Other nations spoke their law in market squares, under colonnades, in the middle of a city. We chose a crack in the ground.

At Þingvellir you walk down into Almannagjá, a ravine where two continental plates draw apart from one another by two centimetres a year. There, in the rift itself, the Lawspeaker recited the law for centuries, from memory, because the law was written down nowhere: it existed only as speech in the mouth of a man. The land was not whole. We built our assembly, the Alþingi, directly into the break.

Which is why I did not stumble over the middle of this book.

When the sky-weave tears open above Liora's head, everyone panics. The threads snap back sem felmtri slegnir fingur (like fingers recoiling in fright), voices cry out of the fabric, a child calls for a mother who cannot be found. Zamir stands there, his face litur ösku eftir eld (the grey of ash once the fire is done), and says the sentence after which the book is never the same: „Spurning þín var enginn lykill — hún var hnífur!“ (Your question was no key — it was a knife!) This is the climax of the work. To an Icelandic reader it is also a description of the landscape.

The book does not ask whether a tear is a bad thing. It asks the older and harder question, and it happens that our language has carried that question on its back from the beginning.

Fate is laid, not spoken

The Roman called it fatum: the spoken. The German has Schicksal, that which is sent to you. English took its fate from the Roman. We have örlög: that which was laid down at the beginning. Lög, law, is what has been laid, from the verb leggja, to lay.

In a book about weaving this is no small matter. With us, fate is handwork. It has an author and a motion; someone laid it, the way one lays a thread into the warp. The sister word tells the same story: álög is what is laid upon a person, the spell one lays over another — and an Icelandic reader knows at once what he is looking at when grey lines appear in little Nuria's palm after the light has bitten her.

The Starweaver is therefore no stranger to us. He does not speak. He lays. And the whole book is a single question that Icelandic could put into a single word long before anyone thought to ask it: who laid this?

The ear wants to hear more than philology permits. Inside örlög we hear ör — and ör, a scar, is exactly what remains in the sky after Zamir has patched it. The words are not related. I let them stand side by side all the same, because a book about how meaning forms in a reader's ear deserves a reader who listens that way. False kinship, true resonance.

The verse laid on the table

In the interlude Freisting Zamirs (Zamir's Temptation) the master weaver kneels before the Loom of Origins and is permitted to see his own future finished and woven: himself, honoured, his name an inspiration to generations. At the edge of that future lies a grey, loose thread — Liora's path — and an invisible hand guides it gently back into the pattern, where her rebellion becomes hrífandi, litla tilbrigðið (that charming little variation) which only enhances the beauty of the whole. The offer is never spoken aloud, and the price is a single item: „Þögn hennar.“ (Her silence.)

And there, in the next breath, stand three lines:

Örlög sín
viti engi fyrir;
þeim er sorgalausastr sefi.
(Let no man learn his lot before it falls — only the unknowing carry it lightly.)

That is from Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One. The verse is meant as consolation: the least sorrow belongs to the one who does not know. It has been laid at precisely the point where Zamir has just been made to know. He has seen his thread to its end, and his life has stopped being his. And he asks, for the first time in his life: „en hver lagði örlögin?“ (but who laid this lot?)

In three lines, the oldest word of comfort this nation owns has turned into an accusation.

This is not translation. It is inlay work — an Icelandic thread woven into a German pattern and set at the worst and best possible place. The book asks for exactly this in its afterword: rather than smoothing away the difference between language regions, the Word-weaver says, the story should honour it. The prelude Þráðarmál (Thread-speech) accordingly stands not in prose but modelled on ljóðaháttur, the metre of Hávamál itself, and it closes with a line struck from the same die: „betra er brot en heil lygi“ (better a fragment than a whole lie).

It should be said plainly: whoever reads Liora in Icelandic reads her in an older voice than the one she was written in. Our book is not quite the German book. It is one verse more heathen.

The weave of Darraður

We hardly needed a German book, mind you, to arrive at a weaver who weaves men.

In Njáls saga, on the night before the Battle of Clontarf, a man named Dörruður sees twelve women ride to a weaving-house in Caithness. He goes to the window and looks in. They are weaving. The warp is men's entrails, the loom-weights are their heads, arrows serve as the weaving rod, and as they work they sing who is to fall. When they are finished they tear the cloth down, each takes her piece, and they ride away.

