JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Let's begin with a story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
IRENE FABRY-TEHRANCHI: (Speaking Old French).
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Sounds like an old story - in Old French, actually - written in the 13th century. The woman reading there is Irene Fabry-Tehranchi. She's the French collection specialist at Cambridge University Library. And they've just published groundbreaking research into one of the earliest literary examples of some characters you probably know.
FABRY-TEHRANCHI: (Through interpreter) While they were rejoicing in the feast, and Kay the seneschal brought the first dish to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, there arrived the most handsome man ever seen in Christian lands.
SUMMERS: She's reading a passage from "Suite Vulgate Du Merlin." King Arthur, Merlin - yeah, these are those stories.
SHAPIRO: Tales of knights on quests and, of course, that famous round table.
SUMMERS: The manuscripts are extremely rare. There are only 40 in the world, each written by hand, so they're all unique. And this one was a new discovery. For the nonbook nerds out there, this is kind of like finding a first edition of "Harry Potter."
FABRY-TEHRANCHI: So this "Lancelot-Grail Cycle" and, within it, "Merlin" and its sequel were a medieval bestseller.
SHAPIRO: So how was this rare story discovered centuries after it was written?
SIAN COLLINS: I think it was probably just luck that I happened to see the word Excalibur.
SUMMERS: That's Sian Collins, a former Cambridge University archivist who discovered the relic way back in 2019. It was hiding just under their noses in the school's own collections.
COLLINS: The reference said that the volume was bound in a leaf of question mark. And I think it's safe to say that one of my defining characteristics is that I am incredibly nosy, so I thought I'd just have a look.
SHAPIRO: So she did and found a bit of parchment elegantly penned in Old French with the word Excalibur there, plain to see. But the parchment was attached to something else. Here's Irene Fabry-Tehranchi again.
FABRY-TEHRANCHI: Parchment, you know, is quite solid, flexible, so it's a good material for a book cover.
SHAPIRO: Yes, this ancient parchment was covering another document. In the 16th century, old manuscript parchment was repurposed to protect important records as a book cover.
SUMMERS: So imagine the Merlin story on a big piece of paper, like Declaration of Independence-sized. That's what this manuscript was. And scribes folded it all up to protect their records of, basically, who owed what to some lord. No one was really reading Old French anymore.
SHAPIRO: As you might imagine, that folding did some damage. So present-day researchers use the latest technology to digitally restore it. The main technique is called multispectral imaging.
SUMMERS: It's the use of high-tech cameras and lighting to capture images of the document from infrared all the way to ultraviolet.
FABRY-TEHRANCHI: Yes, absolutely. It goes through all the colors of the rainbow.
SHAPIRO: The end result is a digitized parchment that closely resembles its 13th-century self, including artistic flourishes on the first letters in red and blue.
SUMMERS: And so the manuscript-turned-book-cover-turned-e-book has been restored and preserved for the ages.
FABRY-TEHRANCHI: There are still these key characters that we find fascinating. There are witnesses, you know, of this past fictional world that has kept a lot of its features in our imagination.
SHAPIRO: Kept in our imagination and, for this long-lost manuscript, now kept in a different part of the library.
SUMMERS: And if you'd like to see it yourself, you can online at Cambridge's Digital Library.
(SOUNDBITE OF JACK TROMBEY'S "HOMEWARD BOUND") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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