Annals of Ambiguity

Overview

The Annals of Ambiguity is a bound recension in eleven folio volumes, held in the eastern apses of Floor 22: The Annals of Unwritten Law and catalogued there under a shelfmark that has itself been recorded three different ways. The work purports to chronicle every occasion on which the Tower's records have admitted of more than one reading, together with the rulings by which each was eventually settled — or, in a substantial minority of cases, deliberately left open. Its compiler of record is Theventh Marrow Index, a Librarian of the Second Scriptorium whose name appears on the title folio of volumes I through IX and, by a substitution of hand contested for two centuries, not on volumes X and XI.

The Annals are formally a companion to the Annals of Jurisprudence, sharing that work's binding dimensions and its foliation from folio 1 at each volume's opening, though the two diverge by the fourth quire and never again agree. The Annals of Jurisprudence cites the Ambiguity at least forty-one times in its procedural mandates, and the Ambiguity returns the compliment in the addenda to volumes II, IV, and VII, where the parent volume's rulings are characterized, not unkindly, as "provisional."

Composition and Recensions

Volumes I–III were assembled between the winters of 6,204 and 6,239, during which period the Second Scriptorium was relocated twice owing to damp. The relocation notes survive as marginalia and constitute the only continuous record of the scriptorium's movements in that decade. Volumes IV–IX followed at irregular intervals, the longest gap falling between volumes VI and VII, a period of eleven years during which the compiler is known to have been in correspondence with the Provost of Precise Ambiguity concerning the admissibility of ambiguity that had not yet occurred.

Volumes X and XI are the subject of the work's principal textual dispute. The second hand, identified by its characteristic treatment of the lower loop of the letter g, is attributed in the Concordance of Scribal Hands, Red Series to the copyist Oris Vantle, whose own testimony — preserved in a letter to the Provost — is that he "copied only what was there, and some of it was not." The Society for the Preservation of Ambiguity has consistently maintained that Vantle's discomfort is evidence of authenticity, while the School of Ambiguity holds that a copyist who complains of his exemplar has already begun to edit it.

Method: The Doctrine of Surviving Readings

Each entry in the Annals follows a tripartite form: the ambiguous passage, the readings tendered, and the disposition. The disposition is the work's peculiar contribution to Textual Collation and is known as the Doctrine of Surviving Readings, which holds that where two readings cannot be reconciled, neither is to be struck, but both are to be carried forward under a single marginal brace until a later hand can demonstrate that one of them was never possible.

"Where two readings stand and neither yields, the clerk shall not choose. He shall brace them, number them, and be at peace. The brace is the record of his honesty."

— Annals of Ambiguity, Volume I, folio 14r

The brace, once adopted, proved difficult to retire. By volume V the margins of several entries carry braces within braces, and the Index of Ambiguity has since ruled that a brace may be braced only to the third degree, a limit reached in the celebrated entry on the Recursive Brace Affair of floor 340, where a fourth brace was applied in error and remains in the manuscript, bracketed separately and annotated "not counted."

Relation to the Concordances

The Annals are cited as authority in three Concordances and as counter-authority in two. Fourth Concordance treats the work as definitive on questions of surviving readings; Ninth Concordance, Annex 12, restricts its application to floors numbered above 100, on grounds never stated. The contradiction is old and has been the subject of at least six petitions to the Librarians, none of which has been answered in writing, as is customary.

The most persistent difficulty concerns Duality Drift in parallel records. The Annals are the sole admissible source for correcting such drift, but the Annals of Ambiguity are not the Annals, and the distinction has never been satisfactorily drawn. In the winter of 7,118 a collator on floor 88 corrected a drifted entry by appeal to volume VIII and was subsequently required to uncorrect it on the ground that he had consulted the wrong Annals. The correction and uncorrection are both preserved, braced together, in the floor's working copy.

Contested Entries

Certain entries are disputed not for their readings but for their inclusion. The entry at volume III, folio 202v, records an ambiguity that the compiler himself could not reproduce on re-examination, and which he retained "for the sake of the reader who may yet find it." The Calcified Ambiguity entry at volume VI, folio 61r, is accepted by all parties, though the Annals of Structural Anomalies records a different date for the calcification by some forty years, a discrepancy attributed to the differing reckonings of the two scriptoria and left unresolved.

The Great Ambiguity Incursion occupies the whole of volume IX and is the only event to which the Annals devote continuous narrative rather than entry form. The account is considered reliable as to sequence and unreliable as to duration.

Use and Restrictions

The Annals may be consulted by any Librarian of the second grade or above, in the presence of a collator, and may not be removed from the apses. Readers are asked to return the brass page-weights to the tray at the desk. Copies of individual entries are furnished on request, braced where the original is braced, and are not to be cited as though they were the volumes themselves.

No complete collation of the eleven volumes has been attempted since 7,301, when the collator abandoned the task at volume X, folio 3r, recording only that "the braces had begun to disagree." The note is filed with the work and is itself unbraced.