Our oldest weaving poem, in other words, ends with the weavers tearing the weave apart themselves. A tear is not a fault in the pattern. It is the pattern's conclusion.

But note where the man is standing. Dörruður is outside. He looks through a window at what no one was meant to see, and they do not see him.

The postlude of this book — the chapter the reader is expressly warned not to open — puts us at that same window and then turns it around. Three presences stand beyond the weave and discuss the world as one discusses an experiment: whether the tear was an error or a correction, what pain has done for the stability of the system, whether the wound should be closed again in the next cycle. It is the coldest conversation in the book, and it rings uncomfortably familiar to anyone following the present debates about thinking machines. And then the thing happens that never happens in Njála: the weavers feel themselves watched.

„Hver sér okkur?“
Ekkert svar kom.
(“Who sees us?” — No answer came.)

Three. Not two, not four. In Völuspá three maidens come up, knowing much, from the lake that lies beneath the world tree: þær lög lögðu, líf kuru alda börnum, örlög seggja (they laid down the laws, chose life for the children of men and their lot for warriors). The same verb again: to lay. And a norn is not omnipotent. In our mythology Odin knows how it ends and can do nothing about it; he paid an eye for a single draught from the well and hung nine nights on the wind-beaten tree, wounded by a spear, to take up the runes. Knowledge costs a wound. That is not a moral, it is a price list.

Which is why I believe Hvíslitréð, the Whispering Tree, when it opens itself to Liora and shows her its growth rings: a broad golden ring of peace and hard against it a narrow dark one, split by a jagged black streak. „Sérhver spurning þín, barn, er ár í viði mínum.“ (Every question of yours, child, is a year in my wood.) The ash Yggdrasil suffers more than men know: the hart bites it above, the flank rots, Níðhöggr gnaws from below. Our world tree is not a healthy tree. It is a tree in pain that holds everything up regardless.

Under the cloak

Liora's house is called „Húsið þar sem beðið er eftir visku“ (The House Where Wisdom Is Waited For), and its rules fit into three lines: Sá sem spyr, sáir. Sá sem hlýðir, hlúir. Sá sem bíður, þroskast. (He who asks, sows. He who listens, tends. He who waits, ripens.)

We own that institution. It was founded in the year 1000, at Þingvellir, in the rift.

The nation stood then on the point of renouncing its common law — heathens and Christians each meaning to keep their own from that day on — and Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, Lawspeaker and himself a heathen, lay down, spread a cloak over his head, and lay like that for a day and a night, and said nothing. Ari the Learned does not tell us what he was thinking. Nobody asked. A people at the edge of schism agreed to wait a full day for a man who had pulled something over his face.

That is precisely the gesture Liora teaches the children: to hold the question, to test its weight, to ask who can carry it with you. We still call it að liggja undir feldi (to lie under the cloak). I believe we are the only nation with a constitutional tradition named after saying nothing.

And note the ruling itself. Þorgeir declared that there should be one law in the land and one faith — but the old customs might be kept in private. Sacrifice in silence. Into the new and perfect pattern a single thread was woven that did not throw the light back.

Liora's mother performs the same handwork. On the night before her daughter leaves she sews a protective pouch, golden threads in flawless symmetry, and into the middle of the finishing knot she sets one single thread: grey, undyed, matte and rough, ekki hreint skorinn (not cleanly cut) but frayed and torn off in haste. Then she slips the pouch in among the question stones. No warning. No prohibition.

Lawgiver and mother arrive at the same conclusion seven hundred years apart: a protection that is meant to hold needs a flaw in it.

What is not said

Icelandic literature has one device more than other literatures have, and that device is silence.

The sagas never tell us what a person feels. They tell us that a hand went to the temple, that knuckles whitened, that a vein beat in a throat like a captured animal throwing itself against the walls. Liora's book is written in that grammar, and the translation plainly knows it. We are nowhere told that the mother is afraid. We are told that her hands, busy a moment ago, now lie still in her lap, eins og einhver hefði skorið á þráð hreyfingar hennar (as though someone had cut the thread of her movement). That is enough. It is more than enough.

When the son of Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir finally asks her, old and half blind, which man she loved most, she does not answer. She says: „Þeim var ek verst er ek unni mest.“ (I was worst to the one I loved most.) That is not an answer. It is a stone laid in the questioner's palm, heavy and full of possibility, and eight hundred years later it is lying there still, and nobody has managed to put it down.

