Review : The Real Middle-Earth (1)

I return to my mythology binge with Brian Bates' The Real Middle-Earth : A History of the Dark Ages that Inspired Tolkien. I picked this up partly because an examination of the spiritual views of the Dark Age peoples of Britain (and it is largely about Britain, despite ostensibly covering a much larger area) coupled with Tolkien is just irresistible, especially because it was also very cheap.

I have to say though that there's a lot to dislike about this book. For starters all the sentences are very short. They're also always about the same length. This makes the style very simple. After a while it becomes quite annoying. The need for longer sentences becomes urgent. It's a bit "this happened and then this happened". It's all very matter-of-fact but not terribly engaging. There's also not even that much punctuation. This is because the sentences are all so short.

The writing style aside, there are more serious issues. First published in 2002, it hasn't been updated since – and the historical deficiencies are readily visible. Bates treats the classical view of everyone-being-clobbered-by-the-Saxon-invaders as a known truth, which now looks very unlikely to be correct. It also tends to be highly repetitive, at least in the early sections, sometimes even repeating sentences almost verbatim directly one after another. The token Tolkien references are no more than that*, and so short as to be almost meaningless; honestly it would probably be better to remove them altogether. 

* So far as I can tell, he references The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, some essays and letters, but not The Sillamrilion !

What may annoy some readers very greatly is that at times it feels Bates is not merely describing mysticism but actually being mystical, and it's impossible to know if he really believes what he's saying or not. He also occasionally says the odd really stupid thing, like how you can tell which tree is which by looking at their bark and leaves. As opposed to what other method ? And he doesn't always explain how he knows what he claims to know, sometimes simply stating that people believed such-and-such without justifying how this can be proven. He doesn't cite anything in the text directly, and though the endnotes give an extensive bibliography, it's very difficult to reference many of his more specific claims. By no means is this always true, but it happens more than enough to be irksome.

Perhaps his most serious error is calling a large tract of Dark Age Europe a "civilisation" : surely nothing so homogenous can be said to exist. "People with a coherent or at least broadly similar world view" might be more credible, but it needs much more rigorous definition and discussion.

Often a list of annoyances this long would be enough for me to write a scathing review and leave it at that, but in this case, there are enough positive attributes to more than compensate for the weaknesses. Bates presents a magnificent alternative world view, eminently plausible, brilliantly emphasising how this impacted all aspects of Dark Age life. For a short book of 200-odd pages it's commendably complete. If he'd called it something like, "The Age of Magic : How We Used To Think", dropping the Tolkien stuff... he'd be on much firmer ground. Treated as a series of independent analyses of how various Dark Age peoples viewed the world, it has fair claim to be outstanding : most of the stupid statements don't actually affect any of the important conclusions at all, and to my way of thinking it would be unfair to let them detract overmuch from the work as a whole. Some of his analyses are even better than those of the other mythological books I've been reading lately.

I can't ignore the negative aspects entirely though, especially those weird, consistent-length short sentences which seem designed to wind me up the wrong way. The outdated history doesn't do any serious harm but it is an annoyance, and it deserves a revised version with the assistance of a professional historian (Bates is a professor of psychology). Fortunately, in the main, the bad stuff is heavily concentrated in the first couple of chapters looking at history, which, to be blunt, are dreadful... but after that things improve quite drastically. 

So overall I'm going to give this one a very respectable 7/10. It is, though, rather hit-and-miss : some of his ideas just seem like complete bunk (dragons as a folk memory of dinosaurs ???), but they're worth enduring for the more frequent and more well-developed good stuff. 

What wisdom, then, does this little book have to convey about such a fascinating period ? Let's start with the prosaic and slowly build up to the more interesting and mystical. In this first part I cover how Christianity stole the magic and the reasons cities died after Rome ran away. Then, by way of monsters, I'll start to look at how Dark Age peoples viewed the supernatural and the nature of their view of reality.

Christian Charity, Christian Contempt

Tom Holland made a commendable effort to understand why and how Christianity came to rapidly replace the earlier pagan beliefs. And no, meme-activist-warriors, it wasn't because of all the Crusades : that is nonsense. Organisation played a key role, with, as noted previously, earlier beliefs not having any set doctrine to rally behind. That made them vulnerable. But Holland's more positive message is what paganism didn't say. Roman beliefs, at least, made little provision for the poor, had no concern for welfare, and would have viewed Christ on the cross as a symbol only of shame and defeat. Christianity, by contrast, championed the downtrodden in a way that was absolutely alien to polytheistic beliefs.

At least that's Holland's thesis. Nevertheless, from the perspective of a non-believer, the goody-two-shoes ideas of Jesus are certainly much more boring than the hedonistic, wild bloodbath of paganism. If Christianity is a tea party then paganism is an orgy.

What Bates notes repeatedly is that Christianity rarely claimed that the magical beliefs of the locals weren't real. Rather Christian missionaries didn't seek to persuade anyone that dragons or witches or fairies didn't exist, because everyone knew perfectly well that they did – including Christians themselves. Instead they reframed the beliefs. Magical things now became the purview of God, or the angels, demons or the Devil (Christianity, as I've said, never really being all that fully-fledged in its professed monotheism). Indeed some early missionaries were even given explicit instructions to incorporate the local beliefs this way. A letter from Pope Gregory to St Augustine (594 AD) instructed him to rededicate temples rather than destroy them, replace pagan idols with saintly iconography, and allow people to "build their booths of green leaves and slay their bulls".

This assimilation was surely not a one-way street. Early Christian art incorporates pagan imagery, but even by the full medieval period, plants like mugwort had their pagan magic included into Christian medicine. Christianity had in particular no problem at all with bringing sacred wells into its belief system. Bates suggests that water very naturally lends itself to supernatural thoughts, that its movement and reflection taps into a deep part of the psyche :

Water seems especially the medium par excellence of the unconscious. Our conscious awareness of water is perhaps meant literally to be only the 'tip of the iceberg'; all that below the surface represents the depths of the unconscious – deep images, flowing receptive, swirling, still and calm, raging and torrential. It is hardly surprising that this language comes naturally to us, for our own bodies consist largely of water. Looking into water is like looking into ourselves.

Bates probably means this a bit too literally and I've omitted some outright pseudoscience he quotes here, but nevertheless, water as a metaphor for thought seems incredibly apt.

Our essential human relationship to the great forces beyond the ken of everyday minds is magic. Religions are a temporary wrap giving context to that primeval act.

It wasn't all noble inclusivity though. What Christianity did, with increasing vigour, was attempt to seize a monopoly on magic. It would literally demonise anyone practising magic who wasn't a Christian : hence, for example, wise women becoming witches. It didn't do away with the supernatural but it recast it morally, from fundamental, normal beliefs that everyone accepted, into something divisive, something to fight against... unless, of course, the Church deemed that it was a work of God. I suppose you could call it a Dark Age culture war.

Cities of Death

In the previous posts on Lost Realms I mentioned that I wasn't fully convinced of the reasons why the Roman cities remained unoccupied after the legions left. Of course, this is a simplification : some did actually survive but revert to timber rather than stone construction, and some were partially re-used albeit as farms. But some at least fell truly into ruin. 

There were surely practical reasons involved, such as a lack of resources needed for basic maintenance. But why not at least re-use the still solid walls ? Francis Pryor noted in Britain BC that modern archaeologists have incorporated a simple and compelling idea from contemporary tribal societies : stone is associated with the dead and wood is for the living. This helps explain why Stonehenge had a wooden counterpart, with one circle for the ancestors and one for the living. 

But it may also help explain that otherwise strange behaviour of leaving all these generally-intact cities to just crumble into dust, the idea being that the locals, after more than three hundred years of occupation, still genuinely didn't want to live in stone houses. To them, it would have been like living in walls made of tombstones. And nobody, not even the most devoutly-antitheistic goth, would today like their house to be made of graves, the names of the dead staring at them continuously from every wall.

Bates goes further. His description of the divide between the worlds of the living and the dead at times reminds me of nothing so much as the Upside-Down in Stranger Things, and violating the two carried severe penalties. Consider Roman roads :

Stretching into the distance for miles, they cut straight through strands of trees, hills, bridged-over streams and rivers – the Romans even built them right through ancient burial mounds. In Saxon beliefs the trees, hills and burial mounds swept aside by the heavy Roman construction must have churned into the air multitudes of ancient spirits, ancestors and monsters torn from their slumber in the depths of the Lowerworld.

To the Dark Age peoples the natural world was not a green background but an essential part of everyday life, alive with supernatural forces which would retaliate if they were mistreated. Imagine, then, the psychic power of an entire stone city. Such a gross intrusion cutting through the very order of things would not easily be forgotten or forgiven. It would be as if David Attenborough were to personally construct and open a coal-fired power station in the middle of the Serengeti and deliberately force-feed the waste products to orphaned hippos. 

The simplistic way this has been remembered is that the locals believed the cities were haunted. Actually, suggests Bates, a curse would be more accurate, though this too would be a very simple view of the "wyrd" which I'll return to later. Still, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy : the abandonment of the cities would have seemed like a moral judgement against urban living, with the very emptiness of the cities helping keep them unpopulated long enough for them to become uselessly ruinous. 

Of course, this wasn't a homogenous process by any means : not everyone would have devoutly believed in the ancestral spirits, and in more ancient times burial mounds were not inert structures, with the remains of the dead moved around for years after their initial internment. Nevertheless, it seems at least credible as a contributing factor.

Existential Monsters

What about the penalties for violating the order of things ? Here's where things start to get interesting. Once again, I've messed up with my interpretation of Beowulf : very stupidly, a few posts ago I said, "the hoard in Beowulf is just an ancient, pre-existing collection that the dragon takes over to nobody's disadvantage." This was a dumb thing to say, because Bates emphatically emphasises the point of burying hoards and other grave goods : they were returned to the realm of the ancestors. 

