Edited highlights from Chapter 1: How Myths Are Made
of Professor Ronald Hutton’s forthcoming book : WITCHES,
DRUIDS AND KING ARTHUR - STUDIES IN PAGANISM, MYTH AND MAGIC
The Welsh in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had in common
with the Scots the experience of having been absorbed into a larger, and
very successful, national unit dominated by the English. Their problem
was therefore to ensure the maintenance of both the union and its advantages,
and of their own historic national and cultural distinction which was
the basis of their communal pride. This need helps to explain the general
Welsh cultural revival of the late eighteenth century, represented most
obviously by the reappearance of eisteddfodau, competitions of the performing
arts. These wholly lacked, however, an instantly recognisable national
symbolism. It was provided by individuals who were not merely liminal
in themselves, like those so prominent in the story of the kilt, but drawn
from or active within a literal borderland, that region where the relatively
Anglicized Welsh counties of Glamorgan and Breconshire met the English
one of Monmouthshire.
The process was commenced by a figure who combined the charateristics
of David Stewart and the AlIens, a stonemason from Glamorgan called Edward
Williams who took the name of Iolo Morganwg. Like Stewart, he had parted
from his homeland, having emigrated to London and become part of the homesick
and patriotic Welsh community there which played a large part in sponsoring
the national revival. It was on Primrose Hill, north London, in 1792,
that Williams first staged a ritual opening for an eisteddfod which he
termed a gorsedd. It made an immediate impression on the London Welsh,
but took considerably longer to be accepted in their homeland. Eventually
it was incorporated into an eisteddfod at Carmarthen in 1819, and thereafter
became standard at such events. Like the AlIens, Williams passed off his
compositions as a rediscovery of old tradition, in his case the tradition
concerned being that of the ancient Druids. Like them, also, his work
consisted of an ingenious mixture of genuine research, misrepresentation,
and forgery.
If the gorsedd provided a set of actions proclaiming and embodying a
distinctive Welsh identity, the next step was to find a costume, an object
and a body of national literature to reinforce that identity. All these
were furnished directly or indirectly by Augusta Hall, daughter of a London
merchant called Waddington who had made a fortune in the American trade
and retired first to Berkshire and then to the point in Monmouthshire
where the rich Vale of Usk prepares to meet the Black Mountains, and England
(until 1974) approached its border with Wales. She lived there for the
rest of her life. Having inherited serious new money, she married more
in the shape of Benjamin Hall, heir of the founder of one of Monmouthshire's
main ironworks, Their wealth allowed the couple lives of leisured gentility.
Benjamin achieved distinction in national politics, becoming ennobled
as Baron Llanover and having Britain's most famous bell, 'Big Ben', named
after him. Augusta acquired two evangelical passions. One was for Christianity,
the other for Welsh cultural nationalism, to which she was thoroughly
converted after attending an eisteddfod at Brecon in 1826. Thereafter
she and her husband sponsored regular eisteddfodau at Abergavenny, the
nearest town to their seat.
In the course of this work she encouraged two other remarkable individuals.
One was Thomas Jeffrey Llewelyn Prichard, a travelling actor, journalist
and author from Brecon who made a speciality of writing guide-books to
encourage the swelling number of English tourists visiting Wales. In the
late 1820s Augusta Hall employed him to catalogue her library. It was
during these years that he published the assertion that each county of
south Wales had its own traditional female costume. The idea was good
for tourist business, although it has been rejected by historians of Welsh
culture. It clearly made an impression on Augusta, who proposed to an
eisteddfod at Cardiff in 1834 that a national costume be developed for
Wales, as distinctive as that now claimed by the Scots. From 1836 onward
she ensured that she and her female friends appeared at the eisteddfodau
that she sponsored, attired in such an outfit, and by mid-century its
red cloak, gown and petticoat, and tall black hat (none of these things
particularly Welsh) had indeed been generally accepted as the national
dress. The absence of any male equivalent has been put down to the disinclination
of Benjamin Hall to take any interest in one. At the same time Augusta
was providing her adopted country with a musical symbol, the triple harp.
This was actually an Italian invention which had become popular in England
in the seventeenth century and reached most of Wales in the course of
the eighteenth. By the early nineteenth century it was commonly accepted
there as both native and ancient. Augusta's enthusiasm for it, supported
by her ample funds, helped to establish it as the national instrument
par excellence.
Modern Cornish nationalism has….focused above all upon the process
of reviving the Cornish language; and here again the same pattern obtains.
