Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

‘He blackmailed you?’ Magnus said.

‘I suppose you could call it that. I deserved it. And it worked. I thought it would be better all round to sell the saga secretly and split the proceeds between Petur, Birna and myself, than allow Agnar to broadcast its existence to the whole world.’

‘How much did he say it would bring?’

‘He was in the process of negotiating the price. He said it would be millions. Of dollars.’

Magnus took a deep breath. ‘And where is this saga now?’

‘In the gallery safe.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want to see it?’

Magnus and Arni followed her through to a store cupboard at the back of the shop. On the floor was a combination safe. Ingileif twiddled the knobs. She pulled out a leather-bound volume, and placed it on the desk.

‘This is the seventeenth-century copy, the earliest complete copy.’ She opened up the book at a random page. The pages were paper, covered in a neat black handwriting, clear and easy to read. ‘You know when you asked me whether the saga had been kept a secret, I said there was one lapse?’

Magnus nodded.

‘Well, this was copied from an earlier version that was bought from one of my ancestors by Arni Magnusson, the great saga collector. The rest of the family was furious that he had sold it. Arni Magnusson took it with all the others to Copenhagen, and it was one of those that was destroyed in the terrible fire of 1728, before it was catalogued. There is only one mention of Gaukur’s Saga in existence today, to our knowledge, with no details as to what it contains. The majority of the collection went up in smoke, especially the paper copies. Within the family, we believe there was a reason the fire started.’

‘Arson? Someone wanted to destroy it?’

Ingileif shook her head. ‘That’s not what they meant, although knowing how obsessive my family were, I wouldn’t have been surprised. No it was more bad luck, fate, call it what you will.’

‘The power of the ring,’ said Arni.

‘Now you are beginning to sound like my father,’ said Ingileif. ‘But when Agnar was murdered, I couldn’t help seeing the parallels.’ She turned back to the safe. ‘And then there is this. The original, or what’s left of it.’

She carefully extracted a large old envelope, lay it on the desk, and slipped out two layers of stiff card, between which, separated by tissue paper, were perhaps half a dozen sheets of brown vellum. She pulled back the tissue so that they could see one of the sheets closely.

It was faded, torn at the edges, and covered in black writing. This was surprisingly clear: the initial letters of chapters were decorated in fading blues and reds. Magnus could make out the word ‘Isildur’.

‘Amazing,’ Magnus said. And indeed it was. Any doubts he had had about the authenticity of the translation he had read in Agnar’s summer house were dispelled. He had gawped at the old sagas in the Arni Magnusson exhibition, but he had never seen one this close. He couldn’t resist reaching out with his fingertip to touch it.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Ingileif said, a note of pride in her voice.

‘Do you know who wrote it?’ Magnus asked.

‘We think it was someone called Isildur Gunnarsson,’ Ingileif said. ‘One of Gaukur’s descendants, of course. We think he lived in the late thirteenth century, right when most of the major sagas were written.’

‘But if this was such a great family secret, how did Tolkien ever see it?’ Magnus asked. ‘I mean, the links to the Lord of the Rings are so strong, it can’t just be coincidence. He must have read it.’

Ingileif hesitated. ‘Wait a minute.’ She returned to the safe, and returned a moment later.

She placed a small, yellowing envelope on the desk in front of Magnus.

‘May I look?’

Ingileif nodded.

Magnus carefully pulled out a single sheet of paper, folded once.

Magnus unfolded it and read:

20 Northmoor Road

Oxford

9 March 1938

My dear Isildarson

Thank you so much for sending me the copy of Gaukur’s Saga, which I have read with great pleasure. It is almost fifteen years now, but I remember very clearly that meeting of the Viking Club in the college bar at Leeds when you told me something of the saga, although I had no idea that the saga itself would prove to be such a wonderful story. I look back on those evenings fondly – a repertoire of Old Icelandic drinking songs is something that no student of Anglo-Saxon or Middle English should be without!

I am very glad you enjoyed the book I sent you. I have recently begun a second story about Hobbits set in Middle Earth, and I have written the first chapter, entitled ‘A long-expected party’, with which I am very pleased. But I expect that this book will be a much darker work than the first, more grown up, and I have been searching for a means of linking the two stories. I think perhaps you might have given me that link.

Please forgive me if I borrow some of the ideas from your saga. I can promise absolutely that I will continue to respect your family’s wish that the saga itself should remain secret, as it has done for so many hundreds of years. If you do object, please let me know.

I will return the copy of the saga to you next week.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

J.R.R. Tolkien

Magnus’s heart was pounding. The letter would double the value of the saga, treble it. It was an astounding discovery, the key to what had become one of the most pervasive legends of the twentieth century.

A wealthy Lord of the Rings fan would pay a fortune for the two documents.

Or kill for them.

Magnus had read the first two chapters of The Lord of the Rings only the night before. The first was indeed ‘A Long-Expected Party’, which celebrated Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday, a jolly affair full of hobbits and food and fireworks at the end of which Bilbo put on his magic ring and disappeared. In the second, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the wizard Gandalf returned to lecture Bilbo’s nephew Frodo on the strange and evil powers of the ring, and to give him the task of destroying it in the Crack of Doom.

It was clear that between the first and the second chapters lay Gaukur’s Saga.

‘Can I see?’ said Arni.

Magnus exhaled – he hadn’t even realized he had been holding his breath. He handed the letter to him.

‘You showed this to Agnar?’

Ingileif nodded. ‘I let him have it for a few days. He wanted anything I could find to authenticate the saga. He was pleased with this. He was convinced it would help us get a better price.’

‘I’ll bet he was. So Hogni Isildarson was your grandfather?’

‘That’s right. His father, Isildur, founded a furniture store in Reykjavik at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, many Icelanders travelled abroad to study, and in 1923 Hogni went to England, to Leeds University, where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien.

‘Tolkien made a big impression on my grandfather, he inspired him. I remember him telling me about him.’ Ingileif smiled. ‘Tolkien wasn’t really that much older than my grandfather, only in his early thirties, but apparently he had an old-fashioned air about him. As if he lived in a time before industrialization, before big cities and smoke and machine guns. They corresponded on and off for as long as Tolkien was alive. My grandfather even arranged for one of his nieces to work for Tolkien in Oxford as a nanny.’

‘It would have been a good thing all around if you had shown me this the last time I was here,’ Magnus said.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Ingileif. ‘And I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry isn’t really good enough.’ Magnus looked straight at her. ‘Do you have any idea why Agnar was killed?’