One Manuscript, and It Has Been Burned

The poem survives in a single copy, written by two scribes who divided the work partway through, in a book that also contains a life of Saint Christopher, a description of eastern marvels, a letter attributed to Alexander and a poem on Judith. That grouping is itself evidence: whoever assembled the volume seems to have collected accounts of monsters and outsized figures, which suggests how a contemporary reader classified the poem. The manuscript was damaged in a library fire in the eighteenth century. It was not destroyed, but the edges were scorched and then continued to crumble for decades before the leaves were mounted and stabilised, taking letters at the margins with them.

Transcripts made before the worst of that loss now preserve readings the manuscript no longer carries, so the modern text depends in places on eighteenth century copies rather than on the object itself. Everything about the poem's origin has to be argued from that one copy. The date of composition, the region it was composed in and the relationship between what the scribes wrote and any earlier version are all open, and estimates of the date span several centuries. The atlas records the manuscript as the fixed point and the rest as contested.