The revival was essentially the work of three men. The first, Henry Jenner,
was born and bred in Cornwall, but his interest in linguistics derived
from his job in London, as Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts at the British
Museum (a generation before Flower worked there). He was converted to
the idea of reviving Cornish after learning about revivals of other Celtic
languages. The second man was Robert Morton Nance, who was born and grew
up in Wales, of Cornish parents. He returned to his ancestral land in
1906, met Jenner three years later, and got swept up in the cause. The
third was A. S. D. Smith, a schoolteacher from Sussex who moved to Cornwall
and made the land and its identity his own. Together they established
a visible expression of national pride in 1928 by founding a Cornish Gorsedd
(or, in the Cornish version, Gorseth), copying the ceremonies which Edward
Williams had invented in London over a hundred years before The expatriate,
the returning son, and the outsider seeking a new home and role; all were
as potent in this story as in the others. Recent investigations of nationalism
have laid emphasis upon the importance of medium (such as print), experience
(such as revolution) and rallying points (flags or songs) in creating
a sense of nationhood. It is argued here that an equal stress should be
laid upon the special sorts of human being who act as the dynamic agents
in bringing that creation into being.
* * *
Some well-known stories had more remote points of apparent origin. That
of Cinderella is first recorded in ninth-century China, and appears in
Europe 800 years later. It is probably impossible to locate the birthplace
of the tale of a hero cornered by an ogre, who escapes by deceiving the
monster into thinking that his name is 'Nobody'. It is most famous in
the west from its appearance in Homer's Odyssey, but is also found in
The Arabian Nights, and in popular versions collected by folklorists from
Scotland to China. A similar range was achieved by the motif of the ring
lost in a river or sea, which turns up in the belly of a fish, just in
time to save the life or reputation of the person who lost it. This tale
is told by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (in a context which suggests
that it came to him from Egypt), but also in the lives of thirteen Christian
saints, in an old Sanskrit text, in The Arabian Nights, and in a set of
medieval Hebrew rabbinical writings. The problem which preoccupied Kenneth
Jackson was that when he came to analyse the stories which made up the
earliest and best-known Welsh literature, those forming the bulk of Charlotte
Guest’s Mabinogion, it turned out that many of the components of
them could be found in older literary works from Rome to India. There
was nothing specifically Welsh about them at all.
Good storytellers will lift material from any source in order to embellish
local landmarks. In nineteenth-century Cornwall, it was said that a prophet
had lived on Bodmin Moor, refreshing hunters who ventured onto it with
draughts of a marvellous drink held in a golden goblet. One day a braggart
among them vowed to his friends to drain the goblet; on failing in this
he threw the drink into the face of the sage, and rode off clutching the
vessel. His horse threw him, and he was killed, leaving his companions
to bury him under a cairn of rocks, the goblet still clutched in his hand.
The apparently remarkable feature of this story is that when the cairn
associated with the tale was excavated, in 1837, the skeleton of a man
was found beneath it, with a splendid golden goblet. He had been buried
in the early Bronze Age, and his grave not disturbed until the excavators
dug into it.
This assemblage of facts has been used to illustrate the extraordinary
range and accuracy of British folk memory, which had apparently preserved
a record of a particular burial for almost four thousand years. It was
cited as such as recently as 1981, by a very prominent and justly respected
prehistorian. The problem with it was spotted by another archaeologist,
Leslie Grinsell; that the legend of the prophet, the goblet and the braggart
is not recorded as associated with the cairn until 1899. It was also,
moreover, told of a mound in Yorkshire and ten different places in Norway,
and seems to be a Scandinavian legend which has been carried to Britain.
When the news of the finding of the Bronze Age goblet spread, some enterprising
storyteller seems to have attached it to Bodmin Moor.
* * *
Until the 1960s ‘oral tradition’ was taken very seriously
by many historians and folklorists as an authentic record of past events,
even if in an embroidered and symbolic form. It was used to supplement
written sources, and sometimes to replace them if none existed. Two caveats
need to be entered against this statement. The first is that there were
always members of both disciplines who expressed strong reservations concerning
this tendency, or even opposition to it. The second is that 'oral tradition'
needs to be distinguished from 'oral history' or 'spoken history', although
the two clearly overlap and scholars do not always use the terms with
precision. The former denotes a body of belief held collectively by a
whole society or by groups within it, and apparently passed down to them
by word of mouth. The latter denotes personal experience, usually of the
person making the statement, described directly to a researcher in conversation.
Oral history is a category of primary source material as important and
viable as any other, and one relatively neglected until the late twentieth
century. My concern here is with the former phenomenon, of beliefs about
the past held collectively by people who had no direct experience of what
they were describing.