Crucially, the dragon doesn't do anything until the hoard is disturbed. Even Tolkien, who pointed out the cosmic symbolism of the dragon through its inherently magical nature, didn't really pick up on this, being more concerned with the literary power of the work than its historical insight into Dark Age thinking. But if we accept that goods were returned to the earth (as they were in other liminal places like lakes and streams) as a way of giving them back to the ancestors, then the symbolism of the dragon is only enhanced. The dragon protects the past*. Bates argues it even represents the end of one cycle of time and the beginning of another, with other dragons being notably more mythological in scale and scope. 

* Speculating wildly, maybe Dark Age dragons weren't always evil, but forces of nature : dangerous but not necessarily malevolent.

This is maybe a bit less convincing, but that dragons were recorded in later times as portents of change lends it some credibility. It may of course have been true here only on a small scale : for the local people, the death of Beowulf and the dragon represents a new beginning for them, but not for their whole civilisation.

In any case, once the goods had been disturbed, the result was the terrible vengeance of a monstrous beast. Boundaries between the worlds could be crossed more easily in certain places and at certain times, but ordinarily, interference of one with the other was a transgression with awful and very real consequences.

And they would, Bates says, have viewed things as real. We can do literary analyses to our hearts content on the symbolism of the monsters, but they were regarded as actual entities – supernatural to be sure, but not imaginary :

Grendel, for the people of Middle-Earth listening to this story, was not an apparition. The Anglo-Saxon audience would have accepted these monsters as monsters, not as abstract symbols of evil, plague or war. Such creatures had a kind of material reality, as well as an Otherworld identity.

Yet there was also another quality to this supernatural reality that set it apart from everyday life. Dragons literally suffused the landscape; place names with "drake" are much more common than you might think. They were fundamental parts of the spiritual ecosystem. This was accessed, says Bates, through imagination, which was seen as accessing an Otherworld, with a sense of having multiple realities rather than one. Poetic language, incantations, spells were used because it prepared the mind for the task at hand, with technical language simply unable to capture the emotional nuance of what was sought. 

Philosophical Interlude

Nevertheless, some of the medical remedies prescribed do have a very modern "take one each morning and one before bedtime" feel about them. This comparison probably only works backwards : that is, ancient practises were sometimes similar to ours, rather than the other way around. In other words, they were occasionally being scientific, we aren't usually doing magic. Our methods are informed by rational inquiry, theirs were demonstrably not. They believed that their spiritual journeys accessed another realm, that offerings to the elves were really taken up and bestowed tangible benefits, that the Sun and the Moon had physical but magical effects on the medicinal plants. Altering the state of consciousness didn't, to the Dark Age wizards, do funny things to the brain : they treated everything as real, on some level.

They thought of nature not only as an objective world, external to themselves, but also reaching internally, with magical powers and imbued with the full richness of their imagination. Features of nature had many layers of meaning, levels of significance, allusions and messages. The forest was alive with the chatter of another world... for shamanic inspiration is largely the sacralisation of the familiar, rather than merely an escape into some 'other' reality. Seeing the familiar with new eyes is the gift of the shamanic journey.

This has a distinct similarity to Chalmers claim that "virtual reality is genuine reality". That is, it's definitely something we can experience, so it's real in that sense at least. And I've covered many times here how animal senses challenge our own view of reality, whether what we perceive can or cannot be said to be genuinely "real" or is just in some sense a model of what's going on : the hydrodynamic senses of a seal, the sonar of a bat, or the electrical sense of some fish are probably as incomprehensible to us as trying to imagine a new colour. Yet to the animals, they are so real that they are dependent on them. To them, sight would be a pretty poor substitute for sensing electrical fields when living in water usually as opaque as soup. Their experience of reality is not much like ours. What seems real to them is non-existent to us.

But... something external definitely exists. It's not all just a matter of different perspectives being equally valid, because they're not. 

The answer would seem to be perspective invariance. If data from one sense can be corroborated with another (or with data from the same sense from a different observer or at a different location, giving a degree of self-consistency), then whatever's being sensed can be said to have some level of existence, however limited. Lack of self-consistency would point to ephemeral phenomena like illusions, random firings of neurons, a trick of the light and so forth. 

For example, objects in virtual reality can be corroborated but only internally : you can look around them and confirm your visual mental model of them from multiple angles, but that's about it. Virtual objects have an existence independent of the brain, but take off the sensory filter of the headset and they have absolutely no relation to everyday reality at all. Nothing you've learned about them can inform you about the physical makeup of the real world. Virtual reality represents "real" worlds in that they are verifiably internally self-consistent, but they aren't another level of reality at all : they are generated by but largely unconnected to our own*.  

* You can affect objects in VR of course, and they can affect you in that you respond to them. But if you choose, you can walk straight through them and suffer no effects whatever. If you don't see them, they literally may as well not exist, quite unlike the case if someone throws a brick at you and you don't see it until it's too late.

It's much the same with dreams and visions. For them to claim any more validity than VR experiences, as the Dark Age (and indeed New Age) peoples believed, they'd need to give information inaccessible to but verifiable in the real world. A vision would have to reveal things previously unseen but testable ; where the treasure is buried, what the winning lottery numbers will be, that sort of thing. Otherwise, all they do is tell us about our own minds, which may well be psychologically important but are materially irrelevant. 

Dreams and visions, even more so than VR, are often not even internally self-consistent, cannot be replicated on demand, and cannot be considered physically real (yet, importantly, can be much more multi-sensory experiences than anything offered by VR). The Dark Age peoples did not accept this, resulting in a fascinating and alien world view. The reality of supernatural experiences appears to have been accepted as different from ordinary life, yet deeply connected to it, and a perfectly valid aspect or level of reality in Dark Age thinking. 

---

As it happens, yesterday I went to a special seminar about the Metaverse. The speaker said that Chalmers doesn't go far enough in defining virtual reality to be real reality, and to be honest, I wasn't overly-impressed. The distinction is strongly nuanced and quite unnecessary for how we view the ethics of VR as the speaker was claiming; whether one thinks of VR as "really real" or not doesn't affect interpretations of whether online harassment is acceptable. To me it seems clear that no, playing virtual reality tennis is not the same as playing actual tennis, but yes, insulting another player in VR is exactly the same as doing it to their faces. Some aspects are "real" and some aren't. Nevertheless, philosophically the distinction is important, as indicated by the overlap with Dark Ages beliefs. 

How then do we define real ? It's clearly not as straightforward as mere perception, nor more generally as to what we experience. Yes, virtual reality has some level of existence (we really can play virtual tennis !), but it's clearly not of the same kind as for everyday, observational reality : it's far closer to a dreamlike state, albeit not of exactly the same order as that either. One can view this form a perspective of neutral monism, saying that everything must be equally real because unreal things can't exist, but this feels a little like sophistry. The problem I have here is that it doesn't make any useful distinction between things which are, in practise, clearly distinct.

Not everything has the same order of existence; VR objects don't derive from direct physical counterparts and dreams aren't windows into a another self-consistent realm. Nevertheless, describing these experience as "worlds" or "realities" is for me at least the most useful way of describing them because this is what they feel like. Saying that anything experience counts as real and that there's only one sort of possible reality to me feels like trying to define the problem away, without replacing it with a useful alternative. It's a lot like using "Universe" to mean "the sum total of everything that exists" versus "the accessible bubble of spacetime" – the latter to me is far more useful.

I still don't think I've quite put my finger on the crux of the issue, but this demands another post. Until then, in part two I'll move on to the interconnectedness of all things, fate, and free will. Don't say these posts aren't ambitious.

Review : Lost Realms (2)

Time to conclude my review of Thomas Williams' excellent Lost Realms. Last time I looked at how Williams says Britain neither collapsed into ruin nor flourished without Roman oppression as the Empire receded. Instead it did both, all over the place and at different times, in a thoroughly messy mixture. Treating Britain as a homogenous unit in this period gives meaningless answers. Some parts were, for a while, left in a period of the utmost destitution. Others, for a while, maintained an elite lifestyle. Some regions constructed new monumental buildings, albeit of timber rather than stone, while in others the abandoned villas were converted into crude farmsteads, the delicate frescos ruined by animals, the towns left dead. 

In this post I want to look at a bit more of the details of the culture that resulted, this curious mix of pagan and Christian, each of different varieties. I'll also look at whether the increasingly contentious notion of the Anglo-Saxon invasion can still be sustained or if it appears this needs significant revision.

4) Cultural evolution

Just how complex the change could be is only really visible when comparing kingdoms to each other. Some were islands of Roman Christianity persisting amongst pagan Celts and Saxons, while elsewhere, there were pockets of paganism which survived while surrounded by restored Christianity. And there isn't a straightforward correlation between which of these areas were trading with continental Europe and which were left isolated.

I've already mentioned the late-survival of pseudo-Roman regions, with their early adoption of Christianity, but the other side of the mirror is an equally romantic tragedy : the survival of paganism among the ever-encroaching and expanding Christendom. What makes the story especially complex is that these lifestyles were likely a mixture of the pre-Roman beliefs as well as imported Scandinavian and Germanic ideas. 

In Hwicce (Gloucestershire) for example, there were Anglo-Saxon foreigners present (but not invaders) re-using pre-Roman burial mounds. Exactly who those people were and who they identified themselves as remains a mystery, though Williams suspects they were closer to the native Britons than either the Romano-British or the Saxons. Crucially, he notes that racial memory is hardly a reliable source of information – societies tell themselves origin myths for all sorts of reasons, and who they claim to be can have very little to do with where they were actually from.

Lindsey (Lincolnshire) too experienced late paganism; like Hwicce this seems to have been Norse. They claimed Odin as an ancestral king, and "weapon dancer" figures* have been inscribed on helmets in a similar style to objects found in Sweden. These too may represent Odin/Woden, though Williams says that nothing can really be known of the kind of Woden worshipped here (which lasted until about the 7th century). Perhaps more surprising is that these beliefs persisted longest in, of all places, in Essex and especially Sussex. Evidence of this is largely archaeological, based on cremations and grave goods, which were (apparently) largely pagan practises, though more direct symbols are also seen (e.g. Thor's hammer being replaced by crosses).

