Pararaton

The Pararaton falls into two parts requiring different treatment. The opening recounts the life of Ken Arok as full narrative — birth, sign, killings, the cursed kris — with few dates and much structure of a storied kind. The later part is a list of dated events: accessions, deaths, wars, ceremonies, mostly without elaboration.

It is the second part that has value as a record of events, and it largely agrees with the inscriptions and with the Nagarakretagama where checking is possible. The first does not. A reader who cites “the Pararaton” without saying which part is equating two kinds of evidence, and that equation is the commonest error in popular writing on Singhasari.

Every known manuscript of the Pararaton comes from Bali and Lombok, and none from Java. This is the same condition as with the Nagarakretagama and most Old Javanese literature: copying stopped in Java and continued to its east, so that the Javanese history known today reaches us through Balinese copyists.

The edition underlying nearly all modern use was published by J. L. A. Brandes in 1896 and revised by N. J. Krom in 1920. An edition settles which reading is chosen where manuscripts differ, and those choices are not always stated in the quotations that circulate afterwards. A reader wishing to check one matter to the bottom must return to that critical apparatus and not to a translation quoting it.