This is exactly what Liora does when the boy asks why the Starweaver gave his father a calling that makes him sad. The circle falls silent. She does not answer. She reaches into her pack, hands the boy a stone and says: „Þetta er þungur steinn sem þú berð. Hann heldur hjarta föður þíns. Finndu brúnir hans. Er hvassleikinn áhyggjur þínar af honum, eða er það hryggð hans?“ (That is a heavy stone you are carrying. Your father's heart is inside it. Feel along its edges: is the sharpness your worry about him — or is it his sorrow?)

A French reader may see refined courtesy in this, the right of the unsaid. To us it is not courtesy. To us it is a working method.

Nuria's Sonatorrek

The finest chapter in the book is the shortest, and it is about a six-year-old child with a ruined hand.

Nuria has tried to weave differently from what her heart told her, and the light has bitten her. The lines in her palm, which used to shine gold, have gone grey. „Það verkjar ekki lengur,“ she says, „en mér finnst hún tóm.“ (It doesn't hurt any more. But it feels empty.)

Zamir does not touch her. He crouches down in front of the child, holds his own hand in front of hers as though taking a temperature, and says what nobody else in the book could have said:

„Hún er ekki tóm. Hún er full. Hún er södd. Grátt drekkur ljósið. Það geymir allt. En sá sem drekkur svo mikið þarf loft til að anda. Snertir þú ljósið, kæfir þú það. Gefðu því rými. Láttu loftið dansa þar á milli.“
(It isn't empty, it's full. It has drunk its fill. Grey drinks the light and keeps all of it. But anything that drinks that much needs air to breathe. Touch the light and you smother it. Leave it room. Let the air dance in between.)

And the child learns to draw a deep note out of the emptiness between her hand and the silver thread. Búmm. (Whum.) Then again, and a shiver goes down her back, because the other children weave bright melodies and this is the heartbeat. The hand was not ruined. It was a sounding board.

Egill Skallagrímsson lay down in his bed-closet and meant to starve himself to death when his son Böðvar drowned. His daughter Þorgerður got him to compose a poem first. Sonatorrek, the loss of sons, is neither consolation nor reconciliation; it is the wound itself, taken into service as an instrument, and it kept him alive until he could eat again.

A thousand-year-old method, taught in a single page by a man who has patched a sky himself, to a child holding her hand three fingers' breadth from the light and not touching it.

The seam that shows

On the night of 23 January 1973 a fissure opened east of the town on Heimaey. The fishing fleet carried five thousand people to the mainland that night. For months seawater was pumped onto the lava front so that it would not close the harbour, and when the eruption was over the harbour lay better sheltered than before. Part of the town lay underneath it.

That is Zamir's seam, measured in cubic metres. The Whispering Tree states the rule: „Sá sem hefur mátt til að brjóta hefur einnig mátt til að græða. Ekki að færa hið sama aftur — það er ekki hægt. En að láta eitthvað nýtt vaxa.“ (Whoever has the power to break also has the power to heal. Not to bring back what was — that cannot be done. But to let something new grow.)

We know the other side of it too: that a fabric which looks flawless can be hanging by a thinner thread than anyone was willing to admit. In the autumn of 2008 we were given that lesson entire, and we are still untangling it. A tear always tells the truth about the material. That is the worst thing about it and the only good one.

At the end of the book the scar is still there. Children point at it and ask their parents what it is, and some answer villa (a mistake), others minning (a memory). One evening, long afterwards, Zamir goes to his seam, notices two threads that have worked loose and are standing out of it untidily, and pushes the ends together with an unadorned, practical movement. The gesture of a caretaker, not an artist. We know that motion. It is called maintenance, it is not beautiful, and it is what keeps houses standing in this country.

And Liora herself does not end on an answer. She ends on a hand opening. She goes down to the river with the oldest and smoothest question stone, does not throw it, does not squeeze it any more until the palm burns, but turns her palm upward and lets the stone rest there, án þess að halda honum eða sleppa (without gripping it and without letting it go).

Þyngd. Bergmál. Loforð.
(Weight. Echo. Promise.)

A French reader sees hesitation there. I see an assembly that has not yet been closed.

Because this is what we learned in the rift and have never quite managed to teach anyone else: that an open thread is not a defeat, that a visible seam is more honest than a fabric that lies, and that a person holding a question without throwing it is not a hesitant person but a person under the cloak.

