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The Hawthorne Saga is a collection of ancient, hand-written manuscripts in a language assumed lost until 2007 when scholar and novelist A.J. Hartley claimed to have discovered a key to unlocking the language in papers written by the Elizabethan translator Sir Thomas Henby. Hartley idetified the language of the papers as "[Thrusian]," though the origin of the language and the place where it was spoken is a matter of some argument. Most experts see the script itself as containing elements of languages which resemble Hindi, but also contain some symbols which seem to function as pictoigrams or hieroglyphics. Others see the language as being more akin to Arabic, though a recent movement has claimed that it has greater connections to Germanic and Scandinavean languages, and that any resemblance to non European languages is simply an accident of the writing itself which is unusually florid in execution in ways leading many to misrecognize its core letter system.

[edit] Manuscript Origins

The manuscript consists of 1,036 pages of closely written script, written by hand in ox-gall ink on vellum sheets and bound in leather in three volumes. Whether the three books were intended to be three separate stories or episodes in the life of the central character and narrator, William Hawthorne, is not yet certain, though many scholars think it likely. Until 2003 the manuscripts were stored in a pair of wooden tea chests taken from Fossington House in approximately 1789, some five years after a fire destroyed parts of the library there. The chests were stored in Berkley Downs Library and were transferred to a climate-controlled room there in 1973, though there was some discussion at the time as to whether they were worth preserving at all, the language and culture of origins then being unknown. How they came to be at Fossington House remains a mystery, though the presence of the Saga there seems to be connected to Sir Thomas Henby.

[edit] Henby's work on the manuscript

Sir Thomas Henby (1542-1609) is a known translator and man of letters who was once attached to the court of Queen Elizabeth I and was, as a young man, responsible for important work on Italian and Spanish writers such as Castiglione and Guazzo. In later years he specialized in languages that were less well-known to the Renaissance English, including languages and dialects from India and what is now Pakistan, though it is possible that he travelled further east still, and some say he may have ventured as far as present day Laos and Cambodia. Some scholars speculate that he came upon the Hawthorne Saga while on his travels between 1603-5, though others believe that the Saga papers had already been in England for many hundreds of years.

What seems clear is that in the last years of his life, Henby had begun to decipher the Hawthorne Saga, though what assistance he had, or where he derived the key to the language remains unknown. He transcribed in his own hand 43 pages of the originbal manuscript, which came out to 64 pages of Elizabethan English, and provided detailed notes on grammar, syntax and vocabulary drawn from the later stages of the manuscript. This seems to have been a decision based on the fact that Henby knew he was dying and would not be able to complete the translation, but why his work was not made more public or handed off to an apprentice on his death is unclear. Also uncertain is why the Saga manuscript was then moved to one place (Fossington House) while his own notes went--according to Hartley--to "the attic of an Elizabethan manor in Oxfordshire". The house remains unknown though there has been much speculation. Hartley will not publicly identified it in order--he says--to preserve the privacy of the owners. He has, however, made Henby's translation available to the public and other experts have proclaimed them genuine.

[edit] Controversy

When Hartley first announced his forthcoming translation of the Saga, there was a good deal of skepticism about the accuracy of the translation since the manuscript had long been considered completely undeciphrable. The Henby papers converted most experts to the sense that Hartley's translation was real and accurate, but this led to dissatisfaction with Hartley's decision to keep key elements of both the original manuscript and Henby's notes to himself so as to prevent other translators from producing rival editions. When editorials and notes appeared in academic journals charging him with acting unprofessionally and even with breaching copyright law (since the original papers and Henby's notes are old enough to be considered Public Domain), Hartley responded by saying that other scholars had had several hundred years to translate the papers, and that they could not beging to do so now without his pioneering work. It was, he said, only fair that he should be able to complete his project (a complete translation of the entire Saga) before other editions emerged. Hartley has also drawn criticism for refusing to declare the manuscripts fictional, even though they take place in a completely unknown area and involve supernatural elements.