[This is the text of a talk I gave at the University of Warwick, 25th January 2017 in which I consider the fluidity of the relationships between folklore, memory and history.]
I’m here to talk to you about
folklore and memory. What I’m really going to do is tell you a lot of stories,
and when we get on to the discussion part of this, I hope you’ll feel able to
tell some stories to me. First of all,
though, it would be helpful to define some terms. I’m going to assume we have
some kind of collective agreement of what memory is or at least what it feels
like. Memory is about personal identity: we depend on memories, however
fragmentary, for our sense of who we are – which is why it’s so awful when we
lose them. But what, please, is folklore?
I want to suggest that folklore can be a form of memory and that memory
actually is a form of folklore. Both
are fascinating, both can be highly unreliable, and I think both are
unreliable-but-powerful forms of history. I’ll try and explain why, as I go
on.
Let’s start with family folklore –
personal tales passed down to us from our parents and grandparents. (These are known as 'memorates': tales of personal experience told from memory.) Perhaps
there was a family tragedy or a wartime adventure, or some striking act of
generosity or betrayal. Most of us know
several stories about our parents – anecdotes about their childhood, the story
of how they met. We probably know fewer about our grandparents and quite
possibly none at all about our great-grandparents: but family folklore seems to
provide a sense of identity. We like to ‘know where we came from’. It gives us
roots. One of my grandmothers was brought up in India, where she was born in
1886. She was a great raconteur and extremely pretty even as an old lady. Here she is, aged about eighteen.
Many if not most of her stories involved men whose attentions she had to evade or fight off. Whether consciously or not, she told stories which emphasised her own attractiveness, courage and resource. There was one about encountering four soldiers as she came home from playing tennis (‘All I had with me was my tennis racket, Katherine!’) and another which involved an amorous male in a railway carriage, from whom she escaped with the assistance of an old lady and a parrot. I wish I could remember it, but I was only sixteen or so when she was telling me these stories, and hadn’t really been paying attention. Only the most striking of family tales survive three generations.
Most of the stories of most the people
in all the generations before us have been lost. Some are simply forgotten,
others are deliberately suppressed. Successful stories by definition are the ones
we continue for some reason to value and therefore to tell. Before I go on, let
me just say that folklore is a massively inclusive genre. It is quite literally
the stuff people tell to one another, from practical information on how to to treat
a cough or get bloodstains out of linen, to how to keep on the right side of
the fairies, or the gods, or God. (Also practical!) Folklore includes myths and
legends, songs, skipping rhymes and lullabies – ghost stories, fairy tales
and jokes – family history, local history, natural history… All these categories shade into one another.
Let’s get some of them out of the way.
First off, I’m not going to be
talking today about myths or legends. Myths
attempt to make emotional sense of the world and our place in it. (So the story of Persephone’s abduction by
Hades is a religious, poetic exploration of the mysteries of winter and summer,
death and birth.) Legends recount the deeds of heroes, like Achilles or King
Arthur. There are often whole cycles of legends about single outstanding
figures.
I’m not going to be talking much
about fairy tales either. The difference between folk tales and fairy tales is
that fairy tales don’t ask to be
believed. They are set far away and long ago. No one’s ever thought there was
an historical Little Snow White or tried to point out the ruins of the Sleeping
Beauty’s castle. Fairy tales are quite definitely fiction.
A folk tale is a humbler, more local affair. (By the way, as I’m talking today
I’m going to be using the terms folk tale
and story more or less
interchangeably.) A folk tale’s protagonists may be well-known neighbourhood
characters or they may be anonymous, but specific places become important. Folk tales are set in real, named
landscapes. Local hills, lakes, stones and even churches are explained as the
work of giants, trolls or the Devil. Folk tales often also
involve legendary heroes, because everyone wants to be close to fame.
All over Britain, from Tintagel to Edinburgh and beyond, there are
places
associated with King Arthur. This is Arthur’s Stone near Dorston,
Herefordshire – a Neolithic chamber tomb which according to various
stories was either built by
Arthur, or was his burial place, or was a place where he fought and
buried a rival king. I said that fairy tales don’t ask to be believed.
