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.In the tenth century, an Arab named Ibn Fadlan had traveled north from Baghdad into what is now Russia, where he came in contact with the Vikings.His manuscript, well-known to scholars, provides one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of Viking life and culture.[49]As a college undergraduate, I had read portions of the manuscript.Ibn Fadlan had a distinct voice and style.He was imitable.He was believable.He was unexpected.And after a thousand years, I felt that Ibn Fadlan would not mind being revived in a new role, as a witness to the events that led to the epic poem ofBeowulf.Although the full manuscript of Ibn Fadlan has been translated into Russian, German, French and many other languages, only portions had been translated into English.I obtained the existing manuscript fragments and combined them, with only slight modifications, into the first three chapters ofEaters of the Dead.[50]I then wrote the rest of the novel in the style of the manuscript to carry Ibn Fadlan on the rest of his now-fictional journey.I also added commentary and some extremely pedantic footnotes.I was aware that Ibn Fadlan’s actual journey in A.D.921 had probably occurred too late in history to serve as the basis forBeowulf , which many authorities believe was composed a hundred and fifty years earlier.But the dating of the poem is uncertain, and at some point a novelist will insist on his right to take liberties with the facts.AndEaters contains many overt anachronisms, particularly when Ibn Fadlan meets up with a group of remnant Neanderthals.(One of the oddities of this book is that the intervening decades has seen a scholarly reevaluation of Neanderthal man; and the notion that there might have been a few still around a thousand years ago in a remote location does not seem quite so preposterous now as it did then.)But certainly, the game that the book plays with its factual bases becomes increasingly complex as it goes along, until the text finally seems quite difficult to evaluate.I have a long-standing interest in verisimilitude, and in the cues which make us take something as real or understand it as fiction.But I finally concluded that inEaters of the Dead , I had played the game too hard.While I was writing, I felt that I was drawing the line between fact and fiction clearly; for example, one cited translator, PerFraus-Dolus , means in literal Latin “by trickery-deceit.” But within a few years, I could no longer be certain which passages were real, and which were made up; at one point I found myself in a research library trying to locate certain references in my bibliography, and finally concluding, after hours of frustrating effort, that however convincing they appeared, they must be fictitious.I was furious to have wasted my time, but I had only myself to blame.I mention this because the tendency to blur the boundaries of fact and fiction has become widespread in modern society.Fiction is now seamlessly inserted in everything from scholarly histories to television news.Of course, television is understood to be venal, its transgressions shrugged off by most of us.But the attitude of “post-modern” scholars represents a more fundamental challenge.Some in academic life now argue seriously there is no difference between fact andfiction, that all ways of reading text are arbitrary and personal, and that therefore pure invention is as valid as hard research.At best, this attitude evades traditional scholarly discipline; at worst, it is nasty and dangerous.[51]But such academic views were not prevalent twenty years ago, when I sat down to write this novel in the guise of a scholarly monograph, and academic fashions may change again—particularly if scholars find themselves chasing down imaginary footnotes, as I have done.Under the circumstances, I should perhaps say explicitly that the references in thisafterword are genuine.The rest of the novel, including its introduction, text, footnotes, and bibliography, should properly be viewed as fiction.WhenEaters of the Dead was first published, this playful version ofBeowulf received a rather irritable reception from reviewers, as if I had desecrated a monument.ButBeowulf scholars all seem to enjoyit, and many have written to say so.M.C.DECEMBER 1992About the AuthorMichael Crichtonwas born in Chicago in 1942.His novels includeThe Andromeda Strain,The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World , andAirframe.He is also the creator of the television series ER.NOTE: The unprintable Arabic script found in the footnotes of the original paper version has been rendered as “(…)” in this e-text version.–Russell[1]Throughout the manuscript, Ibn Fadlan is inexact about the size and composition of his party.Whether this apparent carelessness reflects his assumption that the reader knows the composition of the caravan, or whether it is a consequence of lost passages of the text, one cannot be sure.Social conventions may also be a factor, for Ibn Fadlan never states that his party is greater than a few individuals, when in fact it probably numbered a hundred people or more, and twice as many horses and camels.But Ibn Fadlan does not count—literally—slaves, servants, and lesser members of the caravan.[2]Farzan, an unabashed admirer of Ibn Fadlan, believes that this paragraph reveals “the sensibility of a modern anthropologist, recording not only the customs of a people, but the mechanisms which act to enforce those customs
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