The book is German. The stone is ours.

A man sailing to Iceland to settle would throw his öndvegissúlur overboard — the carved pillars of his high seat, the one thing he took from the old house — and build his farm wherever the sea washed them ashore. This is not a travel story. It is a way of reading.

I have spent this winter with forty-eight essays, each on its own version of the same book, and in every one of them I saw the same movement. The Catalan throws Gaudí overboard and finds, in the tear across the sky, trencadís — the mosaic of smashed tiles that makes a new surface out of the break. The Bengali throws an old sari and finds kantha: nobody stitches that quilt from new cloth, only from cloth that has already torn. The Scot finds a drystane dyke, standing for a hundred years precisely because the wind goes through it. The Low German finds the Brack, the deep pool left where the sea broke the dyke, which is now the richest water in the whole marsh. The Javanese finds goro-goro, the midnight scene where the screen is broken and the clowns say what the kings dare not. The Kannadiga finds Basavanna and the two words he lives by: sthāvara and jangama — the standing thing perishes, the moving thing does not.

And in nearly every essay there stands one and the same sentence, put forty-eight different ways: this book is no stranger here. It has come home.

Forty-nine peoples say of the same book that it is theirs. That is either a miracle or a mirror, and I mean to try to decide which — because I come from a country that knows this trick from the inside, and therefore knows both the hand and the danger.

Let me also say at once what none of my colleagues said: I do not read forty-eight languages. Nobody does. Some of it I read through glass. The reader who has read the whole work does not exist — and that, on inspection, is the conclusion of the book itself.

The grey thread in fifteen looms

Let us begin with statistics, because they surprised me.

There is one short scene in the book. On the night before her daughter leaves, the mother sews a protective pouch, golden threads in flawless symmetry, and into the centre of the final knot she sets a single grey thread, matt and rough, looking torn off rather than cut.

That is the scene the world chose. The Catalan reads it as mosaic. The Italian as il resto, the remainder the system cannot swallow. The Korean as yeobaek, the left-blank space that carries half of any ink painting. The Russian as proof that a perfection without flaw is not perfection but a mask. The reader in Hebrew sees keri and ketiv, the gap between what stands written and what is actually read aloud. The Ukrainian says that from now on he will look for this thread in every embroidered cloth he picks up. The Thai recognises the deliberately mis-tied binding in mudmee weaving. The Swede calls it a Nordic blessing; the Englishman, an unsentimental act of maternal love; the Vietnamese, the breath of the pattern; the Turk, the grey thread under Istanbul's gilding. The Pole reads the greyness as the hiding place of an entire generation.

Fifteen looms, one thread. And notice what unites the readings: it is not the flaw itself. It is that the flaw was deliberate, that it was hidden, and that the one who put it there was the mother who let the child go anyway. The world did not agree about imperfection. It agreed about consent.

The þula

Every essay pays the same toll, and the toll is a word.

Catalan hands over trencadís. The Welshman hands over hiraeth, cynghanedd, and gorffwysfa — the resting point in the middle of the line, without which the second half could not answer the first. The Dane hands over the dizziness of freedom. The Portuguese, saudade. The Russian, pravda and toska. The Ukrainian, volya, which means freedom and one's own willing at once, and shchem, the sweet tightening in the chest when beauty hurts. The Korean points out that to ail and to know are very nearly the same verb in his language. The Vietnamese hands over thương, the love that grows only out of a wound. The Swahili speaker, mtu ni watu: a person is persons. The Turk, merak, a curiosity that does not want the answer. The Spaniard, the courtyard. The Japanese, the interval, ma. The Greek, Heraclitus: the hidden harmony that is stronger than the visible one. The Tamil, a single word, nūl, meaning both thread and book. The Esperantist, two letters, -iĝ-, the suffix that turns what is woven into what weaves itself. The Malayali, Madhava's infinite series from the fourteenth century, in which the circle is never reached and yet approached forever. The Scot, smeddum, and the Caledonian antisyzygy, the pair yoked together and never melted into one. The Finn needs only two adjectives: sharper, and yet warmer.

This is a þula. We have them in our poetry: name-lists, catalogues that the modern reader skips because nothing happens in them. But a þula is not ornament. A þula is storage. It is the method by which names survive centuries in which nobody writes. Several essays in this collection are themselves largely þulur — inventories of the poets and instruments and weaves of the home country — and men have been sneered at for less. I will not do it. I know what catalogues are for.