The decisive re-evaluation of oral tradition came about in studies of
African peoples, and because of a division which had long existed between
historians and anthropologists in that field. The former had tended to
take literally the traditional histories told by tribes about their own
past, while the latter tended to see them as symbolic constructions of
considerable cultural importance but very little direct connection with
real events. In the 1960s the two views collided with each other, and
the anthropologists won. A few specific cases became celebrated in assisting
the swing of opinion. One concerned the Lotuko of the upper Nile, who
were visited by the explorer Samuel Baker in the 1860s. A subsequent English
visitor to them in the 1900s found that they could recall none of the
personalities and events encountered among them by Baker during his stay;
their memory for either stretched back for no more than a couple of decades.
Another case referred to the Tiv of northern Nigeria. British administrators
there in the early years of the twentieth century carefully wrote down
the oral genealogies upon which local rights and duties were based. Forty
years later the Tiv began to claim that these recorded genealogies were
incorrect, because they were no longer convenient to the obligations which
the tribe, in changing circumstances, wished to recognise. As such obligations
were always sanctioned by immemorial tradition, any alteration in them
had to be brought about by changing the memory of that tradition. A third
example was that of the Gonja state in northern Ghana. The legend of its
founder was noted by British observers as having been changed over the
period of sixty years since they had first recorded it, to take account
of the transformation in the number of local chiefdoms.
The mounting compilation of evidence such as this led Africanists to
conclude that oral traditions served more to sanction arrangements in
the present than to provide a faithful record of previous times; indeed,
that they left people with little perception of the past other than in
terms of the present. This did not mean that such traditions were useless
to scholars, for they sometimes contained information about genuine events
which could be used to complement written records, and at all times they
provided invaluable insights into the ways in which traditional societies
remade their perceptions of the past to serve present needs. They simply
could no longer be taken on face value; even where memories of the past
were supposed to be preserved carefully by specialists - tribal bards
and genealogists - the practical limit of accuracy was about three generations,
or about 120 years. That was when it ceased to be possible to remember
conversations with people who had actually once lived through the time
being recalled. Traditions concerning more remote occurrences could sometimes
be very accurate, but most were not, and without independent corroboration,
from written records, archaeology or linguistics, it was impossible to
tell which stories belonged to each category. Oral tradition could therefore
not be ignored whenever it was available to scholars, but could only be
used in combination with other sorts of evidence.
There seem to be two different, if intertwined, forces at work in the
fashioning of memory into mythology. One is the conscious or unconscious
transformation of the past into an artefact of maximum significance and
utility to the present. A three-dimensional example of this already given
is that of the Houston memorial in Texas. Another was encountered by three
archaeologists in 1988, when they were excavating a medieval village at
Faris in Jordan. The local tribe, thinking that what they were uncovering
might be valuable property, came to stake claims to it. Every day, the
excavators had to cope with a string of visitors, each with a vivid and
contradictory account of how they, or their father or grandfather, had
been brought up in the house currently being studied. Some of the claims
incorporated memories of deeds achieved when fighting the Turks in the
First World War. It was quite obvious to the archaeologists that none
of the buildings had been occupied since the middle ages, and, when they
checked the stories of wartime heroics against contemporary written records
of the war in that district; they found them to be impossible. An oral
mythology was being constructed on the spot.
The other force is in many respects an opposite one; the reshaping of
memories of the past as a result of later experiences which have transformed
the people who had the memories. An especially striking experience of
this can be found by returning to the Marquesas. When Western scholars
began to collect folklore and oral traditions from the native islanders,
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were told firmly
that the archipelago had first been settled from the east. They were also
informed that the monumental temple platforms and carved statues now lying
abandoned in the interior of the islands had been the work of an earlier
race, who were destroyed or absorbed by the ancestors of the modern Marquesans.
These stories were accompanied by names of leading individuals and occasional
circumstantial detail, and it is not surprising that they were believed
by some scholars. The Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa-wood raft,
the Kon-Tiki, from Peru to Polynesia to demonstrate how the earlier migration
would have occurred. Archaeologists and historians have now, however,
established beyond doubt that the truth was the exact opposite of the
story asserted by the Marquesans. The temples and statues had been built
by their own ancestors, who were, indeed, still building them during the
early nineteenth century when contact with Europeans had become regular.
Those ancestors had been the first and only settlers of the islands before
European contact, and they had arrived from the Western Pacific. What
the oral tradition of the early twentieth century actually teaches, therefore,
is a valuable lesson in how completely a bruising experience of colonialism
can cut a people off from its past. One specialist in Marquesan studies,
Greg Dening, has commented on the fact that the Marquesans are now totally
reliant on white scholars, who are equipped with the necessary archives
and archaeological techniques, to regain any sense of what their own history
and prehistory actually were.