* Along with various sources of poetry mentioning exotic figures like "Selyf Battle-Snake" and the Three Battle-Rulers of Britain, this is one of many things Williams introduces which I strongly feel someone should have told me about long before. This is one of the most transformative periods in our history and it's pretty darn shameful that we ignore it so.

Predictably, all this is complex and inhomogeneous. Beliefs were certainly varied and varying, and this is about as much as can be said with any certainty. In the case of grave goods I have to say I'm a bit surprised to see archaeologists treating this one as such a trusted diagnostic. It seems to me that the desire to bury treasured possessions with a loved one is a just very human thing to do : you wouldn't necessarily do it out of any sort of spiritual belief, not even due to established custom, but out of a deeper, more primal, simpler feeling of rightness.

Both Essex and Sussex show evidence of re-use of older structures. As with Hwicce, exactly who they were is complicated, especially given the unfortunate label of the "Saxon Shore". Whether this was meant originally as a Roman bulwark against invaders of a region already inhabited by Saxons (or at least culturally Saxon) is unknown. In the case of Sussex, like Tintagel in the west, there's evidence of prosperous trade with Europe and regions further afield. Pagan it might have been, but uncivilised it certainly wasn't. Even in the far north in the lands of the Picts (which I will have to pass over all too briefly), there's evidence of massive fortresses and expensive Roman imports.

5) Invasion

I mentioned in the review of The Anglo-Saxons that there were different ways in which the culture of Britain could change – which it most certainly did :

• The popular view, thanks largely to Bede, is that the Anglo-Saxons arrived and slaughtered the entire native population of England, replacing them in their entirety. 
• Marc Morris thinks this massacre-replacement might have happened but only in isolated local regions, with others experiencing an "elite transfer" in which the great and the good were swapped for foreigners but the great unwashed remained largely unaffected. 
• Francis Pryor, at the opposite extreme from Bede, thinks that there was little or no replacement of any kind, and that the overwhelming mechanism behind the visible changes was simply adoption of cultural ideas rather than movement of actual people.

Williams leans somewhat more towards Pryor than Morris. It's pretty undeniable that foreign invasions did happen, and invaders did on occasion enact savage atrocities. But the numbers, he says, were just not that large even over long periods of time. And diagnosing the presence of actual human foreigners from supposedly foreign artifacts is dubious in the extreme. Pryor expresses this sentiment forcefully and admirably, but I have to say that Williams goes one better :

There are few, for example, who would argue, that the ability to produce a competent croissant implies that the baker was born in France or even of French ancestry. Nor does a surfeit of croissant-producers in a particular town imply a wave of French migration. Even if the popularity of croissants had resulted in a dramatic decline in, say, scone production, none would seek to explain the phenomenon by postulating a genocidal French invasion that wiped out everyone with ancestral knowledge of English baking.

Not quite true ! Nigel Farage would definitely claim this. I'm not entirely joking either, because Williams makes it abundantly clear that Bede's explanation of his tale of ruin and genocide was based on sheer bigotry. Bede hated the local Britons with a passion. They appear in his works conspicuous by their absence, appearing only as totems of barbarism with their foolish hairstyles and miscalculation of Easter. Bede, says Williams, also omits cultural inhomogeneities known from the ground truth of archaeology, neglecting the influence of Gaul in southern Britain and Scandinavia to the north. He's an intelligent witness and his testimony can't be dismissed, but it shouldn't be taken as unarguable truth either. He got things right but also very wrong.

Williams does concede that there must have been some level of foreign migration into Britain in the post-Roman period. It almost certainly wasn't in the form of a genocidal purge from bloodthirsty invaders, though whether any more limited sort of "invasion" took place is unclear. As we've seen, the long-lasting cultural practises in some parts of the island mean that the locals were hardly wiped out. Indeed in Lindsey, the wide separation of the pagan burial sites from the local administrative centre leads Williams to suggest they may have retained a degree of control and authority in the post-Roman centuries. 

In Essex too, with its late-surviving paganism, foreigners and multiple cultural influences were nonetheless definitely present. In some regions, the foreigners may even have mimicked the local British practises to "fit in" with the establishment, completely reversing the usual view of the Britons adopting external influences. Sometimes, scones are better than croissants after all. 

What's less clear here is what exactly about the various cultural practises was appealing. The possible pervading world view that was developing is absolutely fascinating (see next post), but I find it an awful lot easier to empathise with the Roman lifestyle. To me that, perhaps inevitably, will always seem... more civilised, more rational, more comfortable. Why anyone would exchange all the things the Romans did for us (not least of which being a pan-national political system) for the more chaotic, anarchic, inhomogeneous local polities I find very hard to grasp. Like so many issues here, this is probably a multi-faceted topic, and Williams is wise to steer clear of it.

Conclusions

Did Britain collapse or prosper after the departure of the legions ? Was it subject to foreign invasion, brutal savagery, or did the locals come out on top ? Did Christianity quickly triumph or did paganism prevail for a time ? Were there Arthurian-like holdouts of civilisation or should we instead think of it as an age of a continuation of Roman lifestyles with only a few pockets of Celtic practices remaining in a few areas ?

The answer to all of these is yes : both, in different places and at different times. Britain in this period simply cannot be described as a single unit. Those little kingdoms, many of which are now forgotten completely, and some only barely remembered as a word, really mattered to the people of the day. Asking what happened to Britain at this time would be a bit like asking what happened to the whole of Asia. There's no one meaningful answer that can be given.

I want to end with a couple of points. First, this book is a really good bit of critical thinking. Williams tries his best to present the most plausible interpretations but never comes across as certain and always admits openly when things are unknowable. And he guides the reader through his reasoning process very clearly, making this a vital part of the story : asking the questions is as enjoyable as suggesting the answers. If occasionally tedious, by and large his literary analysis to infer where kingdoms where, what their history was, is generally excellent (in particular, wryly suggesting that one poem is simply not good enough to be false).

Finally, why did the kingdoms fail ? As usual, lots of reasons. Most were absorbed by their large neighbours, either by conquest or political choices, but generally with hostility. Others merged together and faded. The Pictish kingdom, uniquely, over-expanded to the point with cultural homogeneity became impossible to maintain.

What didn't work was an attempt to fight the future. Offa, says Williams, probably was the one responsible for the eponymous dyke after all (though I would have liked more about the vast scale of the resources needed for this). And, as Marc Morris suggested, there was likely a racial overtone to this. Williams himself gets a little hung up on the terms "dark ages" and "Anglo-Saxon", justifying their use in probably unnecessary detail... but this obsession with language over matters of substance is another topic. I want instead to close with a quote from Williams which I think brilliantly summarises the folly and fantasy of trying to fence out the world, but also, worryingly, emphasises how little important the physical effect of the project is for its political success.

Authoritarian rule, wherever it is found, typically depends on stoking a fear of others. Building walls is an easy way to divide insiders from outsiders, to project the anxieties of a community onto whatever lies beyond. In this way, wall-builders transform erstwhile neighbours into existential threats – the wolves that stalk the sheepfold, the monsters that haunt the hall. At the same time, the wall-builder presents himself as a bulwark against impending doom. Seen as a protector, he develops a powerful grip on the labour, the obedience, even the devotion, of his people. For any ruler who wishes to be seen in heroic terms, and who depends on unprecedented support for his projects, the political benefit of a such a large public work may be incalculable. Whether the threat is entirely invented or simply magnified out of all proportion, whether the wall 'works' or is ever used as advertised – indeed whether it is even finished at all – is largely beside the point.

The world of "Dark Age" Britain, which Williams adopts as a term to refer to how much we still don't know about the period, is sometimes not so unfamiliar after all. Likewise his comments that historians of the past have tended to underplay the very real collapse of past kingdoms and civilisations owing to our own protracted period of relative stability, also seems pertinent; that actually, however more nuanced the real history might have been, there were times which were simply calamitous in way that are difficult to grasp from the position of the unrivalled comforts of modernity. But just as the Dark Age warlord mentality has never fully receded, so I have to wonder if the opposing view wasn't there as well. The stories of Dark Age Britain are rife with success as well as failure. Perhaps, then, there was also some far-sighted individual, more compassionate and sincere than their later counterpart, who would have said with far nobler judgement : Mr Offa, tear down this dyke !

Review : Lost Realms (1)

Some books stick in my head more than others. Some age well, maturing in memory to have a lasting impact, while others fester and gnaw to leave a bitter aftertaste. Francis Pryor's Britain AD is definitely in the former category, while James Hawes' The Shortest History of England belongs to the latter.

I've mentioned Britain AD before, in comparison to Marc Morris' excellent (but not, it must be said, quite so impactful) The Anglo-Saxons*. The thing about Pryor's book was that he made the radical claim that the Anglo-Saxon invasion essentially never happened, that Roman Britain didn't so much fall as it did revert to an earlier and preferable state of existence. Some of his claims were extremely credible, such as the presence of monumental wooden buildings and the continued use of high Latin demonstrating that the natives hadn't descended into primitive savagery; likewise the archaeological evidence pointing to nothing at all comparable with the Roman invasion seems clear. Some claims I found rather less convincing, such as the idea that the Britons were just not ready for urban life and were downright glad to be rid of the invaders. That the high Latin had been rather badly-scrawled on crude-looking stones didn't help his case either.

* I'll be making references to both of those posts throughout, but it shouldn't be necessary to read either of them beforehand.

But if Marc Morris at least partially supported Pryor's conclusions, then Thomas Williams' Lost Realms offers stronger and more full-throated endorsement. What's more, he offers a very simple solution to how Britain can be both be said to have fallen into ruin, almost apocalyptically so (in agreement with the traditional narrative which Morris largely supports) and, at the same time, that things weren't quite so bad as all that after all.