But here I must confess my nation's peculiarity. We do not accept words. We forge them. When the world was given computer, we forged tölva out of tala (number) and völva (seeress): a prophetess who divines by numbers. We have our own words for jet, helicopter, telephone. In this currency we take no gifts; we melt them down and cast them again in our own metal.

And that is exactly where Icelandic has something to say about this whole work, and it says it in a single verb. The verb þýða comes from þjóð, "people". To translate a text is literally to bring it into the speech of the people, to make it a people's property. The same root runs through German itself: deutsch originally meant nothing but "in the language of the people", and the German verb deuten, to interpret, is the sister of our þýða. This is why one Icelandic sentence asks two questions at once — hvað þýðir þetta? is both "what does this mean?" and "what does this translate?" — and nobody here is confused by it.

Forty-eight people did not translate this book. They nationalised it. My language has a verb for that, and the verb is not an accusation.

Two saudades

The best piece of evidence in the collection is not mine. The Portuguese found it, and he found it by listening to his neighbour.

The book was translated into Portuguese twice. In Brazil, the tremor that the perfect world lacks became "the saudade for what we have not yet been" — a longing that points forward in time. In Portugal what remained was: "that shiver we call saudade." Nothing more. Nothing ahead.

The same German word, the same Portuguese word, on either side of one ocean, and the direction of time reversed. One misses what never was; the other, what departed. The Brazilian names his method so plainly that no doubt is possible: we did not translate her, we ate her — invoking the anthropophagy of his tradition, the genius of his people being to devour the foreign and digest it into new flesh. The Portuguese answers him across the water: we do not eat her, we miss her.

If one word splits into two opposite directions merely by crossing the Atlantic, what is left of the original?

Anyone who wants to measure this can start with the number itself. The Arab and the Malayali count forty-nine languages. The Hindi essay says thirty-nine. The Swede says fifty. The Englishman says fifty in his first paragraph and forty-nine in his last, and does not notice. Not even the work's own number holds still. When a pattern no longer remembers how many threads it has, it is alive.

The notes are given

Now to what I take to be the collection's most important discovery — and no single author owns it.

In the middle of the book the tree shows Liora the same notes again and again, and each time they become a different melody: a lullaby, a wild dance, a lament. And the tree says the sentence: he gives the notes, but you choose the melody.

The Welshman reads it and sees cerdd dant: the harp plays an inherited air that may not be altered, the voice sings a different one against it, must never strike the same note as the harp at the same instant — and must nonetheless arrive together with it at the end. The Scot hears pìobaireachd: the bare ground, the ùrlar, out of which the variations grow and to which they return, changed. The Thai sees khrong phleng and thang: the skeleton of the piece is handed down, but the way through it is yours. The Croat hears klapa singing and says that what holds it up is not the notes but the silence between them. The Hungarian hears the slow and the fast half of one dance in a single stroke of the bow, and says: this is not a mood swing, this is one thread pulled three ways. The Tamil needs no music at all; he shows us the mother kneeling at the threshold before dawn, first setting down the dots, which are given and cannot be moved, and then drawing a single unbroken line around them. The dots are fate. The line is yours.

Six or seven traditions, with no connection to one another, read the same sentence and recognised their own music in it. They knew nothing of each other. This is a conclusion the collection reached collectively with no one steering it, and it runs: freedom is not the absence of a pattern, but the way through it.

We have this too, and I will not leave our share lying on the ground. A kvæðamaður, a chant-singer, inherits the stemma, the tune. He does not compose it; he receives it from another man's estate and sings beneath it verses no one has ever heard. And in tvísöngur, that old tradition of singing in parallel fifths which survived here longer than anywhere else in Europe, two voices run alongside each other from beginning to end and never merge into one. That is an altogether different idea of concord from the idea that everyone should sing the same thing. The Welshman put it best for all of us: harmony is an answer, not an echo.

The one nobody defended

Now to what is missing — because a review without an objection is an advertisement.

Forty-eight essays, and not one of them defends Zamir.

Zamir is the boy who weaves light, who loves his work and the world as it is, and who shouts at Liora when the sky tears: your question was no key — it was a knife! In the whole collection he is read as a frightened man: as Havel's greengrocer, as the craftsman swallowed by the machine, as the one who chose safety and paid for it with his soul. He is met with great sympathy. Nowhere is he granted the possibility of being right.

