Why are these four books so special? It has to do, I think, with the concept of the original-a concept we have almost entirely lost touch with. These represent the sum total of extant original literary manuscripts in Old English, a tongue several centuries distant from our own but still embedded deep within the structure of every modern version of the language.Įach manuscript has what, as Benjamin wrote, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking… its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Josephine Livingstone puts the matter more plainly at The New Republic. Take the case of four manuscripts, all of which recently appeared together at the British Library’s extensive exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War: The Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf Manuscript contain riddles, religious texts, elegies, and the oldest manuscript of the oldest known poem in English. What need to dote on crumbling manuscripts? Why the special status of the original? The question, taken up by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” comes down in part to something he called “aura.” Specialists are useful, art is great, but with sophisticated machine learning, we can make, store, and print copies of every historical artifact in the world, along with all of the accumulated knowledge about them. Without dedicated archivists and preservationists, a slow collective amnesia, or worse, can set in. But the relative obscurity of these professions does not make the work any less valuable. It’s work unlikely to receive the Hollywood (or Netflix) treatment unless wizards, witches, or occult detectives are involved. They deal with weathered, tattered, fragmentary scraps of text in archaic languages and lettering. Book historians and rare manuscript librarians do not have the most glamorous jobs by the usual standards.
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