The
Fanes' saga - The events underlying the legend
The
only operation that remains to complete our analysis is venturing
into the final assembly of a reconstructed course of events that
might have triggered the Fanes’ saga. If we want to proceed
on this path, consequently to the the arguments that were debated
in the previous chapters about the origin and the evolution of
the legend, we must be well aware that we are leaving the field
of demonstrable facts and that, since now on, we must give up
using words like “true”, “real”, “historical”.
We cannot discard the chance that in a few, maybe in several passages,
we have been lured into a trap, either accidentally or by a clever
storyteller (helped by our own lack of critical spirit), and induced
to believe plausible also what had just been fictionally invented.
The investigation techniques that we used to carry on the analysis
of the Fanes’ occurrences can bring, and actually often
do bring, to surprisingly realistic results: however, we are always
drawing more or less coherent, more or less verisimilar, more
or less likely, but never probative
conclusions.
We shall therefore take under examination the narration fabric
of the legend the way it came down to us, we shall remove or reduce
to rational terms all fantastic or spurious elements that we can
realize as such, and we shall apply to the remainder, with all
due care, the hypothesis that the first storytellers recounted
substantially what they wanted us to believe had really occurred,
keeping in due count their imperfect awareness of the facts and
the various psychological reasons that may have brought them to
veil or distort a part of the truth.
According to what stated above, what follows must be read, therefore,
as a quest not for the “truth”, but just for the “most
probable among all possible truths”, because often there
are many that might fit; for sure the emerging reconstruction
has no chance to be accurate and undisputable, but there are solid
reasons to believe that it does have good chances of coming close
to what really happened, and therefore it must be regarded as
a step, just a step, but neither a trivial nor a useless one,
towards a better knowledge of the remote history of this corner
of the world.
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