'A Happy Accident of War' by Karen Maitland

Daffodils in the hedgerow in Tamar Valley
Photo:Tony Atkin

‘Daffy-down-dilly is new come to town, with a yellow petticoat, and a green gown.’

A traditional nursery rhyme recorded in Songs for the Nursery, 1805

Daffy-down-dilly, is an old name for the daffodil dating back to 1500’s. Other ancient English names for the flower were affodil, affodilly, dilly, daff-a-down-dilly or the Lent lily. And, if you are lucky enough to find yourself in the beautiful Tamar Valley on the border of Devon and Cornwall at this time of year, you will discover that the high banks that line the narrow winding lanes around the villages of Weir Quay and Bere Alston are bursting with daffodils. Not just the plain yellow ones you might expect, but white ones too, and double blooms with twisted petals, or vivid orange trumpets. Between February and May, you can spot as many as 15 different varieties growing wild in the hedgerows and woods there, a riot of perfumed flowers – all as a result of a happy accident from a much darker time in world history.

Wild Daffodil known as the 'Lent Lily'
Photo: Meneerke bloem

As early as 1597, John Gerard noted in his herbal, ‘Historie of Plants’ that ‘The common wilde Daffodill growth wilde in fields and sides of woods in the West parts of England.’ But he added that, unlike the ancient Greek nymphs who went out to gather wild daffodils, Londoners had no need to seek out the wild ones, since daffodils grew ‘in great aboundance’ in London gardens.

But in the sheltered and sunny Tamar valley of Devon, daffodils came into bloom much earlier than the rest of England, not that this was much use to the locals. You can’t eat daffodils and in fact, country folk were wary about even bringing them into the house. There was an old superstition in Devon that if these flowers were brought inside, no ducks would be hatched that year on that farm. On the Isle of Man, daffodils in the house would prevent geese hatching and if daffodils were brought indoors when hens were sitting on eggs in Hertfordshire, it was said no chicks would hatch. 

Flower Women of Covent Garden 
Photo: LSE Library
From 'Street Life in London, 1877
By John Thomson & Adolphe Smith

But by the 19th century, gardens had become a luxury in London and in the other rapidly expanding and overcrowded industrial towns and few city dwellers hatched their own poultry. So, the scented golden daffodils, far from being ‘unlucky’, were prized in the soot-caked towns as welcome sign of spring. Enterprising Devonians began to gathered both wild and cultivated blooms which they sent down the Tamar River by ‘market boat’ to the great port of Plymouth, where the wives of merchants had money enough to spare for such luxuries. 

But with the building of the railways across England, suddenly a very large and lucrative market for daffodils opened up. From 1865 onwards, daffodils grown in the warm fields of the Tamar could be taken by river boat to the railway stations and thence by train to Covent Garden market in London. So, more and more fields were planted up with this botanical gold.

Bere Alston Station, Devon 1930
Photo: Roger Griffith

So, important was the trade that in 1890, a railway station was built at the village of Bere Alston where daffodils and other market garden produce could be loaded directly on to trains for London, eliminating the need to carry them down river by boat. This ensured the blooms reached London faster and in better condition. 

Many different varieties were cultivated in the Tamar valley to extend the flowering season. One, known as the ‘Whitsun Lily’ because it blooms late in May, was a beautiful double white blossom, which had been discovered in a local hedge in 1880, and was so prized in London it was transported packed in boxes lined with blue tissue paper to help preserve its strong sweet perfume.

Maximus superbus
Photo: Uleli

Some varieties they grew were old and native to England, such as the daffodil now known Maximus superbus, a large yellow trumpet with twisted petals which was has been recorded since the mid-16th century. Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of this one when he wrote in The Winter’s Tale (1610) - ‘Daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty.’ (take is used here in the Elizabethan sense, meaning to ‘enchant’ or ‘bewitch’) 

But the Tamar farmers began to try other varieties too, such as Van Sion, a double star-shaped daffodil developed by a Flemish man recorded as living in London in 1620. In fact – whisper this if you dare – some Devonians even lay claim to making the sweet-scented daffodil a more popular button-hole for the Welsh on St David’s Day than the pungent leek, when a Devon engineer discovered the pretty yellow daffodil known as Sir Watkin in 1810, and introduced it to Wales.

