The Ballad in the Guard-Book
The Bureau’s medieval desk keeps one item under this heading, and it is not a device but a poem. Two hundred and twelve lines in eight-syllable couplets, copied in a single fifteenth-century hand into the blank endpapers of a psalter, titled by its scribe The Queste of the Glasse Philosophorum, and describing nine knights, a wizard, a map, a wyrm, a fortress, a gate, and a flat object of glass in which — the poem is unusually exact about this — all that is known stands written. The company find it. They carry it home. It does not work.
Nothing about the object is medieval except its housing. Everything about the wish is. The philosopher’s stone, first named in the Cheirokmeta of Zosimos of Panopolis around AD 300 and then pursued without a break for fourteen centuries, was one small portable thing that would settle every problem at once: base metal into gold, sickness into health, age into youth. Our balladeer has changed the substance and kept the appetite. His knights are not hunting a stone. They are hunting a rectangle.
The Bureau prints below the ten stanzas that carry the action. The remainder of the poem is genealogy, weather, and the names of horses.
The First Fitt: The Oath and the Map
A medieval reader would not have found the premise strange, and this is the part of the file that most deserves saying plainly. An object that answered questions was a standing legend of the schools, not a novelty. The brazen head appears in William of Malmesbury around 1125, fixed there to Pope Sylvester II; it was later fixed to Robert Grosseteste, to Albertus Magnus — whose head, in the story, talked so incessantly that Thomas Aquinas smashed it to get some work done — and most durably to Roger Bacon, who spends seven years building one and then misses the moment it speaks. The oracle machine, and its disappointment, were both in the culture before the ballad was written.
One detail of the second stanza the Bureau is obliged to record. The map is described as a hide lettered with a single word, and the word is given. It is data: a Latin perfect passive participle in the neuter plural, meaning the things that have been handed over, and in ordinary scholastic use for the premises granted to you at the start of a proof. It is also, unaltered in a single letter, the modern word for the contents of the object the knights are looking for. The Bureau notes the coincidence and declines to make anything of it.
At Candlemas, in the chapter hall,
Nine swore the oath, and swore it all;
Beneath their hands a graven stone
Woke, and showed them the Glass alone.
“Nine went out.” The ballad is careful to say nine, and never says how many came back.
The wizard spread a map of hide,
One tower lettered on its side;
Four roads went in and none came out,
And all four roads were drawn in doubt.
“Follow the lettered tower.” The whole of the wizard's direction, per the scribe.
The Second Fitt: The Wood, the Wyrm and the Rock
From here the ballad stops inventing and starts remembering. The night wood, the guardian on the open ground, the fortress that stands on no road anyone can name: this is the standard furniture of the quest romance, and it is standard because one man in Champagne made it so. Chrétien de Troyes, active between about 1160 and 1191, wrote five romances and left the fifth unfinished at some nine thousand lines. That fifth is Perceval, the Story of the Grail, written for Philip, Count of Flanders, and it carries the first appearance of the grail in any literature — an object borne past a table, which the hero fails to ask about, and spends the rest of his life regretting. Four continuators added fifty-four thousand lines trying to finish the story. Our balladeer inherits that shape the way a joiner inherits a jig: he does not choose it, he simply has it, and everything he makes comes out that width.
They rode by torch through Arden’s wood
Where neither moon nor marker stood;
The mist came up and took the track,
And no man in the file looked back.
“Torches enough for two nights,” says the scribe, who does not say how many it took.
On the gold field a wyrm lay curled,
As long as any wall in the world.
It rose, it breathed, and where it passed
The barley went to glass, then ash.
“It was longer than the abbey.” The only dimension the ballad gives for anything in it.
At vespers they came up the spur
And saw the hold in a sunset blur:
Nine towers, and a gate below,
And something in the gate said no.
“Something in the gate said no.” Printed here exactly as the ballad has it.
The Third Fitt: The Gate and the Waking
The gate demands a word, and the Bureau stops here, because a machine that acts on an instruction is the one element of this story that was not fantasy. In 1206 Ismail al-Jazari finished the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices for the Artuqid ruler Nasr al-Din Mahmud: fifty machines, set out with construction drawings and instructions detailed enough to build from. Water-raising engines. Water clocks and candle clocks. A castle clock eleven feet high with a zodiac display and doors that opened on the hour. A hand-washing figure with a working flush. And a boat carrying four musicians whose drummer was driven by pegs in a rotating barrel — pegs that could be lifted and reset to change the rhythm, which is a programmable machine, dated to the year. The ballad’s gate, which asks for a password and eats those who cannot supply one, is that idea as rendered by a man who had heard of such machines and never stood in front of one.
It wore a ram’s horn and a mane
And asked a word they could not name.
They gave it steel instead of speech
And bought the arch, and paid for each.
“It asked a word. We had not been given a word.” — attributed to the surviving squire.
Within, upon a shelf of stone,
The Glass lay flat, and lay alone.
Sir Galiard raised it: its face went white,
And every man went blind with light.
“Every man went blind with light.” Four lines later, none of them was.
It showed them stars they had not seen,
A field of figures, and a queen;
Then thinned, and greyed, and gave a sigh,
And shut its one enormous eye.
