Only a fraction of the world’s stories have survived. What might we be missing?
preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains.
The causes of loss were manifold, from fires and other disasters, to the decay or recycling of material on which texts were written, to censorship, incompetence and corruption. Throughout history, the most destructive of these forces was probably fire – and not just in the western world. There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work.
For another, not everything that made it to the stage made it to the page. When plays were printed, it tended to be done cheaply with a single print run of around 500 copies, and these copies were often read to pieces – literally. As a result, McInnis says, we are probably missing the first edition of Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost, since the earliest known edition is described as a revision. All that’s left of another play we know the great man wrote, Love’s Labour’s Won, is its title.
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