The daffodil business was blooming. But in 1939, came disaster in the form of the World War II. Britain could no longer rely on imported food. All over country, flowers and lawns in parks and gardens were dug up and the land re-planted with food crops. The daffodil fields of the Tamar could not be spared. The bulbs were torn up. But what to do with them? Daffodil bulbs are poisonous so they could not be fed to livestock, but the fields needed to be cleared swiftly. So, the bulbs were dumped in the surrounding hedgerows to rot. But some took root and began to naturalize – rays of golden sunshine in the darkest hours of the war. 

Ice Follies 
Photo: Phil Sangwell

After the war, bulb fields were once again planted, some with new varieties such as the white Ice Follies brought over from the Netherlands in 1953, as a vigorous grower. But as country railway lines and stations were closed, the trade never thrived again in the Tamar as it had before the war, and when rail transport for daffodils finally ended in 1969, the Ice Follies too were dug up and tossed into the hedges and verges. But like their older cousins, these daffodils still run wild in valley, bringing joy.

In some of the former fields left to pasture,
the daffodils still come up each spring.
Photo: Tony Atkin
geograph.org.uk

If you discover a daffodil growing wild and want to know if it is one of the old varieties, a rough guide is that those which existed before 1890, have thin, twisted or rolled petals which are separated at the base, and often twisted leaves too. Varieties developed since 1890 have broader flatter petals that overlap at the base. Enjoy your dilly spotting this spring!

All Women's History Matters by Janet Few

 

Here on the History Girls’ website you will read posts about women’s history, posts about the history of women and sometimes, accounts of the lives of individual women. If you are a woman reading this, have you told your own story? Every woman’s life story is part of the fabric of women’s history, no story is too ‘ordinary’, no story is boring or irrelevant. History is weighted in favour of men; it is important to redress the balance.

Writing your life story can be a daunting and for some, a painful experience. At best, we relive life’s less than wise decisions and teenaged embarrassments, at worst, we confront traumas of the past that may have been left buried. Every woman owes it to herself to record an account of her life, the achievements and the hardships alike. For most of us, it is not going to become a best-seller, maybe no one will read it but the writing itself is a satisfying and cathartic process. Your story is about so much more than you, it is also about the history of the communities that you lived in, the schools you attended, the people whose lives you have touched. In a fast-changing society, the lifestyles of our childhoods seem like another world to subsequent generations.

 

Everyone can tell their own story; you don’t have to be a writer. Back in 2014, I set out to help eighty women recount their memories, with particular emphasis on the period 1946-1969. This era, like many others, was one of enormous change, as post-war Britain transformed into the ‘Swinging Sixties’. We moved from liberty bodices to mini-skirts , from ration books to ready meals. These years heralded the dawn of the National Health Service, the comprehensive education system, a new wave of feminism and conspicuous consumerism. In the end, those memories became a book,  Remember Then: women’s memories of 1946-1969 and how to write your own. The book has my name on the cover but the words are those of my eighty volunteers.

 

If you are wondering how to set about writing your own life story, here is some advice that others who have taken this step have found useful. Set yourself a deadline and make that realistic; there is nothing worse than not meeting self-imposed deadline. Most people find that about a year is a suitable time-scale. Divide the task into sections and subsections. Although the temptation is to write chronologically, it is actually easier and often more interesting, to take a thematic approach. Having said that, a timeline is helpful as a framework. Add key dates of births, marriages and death of those close to you. List house moves and changes of school and work. You can include holidays, concerts, sporting events and other special occasions. Don’t forget achievements, learning to  driving, passing an exam, winning a competition and anything else you are proud of. Note down local, national and international events that had an impact on your life. Raid your photograph album and any souvenirs you may have kept to help jog your memory; reminisce with contemporaries.

Then start to put notes together. Take a topic at a time; covering one a month works well. In this way you can write about, clothes, homes, neighbourhoods, work, leisure time, food, schools, celebrations and relationships with friends and family, for example. Let’s just think about the topic of clothes. There is no need to spend a whole day writing all you can remember about what you and your family used to wear. In ten to fifteen minutes you can write about footwear, or swimwear, or nightwear. The key is to break the task down into manageable chunks. When you are writing about homes, take one home at a time, one room at a time and describe it. As you do so, can you recall an incident that happened in that room? If so, include it at that point.

 

Don’t put this task off until next year, the year after or when you retire, make a start now. One word of warning, depending on who you decide to share your story with. Your
story is also the story of your parents, your siblings, your spouse and others whose lives have touched your own. You may have to face ethical dilemmas about what you share, who you anonymise and what you leave out. Of course you want to tell the complete story, the good, the bad and the ugly; a sanitised account of just the successes and the cheerful bits does you no favours and paints a distorted version of the past. History hurts, it can be an uncomfortable and dark place. We’ve have all made mistakes and done things that we regret and we shouldn’t airbrush this from our stories. Just be mindful of the impact on others whose lives have touched your own. Good luck.

