Dicamus et Labyrinthos: A Philologist's Notebook

Richard C. Smith is a professor in the Classics Department of the
University of Alberta.

This rather interesting little work is another jeu d’esprit by the well-known Canadian composer and sometime Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Raymond Murray Schafer. Professor Schafer’s name is not actually found in the work, which purports to be a publication by the president of “The Canadian Helladic Association” of 19 tablets in “Ectocretan,” their translation, and the unedited papers of the translator, who is both anonymous and presently missing.

In a swirling jumble of information and misinformation from the world of ancient Crete, Greece, and Egypt, Schafer sets forth his ideas about the meaning of ancient Crete and Ariadne, daughter of the Cretan king Minos, who helped Theseus slay the Minotaur and return successfully from the Labyrinth. In the end the “unknown” philologist decodes the tablets, which turn out to be not a language from the Bronze Age but a poetic cryptogram in English (!) regarding the adventures of Theseus and Ariadne, the birth of the Minotaur and the construction of the Labyrinth. The work ends as the “author,” in the pattern of the rituals of an ancient Egyptian going to a trial before Osiris, goes himself to meet the Minotaur.

Though the combination of sense and nonsense in a pattern closely resembling Schafer’s stage works may upset the more serious reader, the work is an excellent spoof of the philologist or archaeologist who takes his own work too seriously. It also offers an interesting allegorization of one of the best-known myths of ancient Crete.