Episode Details

The Book of Oberon is the modern name for Folger Shakespeare Library manuscript V.b.26, an anonymous English and Latin compilation assembled in late sixteenth-century England. Its contents include religious invocations, spirit material, practical experiments, magical characters, diagrams, healing material, and passages concerning Oberyon, a king of the fairies. It is not solely a fairy book, and it was not known historically by the modern title now attached to its published edition.

The surviving manuscript carries internal dates including fifteen seventy-seven and fifteen eighty-three, but these date particular textual layers rather than proving that the whole book was written on one day. Later readers added marks and annotations. By the early nineteenth century, its opening and ending had been separated from its central section. Folger acquired the incomplete main portion in nineteen fifty-eight. In two thousand seven, it acquired a separately circulating continuation after distinctive nineteenth-century blue pagination showed that the pieces belonged together.

This episode follows that recovery while separating ritual promises from evidence that rituals were performed or succeeded. It examines the manuscript’s use of Christian language, its cautious claims about fairy knowledge, its modern translation and editorial reshaping, and the first fourteen pages that remain absent. Could those lost pages have contained an original title, a compiler’s name, or a key to the book’s intended order? The surviving record does not yet decide.

This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.

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YES OR NO: Could the missing opening pages change how we understand the Book of Oberon???????