A Broch Blog by Susan Price

 

The broch of Mousa: by kind permission of David Simpson.

Mousa is a small island off the coast of mainland Shetland with a Norse name. The 'a' at the end, as in many British place-names, means 'island.' 'Mous' means 'mossy.'

The 'Mousa boat' ferries you across to the moss. It's a nature reserve now, and well worth visiting for the birds and seals alone. But what I wanted to see -- what I'd wanted to see for years -- was the Broch of Mousa. It did not disappoint.

The first glimpse of the broch is a striking: a monumental tower, against sky and sea, its walls gently curving like those of a modern cooling tower.

Amazement only grows from there.

Towers in the North by Armit

To consider place-names again, the word ‘broch’ is the same as the ‘borough’ or ‘bury’. It means ‘fortified place’ or ‘castle.’ Archaeologists adopted the Scottish form ‘broch’ as a name for the ‘towers in the north,’ the dry-stone, ancient towers found all over Scotland and only in Scotland.

It’s impossible to accurately date these mysterious towers though it’s broadly agreed that they are ‘Iron Age’ and the oldest may be as much as three thousand years old— but Maeshowe, in Orkney, shows that there was a strong tradition of building dry-stone corbelled structures, going back five thousand years. (A corbelled roof is where dry-stone slabs are skilfully overlapped to form a smooth, inward curving roof sealed with a single cap-stone.)

 

The interior of Maeshowe, Orkney: Islandhopper, wikimedia

 

Above, the interior of the passage-grave, Maeshowe, on Orkney, showing its smooth, inward curving, corbelled ceiling. It is acknowledged as 'the finest Neolithic building surviving in north-west Europe.' The main building is estimated to be at least 5000 years old, making it older than the pyramids. Its entrance is aligned to the setting sun at the midwinter solstice.

The immense, upright stone slabs at the corners have no constructive purpose at all. They are not holding up the roof or supporting the walls as you might think. They were already in place before Maeshowe was built. The grave was built around them, as if to preserve or honour them. Possibly they were standing stones. Perhaps the remains of another house or grave. I don't know about you, but this makes my brain boggle.

Mousa’s broch is the most complete of all brochs, still standing 13m (42/43 feet) high. Its twin, the broch of Burraland, which stood on the other side of the strait between Mousa and mainland Shetland, was ‘robbed out’ for building stone and is now only 2-5 metres (8 feet) high. It's sometimes suggested that Mousa's broch was protected from destruction by its position on a small island -- even though Mousa was home to stone-hungry crofters until the 19th century.

Mousa’s excellent preservation tempts us to take it as a model for all brochs but archaeology shows that Mousa is very untypical. It’s quite small, underwent considerable alteration in antiquity and, overall, is much better built than your average broch. Its superior construction may have been its salvation: it was simply harder to dismantle than other brochs. Whatever preserved it, there’s no doubt it deserves its status as a World Heritage Site.

To give a simple account of the broch’s interior:

 

Inside the broch of Mousa: copyright: David Simpson.

There are no windows in the outer wall and only one entrance, facing the sea. This entrance is 1-5 metres (5 ft) high and the passage behind it is 5 metres (16ft) long. At the end of the passage a ‘bar-hole’ can be seen in the wall. This is where a solid wooden 'bar' would have been put in place, to prevent the door being opened from outside. Whoever lived -- or took shelter -- within these massive walls was keen on some other people staying outside.

The entrance passage opens into a roughly circular space. At its centre is a hearth and a stone water-tank, reminiscent of the five thousand year old neolithic houses at Orkney’s Skara Brae. 

Although the outer circumference of Mousa Broch is 15m (45ft), the interior is only 6m (19-20ft) in diameter. Built into the massive base of the broch are three large corbelled cells, differing slightly in size. The largest is about 1-5 metres (5ft) wide, 4 meters (13ft) long and 3 metres (11 ft) high. The doors into these cells are raised above the floor of the broch, perhaps to keep out draughts. Each also has a built-in shelf— again, like Skara Brae, where the bed-spaces had shelves built into the walls beside them.

The walls above the cell-doors have gaps or windows constructed into them, possibly to lighten the load each lintel has to bear and to allow light into the cells.

