Do Androids Dream Of Anything Very Much ?

Last time I set out my despondency at being ever able to solve the mystery of what the mind actually is, in contrast to Robert Kuhn's optimistic viewpoint that we just need to find the right theory. But an Aeon piece soon had me feeling hopeful once more : not that we could indeed solve everything, but that with a bit of a goal-adjustment, we could examine consciousness in a way that would be both interesting and productive.

This post continues examining the rest of the essay. Since this put me in a very different frame of, err, mind, this is not part two and you don't have to read the previous post at all. Rather, the rest of the essay got me thinking about what we mean by hallucinations, particularly in the context of AI.

So the remainder of the essay is of a similarly high standard to the rest, but is mainly concerned with what sort of "neural correlates" may indicate consciousness and how the brain works : does it perceive reality, act as a prediction engine, or is consciousness something that happens when prediction and observation are in disagreement ? In some circumstances it seems that expectation dominates and that's what gives rise to hallucinations; the interesting bit here is that philosophically, this implies that all conscious experience is a hallucination, not just the difference between expectation and reality. 

Which, of course, raises obvious parallels to LLMs. As I've said before, I don't believe the common claim that to a chatbot everything is a hallucination is particularly helpful any more : it's not baseless, but I think we're going to need some more careful definitions and/or terminology for this. Interestingly, this is underscored by the final point of the article, on the different types of self we experience.

There is the bodily self, which is the experience of being a body and of having a particular body. There is the perspectival self, which is the experience of perceiving the world from a particular first-person point of view. The volitional self involves experiences of intention and of agency – of urges to do this or that, and of being the causes of things that happen. At higher levels, we encounter narrative and social selves. The narrative self is where the ‘I’ comes in, as the experience of being a continuous and distinctive person over time, built from a rich set of autobiographical memories. And the social self is that aspect of self-experience that is refracted through the perceived minds of others, shaped by our unique social milieu.

The experience of embodied selfhood depends on predictions about body-related causes of sensory signals across interoceptive and proprioceptive channels, as well as across the classic senses. Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind.

In that sense it would appear that "hallucination" here simply means "inner awareness" of some sort, an experience not directly connected with reality. If so, then by this definition I would strongly dispute that LLMs ever hallucinate at all, in that I simply don't think they have the same kind of experience as sentient life forms do – not even to the smallest degree. I think they're nothing more than words on a screen, a clever distribution of semantic vectors and elaborate guessing machines... and that's where they end. They exist as pure text alone. Nothing else.

I think this is probably my only point of dispute with the essay. I don't think "hallucinate" as used here is ideal, though I can see why they've used it in this way. It seems that what we mean with the word could be :

• A felt inner experience of any sort 
• A mismatch between perception and reality
• A total fabrication of data.

People do the third sort (mostly) only when asleep; they have a kind if awareness in dreams that's got very little to do with external perception. LLMs clearly do this kind of thing much more routinely, but sporadically. They demonstrably do not do this all the time. They can correctly manipulate complex input data, sometimes highly complex and with impressive accuracy; the idea that this is done by some bizarre happenstance of chance fabrication is clearly false. Yes, sometimes they just make shit up, but for good modern chatbots that's now by far the exception than the norm.

LLMs can also "hallucinate" in the second sense, that they can make the wrong inference from the data they've been input, just as we can. Most chatbots now include at least some visual and web (or uploaded document) search capabilities, so we must allow them a "grounding" of sorts, albeit an imperfect one. Hence they can take external data and interpret it incorrectly. 

This isn't mutually exclusive with the third definition though. An LLM that doesn't know the answer because it doesn't have enough data may well resort to simply inventing a response, ignoring any input completely. This would help explain some of their more outrageous outputs, at least.

Humans and LLMs share these two types of hallucinations, but not the first. LLMs experience literally nothing, so it simply isn't possible for them to have this kind of hallucination – a hallucinatory experience – whatsoever. And that's where the terminology breaks down. Most LLM content is statistical inference and data manipulation, which is, at very high level, not that dissimilar to how humans think. This kind of output is not, by and large, an outright lie, but the similarities to human thinking are ultimately partial at best. It resembles, if anything, the kind of external cognition we do when we use thinking aids (measuring devices, paper and pencil arithmetic), but without any of the actual thought that goes into it. 

Perhaps a better way to express this than the standard, "to an LLM everything is a hallucination", is that to an LLM, all input has the same fundamental validity. Or maybe that to an LLM, everything is processed in the same way. An LLM's grounding is far less robust than ours : they can reach conclusions from input data, even reason after a fashion, but their "thought" processes are fundamentally different. They can be meaningfully said to hallucinate, but only if this is carefully defined. They can and do fabricate data and/or process it incorrectly, but they have no inner experience of what they're doing, and little clue that one input data set is any more important than another. 

To return to the Aeon essay, one key difference between us and them is that LLMs have no kind of "self" whatsoever. So yes, they can be meaningfully said to hallucinate sometimes, but no, they aren't doing this all the time. Fundamentally, at the absolutely most basic level of all, what they're doing is not like what we do. They aren't hallucinating at all in this sense : they are, like all computers, merely processing data. 

Hang on, maybe that's all the phrase we need ? To an LLM, all data processing is the same. 

Hmm. That might just work. Let's see if that survives mulling it over or if I have another existential crisis instead.

For All, Eternity ? Beyond the Hard Problem

"Should a being which can conceive of eternity be denied it ?"

This rather strange question is one which has plagued Robert Kuhn in his investigations into consciousness. You may remember that I found this to be distinctly odd when I summarised a three hour (!) YouTube video where he mentions it as motivation. I also said that my views had shifted considerably more towards outright uncertainty, and indeed that remains very much the case... if anything, all the more so after mulling it over.

The thing is, Kuhn's question is plaguing me as well, but in a slightly different way. I've long advocated that the key aspect of consciousness is its non-physical nature, there being no such physical phenomena as redness or guilt or ennui. Oh, sure, there are physical brain states corresponding to these, undeniably so. But that we can conceive of the non-physical... that we can imagine such things as numbers which have no actual substance in and of themselves... if we can conceive of the non-physical, does that make it inevitable ? Since we can conceive of, say, numbers, in the purely abstract sense, doesn't that mean the purely abstract itself must exist, in some very broad sense ?

This bothers me because it feels suspiciously like the old Ontological Argument : God is necessarily perfect, and perfection necessarily exists, ergo God exists. It's perfectly circular.

Is the same true of the non-physical ? I honestly don't know. I worry that the problem is simply intractable, an inescapable limitation of being trapped inside our skulls with nought to describe the world but language. Escape from our mental prisons feels like a true impossibility.

In fact my crisis of confidence borders on the outright nihilistic as far as consciousness goes. If we cannot know the nature of consciousness, you might think, then this points towards neutral monism, my close second favourite interpretation after dualism. In saying that mind and matter are unified by by some third unknown substance, neutral monism readily allows for an everyday sort of dualism : yes, ultimately all things are one, but you can't ever know the true nature of the one substance or how it manifests in such different ways, so for all intents and purposes, mind and matter might as well be different things. 

The problem is that this now feels to me like a massive degeneracy. Dualism slides into neutral monism but the reverse is also true, just as idealism and physicalism appear to be two halves of the same coin. Even worse, if you posit that you can't ever know the true nature of the thing unifying these apparently disparate substances, you might as well be postulating magic. This is the very thing I've been at pains to avoid in trying to make dualism (which still seems intuitively far the simplest option to me) palatable to a scientific viewpoint.

But it gets still worse than this. The more you engage with any one position, the more you attempt to pin it down... the more similar each of them seems to be to all the rest. The merest slip of a definition changes physicalism into idealism or illusionism into panpsychism. The whole thing collapses into a spectacular philosophical singularity with no distinguishable positions and no productive insight at all.

Well, that was bleak.

Is there any hope left ? Yes and no. No, perhaps, in that we might have to admit that the basic problem of describing the true nature of mind is an impossible dream. Neither our language nor our fundamental mental faculties are up to the task : we cannot, for instance, truly conceive of the non-physical and we certainly can't describe it. Since we ourselves are mental constructs, we cannot fully grasp our own nature.

But some hope remains. If we can't really know anything with the truest certainty this doesn't mean that we don't all naturally cling to some preferences. For all that I've just said, I still tend more strongly towards my own innate positions as being the best way that I can make sense of the word. In that sense, this may be less of a nihilistic collapse and more a paring back, a relinquishing of ambition to objectively solve the mystery and more of an acceptance that this is only ever going to be a personal perspective.

But a very much more upbeat stance comes from this excellent Aeon essay, which is of the sort which reminds me of just how damn good Aeon can be.

The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery.

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem).

There are some historical parallels for this approach, for example in the study of life. Once, biochemists doubted that biological mechanisms could ever explain the property of being alive. Today, although our understanding remains incomplete, this initial sense of mystery has largely dissolved. Biologists have simply gotten on with the business of explaining the various properties of living systems in terms of underlying mechanisms: metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction and so on. An important lesson here is that life is not ‘one thing’ – rather, it has many potentially separable aspects.

