英文名著--Eaters of the Dead - Michael Crichton.pdfVIP

The Eaters of the Dead The Eaters of the Dead “Praise not the day until evening has come; a woman until she is burnt; a sword until it is tried; a maiden until she is married; ice until it has been crossed; beer until it has been drunk.” —V IKIN PROV ERB “Evil is of old date.” —A RA B PROV ERB INTRODUCTION THE IBN FA DLA N MA NUSC RIPT REPRES ENTS THE earliest known eyewitness account of Viking life and society. It is an extraordinary document, describing in vivid detail events which occurred more than a thousand years ago. The manuscript has not, of course, survived intact over that enormous span of time. It has a peculiar history of its own, and one no less remarkable than the text itself. PROV ENA NCE OF THE MA NUSCRIPT In June, A .D. 921, the Caliph of Bagdad sent a member of his court, A hmad Ibn Fadlan, as ambassador to the King of the Bulgars. Ibn Fadlan was gone three years on his journey and never actually accomplished his mission, for along the way he encountered a company of Norsemen and had many adventures among them. W hen he finally returned to Bagdad, Ibn Fadlan recorded his experiences in the form of an official report to the court. That original manuscript has long since disappeared, and to reconstruct it we must rely on partial fragments preserved in later sources. The best-known of these is an A rabic geographical lexicon written by Yakut ibn-A bdallah sometime in the thirteenth century. Yakut includes a dozen verbatim passages from Ibn Fadlan’s account, which was then three hundred years old. One must presume Yakut worked from a copy of the original. Nevertheless these few paragraphs have been endlessly translated and retranslated by later scholars. A nother fragment was discovered in Russia in 1817 and wa