Well,
folk tales do. Often – not always, but often – they tug at our sleeves,
hinting
they contain some kind of truth. We know there wasn’t ever a real
Sleeping
Beauty. But was there ever a real King Arthur? Was there a real Robin
Hood?
Well, was there? Do folk tales ever
preserve ‘genuine’ folk memories? As in,
historical truths? Here’s a man who
thought not.
This grim-but-dapper-looking gentleman is Fitzroy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan (1885-1964), amateur anthropologist and one-time President of the Folklore Society. In his 1936 book The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, he provides a delightfully sceptical example of the way in which a tradition may become attached to a place:
1: ‘This house
dates from Elizabethan times, and since it lies close to the road which the
Virgin Queen must have taken when travelling from X to Y, it may well have been
visited by her.’
2: ‘This house
is said to have been visited by Queen Elizabeth on her way from X to Y.’
3: ‘The state
bedroom is over the entrance. It is this room which Queen Elizabeth probably
occupied when she broke her journey here on her way from X to Y.’
4: ‘According to
local tradition, the truth of which there is no reason to doubt, the bed in the
room over the entrance is that in which Queen Elizabeth slept when she stayed
here on her way from X to Y.’
This is very shrewd and funny. All
the same, any individual instance of such a story is going to be hard to kill,
because the Queen undoubtedly did spend the night in a great many different
English country houses, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The
owner of the house, who takes pride in the story, will not want to listen to
Lord Raglan casting cold water. The owner wants to believe it.
Stories grow in the telling, too.
Here’s another tale. A couple of years ago, BBC Radio 4 ran a series called ‘A
History of the World in 100 Objects’. It was organised and written by the
British Museum’s director Neil McGregor, and of course there was also a
book. Ranging from a 2 million year old
African handaxe to a modern solar powered Chinese lamp, McGregor used artifacts
in the British Museum as the focus for a hundred thoughtful essays on the cultures
and circumstances which produced them. Number 19 in the series is this.
It’s a gold cape, it dates from between 1900 to 1600 BC, and it was found near Mold in North Wales in 1833. Here’s how McGregor introduces it:
For the local
workmen, it must have seemed as if the old Welsh legends were true. They’d been
sent to quarry stone in a field known as Bryn yr Ellyllon, which translates as
the Fairies’ Hill or the Goblins’ Hill. Sightings of a ghostly boy, clad in gold, a glittering apparition in the
moonlight, had been reported frequently enough for travellers to avoid the hill
after dark. As the workmen dug into a large mound, they uncovered a stone-lined
grave. In it were hundreds of amber beads, several bronze fragments, and the
remains of a skeleton. And wrapped around the skeleton was a mysterious crushed
object – a large and finely decorated broken sheet of pure gold.
McGregor goes on to tell how the
workmen ‘eagerly shared out chunks’ of the gold, with ‘the tenant farmer taking
the largest pieces’, and that it was only ‘three years after the spoils had
been divided’ that the BM bought from the tenant farmer ‘the first and largest
of the fragments of gold which had been his share of the booty’.
It’s quite a story. I blogged about
it myself back in 2013. I wrote:
The mound those
workmen were digging into was in a field called Bryn yr Ellyllon, the Hill of
the Elves; and the legend of the hill was that it was haunted by a ghostly boy,
clad all in gold. Isn’t it possible that
the sight of a young man being laid to rest in his shimmering golden cape so
impressed and touched the onlookers that for nearly four thousand years if a
child said, ‘Mother, who’s buried in that hill?’ the answer was ‘a boy all
dressed in gold?’
