Part 42 (1/2)

5OURCE5.

AND.

BACK~ROUNDS.

FOR.

AMBRO5IAN.

LEGEND.

hen the Allied forces firebombed Dresden in 1945, their real target was, of course, the Dresden Museum of Occult Antiquities, the infamous Ubersinnlichaltertumswissenschaft- museum, which was believed to be the site of the Axis magical weapons research program. Destruction of the central complex was so complete that we will never know whether the fear was justified.

Because it was considered bizarre and questionable even by that inst.i.tution's unusual standards, the Von Brauch collection had long been exiled to a bas.e.m.e.nt storage facility off the main site. For that and other fortuitous reasons, a significant amount of the collection survived, including an almost undamaged holograph copy of Von Brauch's so-called Gray Book (Liber Glaucus), which until recently was our best source of information about the sorcerous Ambrosii.

I actually had the chance to see this codex when the museum reopened to the public a few years ago. Note taking, or any kind of image making, is forbidden by the curator. (Supposedly this is for the safety of the visitors: ”a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” etc.; more likely it's so that the museum can sell copyrighted images in its splendid gift shop.) But, while a docent was distracted, I managed to scratch out an awkward version of Von Brauch's ma.n.u.script map of the continent of Laent-a map which has never, as far as I know, been published. This sketch was used by the talented Chuck Lukacs to create the map that adorns this book.

But I can't, and don't wish to, deny that most of my knowledge of Von Brauch comes from the magisterial edition with commentary by H. N. Emrys (Amsterdam, 1967), the capstone of a career devoted to the Ambrosian legends. Emrys took some criticism for her agnostic approach to the so-called authenticity question-whether these legends represent an actual tradition of storytelling about Merlin's family or whether they were the mere inventions of a pseudonymous fantasist. (No princ.i.p.ality of ”Brauch” has been discovered on the map of Germany, and it looks as if Von Brauch, like many of those-who-know, operated under a nom de guerre.) Folklorists will long remember Corvino's searing review of Emrys' lifework, comparing her stance on the ”authenticity question” to Jung's tacit endors.e.m.e.nt of UFOlogy.

Emrys's vindication was a long time coming, but nowadays her agnosticism seems almost too conservative. With Gabriel McNally's publication of a rich selection of Khroic ekshal (Minneapolis, 2000), with translations and a theoretical framework of tonal notations, we can now be certain there are not only one but several independent traditions of storytelling about the Ambrosii. The ”authenticity question” has now been replaced by the ”historicity question”-that is, ”Do the Ambrosian stories contain some core of historical fact (like the Trojan War legends) or are they purely imaginary?” It's an interesting issue, one I don't propose to address (since my interests are more mythographic than historical), except to point out how rare purity is.

The legendary material we have falls into three groupings, which naturally have some overlap: 1. Stories about Merlin Ambrosius, particularly before he becomes entangled in the history of Britain.