Modern houses can have rooms smaller than these without the storage.

Mousa's tower is double-skinned, with a ring of outer wall, a ring of inner wall and a gap between them. The outer and inner walls are pinned together with slabs of slate. In this way ‘galleries’ were formed between the walls. It's possible, with some stooping and squeezing, to walk along these galleries to their blind ends. At other brochs, at least where enough of these galleries remain to judge, it isn't. They are too low and too much stone protrudes into them.

These galleries are due to Mousa broch's method of construction: the twin walls were built up to a certain height, then slates were used to bridge the gap between them; and then the walls were built higher and 'pinned' again. The galleries weren't intended to be lived in, or to be used as storage -- but all the same, I'd guess that they were so used, at least to some extent.

The broch's builders used the gap between the walls and the pinning slabs to make an interior stair which winds inside the walls right to the top of the tower. (The hand-rail is modern.)

Mousa's stairs: Wikimedia: Nicholas Mutton

 

 Beyond this, much is conjecture.

Wikimedia

For instance, the inner wall was constructed with tall rows of gaps, (giving ancient Mousa a startlingly modern ‘architectural’ look.) It’s often argued that these were to ‘light the stairwell’ and the corbelled cells, which they certainly do today because now the tower is roofless. Perhaps it was roofed somehow, in the past, and the purpose of the 'gaps' was to reduce weight on the walls?

 

 

Roofed or Open?

 There are endless arguments about what the summit of the broch was originally like. The top was somewhat reconstructed -- with guesswork -- in the 1960s and '80s, so that now you can walk around on top, admiring the view. But no one knows for certain what the top of the broch was like when first built.

Some argue that there was no walkway and that the broch was always open to the weather, as now, allowing the rain and snow to fall down between the concentric walls.

Another argument insists that the broch was roofed somehow, though no one can quite figure out how. Maybe the gap between the walls was turfed or thatched, leaving the courtyard open... Maybe the whole top of the broch was covered by a conical thatch, making the broch look like a very tall Iron Age roundhouse.

 

Photo: wikimedia

 

 Stretch!

 The Open-to-the-Sky mob reply that the weight of the supporting timbers, plus thatch, pressing outward against the walls would make this unlikely. Also, it would make the broch's interior impenetrably dark. (True, but many houses in the past were windowless and dark. Viking longhouses, for instance. Inhabitants spent much of the day outside and, at night, there was fire and lamplight.)

It's a conundrum. About the roof, I'm neutral but think there must have been some kind of platform up the top there. Why go to the enormous effort of building a dry-stone tower that may, originally,
have been more than fifteen metres high (49 ft) , with a stair climbing all the way to the top, if not to stand up there and see further than from ground level?

More Conjecture

At some point in antiquity, a stone wheelhouse was built inside the stone tower. The hearthstone and water tank belong to this wheelhouse, as does the wide stone ‘bench’ that runs around the inside of the tower. (You can see the 'bench' or wall in the photo of the interior above, running around the wall towards the left,)

The builders of the stone wheelhouse continued to use the broch's corbelled cells, because they left gaps in their own stone wall, to allow them entrance. But they built across the entrance to the broch's stairs and galleries, blocking them off. Obviously, they had no love of a sea-view or a need to know who was approaching.

It was possibly around the time this inner wheelhouse was built that the broch’s entrance was altered, making it much larger. This also meant breaking through the floor of a corbelled cell built above the entrance. (This cell must originally have been entered via the stairs and some kind of upper floor. There are also endless arguments about how this upper floor may have been built into the broch.)

 

Dun Carloway, Lewis: by permission of David Simpson

By making Mousa's entrance larger, it was also made less defensive
than the entrances of other brochs, such as Dun Carloway on Lewis, where the doorway is much smaller and narrower.

Why were the brochs built? The theory favoured in the 19th Century was that they were defensive ‘castles.’ Hence their name: 'broch, a fortified place.' Then, in the 'Peace and Love' of the 1960s and 70s, it became fashionable to say that they weren’t defensive because they couldn’t have withstood a determined attack. No, they were merely the prestigious houses of a ruling elite.

Brochs have tall, thick walls, entirely windowless on the outside. Most brochs, unlike Mousa, have low narrow doors, that make you stoop double to enter. Yet the builders could make corbelled ‘cells’ 3 metres high, so the entrances weren’t low for ease of building. They could construct windows too, so the outer walls were deliberately made without openings.

