00:00Tonight, a book said to be written in a single night, with the devil's own help.
00:04It sits today in a library in Sweden. Nearly a meter tall, so heavy it takes two people just
00:09to lift it. For eight hundred years, the story goes, the man who wrote it was a monk sentenced
00:13to death, given one impossible task. Write the entire book before sunrise, said his abbot,
00:18and you live. Fail, and you die. So he did the one thing left to him. He sold his soul,
00:24and asked the devil to help him finish it. By morning the book was done. And inside was
00:29a full page portrait of the devil himself. A great story. There is just one problem.
00:35Experts say that writing this book by hand would take a normal person at least 25 years.
00:39This is the Codex Gigas. The giant book. And everything about it is enormous.
00:45One and a half million Latin words, on three hundred and ten pages of vellum.
00:48The skin of roughly 160 animals. Calf, goat, donkey, nobody is even sure which.
00:54Laid flat, that parchment would cover more than 140 square meters.
00:58And inside is not one book, but a whole library. The entire Bible. A history of Bohemia.
01:05Jewish antiquities. Medical texts. A manual on exorcism.
01:10Everything a medieval monastery could imagine to know. So where does the legend of a single
01:14knight even come from? It comes from the book's own title. Its official Latin name translates to,
01:19the giant book. A scribe, struggling with the enormity of it, might write a note of horror.
01:24That horror became a rumor. And the rumor grew horns. Literally, look at page 290.
01:30A full page devil. Red horns. A forked tongue hissing from his mouth.
01:36Clawed hands and feet. He wears an ermine cloak, a fur reserved in the middle ages for royalty alone.
01:42Here, a clear statement, the king of darkness. And if you actually open the book,
01:46that devil has been seen more than any other page. For centuries, it was the page everyone turned to
01:51first. The candle smoke of visitors has darkened it more than any other sheet. But here is what most
01:56people never notice. Across from the devil stands the heavenly city. Heaven on the left, the devil
02:01on the right. Good beside evil. In medieval art this was a common pairing, a warning, not a thanks
02:07to the devil for a job well done. Yet the page earned this book a dark name for centuries. It
02:12was
02:12taken by a holy roman emperor. Seized by Swedish troops as war loot. It survived the fire, then someone
02:18threw it out of a palace window. Each disaster became proof, people said, of a curse. But a book this
02:24valuable was simply the finest treasure of its age. Being fought over was never proof of the devil.
02:29It was proof of the price. Around 2006, Sweden invited a British expert on ancient handwriting.
02:35He read the whole manuscript, start to finish. His conclusion was blunt. The handwriting is the same
02:41from the first page to the last. The ink is the same throughout. Not one trace of a change of
02:46hand
02:46anywhere. And here is the striking part, the calculation says it took at least twenty years.
02:51Perhaps thirty. Thirty years. One man, from his early twenties to his late fifties. And there is a
02:58problem. Over thirty years, eyes blur. Hands slow. Moods shift. Skill improves. All of that should leave
03:06little marks. In this book, you cannot find them. The first explanation is training. Medieval scribes
03:13practiced one standard script, chasing one goal, no two letters ever alike. That was their craft, not a
03:19defect. But discipline alone cannot hold a hand steady for thirty years without a single waiver.
03:24Then, near the back, there is a name list, a register of the dead, the days to remember which brother
03:28had
03:28passed. In that list is a name, Herman. After it, a Latin word. Roughly, the enclosed one. Read together,
03:37Herman the enclosed. This is the word that matches the legend. And in the 13th century, it had a very
03:42specific meaning. There was a kind of monk who chose to be walled in. He walked into a small cell,
03:48the door sealed behind him, leaving only a hatch. And he never came out. For life. Each day, pray,
03:55work, pray. To be, enclosed, was a respected act of penance. So here is the twist. The legend says the
04:02monk was walled up to die. The truth may be far stranger, he walled himself in. And if that is
04:07true,
04:07the 30 years of unbroken sameness suddenly makes sense. Think of his day. The same room. The same
04:14desk. The same shaft of light from the same small window. The same silence. The same food. The same
04:21hours. No visitors. Nothing to break the rhythm. For thirty years, in a life that barely changed,
04:27a trained hand writing the same letters, why would it ever change? And yet, one man alone could not
04:32have made this whole book. A hundred and sixty animals must be skinned, soaked, stretched,
04:37scraped. Pages ninety centimeters high, cut and ruled one by one. None of it possible inside a sealed
04:43cell with only a hatch. Someone outside had to feed him material, year after year. Which means the book
04:49looks inhuman precisely because its maker lived a life we can barely picture. And that is how the legend
04:53lines up, piece by piece, with the truth. There really is an enclosed man. The tale turns him into a
05:03purchase of a soul. The book is absurdly huge, the tale turns it into one impossible night. Every wild
05:09detail sits on top of something real. And there is one more thing. The book once had three hundred and
05:15twenty pages. Ten are missing. Cut out, cleanly, deliberately. What was on them, nobody knows.
05:22There is no proof at all. We want to believe that something this extraordinary must hide a supernatural
05:26hand. Because the other version is too plain, too plain to accept. So we gave it a devil. But the
05:32version that should truly haunt you is the one without a devil at all. One man, who spent the longest
05:37stretch of his life, every day, writing the same letters, into a book he likely never lived to see
05:41anyone read. He did not sell his soul. He spent twenty or thirty years, writing it out, one letter at
05:47a time.
05:48Eight hundred years later, this book sits under glass, and the whole world queues up to see a devil.
05:53And almost no one knows that, in a register at the back, there is a name.
05:56A man who was enclosed. It may have been him. Not a soul sold to the devil.
06:02Just a life, quietly given to a book. And that is far stranger than any demon.
06:22A woman. A woman. She is a woman. A man who fell for her. He had been Palestin.