One essay reverses this, and it is the shortest in the collection. The Persian begins by reminding us that the word paradise is his — pardis, the walled garden — and then adds what nobody else says: what makes a garden a garden is neither the wall nor the stream, but the gardener. Cracked ground that no one tends does not become a paradise. It becomes a ruin. Liora's question does not give life; it makes tending possible. And therefore, says the Persian, Liora is not the gardener in this book at all. She is the one who wakes him. The real transformation of the work happens not in her but in Zamir, at the moment when he stops concealing and starts maintaining.

The Welshman arrives at the same place from the other side: the rift is not a collapse, it is the gorffwysfa, the caesura mid-line without which no answer is possible. The Starweaver's world was a single unbroken line with no resting point, and that is why it could never answer itself.

Three others at least dared to hesitate. The Indonesian asks, with rukun in mind, whether it is right to sacrifice the peace of many to the curiosity of one. The Marathi author asks the same question from a society in which it is not an abstraction. The Serb asks whether it is wise to tear the fabric of a community in a land that has been torn so often. All three answer it in the end, each in his own way — but they let it stand a moment longer than the rest, and for that I am grateful to them.

This is not a matter of taste but a fault of form, and it is uncomfortably visible to an Icelander. In Njáls saga, Njáll and Flosi are both in the right. Our whole strongest tradition rests on two stories being true at once, and on a verdict costing something. Where everyone agrees, the case has not been decided. It has not been argued.

The charming little variation

And now to what I have been putting off.

In the interlude of the book, Zamir is offered the future. He sees himself honoured, his name in the songs of generations, and at the edge of that picture lies a grey, loose thread — Liora's path — and an invisible hand leads it gently back into the pattern, where the rebellion becomes that

charming little variation
which only increases the beauty of the whole.

There is one price: her silence.

Now I look at forty-eight essays. Every nation was invited to lay its colour into one pattern. All of them said yes. Not one wrote against the book. Not one called it a failure, or overladen, or too certain of its own errand; not one refused to find itself in it. Forty-eight voices, each with its accent, all reaching the same verdict, all published in the same place.

The Croat comes closest to saying this aloud. He warns against the temptation of the ornamented scar: that the wound becomes a souvenir, that a people begins to live off it, that the gap is kept open because it confers a sense of significance — and he quotes the coldest sentence in the book, in which one of the presences beyond the weave says of human beings: leave it open. It gives them a sense of significance. A satisfied animal does not bite.

I will not pretend to stand outside this. This essay is the one that gathers the loose ends and knots them. It is the harmonising variation in its purest form, written by a man who saw the trap and walked into it anyway, because he too wanted to be a thread in the pattern. I do not say this to absolve myself. I say it because nobody else said it, and because a reader who reads forty-eight mirrors and fails to notice that they all show the same face has read nothing at all.

The difference between a weave and an assembly is only this: you can walk out of an assembly.

One skin

What, then, does Iceland have to offer that the other forty-eight did not? Not another scar. We have them, but everyone has them; this collection proved that thoroughly.

We have manuscripts.

The stanza my colleague set at the heart of his essay — Örlög sín viti engi fyrir, þeim er sorgalausastr sefi, "let no one know his fate beforehand; his mind will be freest of sorrow" — stands in Hávamál, and Hávamál exists because someone wrote it on calfskin and that skin did not burn. One book: the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. Bishop Brynjólfur sent it to the Danish king as a gift in 1662, and it came home on the 21st of April 1971, aboard a Danish naval vessel, together with Flateyjarbók, and people stood down at the harbour in the rain and watched strangers carry the crates ashore.

That is the story we have to give: a text survives by passing out of the hands of the one who owns it. Árni Magnússon carried our manuscripts to Copenhagen and thereby saved them. Part of what he had gathered burned in the fire of 1728 and is lost forever. Part of it exists only because he had had it copied out beforehand. The copy lived. The original burned. A scar in the sky.

This is why an Icelander cannot take seriously the question that hangs unspoken over this whole collection: which of the forty-nine is the real book? There is no one Njáls saga. There are redactions, each with its additions and omissions, and the edition on your shelf is a composite that no medieval person ever read. Every saga we possess is already a translation of a telling that is lost.

The book became a people's property forty-nine times. That is not a defect in the work. It is a method of preservation.