At the source

There are many things we should already have read.  Sometimes we get around to reading them.

Our writer reminds us that there are always books we should have read, somewhere along the way, but haven’t.  There’s no real danger of anyone having already read them all: the library of good literature is so large that even a lifetime isn’t quite enough to exhaust it.  (That’s so even in one language, and this was pointed out to us by someone fluent in German, English and French.)  This thought can be depressing, but on the other hand it means you’ll never run out.

Of this Library of Good Intentions, there is a shelf of works that everyone knows about chiefly through references in other writings.  And indeed you can form a fairly complete picture of most of these without ever encountering them in the first person.  We know about Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond without picking up a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress; nowadays few actually read through the Divine Comedy, though a mention of the Circles of Hell is readily understood.  There’s no pressing need to go to the originals if you’re satisfied with second-hand information, and sometimes that’s enough.

But our writer has lately been motivated to go back to the originals.  Having heard retellings of the stories of Norse mythology since he was a child, he found (translations of) the main sources, called the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, and read them.  And encountered a strange feeling.  All the familiar stories are there, and not much else.  Sometimes they’re confusingly told, or a passage has mysterious references that no one now understands, but there is not much more information than in a nineteenth-century book he owns.  Indeed, the latter is more understandable; the various poems of the Poetic Edda were never designed to express a coherent theology or theogony, while the modern version puts everything in (an) order.

With a similar motivation, he then found the sagas telling of the Viking voyages to the New World.  We’re used to the arrival here of Norsemen as an historical fact; he wondered what the documentation was like.  Well, there are details, but he’d encountered all the important ones in other places (including some works of fiction!).

Next and somewhat shamefacedly, he admits that it’s only in the past year that he actually read Paradise Lost, a contender for the title of the English Epic, hugely influential and considered by some critics of judgement as the finest poem in the language.  And while a work of this size and importance of course contains much that doesn’t make it into commentaries, summaries or references, again there was nothing surprising or unexpected.

We are looking for a word to express this feeling: coming late to a work that has a large presence in secondary literature, and finding nothing (or not much) more than we already knew.  It’s not quite disappointment, because these really are first-rate literature; it’s not like having the ending of a mystery story spoiled, because none of these depended on surprise.  It should include a vague guilt at having waited so long to get around to reading them.

But it shouldn’t imply that finally reading them was misguided.  At least now he’s certain what they don’t contain.