When my friend the writer
Susan Price expressed some scepticism about all this, I did some checking, and
unfortunately for me and Mr Neil McGregor, I discovered problems, even
some inaccuracies in this romantic account. The discovery was originally made public on
December 17th 1835 when John Gage, FRS, exhibited the flattened
remains of the cape to the Society of Antiquaries of London. The cape had been dug up two years and two
months previously, on 11th October 1833 (which seems to me
speedy work for the early 19th century) and the tenant farmer – Mr
John Langford – had been corresponding with antiquaries about it as early as
January 1835; so to represent him as a treasure hunter interested only in
‘booty’ is rather unfair. A further letter of the same year written by the
Vicar of Mold, Charles Butler Clough, provides the fullest account.
A short time
before the discovery of the Corselet, workmen had … made a considerable pit for
some yards into the adjoining field. A new tenant, Mr John Langford … employed
persons to fill in the hole by shovelling down the top of the bank. While so
employed … about four feet from the top of the bank and without doubt upon the
original surface, they perceived the Corselet.
Connected with
this subject, it is certainly a strange circumstance that an elderly woman, who
had been to Mold to lead her husband home late at night from a public house,
should have seen or fancied, a spectre “of unusual size, and clothed in a coat
of gold, which shone like the sun” to
have crossed the road before her to the identical mound of gravel, and that she
should tell the story next morning many
years ago, amongst others to the very person, Mr John Langland, whose
workmen drew the treasure out of its prison-house. Her having related such a story is an undoubted
fact. I cannot, however, learn that there was any tradition of such an
interment having taken place; though possibly this old woman might have heard
something of the kind in her youth, which still dwelt upon her memory …
associated with the common appellation of the Bank, the Fairies’ or Goblins’
Hill, and a very general idea that the place was haunted.
So there hadn’t been ‘frequent
sightings’, plural, of a ‘glittering apparition’ of a ‘golden boy’: the Vicar
of Mold never says if the old woman thought the figure was male or female,
young or old. And she saw it only once. But no one can resist a ghost story,
can they? And they get embroidered. If
you Google ‘Mold Gold Cape’ today you’ll come across references to ‘numerous
past sightings’ of a ‘ghostly, giant warrior in golden armour’ who even used to
‘beckon travellers’ towards his burial place. However all that can be said for
sure is that this spot, like many another in Wales, was named ‘Hill of the
Elves’ before the finding, and was believed to be haunted. Since the vicar
couldn’t turn up any other accounts of a golden ghost or a golden burial, bang
goes the ‘information preserved in folklore’ theory, in this instance at least.
If the old woman’s vision truly predated the finding of the cape, it was
probably a coincidence.
It’s all very sad. If you’re
anything like me, you’d love to believe at least SOME folktales preserve real
folk memories. A percentage of them may, perhaps, but which ones and how could
it be verified? The author Adam Nichols, in his recent book about Homer, ‘The
Mighty Dead’ (read it, it’s wonderful) tells an interesting story. In 1953,
just 8 years after the end of the War, an American-Greek professor of ethnography,
James Notopoulos, travelled to the Cretan province of Sfakia. Everywhere he
went, men were singing songs about the War, the cruelty of the Germans, the
burning of villages, the heroism of the defenders. The professor recorded many
of these songs.
One of the most daring acts of the
war on Crete had been the successful kidnapping of Crete’s German commander,
General Kreipe, by two British officers, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss,
who were embedded in the Cretan resistance. They impersonated German soldiers,
intercepted the general’s car, killed the driver, held a knife to the general’s
throat and drove him through 22 German checkpoints before abandoning the car
and taking to the mountain paths, where they hid up in the day and travelled by
night for the next 20 days while the Germans combed the area for them. Finally
they bundled the General on to a British Navy launch and took him to
Alexandria.
The professor was surprised he
hadn’t yet heard any songs about this feat, and said as much to one of the
local bards, a gifted young man called Andreas Kafkalas. Kafkalas agreed, and
said he thought he could compose a song about it right now, ‘to fulfil the
obligations of Cretan hospitality’. He began at once, using ‘the traditional
Cretan fifteen syllable line’, and the professor recorded it.
