Bera's Unwritten Laws (ca. 1800 I.D. - present)

Bera Branehilde's translation remained perfect and unchanged as it passed via oral tradition from scholar to student for 3,800 years before being transcribed into the Mar alphabet invented by the first scholar of the Nightfire Tradition. It has since remained unrevised in its written form, painstakingly copied without error or deliberate alteration for 2,400 years since this transcription. If you believe that, you're probably a mapmaker who doesn't believe konig worms exist because he's never been killed by them before.

It does not require a great deal of rational thought to reach the conclusion that it is utterly impossible that the Unwritten Laws that have since become ironically named exist now in the same form as when Bera Branehilde completed her translation. There are many problems with regarding the official version of Bera's Unwritten Laws (including Vangard's Rules of Governance) as a perfect text. These include errors, linguistic issues, and deliberate alterations.

Of these, the least problematic is the effect of cumulative error on a text the age of which is measured in eons. There has been no shortage of opportunities for the Unwritten Laws - and especially Vangard's Rules of Governance - to suffer from text-altering errors (including those that result in a change in meaning). The purity of the Veravenaton's so-called perfect text was hotly contested by their contemporaries, but it served as the basis of Bera Branehilde's original translation. It is likely that the perfect text was not perfect, so from the start, there were errors in the text.

Even after Bera completed her translation, it likely was not long before even more errors crept into her text. As effective as Mar oral culture has been at preserving the many hundreds of jokes, tales, and epics every mundane can recite from memory with virtually no variation, there is always some variation, especially after a hundred or more generations in the telling. The text of the Unwritten Laws is long and often dry - not at all like the poetic phrases found in most Mar stories.

Even after the invention of writing, transcription is hardly a process immune to error. Despite magical precautions, no text in Marrishland lasts forever and in pristine condition. The original transcription penned by the first scholar of the Nightfire Tradition has long since disintegrated, and its immediate successors certainly are not faring better. It is therefore necessary to periodically replace books before they decay beyond legibility. Upon this dreary task rely future generations of scholars for their knowledge.

Unfortunately, many wizards (especially magocrats) are far too busy to transcribe books, so they delegate this dull and miserable task to apprentices, often as assignments at the beginning of their studies. While instructors examine and correct such assignments, it is far from inconceivable that they might overlook some errors. The major academies therefore have strict policies on who is permitted to transcribe replacements for worn out texts and how many other scholars must compare the original to the copy to eliminate errors before the original can be safely discarded. Apprentices might still transcribe important books - including the Unwritten Laws - but only for their own reference. Even so, it is not inconceivable that a few scholars in the last twenty-four centuries have secretly pressed apprentices into fulfilling the instructors' obligation to transcribe replacement texts. It is no less unimaginable that even well-meaning scholars and proofreaders might introduce and overlook errors at some point during the mind-numbing task of comparing versions.

In short, you have a controversial "perfect" text preserved by oral tradition for 3,800 years and by transcription for 2,400 years after that. Errors are unavoidable. They are also the least influential of the likely sources of change in Bera Branehilde's text.

Linguistic problems, while more succinctly summarized than error problems, pose at least as great a challenge to the claim that the current version of Bera's Unwritten Laws is perfect as arguments based on the introduction of errors. The translation of any text from one language to another is never perfect. As Vangard's Rules of Governance were composed in Kalkoraen Medien and translated by Bera into Mar - two languages with roots and rules developed on opposite sides of the Great Ocean - the gap between the two languages was especially large.

The Mar language has not been in stasis for the last five millennia, and while Bera instructed her apprentices to allow the wording of the text to evolve with the Mar language, this was certainly difficult to implement for several reasons. First, all Mar do not share a single dialect; in fact, the relative isolation of the frontier communities has only served to divide the Mar linguistically even more quickly. Second, language change is gradual enough that the precise meaning of many words and idioms might have become blurred before the text was updated, leading to occasional deviations from the intended meaning that would then be formalized by the change to the text. Third, for the first two centuries after its translations, most of the Unwritten Laws had no application in Mar culture, so a change in the exact wording would not have had any noticeable impact until after the establishment of the Mar magocracy.

Deliberate change, while probably the most significant source of impurity, is also the one most often ignored by conservative legal and religious scholars. Such convenient blindness ignores the simple truth that scholars are wizards of Marrishland. Even well-meaning wizards devoted to scholarship occasionally become embroiled in political and religious arguments, and it is far from unknown for a wizard - scholar or not - to place his own agenda ahead of the pursuit of intellectual purity.

Marrishland has not enjoyed a history of stability. Few students of history would dispute the assertion that the Mar have had more cultural disasters, more intellectual dark ages, and more political and theological revolutions than any other country in the world. They have endured more massed Drake invasions, as well, surviving the equivalent of several Phillite Reavings throughout their long history. It is quite amazing that Bera's Unwritten Laws have survived so much turmoil at all. Expecting that they did so without occasional alteration is patently absurd.

Meddlesome regimes of magocrats and theocrats have surely altered the original text. A little careful study turns up political and religious concepts in our current text that certainly did not exist during Bera's lifetime. Given a choice between intellectual impurity and death, there is plenty of evidence that scholars often chose the former. At the least, those who chose death before compromise were often kept from passing their unaltered version to the next generation of scholars.

Even left to their own pursuits, scholars are seldom content to merely pass information from generation to generation. The changes to the text wrought by scholars might occasionally have been driven by the agenda of the scholar, but this is probably far less the case than it is for the rulers who wished to transform this sacred document into a mandate supporting their own rule. The alterations by scholars most likely resulted from the rise and fall of intellectual fads and methods of interpretation.

An essay interpreting a passage from the Unwritten Laws might popularize a meaning never before considered by previous scholars. When the time comes to translate the text into contemporary language (as Bera Branehilde instructed), it is quite possible that this new meaning will become - at least in the eyes of the next generation of scholars - the only meaning the passage has ever possessed. Compound this process over the course of several millennia, and you would be a fool to believe you hold the Unwritten Laws in a version Bera Branehilde herself would recognize.

In spite of its imperfections, Bera's Unwritten Laws remain the most influential text in Marrishland. Once the foundation of Mar religion and law, it's organic impurity has made it a constant reflection of Mar culture in a written format accessible to virtually anyone in Marrishland. As the Mar change, so do Bera's Unwritten Laws, and as the Unwritten Laws change, so does Mar civilization.

(Contributed by Weard Hakan Ebutor)

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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