In essence, shut up and calculate. If we can't understand the fundamental nature of consciousness, or how and why it exists, we can still understand many aspects of it. Instead of trying to explain how the ghost in the biological machine is able to influence physical matter, we can learn what signature of physical matter corresponds to which mental processes. This is pleasingly neutral as it in no way implies anything whatsoever about the non-physical : sure, ennui might correlate to a brain state, but in terms of determining whether the emotion has some Platonic "realness", it means nothing at all. Just as we can't say what is it about a frog that makes it clearly alive but we can study how it jumps and croaks in extreme detail (if you're into that sort of thing), so we can study what consciousness is doing in the brain (or the other way around if you prefer).

But wait, there's more.

A good starting point is to distinguish between conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self. Conscious level has to do with being conscious at all – the difference between being in a dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) and being vividly awake and aware. Conscious contents are what populate your conscious experiences when you are conscious – the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that make up your inner universe. And among these conscious contents is the specific experience of being you. This is conscious, and is probably the aspect of consciousness that we cling to most tightly.

Ahh, now here it seems like we have scope for real progress after all. We're back in the realm of being able to compartmentalise, reduce, and analyse : we can examine how changing one thing changes others, even quantitatively so in terms of the neurological effects. But more than that, here we have different aspects of consciousness itself, useful things we can discuss without simply resorting to the purely neurological or needing to address the intractable philosophical nature of what consciousness actually is. We can get inside the mind, so to speak, without discussing what it's made of.

Complexity measures of consciousness have already been used to track changing levels of awareness across states of sleep and anaesthesia. They can even be used to check for any persistence of consciousness following brain injury, where diagnoses based on a patient’s behaviour are sometimes misleading. At the Sussex Centre, we are working to improve the practicality of these measures by computing ‘brain complexity’ on the basis of spontaneous neural activity – the brain’s ongoing ‘echo’ – without the need for brain stimulation. The promise is that the ability to measure consciousness, to quantify its comings and goings, will transform our scientific understanding.

This is something I've read about before, but it becomes all the more intriguing when you stop trying to say that "consciousness is correlated with physical phenomena, therefore it must be the same as them" (which I think is a nonsense position). The framework of simply studying the correlations for their own sake, with no need to infer a deeper meaning, transforms this into something much more interesting and rewarding : the goalposts are realistic, achievable, and entirely non-threatening.

Consciousness is informative in the sense that every experience is [slightly] different from every other experience you have ever had, or ever could have... integrated in the sense that every conscious experience appears as a unified scene. We do not experience colours separately from their shapes, nor objects independently of their background. It turns out that the maths that captures this co-existence of information and integration maps onto the emerging measures of brain complexity I described above. This is no accident – it is an application of the ‘real problem’ strategy. We’re taking a description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience, and mapping it to objective descriptions of brain mechanisms.

Some researchers take these ideas much further, to grapple with the hard problem itself. Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism. The additional mathematical contortions needed also mean that, in practice, integrated information becomes impossible to measure for any real complex system. This is an instructive example of how targeting the hard problem, rather than the real problem, can slow down or even stop experimental progress.

Yes ! Quick, someone get me a little flag and/or some pom-poms, I want to be the cheerleader for this approach !

The rest of the essay continues in a similarly interesting vein. However as that ended up sending me down more of an AI-based tangent I'll leave that for the next post. Here I'll just end up recalling Kuhn's comments that we can think scientifically about otherwise non-scientific issues. Years ago I tried to set out the most basic assumptions of the scientific world view, noting that if these were undermined we'd be in real trouble. But perhaps not. The requirement to be logical, clear (both in our conclusions and reasoning process), and accountable might see us through even in realms where scientists otherwise fear to tread. The approach here, of setting out the different properties of consciousness – ones we can surely all agree on – gives me some hope that, even if we can't solve the ultimate mystery, we can still find something interesting to talk about.

Critically Minded

Here's another short post exploring an idea I'm finding useful. I've used this in a few recent posts, so I just want to set it out on its own.

People seem to think in quite distinctly different ways. The different kinds of thinking are numerous, but there are a couple which I think are often confused : critical thinking and analytical reasoning.

The analytical thinker is generally someone like a scientist, who will pick apart an idea into its component variables and explore in detail what would happen if you change any of them. They'll run with this to the nth degree, examining consequences until they really feel that they've fully understood a concept, or can make a testable prediction to check whether the whole thing holds up to scrutiny. Analytic thinking is often technical : most obviously, perhaps, when it comes to mathematics, but it can apply to other areas too. Anyone who'd ever solved a problem by testing out different aspects to destruction (who hasn't ?) has done at least some analytical thinking.

I would define this as asking the question : what if this is true ? What consequences follow ? How does this one thing affect other things ? That's the essence of analysis.

What I think people often confuse this with is critical thinking. And to be fair, this too is a major component of science. Having decided on a way to test their idea, the scientist should then actually do so, or at least consider the results from someone else's test that attempts to answer the same question. The critical thinker is not concerned with what the consequences are, they're concerned with whether the premise is correct. They don't want to speculate as the analyst does. They want to know if they're right at all.

This mode of thinking I would define as asking the question : is this really true ? Can I verify it ? Could there be another explanation ? That's what I mean by critical thinking.

The analogy I like is from programming, having learned this the hard way through direct personal experience. A really protracted debugging session will go something like this :

• First, I'll check if I have any typos, any missed commas or wrong equals signs, or something where a variable isn't being set correctly. This would be the case of the code not doing what I thought it was doing.
• Next, I'll go up a level and look at the code structure – maybe I've got a loop that's nested wrongly, so it's iterating over the wrong variable or not being terminated correctly. In this case, the code might be doing what I thought it was doing, but the way I thought things should be done was itself partially incorrect.
• Finally, I'll stop and think if the very method I've been using is actually likely to give me the correct result at all, if it's even fundamentally possible for it to work or I've built a horribly complex house of cards and need to start again.

Programming seems like a good analogy for me because it encapsulates both modes of thought. The low-level debugging is analytical : have I got the right variables, what if I change where the loop is run, is my input correct, etc. The high-level stuff is critical : is this method actually going to work if I do it correctly ? This sort of multi-level, or multi-scale, thinking blends quite nicely from one mode of thought to the other. It's something LLMs have become noticeably better at over the last few months, no longer picking over minutiae, but actually stopping to consider the premise of a question.

We can of course imagine in a four-way graph to describe this. We can have (1) those who are both critical and analytical, which is pretty much ideal for a scientist. There are (2) those who are analytical but not so critical, again a trait common in the sciences : these people are fine so long as they're given the right problem to tackle. People who are (3) critical but not analytical are less helpful, something common among loons on the internet : "dark matter doesn't exist because your ugly face, that's why" types. And finally of course we have (4), those poor unfortunates who don't do much of either of these modes of thinking.

Dedicated readers might remember my longer 2015 post about skepticism. Back then I struggled to find a good word to describe this sort of concern for the truth, and perhaps there isn't one : "critical" has the same popular negative connotations as "skeptical" in everyday use. But critical thinking, as a term, does seem to be used in this sense of wanting to find out the truth regardless of the result.

Arguably there's an overlap here with curiosity, which similarly implies wanting to know the truth. The problem is that curiosity can also mean something more like a greed for more and more facts : a desire to travel for the sake of experiences, or to read more and more books to see what they contain, or an urge to run an experiment without any preconceptions as to what will happen at all, rather than to test the validity of a claim. If you follow this blog regularly you'll know I'm intensely curious about mythology, but not because I want to determine if Zeus existed or if I need to defend myself against the afanc on my next trip home. 

Critical thinking, on the other hand, seems to much more specifically capture this sense of a desire for verification. Like everything else, it's not an absolute state of mind. Someone might be extremely critical when they first learn a new fact but far less eager to test something they learned years ago, or their degree of critical reasoning might vary enormously across different subjects (I want to know if, say, dark matter exists, but I don't give a flying crap about whether celebrity X really said statement Y on social media platform Z).

Nor is it realistically possible to hold ourselves to the highest standards of critical thinking at all times. If you go down that way, you end up in a postmodernist Humean nightmare where nothing can ever be truly verified and nothing known, further progress being hampered by intellectual impotence. This is why Ronald Hutton's Pagan Britain annoyed me so, being so resolutely noncommittal that he wouldn't even venture to suggest how we could even test anything, let alone claiming that any one interpretation was actually true. That, in my opinion, is not a productive way of learning anything. Better by far to hold an opinion but be prepared to surrender it rather than never believing anything at all.

Likewise, it's also possible to be analytical to a fault, obsessively examining every detail even when they have no possibility of changing any major result (this is the fault of many a peer reviewer). So our four-way graph would be complicated, with the extreme not necessarily being the place one wants to be. Perhaps this helps with a description of wisdom. Maybe wisdom is knowing what should be done, when to apply critical and analytical reasoning and how much, when to rabidly fixate on an issue and when to let go – where exactly the balance of the different ways of thinking lies to ensure a successful, happy outcome.

