Scribe-Primus Aris

Scribe-Primus Aris is the collective designation under which the archive records a single office held, at different times, by two persons whose separate acts are impossible to distinguish in the record. The office is the Scribe Primus, the operational head of the Scribes' Guild, held for a non-renewable term of seven years and requiring of its holder the notarial certification demanded of Final forms under the Seventh Concordance. Whether two Arises held it, or one held it twice under circumstances the Guild declines to explain, is the subject of Concordance 12-C, Recension 2, which has been under amendment since before any living Scribe was admitted to the scriptorium.

The distinction matters in practice. Documents bearing the Aris seal fall into two hands, and a form certified in one hand and contested in the other may not be Final, provisionally Final, or anything at all — a difficulty the Court of Notarial Error has ruled on eleven times without reaching a settled position.

The two hands

The earlier hand — designated Aris A in all catalogues since Catalogus Primus — is dated by ink composition to the years 1794 to 1801. The later hand, Aris B, is dated 1801 to 1808. The overlap is a period of some four months in the winter of 1801, during which seals bearing both hands appear on the same instrument, sometimes in the same day, in at least one instance on the same line.

Aris A is the hand responsible for the reclassification of the whispering ledgers now held on the Whispering Amendment. Aris B is the hand that contested the earlier reclassification without ever naming it. Neither hand ever names the other. The Guild's position, stated in a circular of 1812 and never revised, is that "the office speaks with one voice; the hands are a matter of palaeography" (Scribes' Guild, Circular 44).

The palaeographers have not accepted this. The Office of Hand Comparison maintains that Aris A wrote with the left hand and Aris B with the right, a claim it has supported by the angle of the downstroke in eleven thousand certified specimens and by the observation that Aris A's marginal notes run up the outer edge of the page while Aris B's run down the inner. No specimen of either hand's left has ever been produced for comparison.

The Kael dispute

Scribe-Primus Aris is one of the four named holders of the title since the Third Concordance, the others being recorded only as offices rather than names. The challenge to Kael's classification of a whispered amendment was brought in the name of the office by Aris A and was ultimately unsuccessful; the ruling that dismissed it, Ruling 88-K, held that a classification made in a whisper is not a classification but an aspiration, and cannot be appealed. Aris A is recorded as having read the ruling twice and then asked for the reading to be entered into the daybook, which produced an entry of nineteen pages and a standing complaint from the daybook clerks that has never been withdrawn.

Scribe-Primus Aris's later comment on the drafting of Addendum 404-β to the Third Concordance is universally attributed to Aris B, on the ground that Aris A did not use the word shelved in writing and Aris B used it twice in one paragraph. The comment — that Alara's framework allowed paradoxes to be shelved without resolution — is the earliest recorded appearance of the shelving doctrine that would later be formalised under Archivist-Primus Valence.

The Primum Stilus

Both hands are recorded as having borne the Primum Stilus, the ceremonial writing implement of Scribe's Glass reserved to the office. The instrument is entered in the inventory of the Scribes' Guild three times, once as held in hand, once as held in trust, and once simply as held, and the inventory clerk responsible for the third entry was later transferred to Floor 301 for reasons the transfer notice does not state. The fourth line of the inventory reads: one (1) ceremonial implement, glass, to be returned to its case when not in use; case not to leave the scriptorium.

A minor dispute attaches to the case. The Office of Hand Comparison has requested the case for examination on four occasions; the Guild has declined on the ground that the case has not left the scriptorium since 1803 and there is no observation in the record suggesting it ought to. The request is renewed annually and refused annually, in identical language, by different clerks.

Relationship to the Recovery Division

Scribe-Primus Aris is frequently confused in secondary accounts with Scribe-Captain Aris, who commanded the Fifth Scribe's Guild's Specimen Recovery Division from 1845 to 1868, instituted the Aris Reclamation Protocols between 1845 and 1851, and authorised the initial transport of Specimen 881-7. The confusion arises chiefly from the shared surname and from the fact that both are recorded as having been mentored, in some sense, by Scribe-Mentor Goran, who cannot have held both appointments by any reckoning yet is entered as mentor to both in the Guild's register of instruction.

The register is not in error. Goran's mentorship of the Scribe-Primus is recorded in the form of a note in Goran's own hand, dated 1793, reading "the Aris child will do"; no further apprenticeship is entered for either Aris, and the Recovery Division's own rolls name no mentor for the Scribe-Captain. The Office of Succession has ruled that the note is sufficient, which is why Aris is counted among the four named holders since the Third Concordance and the Scribe-Captain is not.

Scholarly disagreement

The central dispute of Aris Studies concerns whether the four-month overlap of 1801 was a duplication of office or a duplication of record. The first position, advanced by Prefect Aris Thorn in 1922 and defended since by the Prefect's Recension, holds that two persons genuinely held the office at once, in breach of the non-renewable seven-year term, and that the breach was concealed by back-dating Aris B's first certification to the day after Aris A's last.

The second position, associated with Senior Librarian Aris Thorne and the Thorne Commentary, holds that one person held the office and that the "Aris child" of Goran's note took a second hand — a notarial convention, permitted under an annex of the Fourth Concordance that has since been lost, in which a certifying officer maintains two hands so that no single hand may be compelled to certify what it has already certified. Under this reading Aris A and Aris B are the same notary, writing on alternating sides of an honest question.

The two positions agree on only one thing: that the office was held by someone named Aris, and that whoever it was shelved the whisper rather than resolving it. The wording they share is Aris's own, and the archive has not improved on it in two centuries:

"The whisper is not a claim. It is not a form. It is a manner of speaking, and the Tower has never certified a manner of speaking."

— Scribe-Primus Aris, marginal note to Ruling 88-K

The marginal note survives in Aris A's hand. The correction beneath it, striking out never and substituting not yet, is in Aris B's.