Interesting reading. Some revelations I heard first time, like Scottish kilt was invented only 250 years ago, and Cinderella story was originated from China (I certainly didn't know that).


October 25, 2003

Past imperfect

Scots mythed and the power of story
Kilts, burning bras, a Russian invasion . . . Ronald Hutton on national identity and how we invented our past

Whatever else we know about King Alfred, we can be pretty sure that he never burnt any cakes. Similarly, Sir Francis Drake wasn＊t playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the Armada hove into view, and Marie Antoinette never proposed that: ※If they have no bread, let them eat cake.§ These are myths 〞 examples of the human need to see things that aren＊t there, not to see things that are and (above all) to prefer a nicely embroidered story to a boring truth.
Sometimes we even deliberately invent our past to suit ourselves. Half the paraphernalia that goes with the music hall image of being a Scot or Welsh 〞 from kilts to pointed hats 〞 is pure fantasy.

It is a tendency that drives the historian to two disturbing conclusions; first, while we keep finding out more and more about the past, we are likely never to be sure of what actually went on in it and, second, what we are studying, most of the time, is what people thought was going on.

A few decades ago an anthropologist called Nigel Barley was studying the Dowayo people of Cameroon. One day he asked who had organised a particular festival and was told: ※The man with the porcupine quills in his hair.§ He pointed out that there was nobody wearing quills, and got the answer: ※No, he＊s not wearing them.§ Barley used this incident to make the point that traditional peoples tend to describe things as they should be, not as they are; the man concerned usually wore quills, and so was always referred to in connection with them.

In fact, most people, of all places and times, usually treat the world in this way. During the 1880s a respected scholar called the Abb谷 Cau-Durban excavated a cave in France for five seasons. He was looking for remains from the Old Stone Age and found plenty 〞 in the floor. To later prehistorians the most obvious thing about the cave was that its walls are covered in paintings; but the good abb谷 never noticed them. In his time it was not yet accepted that Old Stone Age people painted caves, and so to his eyes all that art did not exist.

Put like that, it can seem as though our habit of constructing mythical realities is a limitation or a failing, but it can of course have powerfully constructive results. One of the most obvious things that it constructs is nations, entities built on common mythologies, often in defiance of geography, language or religion.

Some of the most potent expressions of those mythologies are visible symbols, used to trigger instant feelings of identity. Between 1750 and 1850 the Scots and Welsh found themselves partners in the huge British success story of industrial revolution and empire. The problem was that they were minor partners, in danger of having their traditional national identities swallowed in a superstate dominated by the English. They survived because they found a set of symbols around which a sense of nationhood could be preserved.

In the Scots＊ case these were the kilt, the bagpipes and the clan tartan. The kilt had been invented by a Lancashire Quaker in the 1730s, the ancestral instrument of Scotland was indeed the bagpipe, but the tartans were cooked up by a pair of English adventurers called the Allen brothers. They were brought together in a tumble of accidents, but they worked; they made a Scot recognisable at a glance.

In the Welsh case the process was almost wholly carried out by one person. Augusta Waddington, a rich Londoner, fell in love with Wales and decided to rescue it. She gave it a national mythology by funding the translation into English, and publication, of some of its best medieval stories, under the made-up name of The Mabinogion. She gave it a national folk hero, by paying a Welsh writer to produce a novel about a 16th-century trickster, Twm Sion Catti, which became a bestseller. She gave it a national instrument, the triple harp, which had beauty and tone enough to compensate for the fact that it had originally come from Italy.

Finally, she gave it a costume of its own, by putting together her favourite bits of old-fashioned British female clothing and persuading Welsh women to wear it. It is rumoured that the reason that there is no equivalent male one is that her husband flatly refused to wear the one that she had in mind. No matter; the combination worked wonderfully, and the Land of My Fathers was here to stay.

If the power of the invented symbol is one obvious feature of history, then that of the gripping fiction is another. On the Pacific island of Nuku Hiva is a valley called Taipi. Herman Melville made his name with a novel set there, supposedly based on his adventures during a visit to Nuku Hiva. In fact, it does not appear that he ever visited the valley but by the late 20th century the dramatic events in the novel were all that the natives of Taipi could recount of their 19th-century past; Melville＊s fiction had become their history.

You do not have, however, to go to the South Seas to find the same pattern, and sometimes the substitution is deliberate. In the 1790s the owner of the Royal Goat Hotel at Beddgelert, North Wales, was trying to find a way of attracting more customers. He hit on the idea of transplanting to it an Indian tale of a prince who kills his faithful dog on the mistaken assumption that it had eaten his baby son. The trick worked, and tourists began to crowd into Beddgelert, to shed tears over the grave of the loyal animal (which the hotelier had carefully dug for them). Within two generations the story had become part of local folklore, as an authentic tradition.

The Beddgelert episode touches on another major theme: the sheer staying power of a good tale and its disregard for the boundaries of race and language. Another example is the story of two brothers, the elder of whom goes into a foreign land and gets into trouble with an evil woman, only to be rescued by his sibling. This lurid bit of misogyny is found in its oldest known form in an Egyptian papyrus more than 3,000 years old. More than 800 folk versions are now known, 66 in Danish, 65 in German, 27 in Italian, and so on. The tale of Cinderella began in 9th-century China and travelled to Europe, through which it entered world culture.

The myth of Beddgelert demonstrates that if a tale is told often enough 〞 and with sufficient confidence 〞 it will acquire the status of truth in the face of people＊s actual experience. Nigel Barley＊s Dowayo lived close to the natural world, but still believed that chameleons were poisonous just because tribal tradition insisted that they were.

Here in Britain we do not have the luxury of finding this funny. In the lore of the Isle of Man, the harmless pigmy shrew is also regarded as venomous. A rationalist might argue that long ago somebody associated an unrelated death to a shrew bite, but reason does not explain why, for centuries or millennia after that mistake, nobody questioned the tradition. What is reputed to be has long had a habit of overpowering actual evidence.

In 1968 the emerging feminist movement staged one of its first public demonstrations, in Atlantic City in America. One of its organisers, Robin Morgan, told a journalist that they might engage in some symbolic bra-burning, ※or something§. In the event, no brassieres were burnt, but ever since then the burning bra has been the great popular image of contemporary feminism.

In 1914 the rumour swept the country that Russian infantry were passing through Britain. The Government investigated and story was found to have started with the announcement that a cargo of ※large Russians§ were to be landed at a Scottish port. That report was true 〞 they were a type of egg 〞 but the mistake was made. Hundreds of people were claiming to have seen Russian soldiers on the railway system. They were heard calling for vodka at Carlisle and Berwick stations; one of them jammed a slot machine with a rouble at Carlisle. Only an inspection of official records of both nations confirms the historical fact that none of them were ever there.

The historian is taught to scour away the encrustation of myth from reality. But once this is done, nagging questions remain. The first is: once the crust is removed, is there anything there? Are we, in fact, most of the time merely studying myth? Secondly, if we do uncover objective truth, has the public any use for it? And last: does it really matter? If myth is truly what makes human life work, most of the time, at least we are now in a better position to understand how, and why. It is part of what being human is all about.


Witches, Druids and King Arthur, by Ronald Hutton, is published by Hambledon, £25. Offer £20 plus £1.95 p&p (0870-180 8080)