The King’s Book
Epigraph
The manuscript, which now carries the shelf mark of the Royal Library in Copenhagen where it once was held (as GkS 2635 4to), has over time suffered loss, misreading and botched repair, much like its texts, largely in verse, but also with connecting prose passages, and originally seems to have had 106 pages, rather than the 90 that now survive. Loss of probably eight leaves after folio 32 (the so-called ‘great lacuna’) has left a gap in the narrative of the life of the mighty hero Sigurd the Völsung that can partly be filled by the surviving mid-thirteenth-century Völsunga saga, which, as we shall see, itself bears witness to many of the same poems preserved in the Codex Regius. It seems feasible that the missing leaves offered, among other things, the further wisdom of a valkyrie (one of the supernatural warrior-women who picked the best of the dead warriors for the service of the god Odin) given to her chosen hero, as well as an account of a heroic wooing of a matchless man and a marvellous maid; it is possible that apart from the ending of one damaged poem and the beginning of another, the great lacuna contained the longest single account of Sigurd’s exploits. As such, the self-contained booklet may not so much have been simply lost as removed for private perusal by an over-zealous reader.
—Orchard, Andy. The Elder Edda (Legends from the Ancient North) (pp. 8-9). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
The King’s Book
Hilde met Sigurd outside the Commune refectory. “Where are you headed, Sigurd?” she asked.
“The library. The Royal Library of Nordreich. Always the library”
“Is it true you have a desk of your own there?”
“The desks in the reading room are free for anyone to use.”
“I hear tell you’re there so much, everyone calls it Sigurd’s desk. Anyone looking for you knows to look there.”
“I don’t have a deed to it! Anyone could sit down at what you’re pleased to call my desk, and I would have no right to object.”
“Not me. No women allowed in the library.”
“True, that. I should have said, ‘Any student of the university.’”
“And o’ course women can’t be students.”
“Certainly not!”
“It’s not fair. I can read, too!”
“Yes, Hilde, I know. I taught you,” Sigurd said.
“It was a curse, that was,” she answered. “Books are too expensive for the likes of me, and I’m not allowed in the building where they hide them all.”
When he wasn’t in the library, Sigurd lived in the Regency dormitory. Thanks to the Commune scholarship he had a bed there and two free meals a day. Regency beds and meals were only for students who were “worthy and in need.”
There was no doubt of Sigurd’s need. His mother scraped a living taking in washing—long hard work that earned her just enough to live. His father Carl called himself a soldier. That had been true, until the fight in which he lost his right leg. Now he begged for coins. Any that fell into Carl’s hands were apt to be exchanged for beer.
Carl had named his son after Sigurd the Völsung, the great hero of Norse legend, who forged the sword Grim and with it slew the dragon Fafnir. Sigurd couldn’t help doubting he was what his father had been hoping for when he named him. Sigurd Carlson was a weedy young man, small for his age, and useless in a fight. In the Royal Library, though, he was not useless. He had a gift for languages, and he wrote a fair hand. He secretly named his pen Grim.
Sigurd’s matriculation at the University had gotten him out of his father’s way, and had relieved his mother of the burden of feeding and sheltering him. This was all the help he could give them.
Clothing and shoes were a struggle every winter. When he first entered the University Sigurd had earned the occasional penny by running errands. Now, in his third year, his gift for languages was recognized by the professors. Professor Erik Peterson, who praised Sigurd’s writing, would occasionally throw small translation jobs his way. Most often it was between Old Norse and Latin, but Sigurd was also skilled in Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic.
Housed in a small dingy room of the Royal Library was a collection of rare books in Old Norse. Sigurd knew the collection well.
Thus, he was surprised one day to see a small codex he had not seen before. Perhaps it had just been returned. It was barely fifty brown, heavily written parchment leaves. The title, Edda, was written on the first page, and a mark he had seen before, like a pair of intertwined “S”s. This, he knew, was the mark of the Icelandic Bishop Sven Svenson, who had collected manuscripts for King Erik III. Indeed, he found that it was cataloged as The King’s Book.
