her except for what appears in this book, and that little is often directly contradictory to her own text. Without
wishing to enter into religious controversies, it should be noted (see Camling, "Irony in 'The Glory of Morthu,'"
Urdossian Quarterly, Autumn 2685) that the Vincan word "phis" which is almost universally applied to Sulien
in the later chronicles and poetry dealing with Urdo, meant at that date "faithful," and not, as it means now
and is generally translated, "pious."
In the five hundred years between Sulien's time and Al-ward's the work may have been written by anyone.
Yet, who would have chosen to do it? Indeed, who would have had the skill or the time to do so? Without
need of Godwinsson's whimsical conclusion that the forger died on or before completion of the manuscript, it
is worth considering her point about the sheer time such a forgery must have taken: we are not talking a few
pages but a weighty work that covers two volumes of modern print. It must have taken years. The text is
written in an almost classical Vincan, the sure sign of someone very well educated. Few outside the
monasteries in those centuries would have had that skill. Few inside the monasteries would have had the
desire.
One of the most controversial points in the text is, of course, the treatment of religion. The monks of the
Insular Church were remarkable in their kind treatment of manuscripts from other traditions, but they did not
go out of their way to forge works that would bring discredit on themselves. Sulien's general view of the