Germanic Romance
Found this on the back of an old scroll and translated it.
Last summer, while hiking in the Vulkaneifel region of Germany, I found a brittle scroll on the floor of a cave near Schalkenmehrener Maar, a volcanic lake that’s a lowkey pretty chill tourist spot. The cave was difficult to access because the entrance was not only tiny, it was also high up on a bluff. Once I climbed up there, it probably took me forty-five minutes to squeeze through the toddler-sized cleft, and then another hour to army-crawl through a pitch-black, shoulder-width passage before I found a small bubble of a space inside the rock that was large enough for me to sit up in. Swinging my phone light around, I could see a couple human skeletons sharing the space with me. They were so old that their bones disintegrated in my hands when I tried to grab one to take and sell, figuring they would be worth something to someone. I also found what I didn’t realize at the time was a Roman coin because it was so tarnished. It just looked like a rock. It wasn’t until I got home and soaked it in vinegar and scrubbed it with a scouring pad that I saw the unmistakable profile of Julius Caesar. According to the internet, this coin could be worth anywhere from $300 to $1,000, which isn’t too bad for free money. But by far the most valuable thing I found was the scroll I mentioned. It was covered with a bunch of what looked like charcoal drawings—lines, arrows, maybe people. It might’ve been a map, or a just really bad drawing of something. The scroll was also incredibly brittle, but since by the time I saw it I had already destroyed several skeleton bones with my carelessness, I was much more careful with the scroll. I didn’t even let myself unfurl it until I got back to California. Whatever the lines on the scroll were, I had no context for them because I’m not a scholar. Hoping to know what I had and how much it might be worth, I took it to a medievalist at the University of California-Davis, who told me that I shouldn’t have taken any of this stuff. He said I should give it to him, and he would turn it over to the head of his department who would see about getting it back in the hands of the German government so they could preserve it as a piece of their history and run tests on it and stuff like that. I was adamant that the scroll was mine. Besides, Germany was a powerful country with plenty of history to study and fawn over already, and I was just one ordinary person with nothing very interesting going on. It didn’t seem fair to take from David to give to Goliath. The medievalist said it wasn’t a David and Goliath situation, even after I pointed out how much money Germany has compared to me. Anyway, we argued back and forth about that for a while, but when he realized he couldn’t persuade me, he threatened to tell the police and the media. I told him he better not do that because if anyone came after me, I would simply destroy the scroll and claim he was delusional. Feeling like he had no more leverage, I asked him to tell me what the lines on the scroll were. Acting all depressed, he said he didn’t know, but to him they looked like the drawings of a child. He then asked if any of the skeletons in the cave were little. I thought back and remembered that one of them had been pretty small. He then told me the other side of the scroll was what was valuable. If I looked very carefully, I’d see tiny letters. There was text written on the scroll. I unfurled it in his office as he cringed and screamed and asked me to stop handling the scroll so roughly. I ignored him. I did verify, however, that there were tiny letters covering the “back” of the scroll, which I guess was really the front. Maybe the parent skeletons had given the kid skeletons (before they became skeletons obviously) the back of the scroll to draw on while they were holed up in that cave for whatever reason. The UC Davis scholar expended a lot of energy urging me to be careful with the scroll, and pleading with me that if I wasn’t going to hand it over to an expert, I should at least take extensive photos of it and share them with someone who knows Old English. I asked him if he knew Old English. He said yes. By then I felt bad for him because he genuinely did seem selfless in his desire for the scroll to be preserved and studied, so I told him as long as he didn’t tell anyone about the scroll, I’d send him pictures of it, and he could be the one who translated it from Old English into regular English. In an instant, I could see his entire motivation shift from the altruism of preservation to the vainglory of personal ambition. He eagerly nodded and said he’d give anything for the chance to be the first one to translate it. I looked at him slyly and said something to the effect of this maybe being the beginning of a beautiful friendship, which only made him look uncomfortable. It was that look that made me change my mind when I got home. I realized I didn’t need to be a charity shop giving this random medievalist credit when I could learn Old English myself, at least as much as I needed to translate a fairly short text. Then I could be the one who got the glory. It took longer than I hope, of course. Old English is hard as hell and way different than you think it would be. It’s not just “old,” it’s completely different: there are different letters, different sounds, and completely different grammar. But, like I said, it’s not hard to go letter by letter, word by word, for a single text. You don’t have to even know a whole language to do that. You just have to be able to look things up, then revise backward when you get to the end of the line or the section or the piece as a whole and you have more understanding. Whenever I got frustrated and wanted to quit translating it, I found motivation by imagining that UC Davis guy refreshing his inbox, waiting desperately for an email from me that he was sure was going to change his life, but which he didn’t know was never going to come.
