The Book of Leaves is a European codex extant in a few dozen mss. The manuscripts vary in many ways and the text has been translated into all the surviving languages of Europe.
It is believed that the original text was written in English though even the English mss contain significant instances of macaronic asides and digressions.
The frame narrative of the text depicts the first person account of a survivor, the Wanderer, living during the early years of the Age of Poisoned Sea and Sky. The narrator is a loner describing the conditions of his life and the types of people he encounters as he engages in a migratory existence of hunting and foraging.
He collects “Leaves” from the travelers he meets. This is to say he records their stories and retells them within the Book of Leaves. In this way the storytellers imagined in the codex are like the leaves or pages of a book or ms. The stories contained in the book represent the social world of the Wanderer’s own time and place and present a strange mix between the old world culture of the Precursors and the feudal world inherited by the contemporaries of the Post Cataclysmic Era.
If the narrator described in the text can be identified with the actual author of the ms, then the provenance of The Book of Leaves may be dated within the first century PCE or perhaps even earlier during the Ahistory.
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