Section 7 ends with Gratillonius and Verania on their wedding night. 8 begins with them woken by the smell of burning buildings. Is this the same night? No. As usual in this volume, more time has passed. Verania thinks that she is pregnant.
Arsonists have struck. Gratillonius will rebuild Confluentes/Quimper stronger. But the unfinished manuscript of the history of Ys is lost:
"The story of Ys will die with the last of us who lived the last days of it; and our city will glimmer away into legend." (p. 308)
- the legend that we read in this Tetralogy. The world is changing into the one that we know.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
In eras before the inventing of printing presses and copy machines it was so hard to publish and spread books! E.g., it took a year for skilled scribes to copy the Bible by hand. And despite the best efforts of most scribes errors and discrepancies crept into the books they copied. This inevitably made books rare and expensive.
Ad astra! Sean
I recently had to view a printing press from the viewpoint of a 2nd-century Roman. One of his problems is that he doesn't have the -vocabulary- to discuss 'printing', so his attempts to describe it to another Roman are verbose and clumsy.
(They eventually decide to call it 'book-stamping', using an analogy to stamping a seal into wax.)
Do your time travelers also introduce paper making or would papyrus be adequate for printing books?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: I'm reminded of how Harry Turtledove had the same problem in one of his Basil Argyros stories, featuring an intelligence agent of an Eastern Roman Empire which never had to struggle for survival against Islam. Chapter IV (set in what we would call AD 1317) of AGENT OF BYZANTIUM shows us Argyros investigating what we soon realize was printing, invented in a Persia never conquered by Islam. Argyros also lacked the vocabulary needed for describing printing. He and the East Romans came to call printing "archetypes."
Jim: Off the top of my head I would say "no" to your question about papyrus. IIRC, papyrus would be too fragile for the rough handling a printing press would give it. But I think the time travelers stranded in Antonine Rome could teach the Romans how to make paper.
Ad astra! Sean
Yes, they do introduce paper. It's not a complex technology at the basic level, tho' they have to experiment for months to get the mash, and the clay sizing, reasonably right. As usual (!) -knowing- that something's possible is crucial, because you know that eventually you'll hit the right combination.
But the economics are straightforward; the cost would be -much- less than papyrus almost anywhere except Egypt and nearby ports, and the product would be superior in convenience.
You -could- use papyrus for printing, but it would be much more difficult.
Incidentally, they also introduce changes to a lot of the conventions of text.
Eg., they introduce spaces between words (not used in Roman or Greek cursive), capital vs. lower-case, and much more punctuation than the Classical world uses.
There's a massive freight of things that make reading, and things like -finding- a particular part of a text, much easier. It took centuries for the implications of the switch from scrolls to 'codex' (books) to be worked out; they jump straight to the finished product.
Originally scrolls were meant to be read aloud, and writing in general was more often than not a mnemonic aid.
Eg., 'silent reading' wasn't common until the 9th century, when spaces between words became common in writing. Prior to that, it was considered a sign of extreme erudition and scholarship. Most people murmured the words when they read, even privately, and spoke the text aloud as they wrote.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating, this mini essay! Got it, papyrus could be used in printing, but only with difficulty--and would be displaced by paper once that became available.
I recall reading of how St. Augustine was surprised to observe St. Ambrose of Milan reading silently.
IIRC, our use of upper and lower case dates back to the Carolingian Renaissance. Spacing of words came later, I think.
Ad astra! Sean
"our use of upper and lower case dates back to the Carolingian Renaissance. Spacing of words came later, I think."
One of my personal quirks is that when I create a multi-word filename on a computer, I capitalize the first letter of each word with no spaces between the words.
Kaor, Jim!
SortOfLikeHowTheRomansUsedToDoIt! (Smiles)
AdAstra!Sean
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