Opening Passage: There is a modern-day 'preface', as part of the frame narrative, but the opening passage should really be the first part of Chapter 1 (August, 1348, At Matins, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions):
Dietrich awoke with an uneasy feeling in his heart, like a bass voice chanting from a darkened choir loft. His eyes flew open and darted about the room. A night candle guttering in its sconce cast capers over trouble and basin, prie-dieu and psalter, and caused the figure upon the crucifix to writhe as if it were trying to tear itself down. In the corners and angles of the room, shadows swelled enormous with their secrets. Through the east winow, a dull red glow, thin as a knife across a throat, limned the crest of the Katerinaberg.He took a long, stilling breath. The candle told Matins anyway; so, throwing the blanket aside, he exchanged nightshirt for cassock. Goose bumps puckered his skin and the short hairs rose on his neck. Dietrich shivered and hugged himself. Something will happen today. (p. 21)
Summary: In early August* of 1348, people in Oberhochwald wake to find the air charged with strange meaning -- quite literally, as their is a glow over the Great Woods and the charge in the air raises the hairs on people's necks and arms and the wool fibers on their clothes; as Pastor Dietrich puts it, it is as if God were rubbing the world with amber. A great wind knocks down the charcoal kiln in the woods and tears up trees. And what the people of Oberhochwald will discover will change everything, because all of the strange events have a natural cause, but one far beyond what they had ever imagined. A ship from the heavens has crashed into the forest. The people on it, whom the people of Oberhochwald call the Krenk (the closest that they can come to what the people call themselves), are strange men, looking something like large gray crickets or grasshoppers. The Krenk crew and passengers find themselves stranded, with an interdimensional engine whose circuits are burned out. Even worse, being from another world, their biology is not a perfect match for this new world, and they can find nothing that contains an essential amino acid without which, after their own stores are gone, their bodies will begin to break down. It seems hopeless. But Pastor Dietrich and some (not all) of the villagers befriend them, despite their somewhat demon-like appearance. (In the fourteenth century, of course, there were still legends of distant lands of men who look very different from those we know.) Among the Krenk passengers had been an expedition of scientists setting out to study new worlds, and they are able to develop a means of translating back and forth between the click-heavy Krenkish language and the German, Latin, and Greek of Pastor Dietrich and the villagers.
The Krenk are surprised to discover that the locals are awaiting the return of a Lord from the sky, which would explain, as they think, why Pastor Dietrich (a former student at the University of Paris who has studied natural philosophy) sometimes speaks (at least as their machines translate it) in scientific terms that make sense to them and sometimes seems to have positions very primitive compared to their own. And in trying to better understand the customs of the villagers, they discover the sentence that holds the only hope they may have for living long enough to fix their ship and return home: Take and eat; this is my body, given for you. Of course, they don't quite understand these ideas the way the villagers of Oberhochwald do. (Which will result in a grave disappointment when they go to a Christmas service expecting the return of the Lord from the sky, who they think might be able to help them return home.)
The Krenk, of course, are not theologians, but one thing I like about their discovery of Catholic Christianity is that it tracks very well with the kinds of confusion that often come about when Christianity first interacts with a culture. But, as in those cases, it is a confusion that is at the same time a creative ferment for many great and good things. The extremely hierarchical and caste-ish Krenk puzzling out what Pastor Dietrich means by charitas, in particular, is very well depicted, as is the revolutionary impact the idea has on the Krenkish mini-society of the ship, especially in the context of their near-certain doom as their essential food stores run out.
The Krenk are not the only ones who are doomed, though, because the Plague is spreading through Europe, wiping out entire villages as it goes, and between the humans facing the Black Death and the Krenk facing starvation on an alien world, they together discover the true universal language: hope.
There is also a frame narrative, about a historian and a physicist who live together and unravel the mystery of what happened to the place called Eifelheim, a name it got as a euphemised version of Teufelheim, Devil-home, which is what Oberhochwald came to be called after the Black Death. Tom and Sharon are (deliberately) much less interesting people than the villagers, but I found them somewhat more interesting this time around, and their story serves as a background against which the medieval peasants, scholars, and lords stand out in clearer relief.
Favorite Passage:
Some long time afterward, he crossed the road to the hospital to tell Hans what had happened and found the Krenkl had died also in his absence. Dietrich knelt by the corpse and lifted the great, long, serrated arms and folded them across the mottled torso in an attitude of prayer. He could not close the eyes, of course, and they seemed still aglow, though that was only the rays of the declining sun out beyond the autumn fields reflecting through them like one of Theodoric's raindrops, and the shadow of a rainbow fell on Hans's cheeks. (p. 298)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
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* Sixtus II and His Companions in the fourteenth century would have been August 6th. This day would later become the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration on the universal calendar, which pushed Sixtus II and Companions to August 7th, which is still their feast-day.
Michael Flynn, Eifelheim, Tor Books (New York: 2006).