It was the end of May, four months after Sphere #1 had appeared in Richard’s basement. His job search discarded like a soggy tissue, Richard now spent his days learning everything he could about Old English, Anglo-Saxon culture and laws, Northern European and Germanic mythology, and Dark Age history. Whenever possible, he attended exhibitions, lectures, and other events dedicated to these or similar subjects. He had attended three such events in the last week alone.

One of them was an exhibit at the Harvard Library called “Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art.” Twelve vellum manuscripts—eleven gospel-books and one Psalter—from tenth- and eleventh-century Britain were put on display in custom-designed glass cases that ran the length of a small windowless room. The brochure gushed: “For such a rare collection of manuscripts to be made available for viewing inside the United States is nothing short of miraculous.” Most of the manuscripts were ragged-edged, fire- or water-damaged, and barely legible. Richard lingered over each document, nose pressed to the glass, waiting for another clue to take him by the hand and lead him to some unknown destination. But though he had a slim grasp of Old English at this point, he could not decipher a single word from any of the texts, and no translations were provided. In fact, the exhibit was not so much concerned with the texts themselves as with their illuminated pages, which were indeed astoundingly intricate and beautiful. Their threaded weave patterns and animal imagery were similar to the carvings lining the gunwale of the longship. This minor revelation was all that the exhibit was able to contribute to his stores of sphere-related data: Christian monks who flourished over a millennium ago illustrated their holy books with interlace techniques similar to the patterns that adorned the sides of his Beowulf ship. All well and good, but nothing to dance a jig over.

The next morning, Richard went to the Museum of Fine Arts, where he spent most of the day among the museum’s collection of medieval European treasures. Metalwork, wood and enamel reliefs, pendants, jewelry, plaques, bowls, dishes, and hand tools were all accorded equal significance behind the glass. Objects from Russia, Germania, Francia, Scandinavia, and Britain were strategically grouped together for optimum artistic and historical comparison. Regardless of their realm of origin or intended use, many of the more ancient objects were, like the manuscripts, adorned with animal imagery. The wolf and raven, traditional devourers of slain heroes, were well represented, as were eagles, bears, reptiles, and lions. The most fascinating pieces were those from the Migration Period (c. 300–700 A.D.), when vast hordes of Germanic and Slavic peoples (the barbarians) flooded the continent. These artifacts were transitional markers, combining pagan animal motifs with Christian symbols, often in strange and provocative ways. A dragon-like creature holding a cross was carved into a stone serving-bowl (North Frisia, c. 600); a piece of metal that was once a crucifix was decorated with a lion’s head (Iceland, c. 920); one side of an Anglo-Saxon sceat depicted a diademed bust between a pair of crosses while the other showed a wolf’s head with a serpent’s body (Northumbria, c. 740). Driving home, Richard thought about the futhorc runes and how they had shared space with, and were later absorbed by, Latin characters. And it occurred to him that the struggle for supremacy between the old symbols and the new that had shaped the English alphabet was but a minuscule sample of a much broader and deeper cultural struggle that had shaped and reshaped the Old World from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. He could feel his mind expanding.

The third event was a lecture at Boston College called “Pagan Religion, Ritual, and Social Dynamics in Pre-Norman England,” the second in a three-part series given by a Medieval Studies professor, a man whose name escaped Richard. It was not very good. In fact, it was embarrassing. The professor was young, overenthusiastic, high-pitched, and he desperately wanted to exude charm and wit, which for him were conditions utterly foreign to his constitution. He was one of those creatures endemic to academe who believed himself obligated to enliven his presentations with flashy multimedia spectacles and frequent references to contemporary culture, a misjudgment which lent itself to painful choices. He proposed a link between early Germanic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon rituals such as ship burials, mead-hall gatherings, and runic ornamentation with what he identified as a socially prevalent “modernized” paganism represented by Wicca, vampirism, Goth fashion, and Harry Potter. Among other hilarities, the audience was subjected to orchestral fanfare from a Hollywood fantasy film, a cheesy computer graphics–enhanced video, and excerpts of J.K. Rowling’s prose, which was harmless if consumed sprawled on the couch but potentially toxic when read aloud in a large lecture hall. The presenter’s correlations were specious, his facts either missing or muddled, and his transitions lame. The elegiac tradition was not discussed, nor was Beowulf mentioned. Richard was the only person in the room over thirty. The rest were undergrads, the professor’s students no doubt, possibly bribed with extra points on the final if they showed up and signed a paper on the way out attesting to their attendance. Still, despite the dreadful lecture, Richard felt himself growing younger and more intellectually engaged as he soaked in the academic life, if only for a few hours.

And then there were the books. Stacks of hardcovers and perfectbounds, paperbacks and journals seemed to rise out of the basement floor like rock formations. Norse history, Germanic myth, poetry, sermons, surveys, runic studies, Conquest lore, anthologies, hagiographies, Old English dictionaries—were but a sampling of Richard’s subterranean Alexandria. The biblical swarm of goodies began to arrive from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells, and smaller specialty retailers that Richard had stumbled upon. The way it worked was that if a book found via Amazon or Barnes & Noble dovetailed with his sphere research, he would order it. Then he would read the encapsulated reviews in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section and order some of those. Then he would read about titles written by the same authors and published by the same imprints and order three or four of those. And so on and so on, hydra-like. Rectangular cardboard packages arrived daily now. The first companion to appear alongside Corgan and Carver was Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, which Richard demolished unblinking over a Saturday afternoon. This was followed by Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (which led to word-by-word prose renderings of “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”); Mitchell and Robinson’s A Guide to Old English and Beowulf: An Edition; half a dozen translations of the Rune Poem; Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England (a 700-pager that Richard finished, and annotated, three days after its arrival); Garmonsway’s edition of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Bede’s Ecclesiastical History; Malory’s Morte d’Arthur; and at least thirty books about the Norse Eddas, Icelandic sagas, and Viking history. One of the more enigmatic of Richard's finds was An Autumn Day by an amateur from the Orkneys named E.L. Hennie, which devoted a single chapter to each of the twenty-four hours from seven a.m. on October 20 to seven a.m. on October 21, 1066 1066 (Richard couldn't help but wonder how history might have changed had Jack Bauer been with the English at Hastings). He also loaded up on supplemental material, including biographies of Alfred, Bede, Cnut, and Charlemagne; Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; John Gardner’s post-modernist Beowulf retelling, Grendel; and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. He even downloaded the film version with Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s CGI’ed, gold-glistening mother (idiotic, unconscionable).

Buzzing around Amazon during one of his book-buying sprees, he found himself checking in on Arrangements in Color. When he left JSEP, the book was slated to publish in March, or so Otto had irrationally promised Bertha, but Amazon was now predicting an October release. He conjured scenarios that could have led to such a delay, and in every one of them he saw Otto’s blood-drained face contort with contrition as he absorbed Bertha’s verbal lashings. Richard wanted to savor his vindication, but he understood all too well how this would play out. The book would publish in time for Christmas, be buoyed by a marketing blitz, get reviewed in major publications by members of Bertha’s cult, and sell as well as expected, if not better due to the heightened anticipation. JSEP would hit its numbers and the Otto-and-Bertha regime would roll on undaunted. Even now, Richard’s blood festered whenever he pictured Otto’s face or recalled Bertha’s voice. "I’ll never shake them," he thought.

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter XVI