This is a superb book and I couldn't bring myself to limit this to a single post. So in this first part, I'll give the standard here's-what-it's-like-to-read review and then an overview of what happened to post-Roman Britain : did it fail or did it prosper ? In the concluding post, I'll look at how cultural change occurred and whether this points in favour or against the prospect of the infamous Anglo-Saxon invasion.

0) The Review Bit

In short, as far as I'm concerned this book catapults Williams to the front ranks of popular history authors, with text easily beautiful enough to compete with that of Tom Holland – praise I don't give out lightly. Consider the opening :

What happens when the rug is pulled, when all the certainties melt away and what had yesterday felt permanent, unchanging, unchangeable, collapses at breakneck speed ? And what comes after ?

All ages of the past are dark because the past is a grave. It is a void that historians and archaeologists seek to fill with knowledge – with things made by long-dead hands and the ghosts of buildings long demolished, the uncanny traces of people and their lost lives, poignant in their mundanity : a used bowl, a broken glass, a clay pipe, a worn shoe, the pieces of a game scattered and abandoned. It whispers with the words captured on the skins of animals... lines breathed by poets in fire-lit halls, frozen in ink, repeating again and again across the generations, as the bones of their authors crumble in the cold, dark earth.

It's not always like this, of course (and it must be said the effect doesn't always work), though the start and end of each chapter are usually in this style. Much of the main text is written more conventionally, often with some surprisingly silly and relatable humour that has me thinking, "yep, that's how I'd like to write a history book". It's a brilliant work of truly liminal history, tackling the hardest possible topics where the evidence is thin indeed, with lashings of rigorous critical thinking, gloriously eloquent and evocative rhetoric and laugh-out-loud jokes. A truly excellent mix, of which I simply have to give it 9/10.

I've been doing that a lot lately. I strongly suspect my current read won't fare as well, but we'll see.

The text of this book is beset by legions of qualifiers : words like 'probably', 'conceivably', 'might'... advance over the page with alarming frequency. As do multiple frank admissions of total ignorance. If you prefer certainty in historical writing... then this is not the book you're looking for.

That said, it does lack a couple of things. First, more illustrations and some colour plates would be nice : no description can compete with a good photograph. Second, a conclusions chapter ! This is a strange omission. It wouldn't need to be very long, but a synthesis of how the various little kingdoms all fell and why they were forgotten would definitely add something. To be honest I was actually expecting more of this from the blurb, more of an overview of why some states fail and others survive, but this is largely only implicit here. Still, if you want to know about all those places, people and events often mentioned in a single sentence in history documentaries, this is an absolutely outstanding place to start*.

* I made the mistake of seeing what the internet has to say about it. Goodreads is divided, as usual, but so far as I can tell the nay-sayers are idiots who must've read a completely different book by mistake. Giving this one an overall less than 4/5 just makes me think this is why we can't have nice things. Come on. What the hell more do you people want ?

Since Williams himself neglects to summarise his main themes and conclusions, I guess it's up to me.

1) Fall or Transformation ?

The simple trick that William's uses to reconcile how Britain could both decline and prosper at the same time is that it shattered. It did more than splinter or fragment, more than dissolve into the standard "seven kingdoms" : it burst into an unknown and unknowable myriad of petty kingdoms. Ironically, even more then cities, kingdoms are easily lost, being largely constructs of the mind more than of rock and stone. A kingdom only exists because its inhabitants believe they reside in it. And memories, without being captured in the written word, are all too quickly corrupted and destroyed. 

This book does not tell 'a story', because there is no one story that can be told. It does not follow the progress of a single phenomenon as it irrupted into Britain... the chronology is everywhere muddled and confused by invention and reinvention... sometimes there are no answers to be found.

There simply is no one single narrative of the end of Roman Britain to tell. As it broke, each region was affected differently. Places which were heavily dependent on the urban elites and city living would have experienced something like a cataclysm, or certainly an event easily mythologised as such. But those which were less reliant on Empire-wide infrastructure would not necessarily have noticed very much of anything, at least at first. All regions, of course, ultimately transmuted into early medieval Britain, but they did so with pronounced inhomogeneity. Some adopted Christianity sooner, some later; some experienced economic catastrophe, some kept importing expensive Roman goods for much longer. 

By his own admission, Williams wasn't exactly sure from the outset how to approach this book. I have a sneaking suspicion he initially wanted to tell a simpler story of the apocalypse, of the end of civilisation and the struggle to rebuild (the prologue, which paints this broad picture quite vividly, was adapted from a piece published in 2020, while the book itself came out in 2023). Only on writing it did he realise that this is just too simple, that nothing other than a collection of answers would suffice. This may, perhaps, be the reason for the lack of a final set of conclusions.

Each chapter in the book follows a standard arrangement : an introduction with context and anecdotes, the archaeological evidence, the historical documentation, and a brief look at how the kingdom was lost. Williams is careful to note that the nine selected kingdoms aren't the whole story, deliberately avoiding the bigger, more-well known examples of Wessex and the like. This is a perfectly sensible approach, though I think it's a bit questionable to call the survivors "bullies" : to justify that, you'd have to demonstrate the the ones which were absorbed wouldn't have become the oppressors themselves if given half the chance.

2) Decline

Some of the little kingdoms did experience undeniable and extreme hardship : "the formal end of Empire appears to have rolled in like a thunderhead of doom." Roman Cirencester, for example, was prospering right up until the final decades of the 300s, but after the official end of Roman Britain in 410, it soon fell into ruin. Archaeological evidence shows villas abandoned entirely or repurposed as farm buildings, amphitheatres hastily converted into crude defensive buildings, the ancient hill forts re-occupied. It has a distinct whiff of Francis Pryor's claim that the British were simply not ready at the time of the occupation for urban living, and naturally reverted to their earlier mode of existence. 

This, I have to say, rather surprised me. The idea always felt a bit forced, so I wasn't expecting to see this hypothesis given such serious independent consideration : Williams doesn't cite Pryor at all as far as I can tell.

There are differences though. What Pryor interprets as a more-or-less uniformly good thing (finally the invaders left !), Williams certainly does not. He views the collapse, where it happened, as leading to a pretty bleak existence. Instead of the supporting network of a pan-European Empire, the survivors – and they could fairly be called so in this description – had to scrape by for their very and very meagre existence. They didn't leave their plush, fresco-adorned villas voluntarily, there was no return to a more 'natural' lifestyle in the bountiful and beautiful forest : they did so only because they had no other choice.

A further nuance is that not everywhere went into decline at all (as we'll see next), but even more subtle than this, some places began failing long before Rome did. While Cirencester kept going until the very end, London began its descent a full century before the Roman departure, with various monumental buildings destroyed decade by decade from 300 onwards. This of course makes a mockery of Hawes' claim that the south of Britain was geographically destined for greatness !

The decline and decay was real, then, but it wasn't uniform and it wasn't solely the result of the fall of Empire. Williams also makes a very interesting analogy to what this would have felt like. Rather than the quasi-mystical apocalyptic tones of Gildas or Bede, he describes it thus :

It is perhaps more helpful to think of places like Corinium [Cirencester] as the rust-belt towns of Roman Britain : places where capital flight, the collapse of industry and the absence of functioning markets had led to a fatal downward turn in the economy, leaving behind abandonment, poverty, decay, and ruin.

If you're sufficiently anti-capitalist, this can even be reconciled with Pryor's more positive view : Williams says it was really the rich elite who suffered the most, with life little changed anywhere for the peasant farmers. That's not something to which I would subscribe though.

3) Success

Not everywhere failed. In Dumnonia (Cornwall) the elite Roman lifestyle endured well beyond the loss of the legions : changed, yes, but doing more than merely surviving. At Tintagel, no less, not only was there a castle here far older than the medieval ruins which grace the site today (which were little more than a romantic folly), but it was a spectacular one : "one of the largest defended enclosures of its time in Britain." Archaeology reveals that for two centuries after the Empire that there were people here "who continued to dine from fancy Roman dishes, to quaff wine from delicate Iberian glassware, to drizzle olive oil upon their oysters."

What's more, the connection to Rome even remained somewhat political, not just material. As the Empire temporarily revived under Justinian, Christian missions to the former colonies made trade both economically and symbolically valuable. The Empire could almost certainly have never regained its former strength, but that it was even attempting to do so, that it was looking far beyond its heavily truncated borders, has a wonderfully romantic sense of doom about it. It reminds me very strongly indeed of Marc Morris' assertion of late-surviving Romano-British lifestyles persisting in the midst of their more Celtic, pagan neighbours, something I previously dismissed as just too much of the stuff of poetry, not history.

The story of Dumnonia is the story of how a dream of civilisation was manifested at the farthest fringes of a fading Empire : a determined effort to reach towards the fading light in a place that had barely felt the sun. And seen from a distance, in that haze of light and spray, there appeared the phantoms of Britain's oldest and most potent legends : shining indistinct, immaterial as the rainbow.

And Cornwall is not the only site of Arthurian tales to have long-persisting Roman lifestyles. In the north, the kingdom of Rheged may not have existed at all as a political entity, but clearer archaeological evidence shows that the lifestyles of the soldiers stationed at Hadrian's Wall may have taken decades to substantially change. The majority of those present would have been of British stock and therefore not recalled to defend the faltering Empire, and large timber buildings (if not much like the previous Roman versions) continued in construction and use beyond the year 500. It took "perhaps a century and a half" here for things to fully shift. This was helped because the soldier's pay by 410 was already only about a quarter in coin, making it much easier for the locals to continue to solicit their services without using currency.

Wales too has evidence of the change being one more of transformation than of failure. Viroconium, today in Shropshire which would then have been Welsh, is a veritable lost city. Its archaeological assessment has waxed and waned. Early antiquarians viewed it as a traditional haunted ruin left to rot after the Romans left, but discoveries in the 1960s suggested massive timber buildings constructed afterwards, "staggering evidence for a type of urban life and economy without parallel in Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries". The current assessment is more sober, but that still there was substantial occupation and economic activity here long after Rome.