Behind the entrance, brochs have long, low, easily defended passages with doors which could be strongly barred. None of this speaks to me of an elite’s comfort. It positively screams ‘defensive’.

If a broch couldn’t have withstood a determined attack, neither could the later pele towers of the Borders but no one doubts they were defensive. Rather than withstand ‘determined attack' the peles were meant to discourage attack from largely opportunistic bands of reivers. They said: 'We're ready for you and you won't have it easy.'

The reivers were some three thousand years later but human nature stays much the same. Why invest so much time and effort into building a broch unless there’s somebody around who scares you? People capable of building a broch could, if they'd wished, have built something equally impressive and much more comfortable.

Who were the scary people? Unruly neighbours or passing armies, as with the reivers? Other commentators favour the idea that it was the Romans— but some brochs were probably built long before any possible appearance of any Roman ships off the Scottish coast.

Again, the truth is, no one knows -- which leads to many more fun arguments? Castles? Manor-houses? Cathedrals?

Many brochs seem to have had clusters of much smaller wheelhouses around them -- there are faint traces at Mousa. This might support the manor-house theory or make the broch a place of refuge during raids. Did they, like the peles, have a signalling beacon on top? Or were they look-out towers, watching for danger approaching from land or sea?

The majority of brochs are near the sea. Mousa, and the Burraland broch had views up and down the Shetland coast. Dun Carloway stands near a natural harbour on Lewis. During the time they were built, we know there was trade between Ireland and the islands -- and with what was then not yet England.

A natural harbour often becomes a market-place. Prosperous markets attract thieves and ‘trade’ easily turns into ‘raid’ and slave-taking. If a market town wants to keep its trade, it has to provide protection. Were the brochs garrisons and look-out towers, protecting a market?

In reality, the brochs may have had several purposes: defensive, if need be, but also providing advance warning of the approach of ships, for good or ill. They discouraged attacks by loudly declaring in stone: ‘We’re ready for you.’

All of which may be nonsense. Perhaps they were very expensive and uncomfortable prestige homes for the Iron Age plutocrat. What is without question is that they are astonishing feats of ancient ingenuity and engineering. Anyone who thinks the pre-Roman inhabitants of these islands were 'unsophisticated' should visit the Broch of Mousa.

And Maeshowe.

And Skara Brae.

Follow this link for a short video tour of Mousa Broch.

And if you're interested in more discussion about how, or if, the broch was roofed and what exactly it was used for, follow this link

 Susan Price's website

Tom Lehrer is Still Alive - Joan Lennon

Tom Lehrer in 1960 (wiki commons)

We live in insane times. And the Cold War was an insane time. And so I guess it's not surprising I've been thinking a lot about what it was like growing up during that craziness and now being old in this craziness.

The Berlin Wall did come down, though it was impossible to imagine it ever would. What will be our symbol of a new and better time? Whatever it'll be, we can't stop working towards it.

And meanwhile, please spend some time with the inimitable Tom Lehrer here. I wrote about him back in 2020. He's 96 now, still alive, and still my hero.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

The Lesser Key of Solomon ... by Susan Stokes-Chapman

During the 18th century, Europe witnessed a growing fascination with the occult, fuelled by a mix of Renaissance magic, medieval mysticism, and Enlightenment-era curiosity. Among the most infamous grimoires of this period was The Lesser Key of Solomon, also known as Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. The grimoire was a compilation of earlier magical texts, attributed to King Solomon, and believed to contain powerful knowledge on summoning spirits, commanding demons, and seeking divine wisdom. While its origins trace back to the 17th century (mostly from materials that were written two centuries earlier), its influence remained strong well into the 1700s as secret societies and individual scholars sought out 'forbidden' knowledge.

The Secret Seal of Solomon

The Lesser Key of Solomon is divided into five books: Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, Ars Notoria. Each detail different aspects of spiritual and supernatural interactions which reflect a blend of medieval demonology, Renaissance angelology, and astrological influences, all of which remained relevant in 18th-century esoteric circles.

The most famous part of The Lesser Key of Solomon, the Ars Goetia, describes 72 demons, their ranks, abilities, and the rituals needed to summon and control them. Each demon, from powerful kings to lesser-ranked spirits, could grant knowledge, wealth, or other supernatural favours ... if properly compelled. The practice of Goetic magic, though condemned by religious authorities, persisted underground, with some scholars* believing that these spirits could be harnessed for both good and evil.