* * *
The vagaries of folk memory are associated with defects in another presumed
entity much beloved of the Edwardians: folk wisdom. There is no doubt
that many of the sayings, remedies and topographical beliefs credited
to common and traditional peoples embody a great deal of good sense and
practical efficacy. On the other hand, some clearly do not. They are wrong
in every straightforward sense, even harmfully so, and represent a different
sort of myth-making; the preference of the traditional reputation of a
thing over its actual and discernible nature. Nigel Barley's Dowayo firmly
believed that chameleons were poisonous, despite a total lack of any objective
evidence for that opinion and fairly regular contact with the animal concerned;
the belief was accepted because it had always been accepted. Once again
a leap from a tribal society to the British Isles reveals a parallel rather
than a contrast, for the Manx have always dreaded the pygmy shrew, as
venomous. Now, it is logical to assume that at some point in the past
a person was bitten by one of these little rodents and exhibited symptoms
of poisoning resulting from some other cause but reasonably enough blamed
on the animal. It is also, however, logical to suppose that at some point
in the five thousand years in which human beings have inhabited the Isle
of Man, somebody might have worked out that the shrew is not in fact poisonous.
Apparently nobody did; once the belief was adopted, it could not be eradicated
by empirical reasoning.
Beliefs that are not empirically valid can, of course, have deep and
cogent symbolic significance, and most structures of religion, magic and
old-fashioned science include such symbolic conceptions of reality. Within
their own parameters, they are entirely sensible and logical. Having said
that, there are traditional beliefs which lack both any practical value
and any discernible framework of logic. Jacqueline Simpson, collecting
information on folk medicine in the border counties of England and Wales,
started to boggle at some of the remedies confidently reported to her:
to carry the mossy ball from a rose bush prevents toothache; to cut one's
toe- nails while sitting under an ash tree cures it; to carry a potato
or a mole's paw cures rheumatism; if you apply nine linen bandages smeared
with a mixture of powdered garlic and lard to a child with measles or
scarlet fever and then bury them, this will draw the fever out of him;
‘a fine fat spider, all alive and kicking’, eaten with butter
will cure ague; woodlice make good pills; powdered cockroaches cure dropsy;
cooked hedgehog cures epilepsy; mouse pie or roast mice cure bed-wetting;
eelskin garters prevent cramp; to tie a sheep's lungs or a bullock's melt
to the soles of a patient with pneumon will draw the infection out of
him; live woodlice hung in a bag round a baby's neck will cure him of
thrush; an onion on a mantelpiece will draw infections into it.
It is not surprising that she concluded that such beliefs seem ‘so
very odd and arbitrary that they defy all attempts at explanation'.
* * *
During the past three decades academic scholarship has taken two different
attitudes to the element of myth in its work. On the one hand, the healthy
iconoclasm that has swept the profession since the 1960s has resulted
in an unprecedented quantity and breadth of attacks upon received orthodoxies,
and of revelations of the subjective and sometimes erroneous way in which
the latter had been developed. A common subtitle of works of this period
which evaluated past research has been 'the making of a myth'. This attitude
has generally implied that by sweeping away such myths, a closer approximation
to the truth is obtained. At the same time there has been a growing sense
that this does not necessarily follow, and that - as in the case of the
Samoan controversy among anthropologists - the destruction of a former
certainty does not automatically result in a few and better-founded one,
but in doubts as to how the truth may ever be attained.
The implications for a historian are that the discipline of history operates
like a science in its negative aspects, of testing and evaluating assertions,
and like an art in its positive respects, of advancing opinions about
the nature of the past. Specifically, it is a bardic art, as the historian
is expected to address the society within which she or he is operating
and to hold up to it images of the past. During the past couple of decades
doubts have often been aired concerning the response of the public to
historical revisionism, with the argument that most societies want histories
which provide positive information and appear to explain, helpfully and
persuasively, features of the present which are most apparent, and intriguing
or disturbing, to those living in it. This is, runs the argument, what
most people believe that they are paying the professionals to do. While
that view is clearly accurate in many respects, my own experience of the
public - whether encountered as pupils, neighbours, correspondents, lecture-
hall audiences, tour-groups, mass-media personnel or members of social
groupings whom I have studied in the course of my own research - is that
it enjoys the spectacle of myth-busting just as much as the revelation
of positive new information about the past. It still wants from historians
above all what it has always wanted since the first bard tuned an instrument
to sing of days of old: to be edified and to be entertained, and of the
two the latter is the more important. In that sense the present-day historian
faces a pair of constant, tremendous, challenges. One is to strive for
methods and attitudes which embody the best chance of recovering as much
knowledge of the past as possible, from as many different viewpoints as
can be attained. The second is to craft that information for an audience
in such a way as to turn it into stories with the carrying power of myth.
Ronald Hutton
Edited for this webpage by Krys Boswell, October 2003
Note : no footnotes are included here. For the full text with footnotes
and references, look out for the book, published by Hambledon and London,
available from Samhain 03, price : £19.99.
