Legomenon for the discoverer of Egderus' Archive SCHOLAR

Egderus may be the central figure in the saga of the Archives, but it is the unnamed Scholar who made him so, rescuing them as he did from almost certain extinction. The specific means by which the Scholar came into possession of these documents has never been determined, though the traveler (sometimes called the Fellow) who appears briefly in the Writing {Scholar's Confessio} and the later {Scholar's Apology, redux}, may provide a clue.

The Scholar attempted to present these materials for discussion at the triennial Convention of his peers, but instead of winning recognition for his work, he was censured, stripped of his membership in the Conference of his colleagues, and the Archives themselves were confiscated by the ruling Council. This response was of a brutality that today is hard to credit, but it is possible that the inference to be drawn from his presentation — that the Ancients were not deities, but mere mortals like ourselves — would have been strongly anathematized at the time by the religious authorities governing the conduct of scholarly research, and the Scholar's perceived advocacy of the so-called 'We Descend' heresy was punished with the utmost severity. According to one source, the Scholar was fortunate he was not arrested, tortured, and publicly executed.

Happily for us, none of that happened, and the Scholar continued, after this fatal blow to his career, to tell his story, which took an unexpected turn once he completely surrendered to his fate, and he was granted a vision of ineffable beauty: that the World is itself a Writing, which expresses not only its entire history, but also contains — to quote a tragically tiny fragment from the Ancients, itself ineffably beautiful — 'the seeds of an emergent life we cannot imagine and remain ourselves.'

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Scholar has contributed more Writings to the Archive than any other Author save Egderus. His story begins in {Scholar's Diary}, where he discloses that a peculiar document has come into his possession, one that he thinks may make his career, should he present it to his colleagues in the Conference. Having decided to do so, he begins to write up his findings in the fragment {Scholar's Draft}, giving them overall context in a separate fragment {Scholar's Summary}. At this point, to his surprise, {More Writings!} come into his possession, eventually leading to his disastrous address to the Convention, the response to which crushes all his hopes.

After his censure, in {Scholar's Farewell}, he addresses his successor (possibly the Unknown Curator, the Author of {archive under threat}) in what seems to be a cover letter for the materials he is forced to hand over, advising this person not to take his charge lightly.

Then, relieved of his responsibility for the Archives, he describes his liberation in {Scholar's Vision}.

Some time later, in the long fragment {Scholar's Confessio}, he relates the immediate aftermath of his catastrophic experience at the Convention. The opening of this Writing is so bitter in tone that some believe another person must be its creator: nowhere else in the Scholar's Writings does he speak so corrosively or with such utter despair. To such revisionists, the most popular alternative is the Author and later Curator of the archives known as The Voice from the Locust Grove.

However, if this Confessio was composed more or less immediately after the events here narrated (as seems indisputable from internal evidence), the feelings engendered by those events would still have been raw and intense, hence the keenly affecting cry of the heart we find at its beginning.

The lacuna (redaction?) that immediately follows this controversial passage must surely have contained description of the Scholar's actual presentation and subsequent inquisitional audience with the Council; from the point where the narrative resumes, recounting his journey home, there is little argument over the Writing's attribution to the Scholar.

The odd character who briefly shares the Scholar's journey has been nicknamed the Fellow from earliest times, but has never been positively identified, nor has his mission as messenger to the Scholar been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps this byname constitutes an early surmise that he was acting as a member — or at least at the behest — of the secret order or society known as the Fellowship, which was at one time mentioned in documents that have since been discredited.

The remaining documents from the Scholar's hand continue this memoir, during which the Scholar, now back home in his House in the Mountains, binds up the remains of his discovery for delivery to the courier who will shortly come to fetch them, during which process he is again visited by his new friend.

Customarily presented as one Writing, the self-portrait in {Scholar's Apology} seems to start over: after a half dozen paragraphs, the Author begins the story again in {Scholar's Apology, redux}, as if he had failed to reread — or to remember accurately — what he had already written. This is not the only possible explanation for such a discrepancy, of course, and it is at puzzling interstices such as this that the curious (or skeptical) reader often turns into an investigator, compelled to search for clues that might account for the phenomenon.

So far definitive evidence remains elusive. However, the issue was apparently thought significant enough for a recent Curator to break the Writing into two parts, appending 'redux' to the Title of the second part (the term is of unknown origin; here it seems to mean 'begin again'; compare {Starling redux}). This is appropriate, given the revenance of ancient locutions in this latter segment, a ghostly phenomenon upon which the Scholar cannot help but remark. This sundering of the Scholar's 'apology' (itself an archaic usage) into two Writings has been respected here.

Some dispute the Scholar's authorship of the dialogue {hands}, and propose it was adapted from some fragment of the Last One's discourse, or else is an orphan text even more Ancient than he. It is unlikely we will ever know which is the case.

Many difficulties are posed by {recovery} — the only remaining Writing in the Archives attributed to the Scholar — not least in that it seriously contradicts the experience related in {Scholar's Vision}. It also hints that the Scholar's rediscovery of the Writings of Egderus Scriptor may have played a role, however unintended, in the annihilation of that great institution known as the Temple, as related elsewhere in the Writings of his younger contemporaries, the Unknown Scholastic and the Locust Grove Author.

The Writing's provenance cannot be ascertained, and so the only datum arguing for its ascription to this familiar figure in the Archives' history is the fact that its narrator was found on his back in the snow underneath a tree, a well-known event in the Scholar's life. Of course it is possible that the narrator here is not the same person as the Author of the Writing {Scholar's Vision}, a claim made by at least one impatient analyst, who nevertheless puts forth no plausible alternative candidate...