Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet? (article)

Was Odoric of Pordenone Ever in Tibet?
by Berthold Laufer for T’oung Pao

Who was it that told me that if the title of your article can be answered with a “yes” or a “no”, you shouldn’t bother writing it?

Spoiler alert!!! The answer is NO.

Okay, really, I liked this article. I think Laufer is one helluva smart cookie. Here, he basically tackles two questions: was Odoric ever in Tibet (he is credited with being the first European traveler there), and is the information he presents eyewitness or simply hearsay?

Now, it is easy for me to get distracted by shiny side-paths of small scholarly questions that have nothing whatever to do with Mandeville and his plants. This is one of those things. For some reason, I find Odoric and the map of his travels to be totally fascinating. But let me try to be a little focused here, yes?

For my purposes, it’s really interesting to witness Laufer’s method of examining Odoric’s writing in order to determine the authenticity of his words. Looking at his specific language in terms of his concept of self in place, and how specific details of his work compare to the writing of his contemporaries – holding Odoric against now more or less universally-acknowledged ethnographic and anthropological truths – assessing the author’s style and character to measure his powers of observation and clarity of writing – Laufer’s got a lot of tricks up his sleeve.

Even though he ultimately robs Odoric of his reputation for being the first European to traverse Tibet, he does so with such grace and tact that Odoric himself probably would have shook his hand and thanked him for the corrective measure. What a class act.