---

So Britain didn't fall. Nor did it flourish : it did both, at different times and in different places. Francis Pryor asked whether the lights of civilisation went out with the dying Empire, concluding that actually they got brighter. But William's view is more nuanced and distinctly more plausible, that they probably did both – or sometimes a better analogy might be that they changed colour (Dark Age Britain or Disco Britain ? Take your pick !). Things were a mixture, with some places collapsing disastrously, others continuing to thrive in their old ways, while still others did neither, experiencing a transformation not to something necessarily better or worse but simply different. And that cultural change, and whether it came about due to the enthusiastic adoption of new ideas or was forced at the point of a sword, is what I'll look at in part two.

Review : The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Most of the time, reading the source material of a classic text turns out to be a very good idea. It's not that later interpretations are necessarily wrong or invalid, but they often simplify complex ideas and lack context. And sometimes filtering a piece through the wisdom of later ages does more harm than good, or exaggerates the original message far out of proportion than the author intended, or takes it in wildly different directions from where it should ever have gone, or glosses over vital points that can change the understanding completely.

Examples include the famous "tragedy of the commons", a widely-misunderstood metaphor from a 1968 essay by Garret Hardin which is awash with abject racism that gets lost in basically all modern uses. Wigner's famous "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" is perhaps another, a remarkably boring essay memorable solely for its famous phrase, offering little or no philosophical insight into anything very much. Erasmus' Praise of Folly is a similarly overrated bit of fluff – amusing, perhaps, but too clever by half for its own good.

I may or may not eventually write up something about these. We'll see. Today, though, an example of the opposite case. For the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is mentioned in so many history documentaries and books that it was practically inevitable that I'd try and read the source material for myself. Indeed, I would be surprised if there was a single piece examining the history of the period that doesn't reference this at some point. My penchant for going back to the source drew it to me like a very lethargic moth to a fairly dull flame : a slow progression to be sure, but an inexorable one.

This will not, of course, be a proper review of the source material. That would be silly. No, I'm afraid this one is only a rant. In short, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not for you. Without context provided by proper scholarship, it is useless, tedious in the extreme, and largely devoid of meaning. Don't bother. Trust me, anything you might gain from studying it first-hand is more than offset by wading through its interminable dullness, and vice-versa, anything you might lose by hearing it second-hand from a professional historian will be more than compensated for by their greater contextual knowledge and ability to make material engaging and relevant to a modern audience.

I will, however, offer a few more ordinary review thoughts on the particular edition I have. It is dreadful. It doesn't even say who the translator is, much less offer any kind of explanatory notes about the text. Penguin Classics may have the occasional dud of a translator who won't shut the fuck up and let the reader get on with, well, reading*, but by and large they're very good at providing the basic background needed. They usually give plenty of short, concise notes to explain the more obscure points without ensnaring the reader in a vicious web of petty details. Thus far, all of Penguin's translations of Cicero do this nigh-on perfectly.

* Penguin's Praise of Folly contains about 50 pages of academic-level intro and almost every page is about 50% text, 50% footnotes, making the whole experience more like wading through a swamp than reading a book.

This edition of the ASC is however not a Penguin publication at all, and it shows. No translator listed, no explanatory text, no footnotes of any kind. Maps ? Illustrations ? An index ? Forget it. It even has some bad formatting, like the occasional line where the spacingisallmessedupsoeverythinglookslikeonelongword. Or parts in which WORDS are capitalised AT random or, with wrong! punctuation in places. There's a total and utter lack of paragraphs even in the longest entries, which go on for several pages. And it appears that this edition combines all the different versions of the Chronicle, with some years having (without explanation) multiple separate entries, which usually repeat but with frustratingly minor variations. 

Usually... but not always : sometimes the differences are significant, so you've no idea if a repeat entry is ever worth reading. Oh, but wait, what am I saying ? Of course they're not worth reading, because none of them ever are !

But some final thoughts on the edition before addressing the text itself. The amount of editing done here is absolutely minimal, with maybe three of four place names enclosed in square brackets to give the modern location names. That's it. And often they use spellings of terms, people and places which are quite different from the common standards adopted for the archaic versions, making them difficult to look up. "Reve" for "reeve" is a simple example but often it's a lot worse than this.

The most annoying thing by far is that the translator makes no attempt to clarify who's being referred to. The Chronicle has the bad habit of saying things like, "Then Alfred attacked the Vikings, and they had a great victory" : who's they ? Alfred ? The Vikings ? And the following text (if there is any, because most entries are very short) is often of no help as it usually moves swiftly on to another topic altogether, or worse, maintains the ambiguity. Or it will talk about the conflict of two kings and then refer to "this" or "that" leader without specifying who it means. Now this is because the authors of the Chronicle were, unarguably, pretty shit writers, but the modern translator could at least have included the consensus from modern historians to clarify who the devil they're talking about.

As I say, dreadful. I give it 2/10, and I only don't give it 1 because the price is at least reasonable. Physically too it feels rather cheap, like someone printed it at home and bound it in an oddly-stiff cover.

But to move on, I repeat that the original authors were shit. Their choice of what to include is downright bizarre. When I gave a lecture course on galaxy evolution, I included a history of astronomy in the 20th century and made the joke that this was a lot more fun than the more general history, which is largely one of blood and death. The authors of the Chronicle would not have understood the joke at all, thinking nothing amiss in reporting who was bishop of so-and-so, briefly reporting that half the country had died of plague and then immediately moving to the much more important matters of some paltry church needing a new roof or whatnot. Sometimes it becomes pretty obvious that they're reporting some things at length as a direct, look, this is what you said, we wrote it down in black and white maneuver : an insurance policy against kings reneging on their promises. 

Mostly, though, it's just weird. Occasionally this makes it at least vaguely amusing. The entry for 671 AD consists in its entirety of, "This year happened that great destruction among the fowls." Absolutely nothing else is given to explain "that great destruction", leaving the reader mystified. Later entries are particularly concerned, equally inexplicably, with fruit.

There are probably no more than two somewhat interesting points in the whole thing. The first is that the Viking invasions did not begin with 793 at Lindisfarne, which modern historians still seem to take as the beginning of the Viking period. No, the Chronicle says the first invasion (of unspecified size) was actually a few years earlier, in 787. It doesn't actually specify where, referring only to the Wessex king's sheriff driving them away – so presumably somewhere on the south coast. This relatively minor incident doesn't have the dramatic appeal of the Lindisfarne raid, but still, it's odd that this is overlooked in the usual histories.

The second more general point is one not which I attach any blame to modern historians to, but to which I will say reflects the poor school-level history education of my day. Of course, any good book of the period will tell you about Canute and the other Viking invasions after Alfred's time, and the Chronicle makes clear that Alfred's victory was limited – and by no means assuaged fear of further Norse incursions. In my day, the story was basically : Vikings invade, Alfred bashes them, establishes the Danelaw, gradually everyone pushes them back into the sea, and then the Normans came. The whole bit about being under Viking rule after Alfred was cheerfully ignored.

The Chronicle tries its meagre best to portray Alfred as the all-conquering hero, of course, but its rhetoric is clumsy in the extreme. Describing him as "king of all England except the Danish bits" is like me declaring myself Supreme Overlord of the Couch, though to be fair it does make the exact same claim for a Danish king in the Danelaw region. This mediocre hyperbole at least isn't as annoying as later entries, though, which start saying, "the king William" or the "the king Harald", a downright irritating and unnecessary use of articles. 

The Chronicle is never itself any sort of literary work and doesn't try to be. But on occasion the entries are given in quite passable verse in the Beowulf style, which does at least make those parts somewhat more interesting (thereby making the other entries worse, since they could have done better if they'd tried to). Often, however, it degenerates into little more than lists of names, places and dates, the proverbially bad style of history-telling. 

But its biggest literary flaw by far is to introduce new people without any explanation whatever as to who they are, frequently just to say that so-and-so was made bishop of such-and-such, or, equally, that someone never before referred to had died. Following the text as any sort of coherent narrative is all but impossible. It's something that you don't so much read as parse, and usually only with great difficulty.

In short, the text is wretched bad. I practically missed Alfred's most famous battle, so brief was its description in comparison to the relentless relation of random people being appointed as bishops or dying horrible but pointless deaths. If it contains anything relating to Harald's famous promise to William that he wouldn't compete for the throne, or that William killed all the people applauding his coronation, then I didn't spot it. Mind you, it could well be there and I simply didn't see it on account of having to wade through the endless tedium of the rest of the text. It had an overpowering tendency to dull my brain.

By the end, I was really just persevering so I could have the bragging rights needed to write this post, because ranting about an unfinished book is obviously cheating : now I have a marginally more qualified position from which to pronounce my damning verdict. Of course, the whole experience was a colossal waste of time. It probably took me some months to finish the stupid thing, because I got so bored I read maybe half a dozen other books as a distraction.

Well, we live and learn. That particular millstone is now firmly flung from neck and shall never return.

Review : The Norse Myths (2)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review/summary of Carolyne Larrington's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think. In part one I covered the trickery and tragedy of the Norse stories, of how lies and knowledge were two halves of the same coin, and how the heroes often suffered a much more raw deal than their Greek counterparts. While both Greco-Roman and Norse paganism have similarly complex, highly intricate mythological tales, the Norse myths are underpinned by a sense of fatalism lacking in the Greeks. Both present a series of often overly-complicated events in which protagonists act out of multi-dimensional motives rather than moral obligation, but while the Greeks might have at least some discernible morality to them, they don't often have any higher sense of cosmic purpose. 

The Norse, by contrast, are somewhat opposite to this. If the Greeks have a sense of underlying justice but are generally rooted in the concerns of mortals, the Norse myths are rife with doom – doom on a grand scale, no less, even when the stories don't obviously demand any sense of cosmological connection.

But we shouldn't dive in at the deep end. Let's work up to the big stuff and start off with the much more mundane.