“It showed them stars they had not seen.” Three things are named in the stanza. Not one of them is identified.
The Fourth Fitt: The Road Back
An object crowded with information that nobody present can reach is not a hypothetical, and the Bureau would rather cite the real one than argue about the poem’s. The Voynich manuscript sits at Yale as Beinecke MS 408, on vellum radiocarbon-dated in 2009 to between 1404 and 1438 — within a generation or two of our scribe’s hand. It runs to about two hundred and forty surviving pages in eighteen quires, measures 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 centimetres, and is missing at least fourteen folios. It is covered edge to edge in writing. It has never been demonstrably deciphered, and the people who failed at it include the professional cryptanalysts of two world wars. The knights at least knew what their object was for.
Nine hundred mile they bore it back
By valley road and forest track.
The smith tried fire, the priest tried prayer;
It showed them only their faces there.
“It showed them only their faces there.” The Bureau considers this the best line in the poem.
The Object in the Belt Pouch
Here is the awkward finding, and the Bureau states it without pleasure. The device the company went out to fetch already existed, in a smaller and less exciting form; it worked; and a knight of the ballad’s period would very plausibly have been carrying one. It is the astrolabe, and it is the flat brass disc hanging from a ring that appears in every second manuscript illumination of a scholar, usually mistaken by modern eyes for an ornament.
What it did is the part that ought to be better known. Held up by its ring so it hung true, and sighted along the alidade at a star or the sun, it gave you the body’s altitude; from that, with the plate cut for your latitude and the pierced rete turned to the date, it gave you the hour of the night, your latitude if you did not know it, the time of sunrise and sunset, the direction of Mecca, and the height of a tower you had no way of climbing. Theon of Alexandria was writing about it before AD 405. The earliest Arabic treatise dates to about 815. The oldest instrument that survives anywhere carries its own date on the brass: AH 315, AD 927 or 928. In the tenth century ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī wrote 386 chapters on the thing and is reported to have set out more than a thousand distinct uses for it.
And it had a manual in English. In 1391 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his son Lowys, aged ten, and wrote it in English rather than Latin on the stated ground that the boy had as yet only a little Latin and would take it better in his own tongue. Five parts were planned; two survive, and the last two were probably never written. Skeat counted twenty-two manuscripts. It is the oldest work in English written upon an elaborate scientific instrument: a patient, unhurried user guide, written for a child, four centuries before that was a normal thing to produce.
And all that while, at Galiard’s side,
A brass wheel hung, and hung untried.
It told the hour, the star, the shore —
He had not thought to ask it more.
“He had not thought to ask it more.” The last line of the poem, and of the file.
The Bureau’s Finding
Two further objects belong in the record before the file closes. The first is a set of paper discs. In 1274, at a hermitage on Puig de Randa, Ramon Llull conceived a method for reducing an argument to letters and then turning those letters against one another on concentric rotating figures until every combination had been made. Its mature form worked from nine principles — goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, glory. Llull built it to convert people. What he had actually built was a procedure for generating every statement in a domain without needing to think of them one at a time, and four centuries later Leibniz read him and wrote the De Arte Combinatoria.
The second is older and worse for everyone’s composure. The Antikythera mechanism came up in 1901 from a wreck at forty-five metres and sat in Athens for a year before anybody looked at it properly. It was built in the second century BC. It survives in eighty-two fragments carrying at least thirty bronze gears, the largest about thirteen centimetres across with two hundred and twenty-three teeth, and it tracked the Metonic cycle of nineteen years, the Saros of eighteen years and eleven and a third days, and the Callippic of seventy-six, and told you when the eclipses were coming. Nothing of that complexity is seen again for some fifteen hundred years, until the astronomical clocks of fourteenth-century Europe.
The Glass Sought Against the Brass Carried
What the ballad's company went out for, set beside what the period could actually put in a pouch.
| The Glass, per the ballad | The astrolabe, per the record | |
|---|---|---|
| Holds | All that is known, unspecified | A star map for one latitude, engraved on a swappable plate |
| Answers | Any question put to it | The hour, your latitude, the altitude of any star or tower |
| Size | A hand-breadth; no weight given | Hand-held: hung from its own ring and sighted at arm’s length |
| Runs on | Not stated. The poem says only that it slept | The sky, and one steady arm |
| Documentation | One ballad, one hand, one psalter | al-Ṣūfī: 386 chapters, over 1,000 reported uses |
| Manual for beginners | None recorded | Chaucer, 1391, in English, written for a ten-year-old |
| Oldest survivor | None. The object is unattested | AH 315 — AD 927/928, dated on the brass itself |
| Failure mode | Went dark and did not return | Wrong latitude. Change the plate |
The finding is short. The company swore to fetch an object that would answer every question and that required a power none of them could name, describe or supply; they fetched it; it answered nothing. They were carrying, the entire way out and the entire way back, an object that answered a smaller and duller set of questions and required nothing but a clear sky and a steady hand. They did not consult it, because consulting it was not what they had sworn to do.
The Bureau records this as the oldest failure in the file. It declines to record it as retired.
Plates: the Queste File, Unassigned
Nine further plates struck for the file, for which the ballad supplied no line. They are printed in the order they were struck, and endorsed by nobody.
