The Beginnings of Libraries

by Ernest Cushing Richardson

Brahma’s library was represented in various other forms e.g., as the milk of the cow goddess or the juice of the Soma plant, and in the same way Odin’s collection of words or knowledge is represented in various forms e.g., as the milk of the goat Heidrun, the water of the fountain of memory, the apples of Iduna, which were the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the blood of the wise Kvaser.

That which best identifies the mead, which is the source of the immortality of the gods themselves and without which they languish and die, with books, is the story of Kvaser. Kvaser was the wisest of all the gods (Fooling of Gylfe 54). The dwarfs put him to death and gave out that he had drowned himself in his own wisdom, but in fact they slew him for this wisdom, which was his blood. This was drawn off into a kettle called Odrörer (“that which moves the mind”) and mixed with honey was most carefully kept in jars. Drinking out of these jars makes an ordinary man “a poet and man of knowledge” but the mead is most jealously kept to renew the life of gods and poets (Brage’s talk 3 sq.) and grudged to mortals. Once Odin, hard pressed in flight, let fall a few drops of this essence of knowledge, and this scanty supply eagerly caught up by mortals produced the rabble of bad poets.

This collection of jar-fulls of knowledge was an obvious library and recalls the fact that almost all the mythologers represent books or knowledge as food or drink, kept in jars. It is not wholly excluded that this great series of myths came from the earliest practice of keeping clay tablets or papyrus rolls in clay jars, precisely similar to the jars in which wine, oil and grain were kept in some treasure houses. But however that may be the soma of India, the haoma of Persia, as well as the Scandinavian mead and the ambrosia and nectar of classical times, were all looked on as concrete knowledge and as such the food and drink of the spiritual or immortal life—a very reasonable philosophy.

These libraries of the gods should not be confused with real collections of books of alleged superhuman authorship like the books of the Old Testament, which are not claimed by any to have been written before 1200 or 1500 B.C., or the collections of actual oracles delivered at Delphis, Dodona or other shrines, or even with the forged oracles of Greece, or the apocryphal Jewish and Christian books. All these were actual historical book collections and the question whether authorship was really superhuman or not is indifferent at this point which has to do with the libraries which the gods are alleged to have had for themselves before man was.

§ 7. Animal and plant libraries?

The modern psychologists, by the science which they call comparative psychology, have gradually been robbing humanity of much that it used to plume itself upon as its own unique possession. Among the last strongholds to yield were reason and language, and the defenders of these, although retreating, are hardly yet put to rout. Even if the articulate speech of the parrot and the jackdaw is only “imitation”, and the alleged language of the apes a delusion, still it is something of an open question whether the sounds and gestures which animals use with one another are not really of the nature of language. The fox who doubles on his track in order to lead the dogs on a false scent is getting very close to language in a rudimentary sense, and the dog who sits up or barks for food or wags his tail to express good will, perhaps nearer still.

It is a long step, however, from even developed oral and gesture language to record, and it is still generally denied that among the traits of our kinship with the beasts any evidence has been discovered of what can be called record keeping. If this were true, then it would seem to follow that the animal ceased to be animal and became man precisely when he invented and began to practice record keeping—in short that libraries mark the very beginning of the human race!

On the other hand, however, it cannot be ignored that the psychologists are publishing monographs on the arithmetic of animals and the memory for facts among animals, and scores of other monographs on the minds of animals. There are those too who claim that the dog even marks the place where he caches his surplus of bones, and certainly the bringing home of a dead woodchuck, in order to show his master what he has done, comes very close to that keeping and exhibiting of human trophies which is recognized as among the beginnings of “handwriting”. If it is true that the animals do make conscious marks to guide them back to hidden objects, or even that they do have memory for facts, which is true memory, then possibly the beginnings at least of memory libraries and perhaps of external records must in the future be sought in the animal world. The ancient Egyptians, of course, found it there when they made the writing ape author, owner, and keeper of books. Perhaps after six thousand years modern psychology is about to catch up with this idea! Whether or not future psychology discovers anything like actual record collections and memory libraries among the animals, it remains true that the study of comparative psychology does lead into the beginnings of memory and helps therefore to the study of the real nature of human memory-books and memory libraries, while again it leads into the question of the nature of gesture language, and gesture is the own father of hand-written books. When true libraries have been discovered among animals it will be time enough to take up the question of plant libraries. Nevertheless it may be said that the question of “memory” among plants is seriously discussed and plants may perhaps receive impression as sensitively as animals. It is a little figurative to say that a tree which carries in itself a hundred annual records of its growth is a library in the sense of a public record office which keeps the annals of a nation’s growth for a like period. There is however a certain analogy which the discussions of natural records and object writing suggests may even have some slight germ of scientific interest. Of course where there is memory there may be groups of memorized records which would be collections of very rudimentary “Books”, but so far the weight of evidence seems to be against the existence even in animals, let alone plants, of that kind of memory which retains permanently fixed forms of expression. Sub-human libraries may therefore be for the present left to the fabulists and put with apocryphal, legendary and mythological libraries outside the pale of the real or historical libraries.

§ 8. Preadamite libraries

Whatever psychologists and mythologists may have to say about libraries before the existence of the human race, there seems to be a surprising consensus of opinion that book collections must have started at latest very soon after man himself. A great number of such libraries are claimed by the ancients for the period between Adam and Noah, and if there were human beings before Adam, as many say, it is likely that there were at least memory libraries, for, as will be seen later in discussing memory libraries, these are almost inseparable from human nature. And further than this it appears from those very same sources, which so fluently allege and describe the library of Adam, that the books of Adam’s library represent such an advanced stage in the evolution of handwritten records as to necessitate a long library history previous to his time. These books included e.g., it is said, inscriptions cut in stone, and such inscriptions imply centuries if not tens of centuries of knot and other mnemonic forms of writing, preceding. Therefore if Adam’s library was as described in its literature, there must have been, for a long time before, Preadamite libraries!