The Things We Say

I'd like to add a little corollary to that rather long post on bullshit I wrote some years ago.

Bullshit, I contend, is not caring about the essential truth of a statement. This is a slight, but I think important, modification of the more usual principle that bullshit simply means not caring about the truth. Someone can respond with a perfectly truthful statement, but it's context that matters : if their response doesn't address the point you were making (e.g. with whataboutism or other kind of diversionary tactic), then that's still bullshit.

I also came up with a whole taxonomy of different kinds of shitty statements, but I digress.

In keeping with the theme, let me get to the point in a slightly roundabout way. All the crazy political shenanigans of late have made me acutely aware of a lesson I wish Younger Me had realised much earlier. 

That is, there are two main reasons that people say what they say. The first is that it's because they believe what they're saying is genuinely true. They argue with each other because they believe it's an innately good thing to get at the truth, and that disagreement is something that fundamentally needs to be corrected. This doesn't mean they're not open to changing their minds (although this can certainly be the case), just that they're deeply concerned with what's right and wrong. I think this is most people's baseline assumption about most other people, at least in a healthy society.

The second is that they're trying to produce an effect of some kind. We all become familiar with this in different ways : our parents lie to get us to behave, advertisers exaggerate and mislead, politicians... well, they do all kinds of crazy shit. We get fooled because our baseline assumption is still that people are basically honest; we become less naïve when we realise that this doesn't apply in all circumstances; we degenerate into cynicism when we start to behave as though this second reason is the norm rather than the first, when we think that agendas are all there are.

All this is probably obvious. The reason I wish someone had told Younger Me this is because it should be explicit. When you raise what's known subconsciously to full conscious awareness, you can act on it. It's easier to remember, easier to be on guard, easier to avoid the pitfalls both of naivety and cynicism. Learning it implicitly means that the idea will only arise through learned patterns, and so only affect behaviour in rather narrow domains; learning it explicitly means you can choose to analyse behaviour in all circumstances.

How does this tie back in to bullshit ? Very simply. A classical bullshitter uses the second intention, saying things without regard for the truth... but they do, importantly, still care about something. They say what they say because they want to manipulate people. They want them to react in some way, maybe as part of a carefully-determined plan, or maybe in a more vague strategy of simply provoking emotion but still with an ultimate objective in mind.

The corollary I want to propose is that maybe there's a truly deep kind of bullshit. Maybe the kind of nonsense – anger inducing, incoherent, aimless, self-harming verbal diarrhea that vents forth from the Orange One's unshapely orifice – maybe this is simply because there's no plan of any kind whatseover. Maybe the deepest kind of bullshitter is someone who says things for no other reason than it makes themselves feel good for a microsecond. No aim in mind, no master plan of manipulation, nothing but ultra short-term "I like saying this". Literally nothing beyond that.

Now, many people are aware of this already : "however stupid you think his is, he's stupider than that" someone said recently. Indeed, this is a position I've long held myself, there simply being no good alternative for the sheer level of incoherency on display... that, and a healthy respect for Occam's Razor. There's just no need to invoke some master four-dimensional chess when sheer stupidity presents a far more believable explanation.

No, the point of spelling this out is only to make it explicit. When you realise that this is (perhaps) the way some people really are, you can begin to see it as a pattern. You can watch out for it. It can help keep you aware that all of us say things in this way from time to time (who hasn't got carried away and realised instantly that they said something they actually thought was total bollocks ?) and so don't need to treat every such statement in the same way. When you see someone who might commit the odd shitpost here and there but knows where to draw the line, when to be serious and respectful and when to just muck around, you know how to respond.

And when you find someone who essentially always communicates in this way... well, then you can decide for yourself if this is something you approve of. Maybe it is, in some roles. Maybe it's fine for stand-up comedians. But if you think that either a) someone talking completely incoherently really believes in what they say; b) they're doing so because they're actually really clever; and/or c) this person is an extremely powerful politician.... then I don't think we can be friends.

The Scouring

Today, a short look at the The Scouring of the Shire. Surely the most Marmite of all chapters of The Lord of the Rings... I personally hate it. I've read many arguments as to why it's actually the most important section of all, but every time I read it I just think “nope”. Let's begin with a reasonably sensible defence of the chapter I stumbled upon some time ago.

To be fair, there are more than a few reasons why multiple adaptations have forsaken the chapter. For one, it is sort of an anti-climax, taking place well after the principle plot of The Lord Of The Rings is over.

That’s part of it, but more important is that it’s a huge tonal mismatch. We go from epic, literally world-shaping events, to… an impotent wizard messing up people’s gardens. There’s just no way to naturally flow from one to the other in a narratively satisfying way. As Tolkien himself said about Beowulf :

I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf [i.e. all the villains are monsters]. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf’s rise to fame in a ‘typical’ or ‘commonplace’ war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon*. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a ‘wild’ or ‘trivial’ Swedish invasion !

Incidentally the truly Norse sagas do stuff like this all the time, and to be fair, they're mostly crap.

Which is exactly the problem. We have the Hobbits go from being key players in the destruction of the last great evil of the world, to having to fight the equivalent of “some Swedish prince”. It’s deeply unsatisfying. The argument is sometimes made that they need to prove themselves, but this makes no sense, because after what they’ve already done, no such activity is necessary.

The way the Shire saves itself is, in part, an opening up. Sam uses one of his gifts from the elves to restore the Shire. Merry and Pippin travel throughout the region and maintain their ties with both men and dwarves. Preservation can mean change. In fact, it may require it. Making the Shire an untouched place carries a stagnant stench. In Tolkien’s books, nothing can be protected forever, and all requires active vigilance and care. In the films, the Shire is already perfect and needs no change at all.

This is well put (the Silmarillion explores in much more detail the moral differences between a healed world versus one perfect from the beginning), but the need to save the Shire is just not apparent. The Hobbits have already fought to preserve it, making them do even more – having people's gardens dug up by some loser wizard after having destroyed Bard-dûr  – doesn’t add anything. It can't, really, because the main task has already been accomplished. It's Done. The ending of Sauron couldn't possibly be any more final; anything that happens next is necessarily a detail.

The argument is also made that it was necessary to show the Hobbits have been changed by their experiences, but this too is abundantly obvious. It's clear to reader and cinema audience alike that the Frodo who comes home is not the Frodo who sets off, nor is Sam, nor even Merry and Pippin to a lesser degree. There's no need to be any more explicit about something which is already very explicit... it would be like asking for more nudity in Game of Thrones.

Finally, another point is that this gives the work an added depth of character realism, but again… it’s a fantasy. It isn’t helpful to try and do this. To my mind the chapter is nothing but a weird and colossal distraction : I can see why it’s there, but it’s not a good bit of writing, even if many of the themes are important. It’s just too much of a clash with the narrative imperative, like trying to set up a creepy graveyard scene only to suddenly fill it with hamsters, or something. But others may disagree.

None of this is intended to criticise the linked article, which I do think is rather good. I take issue with the following, however :

The battle of Helm’s Deep, a slim handful of pages in the novel, takes up 40 minutes in Jackson’s The Two Towers. The necessity of peace and restoration, the hard work they require, are left to the cutting floor, while hour-long scenes of heroic violence take more and more space in each subsequent film. Though the films’ pastoral sequences have warmth and joy to them, they lack the bitter, beautiful edge that Tolkien’s prose grants them. That’s the cost of cutting Return Of The King‘s most crucial chapter: A loss as profound as the one Frodo Baggins suffers by novel’s end.

Yes, battles are exciting, and easier to drum up audience engagement if you've got the budget for it. But the text of the battles is some of Tolkien's most magnificent, and I would reject utterly any notion that the films are in any sense "shallow" by focusing on the spectacle. The stakes in the book are the very highest, practically cosmic in scope, and demand an appropriate and lengthy visual. More importantly, it is precisely the combination of this mythic scale combined with the human-level events (not least of which is Theoden's speech) that give the film tremendous, almost overwhelming emotional depth. Reducing the battles would be the direct equivalent of asking for less monsters in Beowulf : entirely and spectacularly missing the point. The mythic grandeur is exactly where the film most beautifully delivers its most potent message.

Nor do I find anything beautiful or bitter in Scouring; it just feels oddly tacked-on and badly-written. I would note that in the early drafts, Tolkien's "note to self" was that Hobbiton was dominated by a biscuit factory and the returning Hobbits decide to sail away to Greenland, so don't you dare tell me that the man who wrote stuff like this wasn't also capable of writing utter shite as well.

But...

One Quora answer to a question of the politics of Lord of the Rings does offer a better answer :

Sam, the humble gardener, has returned from war. And he does not take shit from anybody. He is appalled by the weakness and complacency of his countrymen. They mindlessly go along with whatever the new rulers suggest… anything to stay out of trouble. And Sam doesn’t play that way. He’s seen some shit. Seen the horrors of war. And he urges his people to resist.