It was handwritten, and the copyist—presumably long-dead—had been at pains to crowd as much text as he could into a small space. There were frequent abbreviations, which did not make it any easier to read. Sigurd soon realized that it was poetry, although the copyist had ignored the verses to crowd as much into each page as possible.
In fact, he recognized some of them. It was a book of mythology and legend. It began with the familiar stories of the gods and giants. Here were Odin, Thor, Loki, and other gods and giants. In the middle were stories of heroes, including a long story about Sigurd the Völsung.
This naturally caught Sigurd’s attention. It was the most complete version of that legend that Sigurd had ever seen. Remembering how Hilde had upbraided him, he thought of making a gift of it to her. Taking his pen Grim in hand, he sat at his desk and translated the story about Sigurd into Norse, which she could read. For the abbreviations he made his best guesses, and he wrote the verses out in stanza and verse, the way poetry should be written.
“It’s not a real book,” he told her, giving her the pages, “but perhaps these will make your ability to read less of a curse.”
“That was so good,” she told him two days later.
“You read the whole thing already?” he asked her.
“Well, it’s only a few pages,” she answered. “Did you know that my real name is Brynhild? Hilde is just a nickname.”
“I did not know that!” he said. “So, what did you think of Brynhild in the story?”
“Well, it’s very sad, of course,” she answered. “But honestly, for someone who’s supposed to be so very wise, she’s kind of stupid, isn’t she?”
“Is she really?” Sigurd said.
“Well, yeah. She knows all about runes and enchantments. But she never suspects anything when Sigurd puts a sword between himself and her in bed. I mean, what woman wouldn’t say to herself, ‘My man is acting weird?’”
“I guess I was just too focused on how stupid Sigurd is to notice Brynhild’s obtuseness.”
“Well, just so you know, not every Brynhild is as slow as this one.”
“I know it!” Sigurd said. “But, sad to say, every Sigurd is that dumb.”
“Ha!”
The next day, Hilde caught Sigurd. “I want to show you something.”
She pulled the sheets of poetry he had translated for her from her pouch. “Sigurd wakes Brynhild, and she teaches him her wisdom. I wrote the runes she taught him, in order.” She shuffled to the last page, where she had written a series of runes on the blank space left at the end. “It’s a message, Sigurd. See?” She pointed to the page. “I don’t know how to read runes, not like you do, but I can tell they make a message. It’s like a threat or a warning.”
Sigurd looked at the runic message she had transcribed. She was right! There was a secret message embedded in the poems of the King’s Book, in the runes mentioned in the story of Sigurd the Völsung. He was startled, and impressed, ”You’re right! I didn’t see that at all. I need to look at this more carefully.”
Back at the library, Sigurd took The King’s Book off the shelf and carefully transcribed the runes mentioned in the 16 pages of the story of Sigurd. Working from the original instead of the Norse translation he had made for Hilde, it was even clearer. There was a message concealed in the runes. It was, as Hilde had intuited, a threat.
Sigurd himself was no expert in runic messages. He brought The King’s Book and his transcribed runic message to Professor Peterson.
He explained how the message had been found, not naming Hilde for fear of causing her trouble. He added. “This looks dangerous to me. Am I imagining a difficulty where none exists? Or is it true that this is a secret that could destroy us? The King’s Book was written hundreds of years ago—how is it possible that they would have known something that would still be a danger to us?”
The Professor smiled indulgently. But as he read Sigurd’s transcription, his expression turned serious. He asked for The King’s Book, asked Sigurd to point him to the source of the concealed message, then carefully worked through it himself.
“I see no mistake in your work. It is, as you say, remarkable that a scribe of so many years past could have something so dangerous to say to us now. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“What should we do about it?”
