The Diary of Keldwin T. is, unsurprisingly, a diary, ostensibly penned by a minor lord serving in the First Godking Court . By an large, the work is one of dull rumor-mongering, political in all the worst ways, which was briefly popular among laypersons following its discovery among Grand Scholar Uproot's library, most scholars have dismissed the diary as salacious tripe, doing little but repeating familiar, salacious stories about the godking and his various consorts.
However, while the diary's content is, perhaps, lacking, its construction is deeply compelling. Nearly all texts written during the period were written in Mandrigar, the so-called "courtly tongue." Keldwin's Diary remains, to date, the only known sample of Middle High Amfalla writing composed at any point in the ninth century.
Authenticity[]
Keldwin T. is clearly a pseudonym, as no lord of that or similar name served upon the court; this, coupled with the reputation for exaggerated translation which has plagued Uproot's estate, has led certain scholars to doubt the authenticity of the text. Ignoring for a moment the difficulty of establishing a probable linguistic map with which to construct the diary (and the purpose for faking such a thing!), the credibility of Keldwin's diary is clearly established by comparison to other contemporary texts, most notably the Book of the Inmost Ward . Ignore the Zygote Press edition, whose translators opted to translate Mandrigar word-by-word, and focus instead on Uproot's superior translation which preserves the contextual power of the language: a cursory glance will confirm that, while Keldwin has altered most of the names of courtly figures, the events line up near-perfectly. Enin Tinacal himself is represented within the diary as "Ellara L." Furthermore, the poem Fog Cycle #64, a retelling of the classical tale of Kareth and the Ginger Root, appears in the Book of the Inmost Ward and, albeit transcribed imperfectly, in Keldwin's diary, along with the suggestion that the alterations to the tale (allowing Kareth to survive the attack, for a start) were purposeful alterations on Tenacal's part. (Suggestions that the Book of the Inmost Ward is a hoax are spurious and best dismissed; however, even if lesser scholars doubt its authorship, its status as a document written during the First Godking Court is beyond doubt and should be enough to support the authenticity of Keldwin's text.)
Linguistic Value[]
Entire tomes could be written on textual analysis of the Diary, well beyond the scope of this short article. However, among its valuable contributions is the first written example of the objective case in Middle High Amfalla, as well as dozens of variant spellings of regions and lords, confirming most scholarly expectations regarding vowel shifting over the godking's reign. Most importantly, over the course of the thirty years chronicled in the diary, the inverted question mark was used with a telltale idiosyncracy and later apathy before eventually disappearing entirely, a fascinating account of the controversial puntuation mark's decline and dismissal. ==Articles Cited==