The full text is below. I’m calling it the Schalkenmehrener Codex, after the name of the lake near the cave where I found it. I looked it up and that’s how people name this type of thing. Like many medieval texts, it was written in verse, but I translated it into prose because that was way easier. Just getting the sense of the lines was hard enough without having to deal with matching sounds and rhythms and stuff like that. The story is pretty good and you don’t need all that other stuff to appreciate it. Finally, like a lot of these old legends, it begins en medias res. Don’t ask me what happened before the opening line because I don’t know and, for all I know, the original author wanted people not to know because not knowing actually improves the story. That’s how they used to tell stories back then, and I think it’s a lost art. People today need everything spoonfed to them, and writers must also have some psychological need to spoonfeed people. In fact, I seriously considered cutting this whole preamble and just sharing the Schalkenmehrener Codex raw, but then I wouldn’t have gotten any of the credit for finding it and translating it, which was way too much work to not get credit for.
Heartbroken again, Evera goes to Allor once more to ask him to help her stop Cragleon. Allor is still in love with Evera, and he is certain that Andrea is his daughter too, but he is still in the same bind he was in before. Upon seeing him, Evera says that if Allor cannot help her live, he must at least promise to look after Andrea. Allor lies and says he doesn’t believe that Andrea is his child. Evera leaves Allor’s hut feeling hopeless, betrayed, and abandoned. She then explains in drawings to her daughter Andrea that she will probably soon die. Andrea wants to know why they can’t flee into the forest. Just then the monster comes, and its cries shear the sky and tear the air. It’s so loud and ear-splitting that, just like every time before, everyone buries their heads in their pillows and crawls under their beds. Everyone except Andrea, who is deaf. Andrea observes the sky darkening and then sees the monster again. It is a dragon with a peculiar body. It lands and snaps the thief in its jaws, leaving the stake, and leaps back into the air with one silent but air-rending flap of its wings and flies away in the total silence of Andrea’s perception. Andrea, then, is the first person in the village to have seen the dragon, and she notes that its rib cage is exposed. There is no skin covering its torso, and its heart can be seen from the outside through the cage of bones, beating big and black and purple and, Andrea surmises, simple to pierce with a spear. The next day Andrea draws the dragon on the floor of Evera’s hut, and Cragleon comes and demands to tie Evera to the stake and have her wait out her month in public humiliation for bearing a bastard. Cragleon drags Evera out of her hut by the foot and ties her to the stake himself. In the middle of the month, late at night, Allor comes to weep in front of Evera and apologize for being a coward. He says he should’ve married Evera instead of Pimson’s daughter Orea, and he says he should’ve done more to protect her. Evera has an idea. She tells Allor to make love to her even though she is tied to the stake, so at least she will be able to breathe in his smell when she dies, like a drug to keep her from being afraid. Allor is hesitant because it seems too cruel to make love to a doomed woman without also helping her, but he also does truly love her and cannot resist the opportunity to embrace her. In their lovemaking Allor is thunderstruck by his feelings for her, and as soon as they are done, Evera tells him there’s a way he can save her. Now, Allor wonders if she pitched this intimacy because she knew that if he acquiesced, he would feel guiltier for not helping her. It’s an open question that I don’t know the answer to myself. But in any case, she tells Allor that in her hut on the floor is a drawing of the dragon who terrorizes them. If Allor goes to the hut and reviews the drawing, he will see that the monster is not invincible, but vulnerable, and he can then go into the woods and kill it, saving her and the rest of the village from harm evermore. Allor tries to weasel out by saying that even if he does find the monster, all the monster has to do is howl, and Allor will be so terrified that he won’t be able to open his eyes and see the monster to fight him. Evera tells him to sneak up on the monster while it is asleep. Allor goes to her hut and sees Andrea’s drawing. Andrea is there too, crying and alone and worried for her mother. Allor looks at his unclaimed daughter, then back at the drawing, which is extremely vivid and full of detail, beautiful in its rendering of the horrific monster that is the bane of the village, and beautiful in its rendering of Evera tied to the stake in front of the monster. He recognizes that his daughter is talented and he is so proud of her, and, sorry for having denied her his love and protection, he weeps, and some of his tears fall into the eyes of the monster in the drawing. Then with his finger, Allor draws a crude spear in the sand pointed right at the dragon’s heart, then looks at Andrea. After he leaves, Andrea gains hope from looking at the drawing. Allor gathers his weapons and walks into the forest that very night, the first person to ever leave the village. The trees are twice as tall as our trees are today and ten times as thick, since