Finding Camlann by Sean Pidgeon

a sort though they rarely exchange more than a few words during this long-standing morning ritual.
    When the doors are opened, she is the first to walk up the stairs and into the cool, dark, silent gallery of Duke Humfrey’s, with its extraordinary painted ceiling and ranks of heavy book stacks on either side. She makes her way through the older part of the library to her favourite reading desk, tucked in at the far end with an unobstructed view through the westerly window to the grounds of Exeter College. Once she is seated there, she feelgo,re, shes the first infusions of a familiar tranquillity, a renewed sense of the order and importance of intangible things. It is a feeling that often overtakes her in a great calming wave as she adjusts to the mood of this hallowed literary space. Here, through a mixture of educated guesswork and pure serendipity, she hopes to find some of the earliest recorded uses of words in the English language. When things are going well, this is the part of her job that she likes most of all, the thrill of lexical discovery, the small rush of elation that accompanies the unsuspected literary find. She rarely tires of it, finds that her hours spent at the Bodleian resist all notions of the routine.
    Taking out her thick marbled notebook, Julia finds her bearings by flicking through the pages from the beginning. This particular book, the latest in a long series, runs from the middle of the letter C to the start of D . Each page is devoted to a single word written boldly at the top: coolly , coolness , coolrife , coolth . Some of the entries are crowded with her small neat script, excerpts from sundry texts prefaced with essential bibliographic data, the word of the moment underlined in their midst, while others are almost entirely blank, signifying hours or sometimes days of fruitless searching. She keeps on turning the pages, coolung , coolweed , coolwort , cooly . Then comes a word that gave her some trouble a year or so before: coom or combe , deep hollow or valley, one of rather few loan-words that made the jump from early Welsh into Old English. In her quest to find an earlier usage of this word than any previously discovered, combe presented her with a particular challenge because (as she noted near the top of the page) a very early quotation had already been found in an Anglo-Saxon charter of the eighth century AD :
770 in Birch Cartul. Sax. I. 290 (No. 204) Of þære brigge in cumb; of þam cumbe in ale beardes ac.
     
    To go back further, she decided to begin her search with the medieval Anglo-Welsh ecclesiastical materials, on the provisional hypothesis that the earliest extant uses of combe might be found in English translations of documents relating to the Welsh monasteries (which were often situated in remote valleys). Beneath the citation she wrote:
Welsh monastic establishments, fifth to seventh century. Try Bowen’s poetry book from TF?
     
    Reading this last sentence, Julia’s fragile serenity is disturbed by a powerful sense of déjà vu . At the time, she did not pursue this particular lead for combe . It was in any case highly speculative, and it prompted unwelcome memories of Caradoc Bowen, Hugh’s mentor at Jesus College. She rests her head in her hands, casts her mind back to a talk of Bowen’s she once attended with Hugh. The topic of his presentation that day was a book of poetry he had discovered many years before in a manuscript collection that was then still held at the manor house of Ty Faenor. Professor Bowen described to them a particular poem he had found in this book, an extraordinary narrative depicting a series of heroic battles from the distant past. She can see him standing there at the podium, focusing all the energy of the room into his voice as he recited glowing fragments of ancient verse.
    This is the text that Hugh was quoting from the night before, Julia istiore, Jus quite sure of it. Something Lucy Trevelyan said about the Devil’s Barrow finds made