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Afterword

Andronikos Sosilos


There is a certain charm to the way my ancestor speculates about the moments he or Hanuvar or other eyewitnesses he spoke with did not personally observe, but reading through these often lengthy and vacillating suppositions can, alas, be a challenge. The renowned historian Silenus, in recognition of these problematic scenes, sought to clarify the conjectures of Sosilos by diligently locating hundreds of additional eyewitnesses, but her weighty commentary, while fascinating and detailed, sometimes loses itself in minutia and in any case further disrupts The Hanuvid’s narrative flow. The end result is that recent generations have found the work of my esteemed ancestor more and more challenging until many now regard reading it as drudgery. This struck me as so great a tragedy I resolved to find a more approachable means of presentation.

I removed my great-great-great uncle’s first-person narrative, apart from several linking sections and the well-known preamble. Before his death he outlined how he could stage the work as a series of short plays, and I have divided his work accordingly, then removed the hesitant tone so often present in other portions of the narrative so that all sections of the account are stylistically similar. I admit to expanding freely upon some of the invented scenes and adding others of my own, though I leaned heavily upon my ancestor’s work to do so, buttressed by the lengthy and detailed footnotes of Silenus.

I like to think Antires would be pleased with the result, for late in life he lamented that he had labored too hard to sound like a historian and wished that he had time to rework The Hanuvid as the plays he had once envisioned as a younger man. I flush at the thought of how Silenus might have reacted to my changes, however, for her commentary politely chides even the more mundane speculations of Antires, and I have expanded far further than he ever dared. That I based many of my own suppositions upon Silenus’ outstanding research may have dismayed her even further.

This manuscript retains some of Silenus’ footnotes, mostly in places where I was unable to easily incorporate her findings into the narrative, but only where I thought them either useful or interesting to the story. Those familiar with her commentaries will observe some of her most digressive passages absent entirely, notably the infamous three-page treatise upon the varieties of flowering trees most likely to have been encountered by Hanuvar and Antires during their journey through the provinces.

I can only hope that the resulting manuscript entertains and inspires, as the original Hanuvid did with its first readers. While I have taken liberties, I have constructed every scene depicting either Antires or Hanuvar, or others well known to either man, with almost entirely the same word choices used by Antires and been especially scrupulous about the preservation of the dialogue in my ancestor’s final draft. If this adaption fails to capture your interest, or to approach the majesty of my ancestor’s flawed but brilliant work, the fault must be laid entirely at my own feet.


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