By simple dint of restarting the calendar 296 years into the future, Otto and Sylvester (see “That which we call a rose”) effectively left Islam and Byzantium on the wrong side of the locked door of Catholic eschatology. Simultaneously they jump-started an entire counterfeit industry staffed by clerks and artisans and fueled by the need to fake three hundred years of documents, charters, maps and relics. The next few generations of scholars, as well as those of the 19th (or 16th?) centuries were free to create history to fill a three hundred-year vacuum.

What they have given us (to take England alone) are King Arthur, courtly knights, a whole line of non-existent Saxon Kings, probably including Canute and his waves, Alfred and his cakes … a legendary bestiary of diverse Worms, the founding of Glastonbury, the search for the Grail and the blending of the Holy Blood of Christ into English pedigree via Joseph of Arimathea. Or at best, they have made these things so much the stuff of folktale as to entirely dissociate them from any genuine historical, meaning Romanic, context they might have had and transplant them into a purely “romantic” one.

Textual remnants from the imaginary three centuries prior to the 11th were all written in minuscule Greek and blatantly presented thereafter as transcriptions of “originals” that had been poorly executed in majuscule Greek and subsequently “destroyed” or “cleansed” in some cataclysmic event, but basically because the script had been officially relegated. The clerical class swallowed their own mythology ... they had to, it was in their prime interest as they were the only ones who could read either script and thus stood to profit from clerical fees for the “interpretation” of their own hard work. In addition they needed to all be singing from the same sheet to avoid any future accusation of plagiarism or even heresy!

However, no cottage industry of falsification can entirely replicate a genuine historical record. Many charters and treatises, as well as material vestiges, even gravestones from the period have since been clearly identified as fakes. And the lack of coins is stunning, as if we all suddenly stopped buying and selling. I can remember my own history teacher, a keen young archaeologist, being puzzled at the lack of evidence for continuous habitation in the city of Gloucester: “It’s as if everyone left for a few centuries and then suddenly came back and took things up as if nothing had ever happened” There appeared to be physical continuity, but the dating wouldn’t match up. My vision of the Dark Ages began to subtly change at the age of thirteen. It became less like a nostalgic, but little understood past and more like an alternative universe, complete with dragons and knights errant, in which anything was possible. I was scarily close to the truth.

The problem is familiar to archaeologists, who have long realized that there seem to be three hundred years missing in York, Cologne and Rouen and nobody knows quite why. The physical record shows no gap, although, for the dating to be correct, there has to be one. We’re missing either the archaeological record of habitation or, if there was no habitation, then we’re missing a thick layer of empty sediment, one or the other. It’s not surprising that the apparent hiatus in the archaeological record between the 6th and 11th centuries gave rise, even in the early days of historiography, to the term “dark ages”, as if to explain the lack of historical probate by a sudden and mysterious descent into miasmic ignorance, coupled with an equally sudden and obstinate lack of curiosity or progress.

The conventional wisdom, as I learned it in school, was that after the Romans withdrew from the North countries, life went on for a bit in a sort of post-Romanic free-wheel until inertia set in and we all became stupid … and then magically awoke in the 11th century and began to frantically build magnificent cathedrals and create the most dazzling illuminated manuscripts. The only beacon of hope in that dark world was Charlemagne, his neo-Roman ideal of citizenship, his European vision and his flourishing court of scientists and writers ... well, maybe not.

Nonetheless, Charlemagne is still alive and well today, living in Aachen and getting talked about in the press and having university buildings and restaurants named after him. It is not only facts that have normative power. Name a thing and it will take on life. A name is every bit as normative and persuasive. “Never mind the facts, print the legend.” Well, it seems we did just that, so what happens now? Do we close the curtains and pretend this fraud didn’t occur? Or do we readjust our sets and then sit back and wait for the Mayans to be spot on about the 21st of December 2012 ... in another 296 years!

And if Sir John Gurdon is right, and we do succeed in cloning a human being in another fifty years (still well within the second millennium: you’re starting to get it?) then what will be the right to identity in nomen or to personal freedom before the law (habeas corpus) for that unfortunate non-individual or sequence of identical non-individuals doomed to serve as numbered, but best-left-unnamed bearers of the genetic patrimony of free men or women, most likely to be farmed for their healthy organs. Fortunately the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta are both left on the real-world side of history. For if we are prepared to grant cultural status and physical space to named things, phenomena, concepts and people who definitely do not exist, how will we cope morally and intellectually with those unnamed ones who do?

In Graeme Base’s wonderful, illustrated version of Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky, once our intrepid hero has killed his “manxome foe”, he galumphs back to his royal father through a desolate and wasted landscape that was filled with flourishing farms and villages only a page or two ago. It is a dull world that is left after we have slain the monsters of our fantastic imaginings and the golden calves of our desperate need for something to adore, placate and blame. But perhaps it’s worth it if we can build a brighter future.

So, will we journey back to 1717 to live in a cleaner, clearer world; one that has no need of a Renaissance or Enlightenment to wash away centuries of ignorance and slavish tradition? Surely, at least in relative terms, these periods were also part of the historical arc we have all conspired to span; their historical necessity is no longer obvious. Will a future without Charlemagne also be lived beyond the shadow of horrific weapons of mass destruction? Will a second rewrite of history and a resetting of the clocks reconcile Occident and Orient and maybe put an end to this escalating war of attrition between Isaac, Ishmael and the rest of us?

Oh yes, it will ... as surely as it will bring back the Dodo, the Jubjub bird and the very frumious Bandersnatch.


© Edwin Drood, January 2013



Illustration: Statue of Emperor Charlemagne (German, Karl der Große, 742-814, allegedly) in the Coronation Hall (Krönungsaal) of Aachen City Hall (Aachener Rathaus), Germany.

The statue, dated to around 1620, was originally part of the Charles Fountain (Karlsbrunnen) on the marketplace outside the City Hall, where a copy now stands.

Photo by © David John