You can read the totalitarian state the Shire is turned into as a far-right nightmare scenario. Or as a far-left nightmare scenario. Either way, it is dark, twisted and bleak. Public [sic; surely "private"] property is taken over by the [abjectly fascist] state, the rivers and fields are polluted and factories pump out black smoke as mighty forests are cut down… and most people just keep their heads down, and don’t resist. That’s Tolkien’s politics in a nutshell — do resist, do fight back, and don’t stand idly by as evil does what evil does best.

This is much more credible. It's not about some vague, unspecified way in which the Hobbits have learned important life lessons, nor about them proving their abundantly-clear newfound abilities (after Shelob, what other horrors can life hold for Sam ?). It's about exactly what those lessons they've learned actually are : to resist oppression, to urge their fellows to defend their idyllic lifestyle when the need arises, to realise that the inevitability of evil is an illusion. It can be defeated even by the small : "help shall oft come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter", as Gandalf says earlier. No-one is truly helpless.

Not, however, that this much changes my mind about the chapter. I can see the point to it, but I still find it badly-executed. For it to have any poignancy would require, I think, some far worse tragedy than trampling a few flower beds, and to avoid the tonal mismatch would require some remaining vestige of the cosmic scale of the threat for the Hobbits to overcome (perhaps if Saruman was left with considerably more power, this might have helped matters). 

Regardless, blending this into the narrative consistently is a virtual impossibility. However important the message might be, there's simply no way of defeating the Enemy and having anything else feel like fighting "some Swedish prince". And again, the Hobbits have already demonstrated this resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, so to now scale things back and give them a challenge manifestly below their abilities proves nothing. 

No, the movie's approach is better by far : show that they're conscious of saving the Shire during the War of the Ring ("courage Merry, courage for our friends") with a very gentle nod to show their changed nature on their return : bittersweet in that Sam is now able to face the altogether difficult challenge of approaching a not-especially-attractive barmaid but that Frodo is truly broken, unable to live in the Shire any more. The theme of Scouring, I accept, is hugely important. But I argue that the movie is not shallow by omitting the chapter, nor does it lack the "bitter and beautiful edge". On the contrary, this is somewhere where the movie is a good deal more subtle and – beware incoming treasonous heresy – greatly improves on the books.

Review : Of Doves And Ravens

Let's get straight on with another Christmas read : Benjamin Stimpson's Of Doves And Ravens. This second bit of Welsh folklore is more specialist than Anne Ross's Folklore of Wales, concentrating on witches, wizards, and to a lesser extent magical practises in general. There's a smattering of other stuff here and there : the occasional ghost, weird creature and so on. But mostly it's about magical people.

This appears to be Stimpson's first book, and good on him. It's a pretty extensive, 300 page compendium of tales from across Wales, organised geographically. While I'm not at all sure I agree with Ross that magical beliefs are inevitably dying out (and even less sure as to whether this would be a good thing or not), I definitely think the stories need to be collected. Many of Stimpson's chosen stories are extremely minor, local legends, some of which are even at the level of rumours and gossip. Without books like this, such things would all too easily be lost forever. Some of them are shite, but some are wonderful. They deserve to be remembered.

As with Ross, Stimpson concentrates on presenting the stories rather than analysing them. But the commentary he does offer is intelligent and it's clear he's done some exhaustive research in compiling all this – it's only a shame there's no kind of conclusion section. The other minor issue is that there's a good deal of repetition in the chosen stories, such as :

• The "crow barn", in which a wizard manages to trap crows in a barn to stop them eating crops. That's it. It's dull as hell, but interminably minor variations of this occur across Wales, despite the fact it's an incredibly boring story. It makes us seem like a bunch of halfwits.
• Outwitting the Devil : typically by promising him half the crops (why does the Devil want vegetables anyway ?) and giving him the bad half, e.g. the tops of potatoes or the roots of wheat; being buried in the wall of a churchyard to avoid being buried inside or out and so cheating the Devil of a soul. That sort of thing.
• Using a magical spell book with imprisoned spirits that are released accidentally. Usually the book is so dangerous that the wizard only uses it once per year, but the reason it's used at all is rarely stated.
• And the title : on the death of a wizard, a dove will come to the body if his soul is pure, a raven if it's to be taken by the Devil. There are variations but this basic motif is found in many stories of wizards who would have lived remarkably similar lives if they were real people.
• Endless variations of the Llyn Y Fan Fach tale of a fairy who emerges from a lake to marry some young boy based on the consistency of his bread. Then he "strikes" her three times so she buggers off, leaving him with three medically-gifted children. It's not a bad story, but we don't need this many retellings of it.

If you're reading it geographically then I suppose this repetition doesn't matter so much, but if you read it straight through then it all becomes a bit tiresome. Many local wizards have an essentially identical story, and it would have been far better to just state the repeated bits in the introductory summary that accompanies each entry. 

This aside, there's little else to find fault with. The individual stories are told as descriptions of what the story says rather than actually as fiction. It's an easy read, all very straightforward and with a wealth of detail, once you get past the repetitive strain of yet another witch who did no worse than stopping the milk from churning. But then, this fits with Stimpson's description of a time when "magic was not considered silly... it was common sense".

I'm going to give this one another solid 7/10. It's a great read, and even in the repetitive bits, some interesting themes emerge.

Wyrd Wales

Alright then, let's get on with summarising my favourite bits. I mean, look, you can either go and watch the news about the actions of real-life monsters in America and Russia... or you can read about the much more fun fictional variety in Wales. Your choice.

The Nuisance Witch

As Stimpson says in the introduction, most typical Welsh witches were essentially normal people, not villainous old crones bent on murder. If they caused problems then they were incredibly petty ones : preventing milk from churning, making cows get a bit lost, stopping carts, that sort of thing. Both male and female magicians were often friendly members of the community and usually fully and unequivocally Christian. Unlike other countries, including our English neighbours, witches weren't seen as demonic or inhuman.

Reading through the individual cases I was reminded of nothing so much as the witches of Discworld :  figures who commanded respect but tinged with genuine fear. You wouldn't cross a witch, but you wouldn't expect her to come after you for no good reason – and you could fully expect any curse they inflicted to be lifted so long as you made a suitable apology. Pissing off the local witch would be a lot like annoying the town mayor : it's a bad idea, but for heaven's sake, he wouldn't be likely to try and eat your children or anything.

And as Keith Thomas pointed out, the only time most witches ever retaliated were when they had been wronged in some way. The fear of the witch was not a fear of their innate malevolence, but a projection of guilt : knowing you should have been more charitable* would lead to a fear of legitimate reprisal. At worse, in most cases you'd have a nuisance witch who'd act out of petty spite, but the chance of them doing anything really bad were extremely low.

* Another common motif is a curse that makes people dance for overcharging customers. One extreme case is that of a male witch who made his host get stuck up a ladder for refusing to share his fruit. It's an odd story, and he comes across as a colossal dick : when someone invites you round for tea, what kind of jerk demands they share things they never promised to share ? "Oh, you won't let me change the TV channel ? Well I guess I'll glue you to your chair then !".

What's weird about many of these cases were that people sincerely believed, incredibly recently, that some among them possessed incredible powers but used them for the most petty gains. One nuisance witch was said to turn into a hare in order to sneak into a field and eat the vegetables, another was said to fly from town to town and teleport into beer cellars for a drink. These would be world-changing, reality-altering powers which people seemed to think, quite genuinely, were being used for utterly minor personal gains.

And when I say recently, I mean extremely recently, exactly as in Anne Ross. While a handful of the tales here are medieval, the majority are 19th century, with plenty even in the early 20th century. Even the more exotic claims could be found in the Victorian era, including stories of rescuing a girl from the fairies and the ritual killing of animals in magical rites. Strictly speaking the latter wouldn't be classed as a sacrifice as the animals – which could include, dramatically, horses – weren't being offered to a deity*, though functionally I suppose it would be basically the same. 

* As Keith Thomas also said, there's almost no evidence of witches engaging in devil worship, with only a single example in the whole book. There's even one story of a witch who was literally ripped apart by the Devil because she spoiled milk – which hardly suggests they were on good terms.

Which isn't something I typically associate with such a modern historical period. It's like finding a lost bunch of Druids but in an era of steam trains and newspapers... I also can't help escape the notion that my forefathers must have been incredibly backward people. Had the Enlightenment just passed rural Wales by ? Were we all isolated shepherds living in the misty valleys, scratching a living off rocks and relying on wizardry for survival ?

Witchcraft

One other common aspect is that witchcraft was seen very much as a learnable skill. When magic practitioners were consulted, very often the advice was for the client (not the wizard) to perform some magical rite, typically something very simple like writing down a charm and placing it in the correct location (see also the healing and cursing wells discussed last time). In one case a witch treated two patients, but only one recovered because the other hadn't heard the incantation, almost as though magic were believed to be a two-way thing.

