Treasures of the British Library: Lost in the Ritblat Gallery

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something,” said a pensive Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Walking into the Sir John Ritblat Gallery at the magnificent British Library in the heart of London evokes just this feeling. You may not know what you’re looking for, or that you’re even looking for anything at all, but you will undoubtedly find something in there, something that will stay with you forever.

The icy lighting of the main hall gives way to darkness as you enter the treasures gallery itself. With the golden spotlights illuminating the faded leather covers and ancient yellowed paper sleeping behind the glass and the reverent whispers from their onlookers, the low-ceilinged gallery manages to evoke both the atmosphere of a church or shrine and a library all at the same time.

Stretching along the eastern wall are a thousand years of musical manuscripts from Bach to Beethoven, including ninety-seven handwritten volumes of Handel’s operas. But one of the most intriguing books is seven centuries older. It is one of the first records of musical notation, a slim volume from 1050, lovingly created by Spanish monks from the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos. The minuscule black notes are dotted between lines of curling Latin, the pages yellowed and stiff with notes spilling into the margins like tributaries dancing away from a river. A curious red, green, and gold painting of four pheasant-like birds looks up from the centre of the right-hand page, decorating the music that was once used for the feast of St John the Baptist.

Several feet from this treasure lies another curiosity, the Sumer Is Icumen In book from 1260 found in Reading Abbey, the most famous piece of secular medieval music in existence and known only from this copy. Tight, jagged black and red writing stains the ancient vellum, with flashes of blue or red at the beginning of each phrase, interspersed by lines of tiny, short-stemmed notes. The words are written in the Wessex dialect of Middle English and the rota itself happens to be the oldest known composition featuring six-part polyphony, in which there are six simultaneous lines of independent melody.

But that’s not all. Mounted on the wall to the left of these fragments of history is a panel of famous recordings and a set of headphones, so one has even more of an excuse to simply stand there and stare through the glass, enraptured. From Chopin’s Barcarolle and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus to a soaring rendition of Elgar’s Nimrod from 1926, it would be hard to experience a moment of more intense serenity.

Extending from this spot right up to the literature section are over a dozen original manuscripts ranging from Purcell, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, and Chopin, to Elgar, Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky, Bennett, and Panufnik. Puccini’s handwriting is undoubtedly the messiest, an almost unintelligible scribble of pencil somehow managing to depict the final scene of his 1903 Madama Butterfly opera, when the distraught and heartbroken Butterfly kills herself in a fit of despair after losing her child. But there is something so inexpressibly moving about looking with your own eyes on the original impassioned scrawls of the world’s greatest virtuosos, knowing that they held these pieces of paper in their hands, guided the ink across these very pages in their moments of deepest and darkest pain, joy, and rage. The ocean of notes crash behind the glass, eternal beckoning echoes of those most passionate of souls.

And this is just the beginning.

The feeling of sheer awe when you look upon the Nowell Codex for the first time cannot be overstated. Dating all the way back to the 11th century during the reign of King Aethelred the Unready, the original Beowulf manuscript is truly a sight to behold. The slim, grey pages, stuck inside a larger yellow-paged book, are faded in places, the brown ink almost invisible at the edges, damaged in the infamous fire of 1731 that destroyed more than a quarter of the Cotton Library collection. One dreads to think what would have happened if the flames had consumed it, given Beowulf wasn’t fully transcribed until 1786, nor translated until 1805. The world would have lost forever the epic story of monsters and mortality that would become one of the foundation stones of western literature.

Right next to the Nowell Codex sit the scribbled first drafts of the most famous translation of the Old English poem by Seamus Heaney, or Heaneywulf as he was called by many of his contemporaries. The fascinating thing about these notes is that you can see with your own eyes what he changed on the first page of the poem between his first and sixth drafts.

Take the first line. In the first draft it reads, “So. The spear Danes held sway once. / The kings of the clan are fabulous now / because of their bravery.” Whereas the sixth draft reads, “So: the Spear Danes held sway once. / The kings of that nation are known to us still / because of their daring: what they did was heroic.” Even the adjustment of a full stop to a colon over the course of so many drafts conveys just how much thought Heaney put into his translation, all in the tireless effort to do both the story and the language justice, in many ways an impossible task in modern English due to the idiosyncrasies of the alliterative metre, grammatical uniformity, and proliferation of kennings in Old English.

