The opening of this Writing normally accredited to the Scholar is so bitter in tone that some believe another person must be its creator: nowhere else in the Scholar's writings does he speak so corrosively or with such utter despair. To such revisionists, the most popular alternative is the Author and later Curator of the archives known as The Voice from the Locust Grove.

However, if this Writing was composed more or less immediately after the events here narrated (as seems indisputable from internal evidence), the feelings engendered by those events would still have been raw and intense, hence the keenly affecting cry of the heart we find at its beginning.

The lacuna (redaction?) that immediately follows this controversial passage must surely have contained description of the Scholar's actual presentation and subsequent inquisitional audience with the Council; from the point where the narrative resumes, recounting his journey home, there is little argument over the Writing's attribution to the Scholar.

The odd character who briefly shares the Scholar's journey has been nicknamed the Fellow from earliest times, but has never been positively identified, nor has his mission to the Scholar been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps this byname constitutes an early surmise that he was acting as a member — or at least at the behest — of the secret order or society known as the Fellowship, which was at one time mentioned in documents that have since been discredited.

The Fellow reappears in the adjunctive fragment {Scholar's Apology, redux}, but the questions about him that the Scholar poses in this Writing are answered nowhere in the archives.