Sigmund Beck

Chief Archivist of the University of Acton, Curator of the Grand Library, Honourary Court Historian, Author of the Wythian Codex, Correspondent, Esteemed Imperial Scholar, and Reluctant National Treasure

Sigmund Octavius Beck (Born 9 September 354) is a famed scholar of Westwythe and a native son of the venerable city of Acton. Recognized across the breadth of the former Wythian Empire as the preeminent historian of his age (and, if he is to be believed, of any age) Beck has served, for a most respectable term, as Chief Archivist of the University of Acton, Curator of Acton’s Grand Library, and an honourary member of the royal court of Lord Philip of Acton, whose political intrigues Beck has chronicled with both discretion and relish.   It is with no small degree of apprehension—indeed, one might go so far as to say with a distinct trepidation, such as that felt by a newly matriculated student preparing to recite the ancient compositions of a bygone era before a tribunal of half-deaf grammarians—that we undertake to sketch, however inadequately, the life and contributions of Sigmund Beck, that most singular of intellectual luminaries, that tireless warden of parchment, that walking citadel of chronological certitude. For to write of Beck is not merely to write of a man (though a man he is, and one of flesh, fine Bergic wine, and luxurious silk robes) but rather to write of an era, a sensibility, and, if one permits a moment of poetic license, an approach to reality mediated entirely through the written word.   Table of Contents

Biographical Chronology (23rd Edition; Regrettably Abridged)

Origins most noble (yet humble), and a childhood steeped in letters

It has been observed (though whether wisely or merely frequently is a matter of some debate) that greatness does not always arise from grandeur. Indeed, in the case of Sigmund Beck, it sprang rather unexpectedly from a cluttered candle-shop in the Lower East Boroughs of Acton, wedged between a fishmonger’s alley and an abandoned limeburner’s workshop.   Born on the 9th day of Herbstmonat, in the Year 354 of the Imperial Unification—that is to say, at a time when the municipal charter of Acton had not yet been amended to include the regulation of street vendors (a reform which, incidentally, Beck would later advocate for)—Sigmund was the eighth (and, by his own admission, the “least flammable”) of one Thaddeus Q. Beck, a candlemaker whose notoriety rested chiefly on the creation of picric-coated wicks: a commercial disaster, but a metaphorical prophecy of Sigmund’s explosive entry into the hallowed halls of academia. His mother, Charlotta Beck (née Füch), was a fierce former grammarian whose stern poise and passion for syntax became the boy’s earliest moral instructors. Local gossip claims Beck’s earliest utterance was “That is not where that comma goes.” His cradle reportedly doubled as a rudimentary scriptoria: he rewrote nursery rhymes in chronological order, lectured house cats on ecclesiastical succession, and insisted his older siblings remain capable of reciting the genealogies of local Actonian nobility at a moment’s notice. Though certainly embellished in later retellings, these stories illustrate the essential character of the child: impatient with ambiguity, sensitive to detail, and deeply convinced of the primacy of the written record.   Daily routines in the Beck household alternated between domestic chaos and scholarly fervor. Sigmund’s elder siblings recall evening readings from his hand‑copied Chronicles of Lord Lothair the Linguist: Hero of Wythe and 10th Lord of Acton (complete with commentary). That young Sigmund would ascend the scholastic ladder was apparent even in these his earliest years, when, according to the oral testimony of Sister Beatrice of St. Hildegard’s Conventual Academy, he memorized the Imperial chronicler’s account of the 1st Teoti Civil War in reverse order so as to “better examine the structural symmetry of betrayal.” Such was the child. The man was merely more so.