3) Transgender

I'm going to be deliberately very liberal in this category and lump in other gender and political issues as well. Let's start with straightforward feminism. While Buxton only considers the stories told by the ancient Greeks, Larrington expands to the broader, dual-meaning of "myth", looking at popular but erroneous conceptions of Norse history as well as mythology.

In myth, though, female characters abound, especially female figures of death. The notorious Valkyries aren't always the busty young maidens of opera but can also be cruelly indifferent deities. One poem describes them weaving the fates of men out of the guts of fallen heroes; their loom is made of spears and human heads hang from the grisly cords. Similarly the Norns are three sisters who, less grimly, sit by a well of knowledge cutting wooden strips that determine the lives of men, or possibly braiding threads to weave the future. And Death in Norse culture was consistently female beyond the Valkyries, including a demon that crushed men in their sleep, female ancestor spirits who are blamed for rash decisions, and the woman-corpse goddess Hel. 

If there was a strong role for women in myth, then there was likely one in real history as well. Even the notorious Ragnar Lothbrok, who we met last time, was in one account female. Notably, women are absent from Valhalla, yet non-mythological stories of warrior shield-maidens abound. The hard evidence is thin, but at least one grave seems to have all the hallmarks of a typical Viking warrior burial but with the skeleton being female. 

Now here I have to bring in one of Larrington's rare but really stupid comments, that this could have been a transgender person (and so not "really" a woman at all). I find this a bizarre claim and I wonder if it was actually just intended to provoke, because surely biological gender would be in this case be much more interesting : the common bias is that biological women didn't fight because of their biology, not because they didn't think themselves "manly" enough. Similarly, I didn't think her claims that it made sense for a male-dominated warrior culture to have so many female depictions of death as a connection with birth, because plenty of other such cultures didn't have this.

Not that transgenderism in Norse culture isn't very interesting, mind you. On the one hand we have Thor, who in one popular story dresses up as a woman to pose as a bride for some typical sort of trickery, and yes he's otherwise as butch as Chris Hemsworth. This is clearly just a bit of silly, innocent  humour, because it's funny when great big bearded men dress up as stereotypically feminine women – people have laughed at this since literally forever. Which makes it a bit strange for Larrington to then note that modern retellings of Thor don't have him enjoying his feminine side, because nothing she discusses gives any reason to expect that he would.

Much better examined is Loki, who is transgender through-and-through, and sexually adventurous to the point of bestiality. Not only can he change gender but he can also give birth as a female. In the "master builder" story, Loki turns into a female horse who becomes impregnated by the builder's stallion, giving birth to Sleipnir the eight-legged horse. Any sexual ambiguity one might read in the modern stories featuring Loki pale in comparison with his original shenanigans. Nor is Loki vilified for this; his later actions are treasonous, but there's nothing wrong in his gender fluidity. And it's worth remembering that this was deemed important enough to be included in these mythological tales, with Loki's role being of ultimately negative but nevertheless pivotal importance : he wasn't some minor character, but one of the big guns of Norse mythology.

Which makes it all the sillier that the modern far-right have adopted their own particular view of Viking culture, a tradition stretching back to well before the Nazis. Granted, it doesn't come from nothing, but it's incredibly selective in ignoring both the legendary shield-maidens and the overtly mythical feminine figures of Death and other warrior goddesses. Describing the QAnon shaman, Larrington summarises :

Sentenced to forty-one months in prison for his activities in the Capitol, Angeli exemplifies through his theatrical self-presentation how the Vinland myth has come to represent an imaginary place in America's past - one in which violent masculinity and honour were supreme values, where whiteness and 'purity of blood' were a given, and where women were obedient and submissive. This 'Viking' imagery has been weaponised in American far-right politics to generate an aesthetic that acts as a dogwhistle for white men who hold racist, misogynist and paranoid views.

Quite what it is about American culture that fosters such raving insecurities I will not venture to guess.  

4) Transcendent

Finally we come to the great cosmic stories. At least in Buxton's selection, for the Greeks this wasn't so important : what mattered more was how the characters acted. Metaphor was a key part of it of course, but there didn't seem to be much direct relation to the nature of reality. For the Norse, this was inescapable.

One of the most beautiful conceptions is Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Its origins are unclear, seemingly something beyond the gods. It grows through the worlds, its branches in the heavens and with three great roots : one to Hel, one to the frost giants, and one to mankind. Deer, eagles and squirrels inhabit iis branches, forming a network which is not merely a direct, physical connection, but also a literal information network – the ultimate Wood Wide Web. At its base is a sacred well of knowledge, a concept used in many other cultures. As is the tree itself and its symbolism : in some Norse myths humans are first made out of driftwood, while in reality the early Norse made their idols out of wood, with many farms even having "guardian trees". 

But all is not well with Yggdrasil. While the sort of fluffy animals found in Disney movies inhabit most of it, dragons and snakes continuously molest its branches and roots. 

Even this central pillar of the imagined universe is subject to the effects of time and the attacks of predators : entropy is understood to be at work in the cosmos.

Yet Yggdrasil continuously regenerates, and while it is certainly affected by the apocalypse of Ragnarok, it's unclear if it survives. This theme of being immortal but not invulnerable, of being in a state of permanent renewal, is found elsewhere in Norse myth too. The gods themselves are sustained by magical apples without which they age and die, while in Valhalla warriors regenerate daily after their perpetual battles. On a rather less epic scale, Thor sustains himself on his travels by means of two regenerating goats.

Given all this, it's perhaps less surprising that the Norse converted to Christianity : with its wooden crosses and regenerative god, it might not have seemed like such a revolution as it might at first appear. And as with the dragon stories, Christianity itself is firmly rooted in a pagan past, however much it might profess to be monotheistic.

Whether Yggdrasil can be truly damaged or destroyed is as unclear as its origins, which Larrington never mentions. The same cannot be said of the gods, who share the Greek trait of being essentially just very, very powerful humans. They are immortal only in the sense of having an indefinite lifespan provided all their needs are met, including the life-sustaining apples. And they have definite origins, again like the Greeks being not the first creatures in existence. Odin, for example, was fathered by a giant, who himself was "the son of a male being who was licked out of the melting ice by Audhumla, the cow whose milk nourished the first of all beings, the giant Ymir." In some stories Ymir is killed to make the cosmos while in others the Earth rises up from the sea.

This kind of symbolism, in which one has to presume that the early Scandanavians didn't take things literally, is everywhere in pagan myths. In typical somewhat-comic fashion, Thor's efforts to undertake a series of challenges involve submerging a horn, which becomes an explanatory metaphor for the origin of tides. More dramatically, Loki is the sire of the wolf Fenrir, who "is made to signify time itself, which will come to its end after he gets loose", the serpent Jörmungandr which "lurks in the outer ocean, with his tail in his mouth, signifying the furthest limits of space", and Hel, "half attractive woman, half decaying corpse... She symbolises death, which is imagined as feminine and desiring."

Trying to see this as in any way coherent it likely impossible : the only option would seem to be idealism and even this feels like a struggle. Loki might be literally the father of time but it's the Norns who weave individual strands of lives. And if death is "feminine and desiring", then it seems odd that women are excluded from Valhalla; similarly, that Valhalla is only for the elite but some warriors are apparently there for others to taunt them also feels paradoxical. It is, in short, a mess.

Hanging over all of it is Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. In some stories the sundering of the gods and men is almost a non-event, with nothing more than Odin's spear shattering, yet he himself does not die. In complete contrast to this gentle fading is Ragnarok, in which Loki is bound by the innards of his children, a serpent drips venom over him which causes earthquakes; three savage winters break down human society; and finally war rages : the dead escape from Hel, Fenrir, Jörmungandr and Sutr the fire giant are unleashed. Gods and giants and monsters destroy one another. Wolves devour the Sun and the Moon, until finally "the heavens catch fire and the earth sinks back into the sea. It is over."

Yet the gods always know that this is their inescapable destiny. The heroes too often act knowing that they must in the end die, that they cannot cheat fate. For Tolkien this was profoundly meaningful, that the gods know themselves to be on the right and "think that defeat no refutation" : surely resonant with his own stories of persevering in the face of hopelessness. 

What Ragnarok symbolises appears to be anyone's guess. For some it represents simply the final end, the ultimate nihilism, that everything just dies. For others it "merely" means the end of free will, but for others, such as Wagner, it symbolises the beginning of free will, with mankind at last free of the tyranny of the gods. Some have viewed the Norse gods as having become irredeemably corrupt and deserving of death, others that their fate is a tragic grandeur but not inevitable, or that the whole thing is a metaphor for the triumph of Christianity.

There is clearly no "right" answer to this. A final point of confusion concerns what comes next. In some tales the Earth rises again and a new generation of gods reside in a new golden hall, with a new Sun in the sky and new humans in the fields. Yggdrasil survives and the conditions are eden-like, a rich, bountiful nature. Yet overhead a dragon files with corpses in its wings... is this the final cleansing of the debris of Ragnarok, or an indication that corruption is never fully erased, that it's all a cycle : all this has happened before, all this will happen again ?

Perhaps its neither. Perhaps it's both. I think it speaks to a paradox of good storytelling, that to give anything meaning it must end, but we yearn for the good stories to continue. And perhaps of human nature too, that we long for a cleansing, a reset, but feel ourselves trapped in an unbreakable cycle. To give a single definitive answer would be quite impossible.

Conclusions

All this uncertainty is part of the appeal. Whether by the Church or its practitioners (more likely the former), Christianity has come to portray itself far more as offering clear, certain answers. This has an obvious appeal, but of course it can't and doesn't answer the Big Questions, being rife with contradictions and neo-pagan aspects in spades : angels and demons, monsters and devils, messiahs and spirits. At least the earlier pagan stories never claimed to have such answers.

The flexibility of the pagan myths gives them an often comic surrealism : the Sigurd tale begins with killing Fáfnir's bother who happens at that moment to be... an otter. During the early phases of Ragnarok Loki turns into a salmon to hide from the gods. Anyone thinking that Thor : Love and Thunder is too silly might be in for a rude awakening if they consult the original stories.