In Kafkalas’ version, the two
English officers are replaced by an unnamed English general who arrives in
Crete and summons before him a local Sfakian hero, Lefteris Tambakis - who did exist, but
who had no connection with this operation. The English general ‘draws himself up to his full height, weeps
over the cruelties being done by the Germans to the people of “desolate
Crete” and reads out the order to the Sfakian people that Kreipe be captured,
dead or alive [all untrue – no such order existed].’ Next, Tambakis recruits a
beautiful girl who sacrifices her ‘woman’s honour’ by seducing Kreipe (renamed
“Kaiseri", which I assume means something like ‘the big boss’) who tells
her all his plans. She passes these to Tambakis, who, riding a beautiful horse,
intercepts the general’s car. ‘No horses were involved,’ Nicols tells us, ‘but
they always are in old Cretan songs. The Cretan fighters strip the general
naked [they didn’t] and he begs for mercy [he didn’t, but this is a motif that
usually appears at these moments in Cretan poetry].’ Finally, after the journey
over the mountains, a submarine takes the general away to Egypt. Hitler is in
despair, and ‘Never before in the history of the world has such a deed been
done.’
‘If this is what could happen to a
modern story in nine years,’ Nichols asks, ‘how could anyone hope that anything
true might survive in the Iliad of the Odyssey?’
Well, in this folk version of the
story, at least the core event remains - the successful kidnapping by
Resistance fighters of a German General in occupied Crete during the Second
World War. None of the other details are true, and though the reason Kafkalas
changed them may partly be due to the formulaic structure of traditional songs,
it seems obvious the main reason must be that he wasn’t emotionally invested in
a story about two English heroes. He
has transformed this true and dramatic event – far too good to forget - into a Cretan patriotic epic. National pride demanded no less.
Pride trumps history.
The story that ‘Queen Elizabeth
slept here’ means a lot to the man who owns the house; not much to anyone
else. We are all most invested in what
is closest to us, belongs to us. I grew
up in Ilkley, Yorkshire, ‘knowing’ – and I don’t know who told me – that
fairies were once seen splashing about in the well-preserved Roman Baths on
Ilkley Moor, known as White Wells. The caretaker opened the door one morning
and saw them ducking and splashing in the water, and when they saw him they
rushed past him out of the door screaming like swallows.
I didn’t believe the story but I
knew the place, and I think I was proud of the fact that such a striking tale
belonged to my town. But such local folk tales are unimportant or unknown to
people living ten miles away (who have their own). There’s always the chance
they’ll be lost. A storyteller dies. A family moves away. New people arrive.
And no one remembers any more.
And sometimes stories die because
a deliberate effort has been made to erase them. Here’s an example. My third
book, Troll Blood, is the final volume of a fantasy trilogy set in the Viking
Age, incorporating a lot of Scandinavian folklore about trolls and other
supernatural creatures. In this last book, my young hero and heroine set sail
in a Viking ship to cross the North Atlantic and arrive in America as described
in the ‘Greenlanders’ Saga’ and which we now know from archeological evidence
the Vikings actually did.
Because the book is a fantasy I wanted also to introduce, as players on the North American scene, creatures in some way parallel to the trolls with whom my Norse characters shared their world. A folk belief in trolls is part of one people’s way of apprehending the world which defines and differentiates them from another group, for example one which believes in nymphs. (Trolls are rougher-edged, with snow on their boots.) I wanted to use stories from Native American folklore because I felt that to leave out any reference to the belief systems of the people I was writing about would be to lose a dimension. In travelling to North America, my Norse characters would have to meet Native Americans, and it was important that the latter should have a voice. For reasons I won’t go into here I chose to investigate the folklore of the Mi’kmaq of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, whose ancestors at least could have encountered the Norse voyagers. (No one really knows.) I spent at least six months, probably more, going through ancient copies of the Journal of American Folklore in the Bodleian, tracking down primary sources wherever I could, especially stories taken down verbatim from named individuals. One of these was a story collected in the mid 1920s by the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons from a Mi’kmaw woman called Isabelle Googoo Morris.
THE HAMAJA’LU
These are very
small beings, no larger than two finger joints.
