The Legend of Broken

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Some years ago, while doing research at one of our major universities on the personal papers of Edward Gibbon — author of the multivolume classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 to 1789—I came across a large manuscript in the collection, contained in an unmarked box. On further investigation, I discovered that the work was not entered in either the university’s card catalogue or its computerized list of holdings. Intrigued, I began to read the document, and soon realized that it was a narrative concerning the fate of a legendary kingdom said to have ruled over a portion of northern Germany from the fifth to the eighth centuries. The tale had never been published, during Gibbon’s lifetime or since; I only knew of the thing because I’d run across references to it in several unpublished letters that Gibbon had written to his countryman and colleague, the great Edmund Burke. Burke’s own masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, had appeared just as did the last volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; and, as a token of his esteem for what he had immediately recognized to be a seminal achievement on his friend’s part, Gibbon had attempted to present Burke with a copy of his latest discovery.

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