by Mariano Martín Rodríguez
The Book of Mormon was published in 1830 as the translation into archaizing English of a set of distinct books composed in the manner of the Bible. According to the paratexts of The Book of Mormon, such books, written in ‘reformed Egyptian,’ were inscribed on metal plates. According to Mormonism, its translator, the American prophet Joseph Smith, could undertake this task thanks to a stone tool endowed with supernatural powers allowing him to dictate an English version of the text of the plates. Both these and the way they had to be translated had been revealed to him by a posthumous angelic version of Moroni, son of Mormon, both of whom had added their inscriptions to memorial plates bequeathed by their ancestors. These were a group of Jews led by Lehi who had escaped Jerusalem before the onslaught of the imperial armies of Assyria and Babylon. They had travelled in boats carried by divinely ordained winds to overseas territories apparently situated somewhere in the Americas. The Jewish group multiplied there in such staggering numbers and with such rapidity that they gave rise to two different populous nations, the Nephites and the Lamanites, whose names derived from those of two of Lehi’s sons. Despite their shared origins, both nations fought each other for most of their history, until only the impious Lamanites remained, albeit entirely forgetful of their old religion.
The history of the nations and their epic battles, as well as of others preceding them in their journey, such as the post-babelic Jaredites, was written from the Nephite perspective and engraved on the mentioned plates, up to Mormon and Moroni, by a series of prophets still faithful to their Mosaic faith; they later became Christian, following the post-resurrection ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in these overseas lands. Unfortunately, we cannot read the prophets’ own words. Once Smith finished his divinely assisted translation, both the translating stone and the plates themselves disappeared, thus depriving future linguists of a method which certainly looks more reliable than contemporary machine translation. By the same token, philologists were also deprived of materials to study the grammar and vocabulary of that ‘reformed Egyptian’ of Lehi’s offspring. We have then to rely on the testimony of Joseph Smith and his first followers, the only ones to have seen with their mortal eyes the miraculous plates, if we wish to know more about the history of those peoples, as well as about their extensive prophecies and doctrines, as they were revealed by Smith to the unsuspecting modern world.
Many believed in the truth of those revelations. The new faith, called Mormonism after the new sacred book added by Smith to the canon of Jewish-Christian scriptures, expanded fast enough to raise concerns among the American populace. The latter eventually grew so enraged as to lynch Joseph Smith, his brother and others while they were jailed awaiting trial for their objectionable views on religion and society, such as polygamy, firmly rejected by the Christian American mainstream. Following the assassination of their first prophet, most surviving Mormons undertook a journey to what was then Northern Mexico in order to build up their promised Zion in the desolate lands of the Great Basin, under the guidance of Brigham Young, the charismatic first leader of the now-called Latter-Day Saints (LDS) Church. They founded Salt Lake City as their capital and main center for their faith and culture. It was from that area that they undertook the missionary work through which Mormons have become known all over the world. Their main tool to persuade global believers to join their ranks has always been The Book of Mormon itself. This text has been tirelessly reprinted and translated into numerous languages, thus becoming a significant sacred book only comparable to the scriptures of Mormonism’s sister religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which share a common anthropogony centered on the figure of Adam, the first man.
Among these scriptures, The Book of Mormon is the most similar to the Jewish Bible in style. Its prose, full of parallelisms, sometimes reads as a pastiche of ancient Hebrew writing mediated through the King James Bible, while its division in books, each combining history, prophecy and legal and moral teachings, also reflects the structure of Jewish scriptural canon. However, the differences between both sacred sets of books are also significant. Smith was not a scribe from Iron Age Canaan. He lived instead through times when Western culture was undergoing comprehensive societal changes brought on by the industrial revolution, liberalism, secularization and, last but not least, the development of modern scientific methods, extending to the humanities. Archeology, ethnology and philology began to reveal to the world the monuments of previously little-known antique cultures, as well as new documents related to the Bible itself. For example, when Smith presented The Book of Mormon in 1830 a complete English version of the first book of Enoch had been already published (in 1821). This book, which was part of the scriptural canon of the Ethiopian Christian church, had been directly or indirectly translated into classical Ethiopian from Hebrew original texts otherwise lost. In that heroic first age of modern philology, the English translation of 1 Enoch ascertained that further biblical documents could still appear, thus widening the scope of Jewish sacred history.
