Gilgamesh, Mozart, and Bram Stoker Walk Into a Bar in Westeros…

“Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.” ~ Jean-Luc Picard

There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — “Darmok”, the second episode of the fifth season, for those keeping track — wherein Captain Picard realizes that the alien he’s met (Dathon, played by Paul Winfield) speaks only in metaphor, thus prompting him to try to relate using events from Earth’s history. The Epic of Gilgamesh has been part of the human lexicon for thousands of years, and of course Picard is as familiar with that story as he is with the works of Shakespeare. Using the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as his example, Picard manages to bridge the communications gap with Dathon before the Tamarian dies.

Being a relic of the Babylonian Era, The Epic of Gilgamesh has been translated and re-told countless times, mainly based off a copy that was discovered in Nineveh in 1853. I’ve even got a copy of the book by Robert Silverberg in my library. It’s not a new story, and one could be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing more to the story than what we’ve had for however many years, right? I mean, it’s always existed in fragments of stone tablets and such since the 18th century BC (that’s Before Christ for those of you in Berkeley), and there’s been a possibility of finding more.

Well, there’s now more to the story.

In September 2024, the Sulaymaniyah Museum in the Kurdistan region of Iraq announced the discovery of a tablet that had been recovered after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The museum paid smugglers and other scoundrel types to make sure that historical and cultural artifacts wouldn’t leave the country in spite of the massive amounts of looting that came with the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

One of those artifacts was a tablet with additional lines from Chapter Five of the tale. This new fragment adds to the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing Humbaba, along with the two meeting a monkey.

So, score one for the Babylonians. They’ve published a new piece of the story before George R. R. Martin has.

 

Also in September, researchers at the Leipzig Municipal Libraries were compiling a new edition of the Köchel catalog, a comprehensive archive of work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Hidden amongst the material was a previously unknown composition, Serenade in C, a 12-minute string trio written for two violins and a bass. Researchers believe Mozart might have been around twelve years old when he wrote it, although the manuscript is not in his hand. This may be a copy that was made around 1780.

Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation, says the manuscript is stylistically consistent with his work between the ages of ten and thirteen years of age. “It looks as if—thanks to a series of favorable circumstances—a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig,” Leisinger adds. “The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the trio specially for her.”

With its entry into the catalog, the piece has been renamed Eine Ganz kleine Nachtmusik and was performed in Salzburg, Austria on September 19.

Score one for the musical prodigy, who has a new piece for us to enjoy before George R. R. Martin has.

 

Not to be outdone, Bram Stoker also has made the news with a discovery in a Dublin library archive.

Brian Cleary was browsing through a Christmas supplement of the Dublin edition of the Daily Mail from 1890 when he stumbled across “Gibbet Hill,” a previously undocumented piece from the writer of Dracula. The short story has never been referenced in any Stoker bibliography, remaining hidden for over 130 years.

“I read Dracula as a child and it stuck with me, I read everything from and about Stoker that I could get my hands on,” said Cleary. He was visiting the National Library of Ireland while on leave to retrain his hearing after cochlear implant surgery. “I sat in the library flabbergasted, that I was looking at potentially a lost ghost story from Stoker, especially one from around the time he was writing Dracula, with elements of Dracula in it,” said Cleary. “I sat looking at the screen wondering, am I the only living person who had read it? Followed by, what on earth do I do with it?”

Cleary consulter Stoker biographer Paul Murray, who confirmed that the story was previously unknown. It’s a story about a sailor murdered by three criminals, whose bodies were hanged on a gibbet (gallows) as a warning to travelers. Murray says, “It’s a classic Stoker story, the struggle between good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways, and is a way station on his route to publishing Dracula.”

So, after 130 years, Bram Stoker has given the world a new story before George R. R. Martin has.

 

So that’s three brand new (new to us, anyway) stories from dead people. Oh, and let’s not forget that Brandon Sanderson wrote five novels during the pandemic lockdown, too. And there’s now a brand new edition of Heavy Metal coming back into the world.

What’s Martin’s excuse?

The Week‘s Brendan Morrow has a nicely organized timeline of the epic tale of the Story That Refuses To Be Written. Starting in June 2010, when Martin announced that he had four completed chapters, the timeline reads like a “Will they or won’t they?” dance of anticipation and disappointment as Martin continuously makes promises, teasing progress, but then failing to deliver time and again. Throughout the process, Martin insists that this book in his priority, only to be sidetracked by Fire & Blood and HBO’s spinoff series House of the Dragon. In fact, all of the various spinoff productions take up a good chunk of time, plus there are the other stories he has to write in order to meet certain other obligations and such and thus and so….

So a book that was originally planned for a 2014 release now sits in abeyance ten years later, two years after Martin says it was “three-quarters of the way done” during a Penguin Random House Q&A session.

And now, here we are a month after Martin posted on his blog, that he’s still not done — but he’s made progress! He’s added pages to both The Winds of Winter and Blood & Fire, which is the second book informing HOTD. He’s also got another Dunk & Egg story to write. And once Winds is (finally) published(?), he still has A Dream of Spring to write for the main series. Is Dream the final book in the series? Will he even get to that one? Or will he once again deliver excuse after excuse, to the consternation of those fans who have persevered and stuck it out to the very last?

 

To be sure, Martin’s not the only author who’s failed to deliver the next book in a series — looking at you, David Gerrold — but right now, he’s the most visible and well-known. And he’s still alive, which kind of but not really gives him a leg up on Bram Stoker and Mozart, but then again… And no, he doesn’t owe you a scrap or shred of any new story at all. Except for the fact that he continues to say he’s working on it. He continues to promise delivery and scold you for being impatient when he doesn’t live up to his word. And he continues to demonstrate that he’s a man without integrity.

(But at least he’s not trying to fleece you out of more money to pay for the thing he’s not delivering, right, Alec?)