There are thousands of them who live along the shore. Water-worn, pitted
stones are associated with them, “they have chewed in them, picked in them”. Once
when some men landed on the shore for a short time, before they took to their
boat again they saw a model of themselves and their boat made in stones by the
hamaja’lu. They work very fast.
Elsie
Clews Parsons, ‘Micmac Folklore’, p94, J. of A. F., v.38, 1925
I thought this was charming, and the hamaja’lu went into my story. When the book was finished I sent it to be vetted by Dr Ruth Holmes Whitehead, an expert in Mi’kmaq studies, who kindly set me right on a number of important points. But I was rather dismayed when she asked me to correct ‘the hamaja’lu’ to ‘the wiklatmuj’ik’, a far more difficult word to read and pronounce. (My editor was certainly not going to like it!) So I asked her ‘Why? After all, the word ‘hamaja’lu’ is there, written down in a verbatim account.’ And she wrote back, ‘Because there is no ‘h’ in modern Mi’kmaq, and this word is obsolete. The word used today is the one I have given you.’ I wanted to be sensitive, yet felt I had to express surprise. How could it be that a word used so freely in the 1920’s – there were several stories about the ‘hamaja’lu’ – could have died out? Back came the reply: ‘You would not find it so surprising if you were aware that, during the course of the 20th century, generations of Mi’kmaq children were taken from their parents, put into homes, taught European ways, and punished – beaten, shut in cupboards, thrown down stairs – for speaking their own language.’
The sorry pattern of dominant
Western culture imposing itself on the cultures of indigenous peoples has been
repeated many times. Though stories about the hamaja’lu were written down in the 1920s, it seems they’re not told any
more. (The wiklatmuj’ik aren’t really
the same.) Such tales are more than curiosities. In many, many ways, folk tales
make us. They define us as individuals, as
families, clans and nations. Though the now-forgotten hamaja’lu may never have
had objective reality, they were once part of a wider story, a belief system,
part of the truth of Mi’kmaq identity. That was what the Canadian Government
was trying to eradicate.
Lord Raglan was a real hard-liner
about folk tales. He didn’t believe that any of them preserved any historical
information at all. He defines history like this: History is the recital in chronological sequence of events which are
known to have occurred. Insisting that history depends entirely on written
chronology, he claimed that since (what he termed) ‘the savage’ cannot write,
‘…the savage can have no interest in history.’
I’ll let you gasp. He continues:
Since interest
in the past is induced solely by books, the savage can take no interest in the
past; the events of the past are in fact completely lost.
Pause for another gasp. One more
quote if you can stand it.
When we read of
the Irish blacksmith who said that his smithy was much older than the local
dolmen … or of the English rustic who said that the parish church (13th
C) was very old indeed, it was there before he came into the parish, and that
was over 40 years ago – we are apt to suppose the speaker exceptionally stupid
or ignorant, but their attitude towards the past is similar to that of the
Australian black who began a story with: ‘Long long ago, when my mother was a
baby, the sun shone all day and all night’, and
is the inevitable result of illiteracy. [My italics]
You know what? The man who poured
scholarly scepticism on traditional tales about Queen Elizabeth, has no right
to take these others at face value. He can’t have it both ways. Breaking
his own rule, Raglan does not even source the first two anecdotes, which appear
to be racist shaggy dog stories. In the third example, Raglan makes a category
error. The Aboriginal storyteller is clearly opening a traditional story with
the type of formulaic phrase found all over the world – a nonsense formula which
places it firmly in the land of long ago and far away. In other words, a
fairytale.
‘Long long ago,
when my mother was a baby, the sun shone all day and all night.’
Compare with this, from the Brothers Grimm:
Once upon a
time, when wishing still helped one, there was a king who had three daughters.
Or with this super-exuberant opening from Romania:
Once upon a time, long long ago (and if this story were not true, it would never have been told), when all the poplar trees were covered with pears, and the willows with nuts, when bears switched their tails like cows, when wolves and lambs loved each other like brothers, when fleas with ninety-nine pounds of iron on their backs hopped high in the sky and brought back wonderful stories, when flies wrote rhymes like this on the wall – ‘A tap on the nose for all who doze/Who doubts my lore shall hear no more’ – once upon a time, then, there was a powerful emperor who had three sons.