Along this same wall a whole host of original manuscripts can be found, including the 13th-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s scribbled, looping translations of Petrarch’s original Italian sonnets, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, the first page of Shelley’s politically ingenious 1819 poem The Mask of Anarchy, Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (complete with a wonderfully illuminating revision – a self-deprecating paragraph boldly crossed out in eight arrow-like scores), as well as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles, Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates, WH Auden’s 1939 journal, and even a letter from TS Eliot to a friend glumly reporting his dissatisfaction with London life, his longing for “sea and mountains which give some sense of security” and his struggles with a new poem… a poem that would in just a few short months become The Waste Land.

Really, it should stop here, but this is where the displays begin which house thousands of years’ worth of stolen literary treasures from all over the world. If you’re a wee white Brit looking in on these pages, take a second to ponder the sheer magnitude of cultural appropriation that brought them here. It’s a real Killmonger moment.

You’ll be able to see three thousand years of Chinese writing, featuring everything from “dragon bones” dating back to 1600BCE found in the ruins of Yin, the sight of the last capital of the Shang dynasty, to strips of wood, bamboo, silk, and eventually paper all covered in Chinese characters.

This is followed by a selection of ancient maps ranging from Bedfordshire to Tokyo, overshadowed by an enormous globe from 1693 Paris, A Baroque Vision of the Heavens by Vincenzo Coronello, one of a family of globes specially constructed for Louis XIV, showing the mighty figures of the ancient constellations including Hercules, Delphinus, Pisces, and Habena in a sprawling amalgamation of wings, swords, manes, and tridents.

Just around the corner sits a breathtaking display demonstrating the evolution of bookbinding, with examples of the finest books ever bound, a glittering case of gold, diamonds, rubies, silver thread, green goatskin, purple foil, and white vellum, all positively shining in their elegant spirals, squares, and swirls. The jewel of this collection is a vast Persian tome that sparkles behind the glass like a star fallen from Ohrmazd’s realm.

Next come the substantial range of volumes contained within The Sacred Texts and Art of the Book sections, the former of which features major works from every religion in human history, and the latter of which boasts artwork from medieval Indian paintings, English and Italian art, and the earliest intact European book (the St Cuthbert Gospel, a tiny and unassuming handwritten copy of the gospel of John found in Cuthbert’s coffin in 1104, with a curious Celtic design of four spades emblazoned on its wine-red cover), to the Lindisfarne gospels and the Catholicon Anglicum, one of the only remaining comprehensive Middle English-Latin dictionaries, from 1483.

The Art of the Book display spills onto the historical documents section, which includes a 10th-century glossary of rare Latin words from Worcester, a letter from one of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ recruited by the Soviet Union, a suffragette’s scrapbook, letters from Churchill regarding the Monuments Men, a letter from Karl Marx, the original Crimean reports from Florence Nightingale in 1854, the last letter from Horatio Nelson, which he never finished, written from the deck of HMS Victory on the day of the Battle of Trafalgar, and a beautifully printed and preserved copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, with gold inlaid over the huge cover boards and the histories arranged chronologically from King John to Henry VIII. This also includes one of the earliest surviving copies of Henry IV, collected by Nicholas Rowe in 1709 in an effort to preserve the works of the world’s greatest playwright, given some of the original manuscripts had already been lost. Rowe also divided the plays into acts and scenes, and added character lists and illustrations. Opposite this bewitching display dedicated solely to Shakespeare lies the Codex Arundel, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, showing his eclectic array of passions from mechanics to bird flight and written in Italian in his famous ‘mirror writing’.

But my favourite item on display in the Ritblat Gallery, aside perhaps from the First Folio, is undoubtedly Jane Austen’s writing desk. This unassuming wedge-shaped block of dark red wood and black leather, lying just along from the Nowell Codex and given to her by her father in 1794, is complete with compartments for ink, pens, paper, stamps, and sealing wax. A two-hundred-year-old pair of writing spectacles rests in the top left corner, and the whole bottom half of the desk is hinged so Austen could hurriedly sweep the pages she was working on into its dark and secret interior. Indeed, the two pages of the original Persuasion mounted just above the desk, covered in her tight, slanted writing, are on cream notepaper cut down from their full foolscap size so she could easily hide them when interrupted mid-composition.

With the chaos and carnage that rages in the news every day, we could all do with stopping just for an hour or two for a few stolen moments of true contemplation. And where better to do it than amidst one of the world’s mightiest collections of literary treasures, the air heavy with the weight of three millennia of stories.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something…