The 72 Demon Sigils

Ars Theurgia-Goetia deals with a different class of spirits, often regarded as more neutral than those in the Ars Goetia. The spirits of the Ars Theurgia-Goetia were believed to inhabit the elements and could be summoned for guidance and assistance. While demonologists of the time such as Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) debated their exact nature, many viewed them as intermediaries between angels and demons.

The Ars Paulina was named after the apostle Paul. It divides spiritual beings according to planetary hours and the zodiac, with the first part describing angels governing different hours of the day, and the second describing zodiacal angels, each associated with specific astrological influences. Astrology played a crucial role in 18th-century mysticism, and this section provided a structured method for summoning the celestial forces.

In Ars Almadel, the magician is instructed on how to create the “Almadel,” a wax tablet used to communicate with angels from the four cardinal directions. These angels were believed to grant divine wisdom and guidance, making this part of The Lesser Key of Solomon more closely aligned with religious mysticism than with demonic magic.

Finally, the Ars Notoria, unlike previous sections, focused on prayers, meditations, and sacred orations meant to enhance memory, wisdom, and eloquence. Many scholars in the 18th century viewed this book as a way to access divine knowledge without engaging in dangerous spirit summoning. It was particularly popular among those who sought intellectual enlightenment rather than supernatural power.

Due to the secretive nature of such studies, and the stigma around demonology, direct citations from these aforementioned scholars are rare. However, it is widely assumed that The Lesser Key of Solomon was a text referred to or at the very least known by *18th century figures such as Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743-1795), Ebenezer Sibly (1751-1799), Martinez de Pasqually (1727-1774), and Francis Barrett (1774-unknown).

It was Francis Barrett who became my first occultist inspiration for my sophomore novel THE SHADOW KEY, an idea I'd harboured since 2006. While Francis himself ultimately did not end up in the novel, his own occult text The Magus, (London, 1801) and his references to The Lesser Key of Solomon became imperative to the recasting of the occult aspects of my novel. It led me to creating an 18th century scholar of my own named Julian Tresilian, who has a copy of The Lesser Key of Solomon in his extensive bookcase, and though THE SHADOW KEY is of course fiction, collectors such as he typically had no qualms in keeping the Solomonic volume close at hand. Despite being viewed as a dangerous book of black magic or as a misunderstood spiritual text, its legacy endured throughout the 18th century and beyond; even today, this grimoire continues to inspire literature, art, and popular culture. In the 1700s, as now, the quest for hidden knowledge - whether divine or demonic - remained a powerful force in human history.

~~~~~~

I explore 18th century occult thinking in my second historical novel The Shadow Key, publishing in paperback in February 2025. You can order a copy by clicking the image below:

www.susanstokeschapman.com

Social Media: @SStokesChapman

Rethinking history with the help of K-drama by Gillian Polack

 

I started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US, UK, or Australian television or read most books, I sympathised with the hero. This was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality or sad circumstances. Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief protagonist as being someone who requires that level of audience support in our society. Because I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a story as a hero.

My personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also culturally) only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have, myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?

I knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the validity of that narrative path. Given that the hero was seldom from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a privilege to that hero (normally, as I said, white and male and quite young but in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and who had a British or US accent) that I never give myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the hero’s path and cheered him along.

The hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of related kinds. The stories use similar beats and plot points. The main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not from particular English-speaking countries. This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference to start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes – I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean heroes rather than American or British) opened that choice up to me. 

Right now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and about the same time I started watching K-drama) I saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that, historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before. There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also, that hate rested comfortably on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I was living the history at that point. It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday.  This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for the non-fiction book here (with a few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you. 

Fiction writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I needed to know why all this was so and what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of an entire forest ,I had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with popular history. I went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.

What did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the patterns others see or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the past, or that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we have and whose past it actually reveals. For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay at the heart of how a given historian might interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about “history of the Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the Rhineland.”

Other historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But what of Jewish farmers? What of those working in trade or craft who traveled to other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records of customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?

What I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives. The concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.

Inherent in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are shared. Who we know matters to how we share culture and how we live our lives now, but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.

Christian-based sources are those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The fact that only a part of society had been explained is missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but still remained close to Charlemagne? Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin sources can ignore. It’s a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.

In some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is the story of that place and time.

To return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story, but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other kinds of stories. 

What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see history.Once upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were explained in detail. The participants were then given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of Arthur as told by Mallory.

Quietly, I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s journey.This is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it into popular story. 

It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told differently, in other words. Our most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.

When friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish history for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view of TV heroes. 

And so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.