Parser Elidon of the Silent Stacks

Parser Elidon of the Silent Stacks was a certified Parser of the Silent College, best known for formalizing the containment protocol for runaway predicates and for fixing the strict procedural sequence that governs all Declarative Parser work under the 312th Revision of the Manual. Elidon held the Silent Portfolio from the winter of the 1,144th administrative year until relinquishment, and is the only Parser on record to have held it twice, the second tenure being occasioned by a defect in the first instrument of relinquishment that no office has since been willing to certify as void.

Tenure and office

Parsers of the Silent Portfolio are appointed by the Custodians of the Silent Stacks and answer, in matters of grammar, to the Senior Librarians alone. Elidon's first tenure ran from 1,144 to 1,171 and was marked by an unusual volume of procedural writing: eleven recensions of the containment protocol, four of them superseded within a single season, and a memorandum on the custody of the Ceremonial Quill that remains the authority for its charging. The Quill, which draws its ink from the archival silence of The Silent Stacks, is charged only in the presence of a certified Parser; Elidon's memorandum fixed the interval at nine minutes and forbade conversation during it, a prohibition later extended by Concordance 47 to the whole of the Stacks.

Colleagues described Elidon's method as "sequencing before sense" — that is, the ordering of a parse was settled before any question of its meaning was entertained. The phrase appears in the Sable Cabinet register for the 1,159th year and is there attributed to Wren, whose own difficulties with the Custodians are separately recorded in Wren of the Silent Stacks.

Containment of runaway predicates

A predicate is said to run away when it continues to qualify a subject after the subject has been withdrawn from the floor. The condition is not dangerous in itself, but it is untidy, and untidiness in a catalogued jurisdiction is a matter for the Custodians. Elidon's protocol of 1,163 establishes three graduated responses — the raised hand, the closed stack, and the sealed column — and requires that each be performed in the presence of a witness who has not read the predicate in question. The witness requirement has been the subject of more complaint than any other clause in the protocol; the West Silent Wing has petitioned four times for its relaxation, on the ground that the Wing's staff are few and all of them readers.

Elidon defended the clause in a note appended to the second recension:

"A predicate contained by one who has read it is contained by agreement, not by procedure. The Tower does not keep agreements. It keeps witnesses."

— Parser Elidon of the Silent Stacks, note to the second recension of the containment protocol, 1,163

The protocol was applied in full during the Silent Stacks Excavation (890-Σ), though the excavators' reports note that the sealed column was never reached and that the raised hand was sufficient at every stage.

The 312th Revision

The strict procedural sequence for Declarative Parsers — intake, assent, suspension, resumption, and closing silence — was fixed by Elidon at the 312th Revision and has not been altered since, though it has twice been renumbered. The sequence is unusual among Tower procedures in that it may not be abbreviated by any officer below the rank of Senior Librarian, a restriction that produced the celebrated irregularity of 1,188, when a Senior Librarian abbreviated the closing silence in order to attend a bell and the parse was held to have concluded twice. The Silent Bell in question was subsequently rung only at fixed hours.

Disputed attribution

Scholarly opinion divides on whether Elidon composed the containment protocol or merely transcribed it. The Annex Ψ holds a fragment, catalogued as Ψ-31, which sets out the three graduated responses in language identical to the 1,163 recension but bears a hand not otherwise attested. The First Curator of the Silent Stacks is credited with the fragment in the older inventories; the Custodians maintain that the fragment is Elidon's fair copy; and a minority, relying on the watermark, assign it to an unnamed amanuensis of the Sequestered Stacks. The Veiled Stacks guide declines to adjudicate and lists all three attributions on facing pages. No party disputes that Elidon signed the recension, only that the signature establishes composition rather than receipt.

A second dispute concerns the numbering of the Revision. Concordance 47, Annex 3, refers to "the three hundred and thirteenth Revision of the Manual, being the Revision of Elidon," while the Manual itself prints the sequence under the 312th and notes no 313th. The discrepancy has been referred to the Senior Librarians twice and remains, in the words of the Custodians' annual return for 1,201, "open, and not urgent."

Relinquishment and legacy

Elidon's first relinquishment was executed on Floor -Ψ in the presence of two Custodians and a witness. The instrument omitted the closing silence, and the Portfolio was accordingly held to have passed and then returned; Elidon served a second tenure of nine years before a corrected instrument was sealed. Practice since has required the closing silence to be observed twice at every relinquishment, a rule known informally as Elidon's second silence. The Parser is remembered chiefly for that rule and for the witness clause, and is cited in the account of the Floor -Ψ breach as the authority for sealing a predicate without reading it.