The validity of the journal has been called into question several times over the years—lately by the noted writer Sirin, who claims that the journal is actually a forgery based on Manzikert I’s biography. He points to the writer Maxwell Glaring, who lived in Ambergris some 40 years after the Silence. Glaring, Sirin says, carefully studied the biography written by Tonsure, incorporated elements of it into his fake, invented the underground accounts, used an odd purple ink distilled from the freshwater squid for the last half, and then “produced” the “journal” via a friend in the administrative quarter who spread the rumor that Aquelus had suppressed it for 50 years. Sirin’s theory has its attractions—Glaring, after all, forged a number of state documents to help his friends embezzle money from the treasury, and his novels often contain an amount of desperate derring-do in keeping with the fragments of reason found in the latter portion of the journal. Adding to the controversy, Glaring was murdered—his throat cut as he crossed a back alley on his way to the post office—shortly after the release of the journal.

Sabon prefers the alternate theory that, yes, Glaring did forge parts of the journal, but only the sections on obscure Truffidian religious practices—these pages inserted to replace pages removed by the government for national security reasons. Glaring was then killed by the Cappan’s operatives to preserve the secret. Unfortunately, a fire gutted part of the palace’s administrative core, destroying the records that might have provided a clue as to whether Glaring was on the national payroll. Sabon further speculates that Glaring’s embezzlement had been discovered and was used as leverage to make him forge the journal pages, for otherwise, some of his relatives having disappeared in the Silence, he would have been disinclined to suppress evidence as to mushroom dweller involvement. Sabon explains away the few paragraphs dealing with Tonsure’s captivity as Glaring’s genius in knowing that a good forgery must address issues of its authenticity—the journal must therefore contain some evidence of Tonsure’s underground experiences. These paragraphs, meanwhile, Lacond claims are genuine, pulled from the real journal.

Another claim, which has taken on the status of popular myth, suggests that the mushroom dwellers skillfully rewrote and replaced many pages, to keep inviolate their secrets, but this theory is rendered ridiculous by the fact that the journal was left on the altar—a fact confirmed by Nadal, the then minister of finance. This eyewitness account also nixes the first of Sabon’s theories: that the entire journal is a forgery.