A truly eruditic education and the emergence of a great scholar

Beck’s formal education began at the age of eight under the tutelage of the Sisters of St. Hildegard’s, where his prodigious appetite for knowledge quickly strained the curriculum. Upon discovering the boy had copied and corrected the Annals of the Pre-Imperial Martyrs in full (adding, in the margins, “Martyrdom should not excuse poor penmanship”), the Abbess arranged for his immediate expulsion. He laboured as an apprentice chandler under his father for a time, until at thirteen he gained admittance to the University of Acton—that most venerable institution whose halls echo with equal parts learning and petty academic rivalries—through aptitude, narrative inevitability, and a full merit scholarship funded by the Guild of Learned Tradesmen (who would later petition to have their names inscribed in the Codex, only to be included under the entry “Mercantile Patronage: Dubious Value of”).   Beck distinguished himself early and often, not by his humility (a virtue he considered “merely the rhetorical failure to properly annotate one’s genius”) but by his vast, often disquieting recall of dates, treaties, genealogies, and the most obscure of far-flung Lagonic cultural practices. To provide the reader with one of countless examples, while most students merely read the Chronicle of Wiegand Taschner (Senior Imperial Rittari, Imperial Court Palantine, Seven Honored Knight of the Golden Spur, Hero of the Battle of Arnsberg, the Ironclad Lynx of Dalhurst, etc. etc.), Beck reorganized the manuscript’s chapters by moral relevance and submitted it to the archivists with countless pages of errata; Beck is oft-quoted as saying “to simply present the life of Taschner from beginning to end is to wholly misunderstand the virtuosity and rectitude of the late Palantine."   In his first term at the University, Beck distinguished himself further by correcting a misdated siege in the lecture of Professor Gunther Arryn (who retired in scandal shortly thereafter and was later discovered to have invented two Aparnovosi secession crises and a minor civil war). Professors soon learned (some too late) to avoid rhetorical flourish in his presence, for he would annotate their lectures mid-sentence, offering three alternate interpretations and a brief excursus on lexical ambiguity. Beck’s time at the University was marked by a meteoric rise: from Scribal Assistant to Junior Annotator (during which time he introduced his own indexing language to reduce reliance on scribes while increasing his own stylistic signature), and, by the age of twenty-six, Deputy Archivist-in-Residence, a title he described as “suitably vague, but brimming with future potential.”   His doctoral dissertation, titled “A Detailed Account of the Disastrous Loss, Multiplicitous Replication, and Doctrinal Divergence Arising from the Misplacement of the Hochmaßstab (High Measuring Rod) of Ulmstrang Wythe, Great-Nephew Thrice Removed from His Imperial Majesty, during the Fourth Revision of the Imperial Weights Edict, Including a Chronicle of the Twenty-One Contradictory Standardization Councils, the Emergence of the Nine Competing Calendars of Dalhurst proper, and the Eternal Life and Times of Hans Winzhelm the Lesser, Who Died While Drafting Addendum XVII to the Record of Accepted Distances” is famously unfinishable: both in the sense that no reader has ever completed it and that Beck has never ceased revising it—instead claiming that the treatise was a living argument and that the act of publication would fossilize its flexibility. Nonetheless, it remains the only known work in the University archives to include a complete appendix of draft rebuttals to imagined critics, written by the author in anticipation of lesser minds.

Of offices held, libraries reformed, and honours humbly endured

On the Wythian Codex, that illustrious and inconcludable masterwork

Present activities, eternal vigor, and the matter of mortality

 

On fame, influence, and the slight inconvenience of modesty

Current Location
Species
Men
Ethnicity
Date of Birth
9th of September
Year of Birth
354 AU 76 Years old
Birthplace
Children
Gender
Male
Eyes
A hearty nut-brown
Hair
Thick head of dark hair
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Fair
Height
Tall
Weight
Strapping
Aligned Organization
Other Affiliations
Known Languages
Imperial Wythian
North Wythian
South Wythian
Aparnovosi (allegedly)
Sevnóni
Sinopan (allegedly)
Common Alessan
Draconic (allegedly)
Bergic
Gnomish (allegedly)
Erzihari (allegedly)
Vairyan (allegedly)
Do ignore the scribblings of my most-juvenile scribe, they are naught but a sophomoric attempt at humour by a bored mind. I have crossed them out, so they do not further mar this vital document.
-Sigmund O. Beck