Discovering the work

Things the sources turned up that are readings of the facts rather than facts about the manuscript. They stand outside the endnotes for that reason, and each one says what is not known. The same text is printed in the book as the appendix "What the sources turned up".

The check of the endnotes on 23 September 2026 read every text they cite. Four things came out of it that are readings of the facts rather than facts about the manuscript, and so do not belong in a note. They are set down here with the facts beside them, and with what is not known said plainly. The end of the world, which the book gives a date for, is worked out at the end.

The stolen cup has neighbours. On 004r Lucifer hides a cup, and an angel goes back to the Father twice on the one leaf. No source in the corpus has that. In the Slavonic tale of Michael and Satanael, from Bulgaria in the eleventh or twelfth century, Satanael's wrong is theft: he takes the robe, the wreath and the sceptre made for God, God sends Gabriel, who is afraid and will not go, and then Michael, who goes down and wins them back by a trick. In the Romanian carols of Judas plundering paradise, Judas goes in while God sleeps and takes the little jug of wine, the throne, the sun and the moon, and a servant runs to tell God. The Grail cut from a stone of Lucifer's crown, which is where a reader today would look first, is not medieval: the poem of about 1250 has only the stone, and the cup was put in by Albert Schulz in 1832. A devil who steals holy things out of heaven is a pattern of the book's own neighbours to the south and east, and the cup on 004r sits inside it. Which telling the author knew, if any, is not known.

Adam healed by the branch has a Hungarian relative. In the Golden Legend Seth comes home from paradise with the branch to find Adam dead, and plants it on his grave. In the Teleki codex, a Hungarian Franciscan manuscript of 1525 to 1531, and in it alone among the Hungarian tellings, Adam is still alive when Seth comes back, and asks him to plant the branch at his head when he dies. On 006r of this book Seth brings the branch and Adam's eyes are opened at once. The nearest relative of that page is Hungarian and sixty years older than the date the book gives itself. The healing is in no source found; it is the book's own.

Elijah at the fall of the angels. The book puts an angel dictating to Elijah around the fall of Lucifer, at 004v through 008v, and brings Elijah and Enoch back at 133v to be killed by the Antichrist and raised. In villages near Szeged in the 1890s, Lajos Kalmany wrote down tellings in which Elijah is there at the fall of the angels and throws them down with lightning at the Father's word, and in one village Lucifer forms Elijah and Enoch out of mud and cannot give them souls, so God does. Those tellings were written down three hundred years after the book, and they are the earliest record of them found here. Whether the book is an early witness to a belief the villages kept, or the belief grew out of books like this one, is not known.

The author cites what he was taught. Three places show it. On 105v he names Augustine for the two pence of the Samaritan being the two Testaments; Augustine's own reading, in his Questions on the Gospels, is the two commandments of love. On 084r he tells Augustine and the child emptying the sea into a hole; that story is in no Latin Golden Legend, and first appears in print in Caxton's English of 1483, taken, Caxton says, from an altar-piece in Antwerp. On 101r Antichrist is born of a harlot; Adso's letter, the standard Latin account, has him born of a Jewish father and mother. All three are what a preacher carries from sermon handbooks and church pictures rather than from the texts. That fits a man setting the book down from memory, which is what the rest of it looks like.

The end of the world. The book counts its own date. At 223v:9-10 it gives 5,199 years from the creation to the Nativity, the figure of the Roman Martyrology's Christmas proclamation in its wording before 2004, spelled out sign by sign. At 223v:1-2 it gives 1,560 years run since the departure to the Father, named on the same leaf; 33 and 1,560 make 1593, the year Kiraly and Tokai reached by their own route. At 223v:13 someone asks the master when judgment day will come, and the answer is on the next leaf, 222r:2-4: "in turn, [?], out, [after] two thousand, this is ... one day, and ... judgment year, because the new Son of God judges." "Two thousand" is a numeral by Kiraly and Tokai's own rule, and the same word is read at 215r:4. "Out" is the word 223v uses for the years run since the Ascension. "After" is this edition's word, tier G, and the sign before "out" is unread. What the two thousand are counted from is not on the leaf. Counted from the Nativity, they end in the year 2000. Counted from the Ascension, which is the epoch the book's own count uses two lines away, they end in 2033. The scheme behind the figure is old: the Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a, has the school of Elijah teach that the world lasts six thousand years, two thousand of chaos, two thousand of the Law, two thousand of the Messiah, and Melanchthon put that scheme at the head of Carion's Chronicle in 1532, sixty years before this book. The book's own 5,199 years to the Nativity would put six thousand in the year 801, so its two thousand cannot be the whole count; it is the last span of the three, and the book is counting to its end. That is as far as the leaf goes. It does not say 2033. It says two thousand, and the reader chooses where to start counting.

The facts these rest on are in the endnotes of Book One, and every text they cite is listed under Sources.

This rests on the Király and Tokai dictionary; their translation is unpublished; the readings here are this project's own.