It was somehow fitting that there was not much by way of illumination in the Philology Department library. Not being able to see what you were doing while attempting to research languages not spoken in centuries had a certain poetic note to it.

Didn’t matter. I passed the stand full of literature on Classical Mayan, passed my hand along the large volumes of Guthrie’s Comparative Bantu, looked up at a collection of Greenberg’s work with Amerind, and knocked over a stack of back issues of the International Journal of American Linguistics.

I wasn’t exactly happy to reassemble the pile of magazines. I wan’t even looking for American languages anyway—wrong hemisphere. I just wanted some resources on East Germanic. This Gothic stroll of mine was proving more trouble than it was worth.