An account of the origins of the modern manuscript: (J.P. Renolds, Ancient and Medieval Manuscript Studied, Spring 2009 (Vol 44 #1)

Act of Will is a modern take on an ancient story, a contemporary voice recounting the adventures of a reluctant hero from the distant past. Where exactly the stories are set, and to what extent they are made up is highly debatable. Their present form comes to us from novelist A.J. Hartley who has drawn on his expertise in Shakespeare and things Elizabethan to make sense of a partial sixteenth century English transcript of what were formerly considered ancient and illegible manuscripts. Hartley is playing his cards fairly close to his chest about exactly where that transcript originated and now that he claims to have the key to translating the language now called Thrusian, he's keeping the manuscripts themselves themselves to himself too. Hartley has clearly done a tremendous amount of work translating on the first book (soon to be published as Act of Will) from notes, clues and some sample pages, so its--perhaps--understandable that having cracked the linguistic code he wants to hold on to the key for as long as he can. There are, after all, other volumes in what is now being called The Hawthorne Saga, and--if rumors are to be believed--there is already Hollywood interest and money to be made. Of course, the original manuscripts passed into public domain centuries ago, so the extent to which Hartley can control release of the books in his translation will depend on how quickly the legal system can demand that other scholars get access to the papers in order to make (and publish) their own translations. The first modern translator of Beowulf did not, after all, get to keep other linguists from penning versions of their own.

    It is unsurprising that scholars resent the removal of the original manuscripts form the British Library, and though the library staff insist this is a temporary condition, it is clearly unacceptable that Hartley has commandeered them for his own use. There is no question that it is his pioneering work which has brought to light the crucial Henby papers which he has used to translate the Hawthorne manuscript, but it behooves him as a scholar to share those papers with others so that they can verify the accuracy of his translation and--more generally--the "Rosetta Stone" function of the Henby papers themselves. His refusal to disclose even the whereabouts of the house where those papers were found is intolerable.

A.J.'s response:

I would respectfully point out to Dr. Renolds that though I have temporarily removed the manuscripts from the British Library, I will return them on completion of my work. While I understand that other scholars would like to translate the books themselves, such translation would not be possible without my discovery of the Henby papers. It seems to me entirely reasonable that I should get a brief period of exclusive access to the manuscripts in the light of the work I have done, and I should not need to remind the scholarly community that until that work was completed the Hawthorne saga was nothing more than a stack of completely unreadable manuscript which--though public--had been ignored for the two hundred plus years that they had been in the library collection. I would add that my refusal to name the Oxfordshire house where the Henby papers were found was not my decision, but the request of the house owners who do not wish their home to turn into the scholarly equivalent of Disneyland.