In this context, The Book of Mormon presented new episodes of that history, transferring it to America along with the Jewish exiles who had been removed there by divine intervention. However, Smith did much more than imagine a second holy land in the New World. He presented his readers with a wealth of new civilizations from which no other archeological record has been preserved, thus allowing later literary scholars, especially among the Gentiles (or non-Mormons) to study Mormon sacred history as it were an early attempt at a spiritual genre of subcreation in the Tolkienian sense. This attempt was already firmly ingrained in European literatures in Smith’s time, since John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) had long acquired a supreme canonic status both in English and in continental literatures. Following Milton’s footsteps and epic form, other poets, from Johann Jakob Bodmer to Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, devised new stories set in the early ages of the universe and humankind according to ancient Hebrew lore, but expanding it to produce long narratives, some of which were quite liberal in their invention of episodes not to be found in Hebrew scriptures, such as James Montgomery’s The World Before the Flood (1813) and Willem Bilderdijk’s De ondergang der eerste wereld (The Fall of the First World, 1820). In these two epic poems set in the antediluvian Earth, only some characters are taken from Genesis, although their adventures are presented as having really occurred in the framework of biblical sacred history. Nevertheless, if we read from a secular perspective, we will see that both offer in their poems detailed descriptions of extinct civilizations, all of which were endowed with their own social and ontological order, an order that is broadly invented in both cases. Consequently, these poems look as proto-high fantastic works, being the result of a mythopoetic process of subcreation of fictional secondary worlds. However, they cannot be considered pure high fantasy, as they still include characters and events from Genesis. Only a few years later, works with a similar primordial setting such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s short novels “The Fallen Star, or the History of a False Religion” (The Pilgrims of the Rhine, 1834) and “Arasmanes or the Seeker” (1833; The Student, 1835), as well as French poetic narratives such as “Le Poème de Myrza” (Myrza’s Poem, 1835) by George Sand and La Chute d’un ange (The Fall of an Angel, 1838)by Alphonse de Lamartine, could already be read virtually as high fantasy, aside from a vaguely biblical framework limited to mere allusions to scriptural types (e.g. angels) or tropes (the terrestrial paradise).
As befits its 1830 date of publication, the history of the peoples in The Book of Mormon lies halfway between Montgomery’s incipient subcreative approach and the more advanced one embraced by these latter Romantic authors. On the one hand, the first book of The Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi, tells of the exile of the Nephites and Lamanites from the kingdom of Judah and their journey to the New World. On the other hand, the books that follow, whose stories are already set in the new continent, describe civilizations and sacred histories, including miracles, that no longer owe anything to the Hebrew Bible. The language of the few testimonies of reformed Egyptian shown by Smith and his religious brethren in their own still undeciphered writing, does not correspond to any positively known philological reality. These testimonies are, rather, like the texts J. R. R. Tolkien’s wrote in any of his invented languages or alphabets, such as the Elvish chants from The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Likewise, the toponymy and onomastics of The Book of Mormon are so plentiful and varied that Smith (or Mormon, for that matter) appears to surpass the outstanding invention skills of prominent high fantasy writers such as Lord Dunsany. The wealth of new proper names in The Book of Mormon also suggests its closeness to high fantasy, since linguistic creativity in names is a distinctive element in that genre.
Invented names also appear in one of the earliest works of American origin that can be mentioned among the forerunners to high fantasy. Salomon Spaulding left unfinished at his death in 1816 a prose narrative entitled Manuscript Found, where he narrated the exile of some Christians from the Roman Empire to the lands of North America, where they came across peoples such as the Ohon nations, the city of Golanga, etc. Neither these names nor their civilizations had anything to do with those of the Amerindian past and present. Instead, their subcreation was based on theories about the existence of advanced non-Amerindian nations that would have built the impressive earth mounds that the antiquarians of the young American Federation had begun to excavate back then. Such fabled ‘white’ nations were sometimes linked to ancient European legends such as that of Atlantis, as John Galt did first in his drama The Apostate; or, Atlantis Destroyed (1815) and later in his short story “The New Atlantis” (1831). In both works, the names (Oroon, Icab, Arak, etc.) are also as imaginary as the nations portrayed in them. Although Joseph Smith could not have known the work of Spaulding, which was not published until 1885, nor is it likely that he could have read Galt’s drama, which had been published in London, The Book of Mormon is for its setting and narrative quite similar to that strand of literary archeological fantasies about the hypothesized Mound Builders of yore, such as the unjustly neglected short novel Behemoth (1839) by Cornelius Matthews, whose hero shows extraordinary courage and strength in a manner only comparable to that of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.