“There is only one answer. We must lay it before the man who knows all our secrets. Only he can judge if there is a real danger.”
“The man who knows all our secrets,” said Sigurd, puzzled. “The King?”
“Just so.”
“Will he listen? Will he understand?”
“Sigurd, those are dangerous but very good questions. We have had kings for whom the answers would have been ‘No’ and ‘No.’ But we are fortunate in the current incumbent. He is both wise, and a scholar. You will have no difficulty making him understand.”
“Me! I can’t talk to the King!”
“You can and must. You discovered this hidden message—”
“—I did not. It was Hilde—” thought Sigurd.
“—and you are the only person who can explain it.”
“But the King will not talk to me!” Sigurd objected.
“I believe he will. He has little care for status and great respect for intelligence. He and I are nodding acquaintances. He will listen if I tell him you have something important to show him.”
And so it was that Sigurd entered the King’s private audience chamber accompanied by Professor Peterson. He was wearing a suit of new clothes purchased for him by Peterson. If nothing else, he had gained solid boots and a warm new overcoat from this adventure.
The King said, “The Professor tells me you have something to show me?” He was not kingly or overbearing. He was just a man asking a question.
Sigurd opened The King’s Book, which he had brought with him, to the story of Sigurd the Völsung. Opening it to the waking of the Valkyrie, Sigurd pointed to the rune spells mentioned. He showed the king the message he had copied out on a separate sheet of paper. “This is the message hidden in The King’s Book.”
As Professor Pederson had predicted, the King was quick to understand. He immediately grasped how the message had been hidden. He also understood the significance of the runic message Sigurd had copied out. He found it, indeed, far more alarming than Sigurd had expected.
“This must be destroyed!” the King said.
“Sire, The King’s Book is one of the treasures of the realm,” Professor Pederson said. “Its outright destruction would draw notice.”
“How can that matter, if it be destroyed?” the King replied. “The message will be nowhere to be found.”
“Sire, we cannot be certain of that. Any visitor to the library might have copied it. If the book vanishes, the Library will entreat scholars to reconstruct it from personal copies.”
“What then do you suggest, Pederson?”
“Since this discovery, Sigurd and I have combed the Book carefully for other secrets. The hidden message is, we believe, confined to these 8 sheets on which the story of Sigurd the Völsung is recorded. We suggest returning the Book to the library without those eight sheets.”
“Aha! You believe no one will notice, or that, by the time anyone does, any copies will have been lost?”
“Indeed. The secret has already lain hidden for centuries.”
Thus it was that later, Sigurd, carefully excised the stitches holding the eight offending leaves in the Codex with a razor and slid them out. Unless you knew what to look for, the change was barely noticeable.
Sigurd did, however, take one liberty. To him it seemed almost sacrilegious to destroy the pages. Instead, he gave them to Hilde as her very own book.
Afterword
The story was suggested by the loss of 16 pages (eight leaves) of The Codex Regius, one of our two earliest sources of Norse legend, also known as The Elder Edda or The Poetic Edda. This gap is called the Great Lacuna, and is still unexplained. Although The Codex Regius is now held in the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík, Iceland, it probably resided in the Royal Library of Copenhagen when the pages were lost.
In writing this fictional explanation of how the loss occurred, I used Guy Gavriel Kay’s “quarter turn towards fantasy” trick. Nordreich is, of course, loosely based on Denmark. It is not, however, set in any specific year, nor is the King of the story intended as any specific Christian or Frederick who ruled Denmark or the United Kingdoms of Denmark-Norway during the time when the Royal Library held The Codex Regius.
The cover is a cycle graph of the quaternion group Q8, meant here to stand for the eight leaves of the Great Lacuna. The colors are based on a phase portrait of the identity function, f(z)=z and have no particular meaning, other than the aesthetic.
Hilde was sharper than Sigurd gave her credit for. She spotted what everyone else missed. I liked that.
Well written piece