To be fair to my deplorably uncritical forebears, there were at least some notes of skepticism about the whole thing. There are plenty of stories where the famous local wizard might successfully summon demons or fly fifty miles in a night* but then be totally unable to find their own stolen property. At least they didn't think of magic as being a foolproof solution; they seemed aware that things didn't always work.

* In one particularly pointless case, a wizard flew across the country to deliver a hot mince pie to the King. We're a weird bunch.

Skepticism proper also crops up from time to time. Some visitors write in downright mocking terms about the claims of the local wizardry, with one story in particular deriding an "ancient book" as clearly having been printed with moveable type. One case that stands out to me is when someone pointed out that the reason the oxen weren't moving was not because of a curse but because their harness was demonstrably too small. 

So the Welsh were not entirely stupid, and we have to be given full marks for creativity if nothing else. Even so, it's hard to understand why people went straight for magic as an explanation. Now I love Uncanny, but there are only a few cases where I can honestly say, "yep, that's plainly stupid*, why did you even report this ?" (like the one where the claimed supernatural monster is blatantly just a smelly goat). Yet virtually all the cases here fall into this category, and there are none at all which present anything that sounds even remotely like credible evidence.

* There are, to be sure, only a very few of the opposite extreme where I struggle to see any rational explanation. Most are in a happy, entertaining grey area; I think, if I'm honest, I would like to believe in some supernatural aspect, but equally honestly, I can't say that I actually do.

It's not that I'm surprised to find a lack of evidence for fairies, you understand. No, what I'm getting at is that I'm surprised such beliefs persisted for so long and until so recently without any good supporting data. The demand to have some explanation is extremely strong, and far outweighs the need for it to be correct. If a child went missing, fairies it must be; if the milk won't churn, we'll blame it on a witch and get on with our day.

Even so, I perpetually wonder that people really do seem to think like this. And I continuously fret over the notion that half of all people are stupider than the average, especially when I look at the state of the world today.

Hags and Hounds

Witches in Discworld come from magical stock : some innate ability is required. This notion appears absent from Welsh witches but with a few exceptions. For as well as the formidable but usually well-meaning village witch, there were also other beings of an entirely different order.

Fairies are one such case, being inherently magical and inhabiting a world all of their own. Spirits and demons are another, often of extreme power... and yet, like the Devil himself, usually unbelievably stupid (though presented as though those who outwitted him were absolute geniuses) and easily manipulated creatures. But two stand out as being truly the stuff of horror. As promised last time, I want to look at these in a bit more detail.

My favourite is the gwrach y rhibin, the hag of the mist. Stimpson notes that modern would-be witches are making a mistake when they adopt this term for themselves, because the term is one of insult and true gwrachs are implicitly understood to be inhuman monsters. He charts the evolution of the creature over about a hundred years. The gwrach begins as a mountain hag who comes at dusk to the windows of a house where someone is about to die, naming in a "shrill voice" the the unfortunate person. Then she gains an apron full of stones which dribble along the path behind her as well as wings with which she flies (so being upstairs will no longer save you). Next comes her extreme ugliness, leathery bat-like wings and a "cadaverous appearance", as well as an ability to literally freeze the blood in the veins of those who hear her. She can even change gender and has fire in her eyes, with a screech that can drive men insane.

The gwrach began as a northern mountain legend, related to the torrent spectra and Grey King (both other figures associated with streams and mists, with the streams explaining the trail of stones). But at least one tale, from 1878, reports a gwrach much further south, visiting the far more domestic setting of a pub in Cardiff : and a full-on gwrach too, with teeth like tusks and a gown trailing as she flew through the air.

There are a few other interesting hag figures not directly related to the gwrach. The canthrig bwt was a child-eating hag who dwelt in a cave. She features in varying legends, sometimes killed by a criminal to avoid his penance, sometimes contemporary with – and even asking for assistance from – King Arthur. Sometimes she's a giant. A smaller but intimidating 7-foot swamp-dwelling hag, the Morfa Borth, was supposed to cause disease by blowing on people's faces. 

And then there's the gwyll of Llyn Cwm Llwch, a lake-dwelling Druid priestess seeking 900 victims to secure her immortality. Falling in love with a prince come to retrieve his lover, a princess already in her thrall, the Druidess called on the Devil. A whole host of writhing corpses followed her out of the pool* together with the princess, but she – in a most un-fairytale-like fashion, rejected the prince and chose the Devil instead. The prince seized the gwyll and leapt over the cliff to their deaths. Good luck with that one, Disney.

* This is one of few stories featuring undead bodies of any sort. There are no vampires, no zombies, but arguably one werewolf (if we count them as undead). The latter was a nasty little man turned into a wolf twice for bad behaviour, but the second time the witch died before he could be turned back. He was shot some years later, c.1890.

The last hag I want to mention brings us also to the terrifying cwn annwn, the hell hounds*. These huge dogs also come with the mist, white of coat but sometimes with red ears or covered in gore, with flaming eyes and nostrils. Their howls foretell death, and apparently they had a good make-work plan because they were also feared as dangerous in their own right, being thought to eat sleeping children. Incidentally, this hardly suggests a mere scare-them-straight threat to misbehaving youngsters, because how would this do anything but keep them awake and unruly ?

* Google them and most of the pictures are adorable. Canthrig bwt returns almost nothing, which just goes to show how important it is to have actual books about this stuff. 

The legend gets even stranger, and is worth a full quote (from James Motley, 1848) :

They are guided by the Master, a dark gigantic figure, carrying a long hunting pole at his back, and with a horn slung around his neck... no-one must call to them, for if anyone says, "I join in the hunt", blood will rain, and pieces of dead bodies fall to the earth, which have been torn from the ground by a powerful witch who accompanies the procession. This witch is probably the Mallt y Nos, or "Matilda of the night".

Blimey ! The witch herself seems very similar to the gwarch, and may or may not be the same figure. Later her story was developed into something all of its own, said to be a noble lady who declared she'd not go to heaven if she couldn't hunt there. Now she's condemned to join the Wild Hunt for all eternity, and some say she's a figure of misery, having long since come to regret her casual blasphemy.

... but wait, there's one more ! Not really a hag or a witch, but a fairy. I have to mention Llyn Y Fan Fach because it's so popular and strange. I visited the lake once, in the depths of winter. Smaller pools were frozen and there was a bitter wind up in the mountains; at a frosty sunset, it's a place all too suggestive to the imagination. Anyway, the basic tale (there are others which involve giants and stuff, but this is the principle legend) is that a young lad goes to the lake minding his herds when he spots a beautiful girl emerging with her own cattle. He offers her bread, three times : in goldilocks fashion, it's the wrong consistency until on the third day he gets it right. She promises to marry him, but in true fairy tale Chekhov's Gun fashion, the condition is that he mustn't strike her three times without cause. 

The marriage is by all accounts a happy one, and they have three children who later go on to become great physicians. But here the versions differ. In some, he gets angry and indeed strikes her; in others, he does no more than tap her on the shoulder to get her attention. In all cases he has cause, such as her laughing inappropriately at a funeral*. Nonetheless, three blows are three blows, and she takes all her herds back into the lake and he never sees her again. Like most fairy tales it isn't clear what exactly compels her to do this, but unlike most, she does in fact return, though only to see and tutor her sons. This makes it all the stranger as to why she can't see her husband again, especially in the cases where he's done her no injury (in one, the "blow" is no more damaging or threatening than a pillow fight).

* I mean there's a clear reason for his actions, not that he's justified in the versions where he hits her violently. She herself appears to be morally impeccable.

What does it mean ? Is it supposed to describe the complexities of life, with rules we can't fully understand – a case of making no mistakes but still getting things wrong ? Or is the man a figure who literally can't control himself ? Perhaps the popularity is due to its ambiguity, a useful metaphor that's flexible to many different situations.

Conclusions

In all of these examinations of supernatural beliefs, I keep coming back to two questions : did people really believe all of this, and did those beliefs reflect a moral belief or a world view ?

The answer to the first is relatively straightforward here : largely yes. Most of the stories don't actually go anywhere or make any sort of moral point whatsoever, literally amounting to "the milk wouldn't churn until the witch removed the curse" and suchlike. They feel like very simple tales that do no more than claim the event happened. There's a fundamental honesty about their utter lack of narrative and highly limited entertainment value.

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone believed all of them, and presumably some were things people just straight-up invented to amuse each other. But that they thought people would take them seriously seems clear enough. It would be much harder to decide on the boundaries of what they believed, whether they really thought the gwrach had wings or not for example. But the general principles, the belief in witches, fairies, wizardry and charms and omens of death... that's secure enough. As to why such ideas persisted for so long, I don't care to speculate.

What of the morality ? Here it's more complicated. Some definitely fall firmly into "this is just the way the world works" variety : there's no moral defence against the hounds of hell; writing down a charm wasn't itself deemed a moral or immoral act. That there was seen no issue of the clergy being wizards, or witches usually (though not quite always) being professed Christians who happened to do magic, suggests that for the most part, the supernatural was an inescapable part of life. Nobody gets punished or rewarded for their actions in most of these stories – they might benefit or suffer, but that's not the same thing at all. They might be warnings or encouragements, but they're not moral lessons.