they have never been cut or trod by humans and have been growing since the dawn of time. Allor searches the woods for weeks, seeing many animals and plants and creatures no one had ever seen. He learns to eat new foods. He gets sick a few times. He finds water. He sleeps with one eye open and one eye closed and rests half his mind at a time, his spear clutched tightly across his chest. But he can’t seem to find the dragon until the final night, when the moon is almost full. He hears a sound like wind wheezing back and forth, with a high faint whistle. He follows the sound and finds that it is echoing from inside a cave. Outside the cave are scattered many bones. Allor suspects the dragon lies within, and he sneaks inside, spear raised. After walking in the dark, he starts to feel the hot wind of the dragon’s breath on his face as he moves into the dark. He has a torch at his side, but dares not light it. He comes into a large inner chamber and there he sees the dragon’s beating heart inside its open ribcage, producing its own dark light, almost like moonlight on a stone, but there is no moon in the depths of the cave. The breath of the dragon, this close, is like a howling wind. Allor cannot see the dragon’s head, as it is turned away. He reaches back with his spear and, just as he about to hurl it, the dragon wakes and howls. The sound is so loud that Allor drops his spear to cover his ears with both hands and runs screaming out of the cave. He darts through the moonlight as the dragon lumbers out in pursuit. Behind a boulder he hides his head against the ground and cries from the sound. He manages to pull out a small knife from his belt, but the dragon’s cries are so deafening and terrifying, that Allor just whimpers and drops the knife. The dragon snorts and screeches and stomps around him, smelling the air, then swings its enormous head toward the boulder Allor is behind. Allor knows he’s about to be eaten. Then he summons his courage and picks the knife back up and cuts off both of his ears and then with blood mingling with the earth at his feet, he makes a clay and packs it into the holes on the side of his head. He stands up, earless, wearing a beard of blood, teeth gritted in great pain. He can still hear the dragon, but the noise is lessened just enough so that Allor can open his eyes. He looks at the dragon and thinks about all the heartache it has caused his village over the years, and he even realizes that had it not been for the dragon, Pimson would’ve never gotten powerful, and his daughters would’ve never become important brides, and so he might’ve married Evera, in fact, if not for the dragon. Then Allor thinks of Evera’s courage, and his cowardice, and yet her seeming love for him in spite of that cowardice and betrayal of her love, and then his gratitude for her machinations that led him here with a chance to charge the dragon. The dragon swipes at Allor. Allor ducks. Allor jumps around its snout. He leaps into its rib cage. He reaches up and tries to cut the heart out, but the dragon jumps up in the air, and spreads its wings through the tops of the trees, and pumps them once and shoots high into the nearly full moon night sky. Allor loses balance and falls out of the dragon’s body. He grabs onto the dragon’s curling tail, holding for dear life. The dragon deftly flicks Allor to the trees with the tail. Allor strikes a formidable branch like a rag doll, and then falls onto a rock, cracking his back. The dragon lands and looks at his body. The dragon sniffs Allor, and sticks out its long, dripping tongue and bares its fangs, and suddenly the dragon’s eyes roll backward. The dragon rears and claws at its own ribcage. There’s a spear in its heart. The dragon falls over dead. Andrea, with a tiny spear in her other hand as yet unused, stands behind the dragon, having followed Allor out of the village all the way to the cave. Andrea walks to Allor. Allor is still alive, gasping. Allor gets up and with his daughter’s help, cuts off the dragon’s enormous head. He and Andrea drag it back to the village. There Allor demands Cragleon release Evera, but Cragleon says that there’s no proof that this monster’s head belongs to the monster that has been terrorizing the village. Allor takes Cragleon and the villagers back to Evera’s hut to show them the drawing of the dragon on the floor, but the drawing has since been swept away, apparently by Cragleon. Cragleon demands that Allor and Andrea both die because they ventured beyond the village walls and are now infected with the evil of the woods. Andrea is tied to the stake next to Evera, and Allor is too wounded to help. Evera draws a heart on the ground in front of Andrea and points at her to let her know she loves her. Allor gets to his feet and kills Cragleon just as Cragleon is about to kill Andrea and Evera, but not before Cragleon is able to disembowel the severely weakened Allor. Cragleon’s firstborn Rhoan lifts Cragleon’s blade and is about to kill Evera and Andrea when he is stopped by Pimson’s daughter Orea, now widow of Allor, who takes the blade from Rhoan and brings it down on the bonds, freeing Evera and Andrea. Evera and Andrea leave the village voluntarily. They go into the woods and live out the rest of their days in the monster’s cave. No one ever sees another monster, and slowly people start to leave the village and populate the forest. Evera and Andrea befriend many animals because they use a language of pictures, which the animals understand.