The Library
The Library is the vast, labyrinthine heart of the unnamed Benedictine abbey, housing the greatest collection of Christian manuscripts in Christendom. It is a forbidden, self-defending fortress of knowledge, whose secrets are guarded by a blind librarian and whose inaccessible top floor—the Finis Africae—conceals the single copy of Aristotle's lost second book of the Poetics, a work on comedy that the blind monk Jorge of Burgos believes would destroy the Christian world. The Library is both the setting and the cause of the seven murders that William of Baskerville investigates, and its fiery destruction in the novel's climax marks the end of an era of monastic learning.
Architecture and Labyrinthine Design
The Library occupies the entire top floor of the Aedificium, an octagonal construction that from a distance appears a tetragon, expressing the sturdiness and impregnability of the City of God. Its southern sides stand on the abbey's plateau, while the northern ones seem to grow from the steep side of the mountain, a sheer drop. The building has three rows of windows, proclaiming the triune rhythm of its elevation, so that what is physically squared on the earth is spiritually triangular in the sky. The quadrangular form includes, at each of its corners, a heptagonal tower, five sides of which are visible on the outside—four of the eight sides of the greater octagon producing four minor heptagons, which from the outside appear as pentagons. The Library is laid out as a labyrinth, a spiritual labyrinth that is also a terrestrial one. The abbot explains to William that the library was laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the centuries, and that only the librarian has received the secret, from the librarian who preceded him, and he communicates it, while still alive, to the assistant librarian, so that death will not take him by surprise and rob the community of that knowledge. The secret seals the lips of both men. The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves. The rooms are arranged according to the image of the terraqueous orb, with books grouped by the country of their origin or the place where their authors were born. The system of words on the walls, taken from the Apocalypse, proceeds in a single direction, backward, or in a circle, and the same letter often serves to compose two different words. The library has fifty-six rooms, four of them heptagonal and fifty-two more or less square, and of these, there are eight without windows, while twenty-eight look to the outside and sixteen to the interior.
The Finis Africae and the Forbidden Book
The most secret part of the Library is the Finis Africae, a walled-up heptagonal room in the south tower, accessible only by pressing the letters 'q' and 'r' in the word 'quatuor' carved above a distorting mirror in the room called 'Super thronos viginti quatuor.' This room contains the single surviving copy of Aristotle's second book of the Poetics, a work on comedy that Jorge of Burgos has hidden for forty years. Jorge stole the book during a trip to Silos, near Burgos, his home, and has kept it in the Finis Africae, poisoning its pages with a lethal substance taken from Severinus's infirmary. The poison, which blackens the fingers and tongue of anyone who touches it, kills Venantius of Salvemec, Berengar of Arundel, and Malachi of Hildesheim when they attempt to read the book. Jorge explains to William that he feared the book because it would teach that laughter is proper to man and could be used to cancel fear, particularly the fear of God, which is the foundation of law and order. He believed that if the book were to become an object for open interpretation, the last boundary would be crossed, and the people of God would be transformed into an assembly of monsters.
The Library as a Character and Cause of the Crimes
The Library is not merely a setting but an active agent in the novel's plot. The prohibition against entering the library, enforced by the abbot and the librarian, creates a climate of secrecy and desire that drives the murders. The monks who die—Adelmo, Venantius, Berengar, Malachi—are all connected to the Library: Adelmo was an illuminator, Venantius a translator who stole the forbidden book, Berengar the assistant librarian who revealed the secret of the Finis Africae, and Malachi the librarian who killed Severinus to recover the book. The Library's labyrinthine design, with its mirrors, vision-inducing herbs, and ventilation slits that produce ghostly sounds, is deliberately constructed to frighten intruders and protect its secrets. The abbot tells William that the library is a vessel of both truth and falsehood, and that not all truths are for all ears. The library's self-defense mechanisms, combined with Jorge's manipulation, create a pattern of deaths that William initially interprets as following the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse.
Destruction and Aftermath
The Library is destroyed in a fire that begins when Jorge, having eaten the pages of the forbidden book, knocks over a lamp in the room called Y of YSPANIA. The fire spreads rapidly through the labyrinth, consuming the thousands of dry pages, and then spreads to the scriptorium, the church, and the rest of the abbey. The Aedificium burns for three days and three nights. William and Adso watch the destruction from an open space, and William declares that the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more. Years later, Adso returns to the ruins and finds only scattered fragments of parchment, which he collects and tries to decipher. He concludes that the library has become a lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one, made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, and amputated stumps of books. The Library's destruction marks the end of the abbey's power and the beginning of a new era in which the old monastic learning is replaced by the new learning of the universities and cities.