Like the Greek myths this flexibility is a great strength, but do they truly "shape the way we think" ? Quite probably. Like a mirror, what we see in them can be a direct reflection of our own values, but also gives us a way to examine ourselves and change what we don't like. But this flexibility comes with a weakness : the ability of the myths to be abused. Stories of the early voyages to Vinland have been co-opted to promote the idea of an America that was "always white" even in pre-Colombian times, while the idea of berserkers (who Larrington says were real but not always held in high regard, but see Lindybeige for the idea that they didn't exist at all) and the male-only Valhalla has come to be (in)appropriated by fascists and thugs.

This isn't inevitable, and the messages of the far-right certainly aren't intrinsic to the old tales : nor would we have to take those lessons even if they were. Larrington concludes :

Those of us who study the myths must counter this by reminding those coming to them afresh that the myths are historically contingent. They mean largely what they are made to mean at different times, and we can never know how they signified in the distant era when they took shape. They are supple, strange, radically different, and yet they engage, as we have seen, with far larger questions than the limited and self-serving obsessions of far-right politics, nationalism and the ravings of conspiracy theorists.

The Norse myths enable us to think critically about the climate crisis and humanity's place in the green world, about death and its place in life, about the inevitable end of the old order and the emergence of the new... These stories allow us to explore the paradoxes of hybridity and the limits of time, space and mortality. Revisting the tales of Vikings and their culture's greatest heroes has illuminated some of the changing ways we think about masculinity, its positives and its drawbacks, and the ways in which women inflect and reconfigure the familiar social roles. And... we have returned to the spectre of planet-wide destruction... and the ways in which we must work to imagine a brand-new world if one is to arise, green and hopeful, out of the old.

Review : The Norse Myths (1)

Following my absolute delight at reading Buxton's The Greek Myths That Shape The Way We Think, I immediately rushed to the bookshop for the others in the series. Alas, they only had the one, so I've had to order the Celtic one online to complete the trilogy. No matter. I have piles of booky goodness to keep me busy until then.

The Review Bit

It's interesting to note that the other two books get glowing reviews but this one only has four stars on Amazon, with one complaining that the myths have "been made palatable for modern audiences and feminists." The first part of the complaint here is actually not without foundation, but the second is garbage. Larrington does spend a long time describing modern retellings of the Norse myths, sometimes too long and without much analysis – sometimes. This I would agree is the book's biggest weakness. In addition, it can be a bit non-linear, referring to future sections more often than is perhaps ideal, but given the nature of the book, it's also hard to see how it could have been done otherwise.

But making the stories palatable for feminists ? That is laughable. She clearly sets out how there's a lot more abject feminism in the earliest known versions than in some of the more recent hyper-macho interpretations. What's more, it's never anything that's "in your face" or "rammed down your throat". There's maybe one or two remarks in the whole book that I'd say sounded very silly to me, but to get hung up on these would be stupid. In fact I found this aspect, on the whole, to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. She also very gently and non-judgementally relates how Norse myths have been culturally (in)appropriated* by the far right, but you'd have to be truly raving in your insecurities (and/or of such ill-bred ilk yourself) to let this lower your rating.

* As an aside, I've long been mystified by what anyone ever means by "cultural appropriation", which seems like a nonsense term to me. Then I remembered a comment on Tolkien trying to claim the fairy myths for the English at the deliberate expense of the Welsh, and finally it made sense. One culture adopting the practises of another is never, by itself, "appropriating" of any sort. But if that culture then turns around and denounces the original inspiration – that's where there's a legitimate grievance. 

By and large, the prose is excellent, especially the summaries at the end of each chapter which are invariably eloquent and concise. My only real complaints besides the occasionally excessive descriptions are minor : use of the original Nordic script is quite annoying (just Anglicise the names so I can read them properly !), and she seems a bit obsessed with disproving the myth that Vikings used skulls as drinking cups – I never heard of this as any sort of stereotype before. Even the excessive descriptions, though, are hardly a serious deficiency : the lack of analysis is only felt in some places, by no means all.

Overall, provided you take the subtitle "That Shape [PRESENT TENSE] The Way We Think" seriously, this work is every bit the equal of the Greek Myths book in the same series. In presentation it has a good balance of similarity and differences in style to keep it feeling familiar but engaging. I don't have any issue in giving this one too a 9/10, and I find myself an increasing fan of Thames & Hudson – they seem committed to making their history books both physically beautiful objects but also with excellent writing... a rare combination indeed !

As I was reading the book and then later distilling my notes, four main themes stood out to me. In this first part I'll look at trickery (how the Norse gods use both knowledge and deception in their quests beyond the popular image of Loki) and tragedy (exploring how the Norse heroes never seem to get any sort of lucky break). In part two I'll move to transgender issues (and also more broadly the feminist aspects of the stories) and the transcendent, the cosmic symbolism of the nature of the universe, time, fate, and free will.

1) Trickery

The Greek myths feature plenty of examples of the gods behaving badly, but the Norse take this to another level. Loki is of course the most famous example, but even Odin seems like the sort of chap who would lie for no particular reason – not even for funzies, but seemingly because he thinks lying is innately a good thing. His deceit is often intimately connected with knowledge. Odin promises to only take three draughts of the mead of wisdom but swallows the whole lot and flies away as a bird. Like Zeus, he's frequently found in disguise but his powers are distinctly limited. It's quite hard to imagine Zeus the Thunderer ever getting into a riddle contest with a mortal king and (again) turning into a bird to escape his wrath. 

Odin's association with knowledge runs deep. He hangs himself from Yggdrasill "without food or drink for nine days and nights", also loosing an eye, for the sake of knowledge of the World Tree. And he has two ravens, representing Thought and Memory, which fly out into the world each day and report back, with Odin worried more about the vulnerabilities of memory than thought, representing its decline with age. Finally, he's continuously seeking out information about Ragnarok, the apocalypse he's ultimately unable to prevent. Odin has wisdom aplenty, and apparently noble intentions, but seems to have few scruples about lying and manipulation when it suits his purpose.

A couple of stories Larrington relates are emblematic of the sort of trickery found throughout old folk tales, of the "too good to be true" variety. Gefjun asks her lover for as much land as she can farm in one day, which he grants, but then she turns her four huge sons into oxen and ploughs an entire island. Then there's the master builder who promises to build fortifications for the gods if they'll give him the Sun and the Moon. The gods agree but place a strict time limit on the contract, but the builder's stallion can "cart huge amounts of stone" so he easily succeeds. Not wanting to surrender the heavens, in response Loki draws him off, as we'll see next time, and Thor breaks the god's promise and kills the builder. He hasn't tricked them exactly : he agrees to their terms, but he hasn't revealed crucial information. The response is oath-breaking.

Loki himself is an even more inscrutable character than Odin, with an even stronger connection between lies and knowledge. While it's hard to know where to stand with Odin, who seems to be assumed to be basically good but actually is a bit of a bastard, Loki takes this further. He begins as a mean but essentially harmless prankster, loyal to the gods when push comes to shove, but ultimately is instrumental in Ragnarok. His very nature is even more unclear than Odin's : his father was a giant, there's no evidence he was worshipped as a god, and he can not only change shape but also gender.

Whereas Odin and Thor have clear adversaries to fight (the giants), Loki's stance is much more ambiguous. His initially amusing and inconsequential pranks (poking an eagle, shagging a horse, that kind of thing) evolve from trickery into outright treachery. He sires the world-destroying monsters of a wolf, a serpent, and the half-woman half-corpse goddess of Hel. Ultimately this ends in tragedy, with Loki's sons tearing each other to pieces and, in a particularly grisly finale, their guts are used to bind their father in torment.

2) Tragedy

Deceit rarely ends well, except occasionally during moments of comic relief. But, just like with the Greek myths, the stories rarely feel like moralising tales : the gods hardly seem like role models of any sort, and at most there might be aspects of their behaviour the audience was intended to emulate. Again, they're none of them any sort of goody-two-shoes like Jesus, nor are they even repentant sinners like Jonah. The tales have an almost history-like quality about them, as though they were telling the audience look, this is what happened without passing judgement, just relating the kind of weird shit the gods got up to. Sometimes there's deep physical and psychological symbolism about them, but the moral meaning is usually veiled in the extreme.

The ultimate tragedy is of course that the gods and Loki and all the rest are ultimately doomed. But much smaller, more everyday sorts of tragedy pervade the tales as well, even when the consequences are mythically profound. I found the story of Fenrir (Loki's wolf-son) a particularly good example of the backfire effect and the self-fulfilling prophecy. Initially friendly, he only becomes suspicious of the gods when they mistreat him due to a prediction he will one day devour the world. The gods challenge him to break the bonds they put upon him; Fenrir allows this, but demands one of them puts his hand in his mouth at the same time. Realising the bonds are not the thin silk they appear, he bites off the hand, loses faith in the gods, and ultimately becomes the monster that brings about the end of time.

Other legends are decidedly more ordinary. In the earliest stories, Ragnar "Magical Trousers" Lothbrok (he of of History Channel fame) starts out by fighting a dragon with a traditional mixture of cunning and prowess – and dragon-proof trousers. But after that, while he raises many legendary sons, he himself has a series of failed marriages and dies on a hopeless expedition to England, taking just two ships to demonstrate his warrior mettle. It's all a bit sad, really. Later versions have made him a far more epic and interesting character.

Like Ragnar, Sigurd (or Siegfried) peaks early in his career by killing a dragon. And like Ragnar, he isn't especially likeable, with little about him that seems especially worthy of emulating. His life is certainly an interesting one, wrapped in stories of cursed gold and Valkyries surrounded by not-quite-impenetrable flame, but it's all a bit soap-opera full of narratively-unnecessary complications. The curse is by far the most interesting aspect, this notion of inescapable fate : Sigurd doesn't do anything wrong but cannot avoid his doom. He's brave, but whereas in Beowulf the hero's "naked will and courage" is successfully pitted directly against the cosmic forces of the dragon, in the Sigurd tale the dragon is almost incidental. It's the curse that matters, and that is something that no amount of bravery will overcome.