All these similarities do not certainly imply that the Mormon scriptures should be understood as a religious version of the Mound Builders theory and its stories. Nor is Smith’s sacred book a further amplification of Biblical legends following John Milton’s and later antediluvian epic poems. Although The Book of Mormon also complements the Bible by telling the history of some unknown branches of the Jewish tribes, its literary approach is very different. Its biblical prose seems rather to be related to a contemporary reappraisal of Hebrew writing as a viable alternative to the formerly prevalent Greek and Latin classical rhetoric still worshipped by Milton and his disciples. Instead, The Book of Mormon fully reads as a second Hebrew Bible, including its division in books and, above all, its extensive use of parallelism as its main stylistic device. In this, it was highly original and innovative. No other contemporary book was so fully aligned to ancient Hebrew rhetoric for so many pages. Additionally, it was published before other attempts at mimicking Hebrew prophetic literature, such as Félicité Lammennais’s Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer, 1834), or Hebrew sacred historiography, such as Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s Vision d’Hébal (Hebal’s Vision, 1831). The Book of Mormon did come after William Blake’s poetic-prophetic works such as The Book of Urizen (1794/1818), but Blake’s texts were written in Miltonic blank verse, not in the kind of Biblical prose so consistently used in Mormon scriptures.
All these details of literary history aim to contextualize The Book of Mormon as a work perhaps inspired by God, but certainly written according to the narrative, thematic and writing approaches embraced by quite a few authors in Europe and America in the broader Romantic Period. We saw how archaic legendary exploration gave birth to nearly fully-fledged high fantastic secondary worlds, including in the framework of neoprophetic and neobiblical prose poetry, such as the episode of Cethim in Alexandre Herculano’s A Voz do Profeta (The Prophet’s Voice, 1836). This kingdom of Cethim was fully imaginary, although its name comes from the Hebrew Bible as well. However, none of these works, including the most high-fantastic ones by Bulwer-Lytton, tried to add scientific plausibility to their inventions. They were presented as plain legends and myths. In contrast, The Book of Mormon is the result of revelation, but how it was revealed can also be related to (proto)high fantasy, given the fact that this genre often relies on the scientific methods and discourses of modern humanities to underpin the historical or mythical plausibility of its secondary worlds.
Unlike Blake’s poetic visions, the sacred book of the Mormons bears, indeed, the mark of these disciplines. Joseph Smith tried hard to confer material plausibility to the revealed book by invoking the authority of philology, which was contributing so much back then to the decipherment and knowledge of ancient languages and documents of the Fertile Crescent and nearby regions, such as the Ethiopian first book of Enoch. In fact, the mention by The Book of Mormon of reformed Egyptian as a historically existing linguistic reality was underpinned by the short writings in it offered by Smith and his followers. These short texts were allegedly copied from the metal plates from which Smith had translated Mormon’s sacred history, likely as a sort of hard proof of the existence of the plates themselves. Thus, the supernatural vision is coupled with an undeniable interest in persuading modern readers of the material nature of the revelation. It was not Moroni who had dictated the sacred scriptures to Joseph Smith orally and directly in successive visions, as the angel Gabriel had revealed the Quran to Muhammad, according to Islamic sacred history. The knowledge of the ancient Mormon books is mediated by tangible objects and an ostensibly scientifically accurate translation, although the alleged original went missing. In this regard, one can wonder if Smith had heard of the staggering success of a legendary matter offered to the public through philological translations, including explanatory notes, and also without a documented original. In 1830, the matter of Ossian, as it was pseudo-translated by James Macpherson into English and subsequently into any major European language as from 1760, was still very popular. Indeed, Ossian and Mormon have in common that their attempt at securing plausibility through philology was so successful that they were considered not only authentic translations, but they also gave rise to a sizable number of derivative literary works. These revisit the supposedly historical venues and times revealed by Macpherson through his prose renditions of the works of Ossian, such as Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s poem Kung Fjalar (King Fialar, 1844), which soon acquired canonical status in Swedish literature.