Or even this:
Long
long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
None of these openings are naïve. The Aboriginal storyteller and her audience
know perfectly well there never was a
time when the sun shone all day and night. That’s the whole point. The concept
is deliberately, joyfully surreal. Far
from from making any claim to be true, fairy tales openly delight in their
unbelievability.
How does Raglan miss all this? Partly because his sense of privilege and
superiority blinds him to the sophistication of illiterate narrators. And in my
view he misunderstands folk narratives. What he really wants to do with
folklore is to prove that ‘All traditional narratives originate in ritual’,
which is a very 1930s thing to think.
Take the widespread folk motif of ‘The Faithful Hound’. The best-known
British version is about Gelert, favourite wolfhound of the Welsh prince
Llewellyn. The only thing Llewellyn loves better than his dog is his own baby
son. Coming home from hunting one day,
he’s horrified when Gelert, whom he’d left guarding the child, bounds to greet
him, jaws and muzzle covered in blood. He rushes into the castle hall to find
the baby’s cradle overturned, the sheets bloodied, the child nowhere in sight.
‘Faithless hound,’ he cries. ‘You have murdered my son!’ and drawing his sword,
strikes Gelert dead. Then he hears a baby
chuckle, and behind the cradle finds the child tugging at the fur of a huge
dead wolf – which Gelert has clearly fought and slain. In deep remorse, the
prince buries Gelert and raises a stone in memory of his faithful friend.
Lord Raglan tries to convince the reader that this well-known tale-type preserves, as if in aspic, references to a type of ritual drama going back to the days of Abraham and Isaac when child sacrifice was replaced by animal substitutes. This is as much baseless conjecture as any ‘Queen Elizabeth Slept Here’ story.
Now, OK, this is a guy writing in
1936: do we need to listen to his outmoded theories about what is and what
isn’t history? Well, I think it’s salutary, I think it can provoke thought,
because here’s where he goes wrong. He thinks, and a lot of people still think,
history is all facts and dates and dated events, and being able to prove
conclusively that certain things happened and where they happened, and when. Of
course that’s essential. But another view of history could be that it’s what
goes on inside people’s heads. It’s what we remember and what we forget, it’s
what we’ve been taught and what we’ve never had a chance to learn. And it’s
shaped and driven by all sorts of inconvenient emotions such as pride and shame
and patriotism and nationalism.
This is a book called ‘OUR ISLAND STORY, a History of England for Boys and Girls’, by H.E. Marshall, first published in 1904.
The opening chapter, ‘Albion and Brutus’, tells how Neptune and
Amphitrite had a lovely little boy called Albion. They wanted to give him an
island all of his own, so they sent the mermaids far and wide to find somewhere
good enough, till at last one pretty little mermaid came back with news of an
island ‘like a beautiful gem in the blue water’. So Albion ruled over this
island for seven years, until he was killed in a fight with Hercules, and then
Brutus arrived from Troy and fought and killed various giants who lived here,
and finally, when Neptune retired as a god, because he had loved Albion so much
he gave his sceptre to the islands now called Britannia – ‘For we know – Britannia rules the waves.’
Now that’s clearly a fairy tale,
even if parts of it are based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century
History of the Kings of Britain,
which itself, as you’ll know, is almost entirely fiction. The author, who was
Australian, winds up the chapter like this, loading it with nostalgia for the
imagined past.
In this book you
will find the story of the people of Britain. The story tells how they grew to
be a great people, till the little green island set in the lonely sea was
longer large enough to contain them all. Then they sailed away over the blue
waves to far-distant countries. Now the people of the little island possess
lands all over the world. … Yet the people who live in them still look back
lovingly to the little island, from which they or their fathers came, and call
it ‘Home’.