On the other hand, morality does creep in. Share your wealth with your community. Treat the old and the poor with generosity and kindness. Apologise when you give offence. Try to follow the rules and respect the elderly. And from time to time, don't assume your cart broke down because a witch broke it – use your stupid brain and do some proper maintenance every once in a while.

Myths, legends and folklore are too complex to pigeonhole. Morality tales or world view... sometimes they're one or the other, sometimes they're both, and sometimes they're about flying a mince pie to the king. Make of them what you will.

Review : Folklore of Wales

Following on from Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter, I couldn't resist picking up another couple of short books on folklore. Both of which I devoured over Christmas, so let's start the New Year with the happy business of witches and whatnot.

The Review Bit

First up, Anne Ross' Folklore of Wales. The only appropriate adjective for this is... well, nice. It has a very distinctive style, an unusual mix of the academic, the readable narrative, and the unbearably twee : for one annual festivity she describes how "the sweet music of the harp would further enhance the happy occasion", without embarrassment. It takes some getting used to, but the clarity and simplicity of the text generally makes up for the often rose-tinted view of the people of the past. And Ross knows when to be lucid and when to be deliberately obscure, when to be literal and when to be quasi-mystical.

As Clegg noted, academics of Ross' generation tended to view the originators of folklore as being simplistic peasants, uncreative and dull, with all their wild beliefs being vestiges of ancient pagan religions rather than their own creations. Ross certainly does fall into this trap quite heavily, rarely acknowledging that largely illiterate people can still be crazily imaginative. She definitely infers too much that weird cults and practices must have been remnants of lost religions proper... but she doesn't lean into this too heavily. We don't get lectured here, with Ross largely concentrating on presenting folkloric beliefs rather than analysing them. Contrary to Clegg's view, it's also clear she loves her subject matter* dearly – on more than one occasion I had to wonder if she was a pagan herself.

* No lectures here on the word "Celtic" either, a word only delivered with lengthy apologies in many recent books. And to be fair, she does sometimes note that some ideas are wholly modern.

So yeah, it's nice. It's a short book but with plenty of illustrations and figures, covering a very wide breadth of all aspects of Welsh folklore. At ~£15 it's pricey for a 150 page paperback, and it would have helped if she didn't keep complaining about the lack of available space* – just add another 50 pages if you want to ! Perhaps the biggest problem is some chapters are rather unstructured, with no clear link between one topic and the next. But it's rare to find any section which is uninteresting, and overall it's well worth a read. A solid 7/10 from me.

* Two other things. She's weirdly horny for cranes (the birds), describing them as though they were near-miraculous and – for some unknown reason – able to run as fast as a horse (hint : they can't). And worryingly, she seems to think that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Wales, It Is A Silly Place

Right then, here's what I learned about my native country.

Commonly Celtic 

I've previously remarked on the similarities of pagan stories across Europe, but I wasn't aware of just how similar Welsh beliefs are with other traditions in Britain. For example the famous "Scottish" Kelpie also occurs in Welsh folklore as the Ceffl Dwr and appears to be essentially the same type of beastie : a water-dwelling horse, sometimes with shapeshifting abilities, that lures the unwary to their deaths. Good marketing on behalf of the Scots, but a bit unfair on the rest of us. Quit hogging the water horses !

I'll get my own deadly water horse, with blackjack, and hookers...

Fairies also occur throughout Sottish, Irish and Welsh myths in very similar form* : smallish (about three feet tall as a rule, though larger in the older stories), chaotic neutral (capable of both good and evil but primarily concerned with doing their own thing), living underground (though again not always in the earlier Welsh stories, where they seem to inhabit more of a parallel world than an underground kingdom), highly magical, and with a distinctive tendency to manipulate time.

* Although it should be noted that the Irish have specific mythological tales describing their origin. I'm not aware of any comparable Welsh stories, with our fairies just being a thing.

There are also soothsayers who are described almost like shamans, with similar ritualistic performances and a dress code not at all unlike what you'd expect for an ancient wizard (quoting third hand, with similar Scottish practises described elsewhere in the text) :

Whenever he assumed to practise the black art, he put on a most grotesque dress, a cap of sheepskin with a high crown, bearing a plume of pigeon's feathers, and a coat of unusual pattern, with broad hems, and covered with talismanic characters. In his hand he had a whip, the thong of which was made of the skin of an eel and the handle of bone.

He certainly sounds like an intimidating chap if nothing else.

Ross also points out more specific similarities between the Welsh Arthur and the Irish hero Finn MacCool. Both lead warbands (early Arthur is not even a king; later Arthur is an Emperor), both invade the otherworld, both command animals, both fight magical pigs*, and both are said to be sleeping rather than dead. She also notes, albeit a bit more tangentially, the similarity of Arthur and the Welsh for bear (arth), as well as the name of the magician Math (of the Mabinogion) and the Irish word for prophet.

* I know wild boar can be dangerous beasts indeed, but still, my modern notion of the farmyard varieties just doesn't accept them as much more threatening than Peppa Pig.

Not that Arthur is just a Welsh version of an Irish hero or the other way around, however. A final interesting suggestion from Ross (and others) is that the linguistic similarity suggests Arthur was originally a Celtic bear god, though this feels like quite the leap of faith to me. Regardless, the Arthurian traditions throughout the British Isles (and indeed France, as we shall see) all have unique attributes, and the English Arthur is no more the Welsh Arthur than he is secretly Finn MacCool in disguise. Perhaps they had a common point of origin, perhaps not... Arthur's origins and evolution are nothing if not complex*. Perhaps it's all just the result of similar cultures exploring similar themes.

* And Merlin's too. In a variation on the Vortigern tale of needing a child without a father, Ross gives a version where the locals set the far more realistic standards that the father only had sex with the mother once. There are even Welsh accounts where he's not Welsh at all, which is not what I expected from ancient legends.

Of course, the original Arthur was Welsh though. That's just common sense.

Monsters in the mist

Not all supernatural tales are as sophisticated or as pan-Brittanic as Arthur. Some are distinctly Welsh*, with a particular focus here on creatures of the mist. Of these, some are widely mentioned but little described, such as the Grey King who appears to have power to control mountain fog, but whether he's a figure of malevolence or just a personification of natural forces is... ahem... hazy. Sinister might be the best word, rather than outright evil.

* Although not entirely. Ross doesn't do a detailed comparison of everything, so it's possible that some of these are found elsewhere as well.

Far less ambiguous is the torrent spectre, a ghostly giant that dwells in streams and delights in causing deadly floods. Oddly, Ross says nothing of interest at all about giants more generally, which is strange as  they appear to be far more common in Welsh legends and folklore than our more famous dragons. She's also a bit confusing with the afanc, the strange crocodile-beaver water monster than does classic monster things, but according to the story here also seduces local maidens... whereas another version of the same local tale I found online says that the poor girl volunteered herself as bait – a far more heroic interpretation.

Some descriptions of the afanc also have it more straightforwardly as a water-dragon. Of the more familiar land-dwelling dragons, every book on Celtic folklore harps on about the incident under Vortigern's castle which gave rise to the big red one on the flag. Ross, to her great credit, gives another dragon story I'd never heard before. The legend says that snakes who drank women's milk and ate communion bread would be transformed into winged serpents or dragons. She relates one particular tale of a nest of such creatures at Moel Bentyrch, where the locals erected a stone pillar. This was not to commemorate the story but allegedly as an active defence against the monsters : covered with scarlet ribbon (which they supposedly hated) and concealing iron spikes in the hope they'd impale themselves on it.

Other creatures are less surreal and more straightforwardly horrific. My two favourite are the cwm annwn (the hounds of hell) and the gwarch y rhibyn (the hag of the mist). The hounds were ferocious white beasts whose appearance and howls presaged death, but they were also said to bite and even kill people, disappearing into the earth at the spot the grave would be dug. The gwarch was even worse. A banshee-like hideous hag that appeared in the mountain mists to rattle on windows, she evolved in the tellings into an almost Balrog-like monstrosity. More on both of these two when I review the next book.

This is getting much too scary, but fortunately some monsters are altogether weirder. Monstrous water-cats are apparently another widespread concept, of which the Cath Palug is surely both the strangest and the silliest. Arising from yet another magical pig hunted by Arthur, which went around birthing a whole assortment of different creatures before the cat, British stories have this later slain by one of Arthur's knights. Not so the French, however, who have the cat killing Arthur and going on to assume the throne. Which is quite possibly a case of deliberate mockery of a folk hero, and not very nice at all.

Believing in believing ?

All this raises the classic question of whether anyone ever really believed in any of this, or if later people just mistook fiction for documentation. Surely the Cath Palug becoming king was never believed by anyone at all and always understood to be fiction, but what of the rest ?