The hero dies, realising all too late how he has been deceived and what he has lost to his enemies flattery and manipulation. This most ancient of Indo-European mythological patterns resonates remarkably with modern preoccupations : our apprehension that the real horror does not emanate from the mythological monster, but rather from the multiple ways in which human beings are prepared to betray one another.

This is brilliantly argued by Larrington, but all the same, I cannot help feeling that using a dragon just to fool the audience is to rob it of its power unjustly. Yet, perversely, I don't agree that Euron Greyjoy's slaying of a dragon is "outrageously subversive", what with him being an utterly dislikable cunt. Well, I do, but the fact that he doesn't deserve to kill a dragon, that he isn't worthy of a such a pure and noble creature, is exactly why he's (deliberately constructed to be) easy to hate : he has no redeeming qualities and is just a brute, but in real life brute force too often succeeds. If not a very nice message, this is at least self-consistent within the world of Westeros, and the dragon's nobility and potency is never in doubt. The dragon is only partly undermined, remaining a potent and deadly force to be reckoned with : in contrast in the Sigurd story the dragon is ultimately just a man in disguise, having no greater cosmic significance himself.

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In Greek stories the hero often gets some level of reward, at least for a time. Odysseus struggles but ultimately wins back his home, Jason recovers the fleece, Perseus becomes king, Hercules becomes a god. Of course plenty of them do end tragically (Paris, Agamemnon, Achilles) but there's at least some semblance that if you act well and the fates are kind, you'll live an honoured life : at the least you'll be remembered and emulated. But while Beowulf at least got to rule peacefully for many years before the final encounter with the dragon, many Norse myths seem to screw both gods and men alike. If in Greek myths some people suffer some of the time, in Norse tales it feels almost like everyone is suffering all of the time.

This may be an exaggeration, and there are plenty of comic moments in the Norse myths : it isn't all doom and gloom and it certainly isn't perpetual angst. There's a sense of fun about the world-devouring monsters, something appealing in this draw of the cosmic down into the ordinary. The Greek stories, at least those selected in this series, focus heavily on character, with actions and feelings we can relate to in principle if not in practise. The Norse have this aspect as well, but are replete with a sense of mortal dread that the Greek tales lack. Ragnarok can be avoided for a time but it's always looming in the background. So that is what we must face, head-on, in part two.

From Folkore To Fakelore

Before I continue my mythtical binge-readings, I want to say a few words about folklore. 

One thing I wondered about while reading the Greek Myths, Penguin Dragons, and the Norse Myths (next post) was just how sincerely people ever believed in this stuff. The dragon-writers address this almost directly, sometimes very critical about the supposed nature of dragons if not ever questioning their actual existence very much. Less explicitly, Greco-Roman writers were inherently flexible in a way quite alien to later religious doctrine : compare the wonton misogyny of Hesiod with the pseudo-feminism of Plato, or the myriad versions of the same basic myths told by people living a few miles apart. 

And yet, like the Norse, the stories are often incredibly specific and detailed, which doesn't feel like they they were just casually making it up as they went along. They must have had some level of actual belief in what they were saying, surely, but in what sense exactly ? Did they believe it mainly as metaphor, or largely as literal truth ? Did they see Zeus swallowing Athena's mother as symbolic or something that actually happened ? Did they believe the operatic-level details of Baldur's post-death romance as real occurrences ?

Belief, here in the simple sense of a sincerely-held opinion, is of course a spectrum. We can believe things with varying degrees of confidence and hold things only to be more or less probable in relative terms, rather than having absolute certainty or truth about anything. We can also, of course, be certain about things which are absolutely mutually exclusive, such muddled creatures as we are.

One aspect of how we evaluate evidence, a really crucial and perhaps the most important part of all (at least according to Damon Centola), is the metadata : the data about the data, especially the powerful heuristic of who-believes-what. After all, it makes sense to trust a hitherto-reliable source more than a stranger if you can't assess the situation for yourself.

But we can take this up another level. We ourselves have beliefs about what other people believe. We generalise. We assume all of demographic X believes assertion Y, which is hardly ever fully true but is a useful way to simplify things. This sort of metabelief itself forms a spectrum : we ourselves directly believe things; we don't believe them ourselves but think that other people do; we believe nobody thinks this any more but used to in the past; or we actively claim that a thing is not true at all (we can apply this in reverse as well, thinking that nobody actually believes in things they profess to when in fact they're quite sincere).

A myth, says a recent topical SMBC, has to be something that people actually believe... as well as not making any sense and featuring weird sex. Well it's tough to argue with the latter, even for dragons. For "not making any sense", that seems not unreasonable either. Put more charitably, a myth or folklore in this quasi-religious sense has to be irrational, something that's inherently unscientific and unprovable*. But I won't go into the distinction between folklore in the more general sense of folk-wisdom versus superstition here though, as this isn't really my point. I'll only add that folklore perhaps requires a few doubters and unbelievers : a thing which everyone believes is true and actually is is just common knowledge, which is hardly what we usually mean by "folklore".

* This is not the same as being anti-scientific, which is actively opposed to rational inquiry and at odds with tested and testable procedures. That would be the realm of conspiracy theories, not myths in the old sense.

But accepting this as a vague, rough, but workable definition, still doesn't answer my main question. Is it really actually necessary for people to believe in a thing for it to count as folklore ? What if people only believe that other people believe in it instead – does that still count ?

Like the folk beliefs themselves, this is satisfyingly murky and probably can't be entirely pinned down. But it does at least perhaps elucidate the difference between what was understood to be fiction from the outset and what was supposed to be taken as myth. There need be absolutely no level of belief in fiction whatever. One can read Tolkien and either accept or reject whatever moral lessons one cares to draw, but the works are unarguably fictitious. But with myths and legends, perhaps there needs to be some level of belief, maybe even just this meta-belief, for it to count as in some way authentic. 

This is perhaps why the "original" stories feel different to modern retellings. There's nothing wrong with reshaping the old stories, of course, but nowadays there is absolutely no serious level of belief in them whatsoever. This wasn't the case at the time, when people would at the least think that somebody else believed them even if they themselves didn't. The modern versions can be enormously interesting, but don't tell us much about the mindsets of those who actually thought some aspects of the stories were really true : only the earliest versions can tell us anything about the world view of those lost eras.

While I don't think we can or should put down strict rules regarding authenticity, it might be safe enough to attempt a rough guideline. Perhaps folkore can be said to be that for which there is a community of active believers (it can't be just some lone nutter), and when this ceases but people believe other people still believe it, this becomes fakelore.

The extra complication is of course that this metabelief itself can engender credibility. Not always, but sometimes. Even if half the group don't really believe a thing but are just acting out of conformity, our brains doesn't register this : we only see the sheer size of the group apparently acting in good faith, and so we give them more credence than we should –  this is of course closely related to a false consensus. Folklore can be self-sustaining because everyone knows it's true and knows that everyone else knows as well, so nobody sees any need to question it. The tales grow in the telling.

But beliefs can also go there and back again. Fakelore can become folklore if the group size is taken as evidence in lieu of anything better; but if direct evidence becomes readily available than folklore shifts to fakelore and eventually dies altogether. The shift is complex, and surely important beyond the mystical realm of legends and relevant for beliefs more widely. Things which feel true, or at least resonate with some moral or ideological thing we believe, are often political kryptonite to rational inquiry.

So did the people of days of yore believe in the lore ? My guess it that whether myths and folklore were regarded as literally true would be, for the ancient peoples, missing the point. They were perhaps often a mixture of true folklore and fakelore, but it wouldn't have mattered. The point wasn't usually to establish what was actually happening; such a level of rationality often didn't exist. Rather the stories were usually things you could believe in, not believe directly. As long as the story gave some useful message to the audience, whether anyone seriously thought it actually happened or not was irrelevant. I would suppose that some people took it very literally indeed, others as metaphors, but the majority never stopped to think about it : they'd take the general characters of the gods and the necessary rituals as "true" but be utterly unfazed by contradictions in any specific details.

It's also interesting to note how "myth" can also refer to something that needs to be disproved. Like conspiracy theories, some claims have apparent explanatory power but don't stand up under rational scrutiny. The difference with the old myths is that these ideas are explicitly intended to be taken literally, with no symbolic value : the myth that vaccines cause cancer isn't a metaphor for science run amok, whereas Fenrir's turn to aggression due to the gods treating him with suspicion has value completely independent of the wolf's actual existence. You can't disprove Fenrir, but you can easily debunk anti-vax nonsense.

There is however a connection. In some ways the batshit insanity that is the Republican party would seem to argue that yes, actually, large numbers of people can be believe anything. It doesn't have to offer any symbolic value. It certainly doesn't have to be in any way beautiful. It can be an open, bald-faced liar with a more than passing resemblance to a bloated orange fish spewing incoherent word salad, and they'll still believe it.

At least the ancient peoples had the unprovable nature of their deities to fall back on. In contrast those duped by modern, very obvious liars have no such luxury. It's been suggested that people believe in Trump and Farage and the rest because of what they're against, not what they stand for, and similarly that there's a cult-like aspect in supporters following them, personally, rather than caring about their particular message. Both of these might be partly at work. The problem is that every time I hear them speak they just sound ever-more self-evidently ridiculous to me. And not at the level where it requires some specialist training to see through their charade, not because of being a self-identified lefty with a liberal agenda or some brand of elitist intellectualism, but at the bloody fucking obvious level of fire-is-hot inescapable reality.

This leave me with a paradox. I can accept value and beauty in the old, incomprehensible myths of wolves eating the sun, world trees and gods swallowing their own children our of spite, of demons turning the world to stone and monsters of the deep. All this is easier to understand, far easier(!) than modern right-wing Western politics. The ancients ? A mixture of folklore and fakelore, moralising and metaphors, crackpots and consideration. My contemporaries ? I'm beyond baffled.