The Gift

THE
Naraudh Lar-Chanë
(or
Riddle of the Treesong
), one of the key legends of the lost civilization of Edil-Amarandh, is here translated in full for the first time. This great classic of Annaren literature deserves, it seems to me, a much wider audience than the academics it has so far attracted.

This is therefore a book directed toward the general reader rather than the scholar. Up until now the
Naraudh Lar-Chanë
has been primarily valued for the illumination it throws on the culture of Edil-Amarandh, but what struck me when I first encountered it were its virtues as a romance. I was overcome by a desire at once humbler and more ambitious than my original intention of writing a dissertation on Annaren society: I wished to capture its vivid drama and unique magic in contemporary English. If my labors have captured a tenth of the enchantment of the original, I shall be well pleased.

To this end I have eschewed explanatory footnotes, which would have interrupted the flow of the story. Instead, as a courtesy to the reader, I have included some general information on the society and history of Edil-Amarandh, as well as notes on the pronunciation of Annaren names. However, I hope that the tale stands without these notes, and that the reader who seeks primarily the pleasures of adventure will be satisfied by the narrative alone.

Much has been written elsewhere of the sensational discovery of the Annaren Scripts in a cave revealed by an earthquake in the Atlas Mountains of central Morocco. Since that event in 1991, much more has been said of the dismaying implications for contemporary archaeology, of the riddles of dating that still remain stubbornly unsolved, and of the laborious and ongoing task of decipherment and translation. For the curious amateur, the most useful sources to begin looking for background on the
Naraudh Lar-Chanë
are
Uncategorical Knowledge: The Three Arts of the Starpeople,
by Claudia J. Armstrong, and Christiane Armongath’s indispensable
L’Histoire de l’Arbre-chant d’Annar.

The Gift
consists of the first two books of the
Naraudh Lar-Chanë.
The original text, of which there exists a single complete copy, is written in Annaren, the principal language spoken in Annar. In translating from the Annaren, I have attempted as my first concern to convey its vitality: if this has led to some unscholarly, or even controversial, decisions, I at once plead the conventional excuse of the translator — that it is sometimes impossible to keep both to the letter and the spirit of another language. Where I have struck an intractable problem, I have chosen to serve the latter rather than the former. Many decisions perhaps require a little explanation, but here I wish to be brief and will examine only the most important, my choice of the word
Bard.

I have used
Bard
to translate
Dhillarearë
from the Speech. It means, literally, Starpeople. With its particular resonance of artistic mastery and spiritual authority,
Dhillarearë
has no real equivalent in our language. I also considered the fact that in the Annaren language,
dhillë
was the verb “to sing” or “to chant,” and this bilingual pun led to the popular designation of the
Dhillarearë
as Singers of the Gift.
Bard
seemed the most transparent and useful word available to me in English for imputing political, social, and cultural status to those it describes.

The danger of using the term is, as has been pointed out, its inevitable associations with Irish and Welsh traditions. Bards in Edil-Amarandh held a very different political place and power from the bards in these later societies; there is however an intriguing foreshadow of their later decadent status as courtly chroniclers and flatterers in Gilman’s employment of the Bard Mirlad at the beginning of the story. In Annaren society this position would have been considered well beneath the dignity of a
Dhillarearën,
and the present-day eclipse of poets, whom we presume to be their contemporary descendants, would have been well nigh unthinkable.

There are many people to whom I owe thanks, and I can mention only a few here. Nicholas, Veryan, Jan, Richard, and Celeste Croggon read the manuscript at an early stage, and their generous responses encouraged me greatly. Thanks are also due to Dan Spielman for his enthusiastic advocacy of the project, and to Sophie Levy of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for illuminating some of the more obscure aspects of Bardic social life during many fascinating conversations. I am grateful also to Alphonse Calorge, of the Department of Comparative Literature, Université Paris IV — Sorbonne, for invaluable advice on some nuances of translation, and to Rebecca Seiferle for suggestions on the prosody of the poems, which was often very difficult to render in English. Lastly, but by no means least, I would like to thank my husband, Daniel Keene, for his unfailing support, his acute comments on some tricky questions of Annaren syntax, and also for proofreading the manuscript, and my editor, Suzanne Wilson, for her excellent and painstaking counsel on all aspects of this book. Any remaining faults and mistakes are, naturally, solely my own.

Alison Croggon
Melbourne, Australia

MOST Annaren proper nouns derive from the Speech, and generally share its pronunciation. In words of three or more syllables, the stress is usually laid on the second syllable; in words of two syllables such as (
lembel, invisible
) stress is always on the first. There are some exceptions in proper names; the names
Pellinor
and
Annar,
for example, are pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.

Spellings are mainly phonetic.

a
— as in
flat; ar
rhymes with
bar.

ae
— a long
i
sound, as in
ice.
Maerad
is pronounced
MY-rad.

aë
— two syllables pronounced separately, to sound
eye-ee.
Maninaë
would be pronounced
man-IN-eye-ee.

ai
— rhymes with
hay. Innail
rhymes with
nail.

au
—
ow. Raur
rhymes with
sour.

e
— as in
get.
Always pronounced at the end of a word: for example,
remane,
to walk,
has three syllables. Sometimes this is indicated with
ë,
which also indicates that the stress of the word lies on the
e
(for example,
ilë,
we,
is sometimes pronounced almost with the
i
sound lost).

ea
— the two vowel sounds are pronounced separately, to make the sound
ay-uh. Inasfrea,
to walk,
thus sounds:
in-ASS-fray-uh.

eu
—
oi
sound, as in
boy.

i
— as in
hit.

ia
— two vowels pronounced separately, as in the name
Ian.