Here things get more interesting. Ross is explicit that many believed in some of this within living memory, and indeed a few still do – as communities, even, rather than the odd crazy loon. She recalls children around Bala being actively scared of a ghostly pig that would emerge at Halloween (best episode of Peppa ever), but also adults who believed in various lake monsters. There are even eyewitness accounts of fairies well into modern times, and people leaving milk out for them in living memory – enough to demonstrate that people took some of this stuff very seriously indeed. The gwarch also appears to have been a figure of genuine fear, not a story to scare naughty children with.

It wasn't just monsters either. Other supernatural ideas also appear to have been widely believed, especially omens and prophecies. The number of rituals for divination was huge : burning candles to see when the flame went out to check for ill health, or checking which way a rooster crowing at night happened to be looking*, or seeing the future through holes in bones, planting hemp at crossroads, and all manner of other bizarre practises and a myriad of variations on a theme. Basically anything you see on a cheap TV show featuring fortune-telling – yeah, someone did that. There are legions of examples of how such seemingly arbitrary rites were exactly that : a way to make a random decision when there was just no way to make a properly informed choice**. 

* Quite who would be able to get up in time to check this accurately isn't specified.

** In relation to the sheer randomness of it all, two examples I particularly like. First, the notion that eating the flesh of an eagle could allow you to cure shingles (and/or grant prophetic powers) by breathing and spitting on the affected area, an ability than some said would be retained for nine generations. Secondly how snakeskin could be used to cure essentially anything, including granting invulnerability. I mean, you can see how some weird ideas stick around a lot longer than they should, but you'd think people would eventually notice that consuming the ashes of snakeskin wasn't making them invincible.

One of the most eerie beliefs was that of the corpse candle. A traveller sees a blue night wandering the fields at night which goes into a house and into the room of someone who'll be found dead the next morning. Similarly, blue lights represented the soul in other, happier but equally weird circumstances, such as girls letting down a woollen ladder hoping to reveal a future lover. The idea seems to have been that their soul would climb the ladder as a blue light and then reveal themselves. 

There were also wells used for both healing and cursing, or even weather control by dropping in pieces of quartz to cause storms. It's interesting to chart how some wells began as extremely holy places but later became sites of evil used exclusively for cursing, dropping in charms and spells in the hope they'd summon some supernatural power to inflict harm on their targets. Many spells appear to be simple things, not much more than writing down what you wanted to happen and dropping it in the appropriate places. While this began as a pagan practise, the rituals evolved to become fully Christian : a sort of modified prayer would be written, explicitly calling on the power of God or Jesus or whatnot. And Ross notes that some such wells only gained their reputation in the modern era, acknowledging that not all folklore is the end product of centuries of tradition.

Conclusions

Ross does, however, state that we're likely now at the very end of such beliefs. She goes on something of a stock rant about the decline of society, how television is corrupting the young and the instant gratification of big-city living is eroding the value of storytelling and village life. It's not at all convincing, and I'd be willing to bet such laments have been made since the first caveman decided to build a hut.

Are such beliefs changing ? Yes, absolutely. They always do. It's difficult to think that we'll ever return to thinking that standing stones would take themselves down to the nearest lake for a drink, or that eating eagles would grant healing powers – and in some such cases, it's far better to let these ideas die (both for our own well-being and that of the eagles). Presumably, Ross wouldn't have felt so nostalgic had she been a bit more skeptical of the idea that most local customs are truly ancient.

That said, I concede that Ross presents a decent case for a more community-oriented view of the past. Not in the meddling, interfering sense we see in cases of witch hunts, but in the common activities open to all. These days we have essentially Christmas as the only major annual communal event, perhaps also New Year, with the others (Halloween, Easter, a few others) being much lesser. In contrast Ross describes festivals of similar magnitude to Christmas happening throughout the year, even just a century ago. Nowadays we have a great deal more activities available for like-minded people to participate in, but fewer that act for community unification.

Are we losing the sense of magic though ? I'm not so sure. If we accept that folk traditions are, in many cases, not ancient, then it seems to point towards how people think at a fundamental level. Two thousand years of the Christian faith was unable to stop people going from door to door with a horse's skull to engage in a rap-battle with the neighbours... I suspect at any point in history one would witness beliefs changing, some dying out while new ones spring up. As in Hogfather, there is a fixed quantity of belief in the universe. You can't kill crazy : if the gods are dead and we have killed them, then – sorry atheists – some other mad idea will simply emerge to fill the gap.

Review : Land of Mist And Magic

I continue exploring the world of mythology with Philip Parker's Land of Mist and Magic. This rather lovely coffee-table book presents a fully illustrated guide to a collection of British mythology, legends, heroic fiction, and folklore. 

As a physical product it's hard to find fault with this one. Good, thick pages, extremely high-quality printed images, and a text that's highly readable. It doesn't offer much in the way of outright analysis but it does include some incisive and intelligent commentary. This is absolutely a book you can read for pleasure as well as display as a sort of trophy-book to impressive visitors. Come in, gentle stranger, and marvel at the wondrous books you see before you !

Anyway, the text consists of a series of retellings combining different sources to merge all the major elements together, usually with a short introduction describing the origin and history of the story. They're all written in a simple, present-tense style which is never going to win any literary awards* but it gets the job done; they're imperfect, but more than adequate. The descriptive passages of both the scenery and the emotional state of the characters usually adds something not found in the original, archaic literature. But it can also lack an edge, sometimes missing important details for the sake of brevity.

* In particular, over-use of bland phrases like "will never be forgotten" does feel a bit chatbot. In one extreme case, Parker uses "forgotten" three times in as many sentences, which is getting lazy.

On the other hand, there's an unexpected benefit of being concise : when giving only an extract from a story, the moral lesson becomes so much clearer than when reading the tale in full. Often in the old myths (Celtic, Greek and Norse alike) it's very hard to understand what, if any, lesson the reader is supposed to take from these vast pseudo-histories. It may be more realistic to have a hero falling into cynicism and pettiness, but it makes it much harder to understand which actions are deemed to be "right" if everything a hero does is always undone; everything becomes subsumed in the ever-changing now. Cutting the story off, or into distinct segments to be told separately, makes it so much easier to say, "look, they did this, and they were rewarded" without being bogged down by what happened next.

One example illustrates both points. Pwyll and Rhiannon involves the nobleman Pwyll marrying the mysterious fairy Rhiannon, along with some job-swapping with the fairy king. At his wedding feast he foolishly grants a request to a stranger, which turns out to be Rhiannon's abusive ex... but with some cunning trickery involving an unfillable magic bag, they trap him and beat him up so everything ends happily*.

* It probably needs to be reiterated quite a lot that ancient fairy stories are not much like the modern versions. On the other hand, some stories, like Lady Godiva, are so boring they could only appeal to puritanical Victorians; if it was a modern version, the very least she could do to make it interesting would be to start an OnlyFans account. Get over yourself, Lady G.

In this version, that's all that happens, and the moral that even rash promises must be upheld comes through clearly. In the full telling, as given in Epic Celtic Tales, the story continues and it all gets weird, involving a horse-stealing monster and Rhiannon being framed for eating her children*. The moral theme of the earlier part of the story is lost, but on the other hand, the version given in LOMAM doesn't include Rhiannon sharply chiding her witless husband. This isn't a minor detail – it gives her much more feminist depth and underscores just how stupid the otherwise astute, and seemingly generous, Pwyll, is being at that particular moment.

* What did I just say ?

But restricting the story to only a single episode in the otherwise near-complete history of the pair changes the interpretation completely. Instead of it being an almost random "bunch of stuff that happens" sequence of events, suddenly it has a clear message. I tend to read stories expecting that the main point will only come through in the entire product, that the ending is what gives it meaning. Here is seems that this is not the case, that the reader is expected to consider each part in isolation : it's up to the audience to decide at what point to search for the lessons being told. This is exactly what Plato did when he quoted poets to debate some moral point, rather than considering the full history of Achilles or Odysseus. Still, to have this pointed out explicitly is, for me, very valuable.

Anyway, since the analysis is light with this one, and having covered mythology quite a bit already by this point, I think I'll limit the rest of this post to a short set of the most interesting tales I came across within the pages. It's very much a mixed bag, but some of these were wholly new to me while others put familiar tales in a new light. 

Origins : the origin myths of Britain are certainly interesting if you're a modern-day fruitcake... sorry, Reform voter. They're all explicit in that Britain was founded by foreigners – in the case of Scotland, a bunch of mixed-race (mainly Egyptian) immigrants arriving on a small boat. They are clearly proud of having a foreign origin, albeit ones they could look to for imperial glory (Egypt, Rome, Troy). They wanted the Stone of Scone to have a foreign origin to give it mystical credence, wanted to associate themselves with Brutus even as early as the 7th century. They actively deride the previous "native" inhabitants as savage giants who don't really do much except get killed by the heroes. Even when they give Britain a more glorious path of its own, such as when Arthur conquers the Roman Empire, they have it done by forging respectful alliances with other people and respecting their treaty obligations.

Fuck off Reform. Just fuck right off and stop spouting bollocks about "native Britons".