David Cameron (remember him?) has
gone on record three times to describe Our
Island Story as his favourite book. Clearly, its version of British history
shaped his mind. In a speech delivered in 2014 just before the Scottish
Referendum he says:
I have an old
copy of Our Island Story, my
favourite book as a child, and I want to give it to my three children, and I
want to be able to teach my youngest, when she’s old enough to understand, that
she is part of this great, world-beating story. And I passionately hope that my
children will be able to teach their children the same … that together, these
islands really do stand for more than the sum of their parts; they stand for
bigger ideas, nobler causes, greater values. Our brilliant United Kingdom:
brave, brilliant, buccaneering, generous, tolerant, proud – this is our
country.
‘Our Island Story’ is absolutely jam-packed
with pure folk tales. It’s got a chapter about how Merlin brought the
Giants’
Dance (Stonehenge ) to Britain from Ireland for the legendary Aurelieus
Ambrosius. It’s got a chapter about King Arthur (‘only fifteen when he
was made
king, but the bravest, wisest and best king that had ever ruled in
Britain.’)
It’s got the story of King Canute and the waves, and Robin Hood and his
Merry
Men, and Sir Walter Raleigh throwing down his cloak so Queen Elizabeth
can walk
across a puddle, an act beloved of illustrators such as Herbert Moore
whose colourful picture of 1908 is reproduced at the head of this post,
though there is no contemporary evidence Raleigh ever did such a thing.
More
bizarrely, 'Our Island Story' presents Raleigh as a benefactor of the
Irish people; listen to
this:
Two of the
things Raleigh brought home with him [from the Americas] were tobacco and
potatoes. [Queen] Elizabeth had given him estates in Ireland, and there he
planted the potatoes and showed the people how to grow them. Even to this day
the poor people in Ireland grow potatoes and live on them very largely.
Raleigh received his Irish lands as
a reward for helping to put down the Desmond Rebellions, when he took part in
at least one massacre, so this vision of him as a sort of kindly
agriculturalist is ‘alternative truth’ of a high order. These are folk tales,
not history. H.E. Marshall admits this openly in her introduction.
I must tell you
that this is not a history lesson, but a story book. There are many facts in
school histories, that seem to children to belong to lessons only. Some of
these you will not find here. But you will find some stories that are not to be
found in your school books – stories which wise people say are only fairy tales
and not history. But it seems to me that
they are part of Our Island Story, and ought not to be forgotten, any more than
those stories about which there is no doubt.
This is highly equivocal. The book
is subtitled ‘A History of England for Boys and Girls’. In fact it’s a complete
mélange of fact, folklore and fiction, and there’s very little way for a child
to tell what’s true and what’s not. If anything, Marshall favours and prioritises the unlikely
but emotionally weighted tales. This is not history, but a book of stories
chosen and designed to give a child a particular identity, that of the son or
daughter of a heroic, benign and glorious British race. It is still in print. Lord Raglan – I assume
– would have deplored it and he’d be
right. But even if they’re exaggerated, even when they’re total inventions,
these stories, these folk tales, have become woven into the British historical
narrative and won’t go away. They still influence real people, real
politicians, real events.
Stories are very powerful. With every story told to
us, especially if it’s one which pretends to a thread of truth, it’s worth
pausing to consider who is telling it, and why. The stories we choose to
remember and pass on, as individuals, families, societies and nations, have
real agency. Don’t think for a moment you can ignore them.
Picture credits
Raleigh lays his cloak before Queen
Elizabeth. Illustration by Herbert Moore, 1908, from 'The Men Who Found
America' by Frederick Winthrop Hutchinson, 1909
Arthur's Stone, Herefordshire. Photo by UKgeofan at Wikimedia Commons
Lord Raglan. Photo by Evelina B at Wikimedia
Mold Gold Cape. Photo by kind permisson of the British Museum.
Pebble figure found on sand-dunes - Photo by Katherine Langrish
Llewellyn and Gelert. Engraving by Gourlay Steell RSA 1819-1894
Our Island Story, cover. Photo by Katherine Langrish
1 comment:
Very thought provoking. Thank you. And thanks for the mention!
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