The Book of Mormon also inspired its own amplifications already in the 19th century. Unfortunately, the (hi)stories about its matter have never obtained appropriate literary appraisal outside of the limited community of Mormon scholars, despite the existence of highly estimable prose narratives such as Corianton (1889) by Brigham Henry Roberts. This writer, as well as high authority of the LDS Church, expanded to the length of a short novel a couple of sentences from the Book of Alma, the longest in the Mormon scriptures. Those tantalizing sentences hint at a sinful love affair between one of Alma’s sons, Corianton, and Isabel, a woman of questionable morals who had perverted the innocent young man. He only repented after having been deceived and mocked by that ‘harlot,’ a willful woman in the service of evil, portrayed as all the more attractive for it. Isabel becomes in Robert’s novel a fascinating example of the stock character of the femme fatale, which was widely popular back then, when Salome, among other sexually empowered ‘harlots’ from sacred history, became a prominent motif in the artistic and literary circles of late 19th century Decadent movement, not only in the European continent, but also, as we can see, in Mormon Utah…
Corianton was for decades a model for new literary recreations of Mormon sacred history. It was turned into a play and, eventually into a peplum by Mormon filmmakers in 1931. However, it failed to overcome the invisible barriers surrounding the community. Even today, Corianton is a classic of Mormon literature, but has been ignored outside of the academic world directly linked to Mormonism. Contemporary Mormon writers such as Orson Scott Card, Stephenie Meyer and Brandon Sanderson have fared much better, crossing all barriers. Their widespread success has secured them a significant place within speculative fiction. Their best-known works, however, do not belong to Mormon literature since they are not set in a Mormon milieu, and do not directly address matters of Mormon theology, ethics and sacred history. As a consequence, the latter remains terra incognita to most Gentile readers and scholars.
One could argue as an excuse for this regrettable ignorance that narratives treating Mormon sacred history as fiction do not usually show much literary sophistication, save Roberts’ Corianton. American Mormons have rather produced series of novels which rewrite episodes from The Book of Mormon following the received model of contemporary best-sellers from the Anglosphere. Among them, Heather B. Moore and Chris Heimerdinger continue to do so tirelessly. These novels are quite popular among Mormon readers, but their literary sancta simplicitas is all too evident, given their linear narrative, their exclusion of any other forms of writing but plain narrative prose (no poems, dramatic scenes, or fictional non-fiction), their unsubtle dialogue, their virtual lack of stylistic devices, and their taste for action rather than for introspection and for the explicit rather than the implicit in portraying characters, as well as the matters of feelings and life. However, there have been a precious few recreations of Mormon sacred history with both human depth and formal beauty rivalling those of any work by international writers from the literary mainstream. Two of them seem to stand out in this regard. The Nephiad (1996) by Michael R. Collings is an epic poem focusing on the departure and first adventures of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem. Its Miltonic style, handsomely updated in its rhetoric and moral conception, allows this poem to be comparable to others written by renowned authors in the last quarter of the 20th century also in blank verse and commemorating figures from sacred history, such as Moses (1976) by Anthony Burgess. Estampas del Libro de Mormón (2018) by Gabriel González Núñez, translated by the author himself into English as Book of Mormon Sketches (2023), is a collection of brief monologues in poetic prose summarizing the life of forty characters from The Book of Mormon, and masterfully following in the footsteps of celebrated poetess Juana de Ibarbourou, who had published in 1934 Estampas de la Biblia (Bible Sketches, 1934), composed of monologues in prose of men and women from the Old Testament.
These two works by Collings and González Núñez, along with the best-sellers by Moore and Heimerdinger, show that the sacred matter of The Book of Mormon continues to inspire fantasies across the spectrum of both highbrow and lowbrow literature, at least among Mormons. Given the consolidation of that matter as a literary subject, it is perhaps high time for Gentiles to become also familiar with it and to be aware that it is one of the great cycles of (proto)high fantasy worlds still being revisited today, at least among those whose first alleged subcreator is known by name. Unlike the arcane scribes from Canaan and Aryavarta, whose sacred stories were anonymously recorded over the centuries, the (pseudo)translator of The Book of Mormon has a name, as well as a specific place and time for his writing. Joseph Smith is, therefore, to be counted among the few people having succeeded in offering new vistas of ancient human history along with Plato, who revealed Atlantis, and Robert E. Howard, who told us of the Hyborian nations among whom Conan lived his adventures. Many other writers have offered us afterwards new details and new stories from the civilizations first known thanks to those these three geniuses. But were they fiction or history writers?
Mormons believe in the literal truth of The Book of Mormon as a historical narrative with the same legitimacy with which members of other religions believe in the truth of their various sacred histories, even when they all might challenge the laws of nature and common sense. Others have believed in the existence of the bard Ossian as an actual person, while many are persuaded, still today, that Atlantis was a truly existing empire and continue to relentlessly search for it throughout our planet, with the same lack of success in their endeavors as if they were on an archeological quest for Conan’s Aquilonia. All those beliefs are equally respectable. If we do not feel entitled to question the sacred words of the one God of Islam or of the eight million Shinto Gods, why should we dare to question those who believe in the real existence of Atlantis, of Howard’s Hyboria and, for that matter, of the mighty city of Zarahemla as described in The Book of Mormon? Believers or not, we feel nevertheless entitled to reading all these sacred and secular histories as if they were fictions, that is, as if they were, indeed, high fantasies.
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