Though to be fair... they don't always have the Britons, once established, as being a bunch of Guardian-reading hippies. They're extremely racist against the Irish, in one story having Merlin steal the stones for Stonehenge (which is constructed, pointlessly, as a war memorial) after slaughtering their way through the Irish ranks. Just because they weren't anything like modern bigots doesn't mean the people telling these stories were very nice. Likewise, when St Carantoc subdued a dragon, he doesn't let Arthur kill it. Saying that it surrendered to Christian faith, instead it he lets it loose to, err... go off and eat Saxon children instead.

Well, I guess that should scare away the Guardian readers as well as the Reform voters, thus bringing my audience down to pretty much zero. Oh well.

Bladud : A curious tale that, while told in its fullest form by Geoffrey of Monmouth, took centuries to develop. Bladud was a possibly Welsh princeling with a hunger for learning who went to learn at Plato's Academy. Expelled for pursuing forbidden knowledge, he returned to Britain with leprosy and found employment with a kindly swineherd. Thanks to his keen wit and observational skills, he discovered a cure and was able to assume his rightful position as king, building a bathhouse on the healing waters that cured him. But his all-consuming hunger for knowledge was not sated, eventually ending in his death in an attempt to fly.

I rather like this one. Bladud's thirst for knowledge isn't the problem, it's that he lacks wisdom. He's a complex character, wanting to help the people of the kingdom but also foolhardy : he doesn't know when to stop, when to just be grateful for his first miracle rather than greedily seeking a second. He could have ruled well – no external enemies assailed him – but he threw it away on a vanity project rather than making the most of what he had. He knew a great deal, but lacked the self-awareness needed to control his own worst impulses.

Saint David : As my patron saint I feel I have to mention this one, but it seems he was a right cunt. His clifftop birth in a storm, to a mother who was herself a saint, was dramatic enough I suppose. But then he was apparently "so holy that he silenced the Bishop from the womb" when his mother walked into a sermon, and if that doesn't scream "awkward pregnancy" then I don't know what does*. Fair play to him for reviving the dead and healing the sick, but his lifestyle of extreme asceticism for himself and his followers – even the one with magical bees – doesn't appeal. Only eating bread and drinking water, preaching while neck-deep in freezing rivers... no thanks. Never mind that his most famous sermon, where the ground rose beneath him so his words could be heard by the crowd, was against the Pelagian "heresy" of free will. Sorry, Dave, you sound like a dick.

* It would also make her rather less saintly and a lot more interesting.

Folk heroes : A couple of popular figures need to be mentioned because they show just how much the stories have changed. Jack (of the Beanstalk fame) didn't start out as a figure having anything to do with beanstalks of any kind, but he did go around killing assorted giants : the earlier Jack has a much longer and more interesting series of adventures than the later one, though both are the classic "unexpected hero" who did nothing to earn his abilities. Similarly, the modern narrative of Robin Hood has a very fixed storyline, whereas the original has nothing much to do with robbing from the rich and has Robin of unexceptional abilities who brawls with his own men. A cantankerous, petty Robin who's also a bit of a god-botherer certainly puts a different spin on things. He begins his journey to folk hero as a commoner, not one of the gentry who merely sympathises with their plight.

Arthurian stories : A few micro-comments on these. Vortigern, tyrant of Britain during Merlin's infancy, is portrayed here as weak and ineffectual. I much prefer Rutger Hauer's version in which he's a classical... well, tyrant. It's not at all clear how he stayed in power in Parker's description, especially as he's given all the charisma of a diseased hamster. This vision of a past Britain in a state of decay is, however, interesting in itself, given the myriad concerns as to whether the Anglo-Saxon invasion ever happened (or at least to what extent and in what form). For the Greeks and Romans, history seems to have been a tale largely of continuous decline, but the medieval British, it seems to have been much less of a monotonic fall from grace. Perhaps this willingness to believe in a ruinous past says something about the mindset of the authors and why we shouldn't take their more apocalyptic descriptions too literally.

The stories of the Holy Grail also varies considerably from some of the modern Arthurian legends. As mentioned in Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic, this appears in the Mabinogion story of Peredur, but once again, setting this part aside as its own complete tale changes the whole interpretation. Peredur encounters the grail – a plate carrying a severed, bleeding head, and nothing at all to do with Jesus or a cup* – in the castle of the Fisher King (so called because he's injured so he fishes rather than hunts), where his failure to ask about it means he can't recover it... but he wasn't even looking for it, nor could he possibly have known what he was supposed to ask. The message is so utterly unclear that it actually becomes oddly satisfying. One day I might even attempt to articulate why.

* Wikipedia says that the Peredur story doesn't contain a grail, but this doesn't ring true. The plate carrying the severed head may not be described as a grail but it carries exactly the same narrative function as in the carbon-copy version Percival, which does supposedly contain a grail. Methinks someone is nit-picking here in the extreme.

There are other points where things verge on the confusing rather than the merely complicated. In the story of St Carantoc Arthur is a mere sub-king rather than the all-conquering perfect Emperor of later elaborations. In some stories there are multiple ladies of the lake, one of whom is decapitated, and multiple Excaliburs that may or may not relate to the one in the stone. Just as in Mark Williams' Celtic Myths That Shaped The Way We Think, Gwain's quest to seek the Green Knight is described as a failure, but what exactly makes it so isn't really stated*. Arthur's death, in some versions, is an almost complete catastrophe, a descent into anarchy and an ending which is simply tragic. In some versions, Arthur's army flee Mordred's host to the land of Lyonesse, which is destroyed in an Atlantis-like flood, a dramatic and absolutely final end to the whole Arthurian saga. At least it provides a clean break for history to resume.

* I find ChatGPT's answer to this very satisfying, however. I might have to re-read the tale in full.

Hereward the Wake : Not to be confused with Hereward the Woke, his liberally-minded cousin. This is a very interesting legend/fiction of one of the few romanticised holdouts against the Normal conquest. The mythologised idea of clinging on to the old ways is rife in Arthurian legend but appears virtually absent following the Norman Conquest... is this because the Normal lifestyles were simply too similar to their Saxon predecessors ? It's hard to mythologise a bygone age of different pottery styles and questionable facial hair choices, maybe. 

Anyway, Hereward is a rebel in East Anglia whose prior adventures include killing giants and man-bears. His tale partially follows the classic narrative structure : an overly-complicated and seemingly unconnected series of events without a clear message. More unusual is that when Hereward goes to reconnoitre the surroundings in disguise, it doesn't work very well. This is extremely refreshing because disguises in these old stories seem to be otherwise of near-perfect efficacy. And when his camp is attacked by a witch in service of the Norman army, they send her in by pushing her atop a tower. It's a very Norse image* that doesn't fit our modern ideas of the Normans as relatively advanced and sophisticated compared to the Saxons. Here is an unexpected, incongruous bit of paganism in an era otherwise familiar to every schoolboy raised on stories of 1066 and all that.

* The witch operating from a tower appears in other Norse sagas and archaeology. ChatGPT suggests that the height affords the witch the liminal space that in other cultures might be represented by forests, water, caves and so on, as well as stemming from a peculiarly Norse requirement for magic to be visible.

Hereward's tale stands out for romanticising a previous era which is usually glossed over as mere regime change. As in Mark Morris, the cultural change throughout the Saxon era was substantial, with the heroes of the local mead halls not being much like the powerful rulers of country-wide kingdoms. It's also unusual in having magical events and creatures but set in a distinct, highly identifiable time and place with real, named people. Even King William gets a look in. He forgives Hereward his rebellion, thus making the whole thing a complete waste of time, making it very much a classic "bunch of stuff that happened" narrative despite its many oddities. Well, maybe in the full text there's a more skillful explanation and some more satisfying moral narrative being told.

---

Ronald Hutton and Neil Price, as well as others, describe paganism as essentially amoral, more a world view than a moral doctrine. And I can see the appeal of this, but the most interesting thing about Parker's book is that it strongly challenges this simple view. I think it's fair to say that the morality of Christian stories does come through a lot louder than in the pagan myths, but this doesn't mean it's absent. Certainly the ancient moral beliefs wouldn't find much in common with those any modern religion, even the reinvented strands of paganism, but the stories might not be as inconsistent as they first appear. Perhaps we should be reading them less as epic sagas and more of collections of individual tales, each one with a different but distinct moral aspect. They require more analysis than listening to Jesus droning on about the meek, and they're probably a lot less self-consistent too. But there are morals to be found within – they're not stories purely intended for entertainment nor records of events people believed actually happened. 

I love the glorious weirdness of the whole thing, a dangerous and magical world of unpredictable adventures, strange creatures and supernatural forces around every turn. Their literary sophistication, with themes running and developing across multiple stories which relate back to each other, is clear; these were not written by the chronically bored or insane (well, not all of them, at any rate). If we allow that the moral lessons are being imparted in a very different way to modern sensibilities, just as the stories themselves are told differently, perhaps there's a whole other level of appreciation to be found here.