Free The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt

medals and in frontispieces, decorated with orders and medals, framed in garlands of flowers and sweetly discreet flying
putti
. He wears his flat pyramidal bonnet and his huge flat-footed fur boots, and looks out of huge, wary dark eyes at the looker-in, as though he was an alert wild creature that might shy away. He wears also his reindeer-skin garment and great fur-cuffed gloves. Round his waist hang the implements of Lapp life, a netting-needle, a straw snuff-box, a cartridge box, a knife, a receptacle also made from furred hide. At his side hangs the Lapp drum, with its mysterious signs facing the viewer, like a clock-face. In his right hand he carries the small pink plant he found near Gävle then named
Campanula serpyllifolia
, but later renamed
Linnaea borealis
, “a plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space—from Linnaeus, who resembles it.”
    Naming is a difficult art. The names of magicians who undertake the
hamfar
must not be spoken; nor must the names of the beasts who are their
hamrs
. CL himself, in the fragments, shows his awareness of this, and also of the fact that the creatures were named by circumlocution, indirection and euphemism. He left—if the fragment is his, and autobiographical, and not some record of some old saying, a verse which resembles some of his more conventional poems and paradoxes:

    Linnaeus in His Lapland Dress
, mezzotint by Dunkarton after a painting by Martin Hoffman, from Thornton’s
Temple of Flora
    I ran with grey-foot
With the old man with the fur pelt I ran
Who came from the Stygian depths.
With the winged creature, Voesa, I soared
Over the boiling water-pot.
I flew over the highest mountain,
Where the snow lies, and the grey clouds
Make a mist-cloud for erica and the grey stones.
    Northern languages named men for beasts. Björn, the bear, Ari or Örn, the eagle, Hrútr, the ram, Kalfr, the calf, Hundr, the dog, Ormr, the serpent. Did he meditate on these when he made his system of double names for plants and animals, bringing order to the rampant world of creatures and things? Did he muse on his own polymorphous nomenclature? It has been said that he was named originally for flax, lin, linen. It is almost certain his father took his name from a large and venerated lime tree in SmÃ¥land—Swedish
lind
, Latin
tilia
(French
tilleul
, English linden …). Some of the family were called Tiliander.
Tilia
(and
Papaver
, the opium poppy) in CL’s sexual system belong to the
Polyandria
with “twenty males or more in the same bed with the female.”
    Paradise, CL believed, was an island,
the
island, the part of the earth’s crust that rose above the waves, as the primal waters receded. In it the Creator had planted two seeds of every species, one male, one female (one seed sufficed for hermaphrodites). The island of Paradise, both because it thrust upwards from the seabed, and because created Nature required it, “was in form a high mountain peak, with the flora and fauna ideally placed in ascending or descending strata, to suit the climate they required. Adam the gardenerwandered this mountain, noting and naming all things, plants, beasts, insects, birds, and the fish in the descending funnels and troughs of the surrounding sea.” Even as a young man, CL thought of himself, as he journeyed over the fells, swamps and mountains, as the second Adam, the separator, the taxonomist, the Namer of species. Wrapped in his deerskins, he noted the nature and vagaries of mountain climates. After a few days in Norway, he said, he felt heavy, but the mountain air revived him—he was advised to put a wet sponge to his nose, to make the light air thicker. He believed the air only appeared thin because of the compression of his lungs by the effort of climbing—one is breathless
ab accelerata circulatione sanguinis
. But he checked his barometer, and found that the air pressure was weaker. This,