The unreasonable effectiveness of memorable metaphors

I read Wigner's notorious essay on the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics recently, but I wasn't overly-impressed. The famous phrase seemed to be the only good thing about it. But then an article from Quantum Magazine came along with the even more provocative title, "How is science even possible ?", and that takes things in some interesting directions.

Wigner's basic argument boils down to : mathematics works so very well indeed, that the universe must truly operate on mathematical principles. The counter-argument is that mathematics is and can only be a human description of what the universe does. In that case it's not at all surprising that we can describe the universe with extreme precision, but we haven't figured out anything about what's really going on. Huge swathes of mathematical theorems exist with no applicability to observed reality, so we're just picking-and-choosing the ones that happen to work.

After mulling this one over, my sympathies went in all kinds of directions before eventually recoalescing. Let's do Wigner first.

 

Wigner begins with an admission (albeit in truly torturous language) that there's nothing intrinsically preventing there being alternative models which provide equally good descriptions of the same phenomena, as per my favourite example here. That would seem to shut down the "we really understand what's going on" argument straight off : how could we, if all our models were riddled with degeneracies ? But...

Those mathematical concepts which do work, work widely. The Gaussian distribution turns up everywhere : the statistics of noise from a radio telescope share much in common with dropping balls through a series of pins in a Galton board. Linear and quadratic relations abound. Forces of all kinds, generated by totally different underlying physical principles, decay according to the inverse square law. Laws governing the spread of disease can be applied to those governing the dissemination of information. And so on.

There is no need to be surprised by this : situations which may look at first glance dissimilar actually have more in common than may first appear, at least in the ways which matter for the observations. What's more interesting is that we don't need a a single unique mathematical model for every situation, broad trends exist which allow us to re-use the same basic models over and over again. That we've found other descriptions which are mathematically valid but inapplicable is not relevant, says Wigner : the fact that our limited toolkit is so widely applicable is what's interesting.

He goes on to say that while our most basic mathematical principles were indeed derived directly from observations, the same isn't true of the more advanced stuff. Complex numbers, for example, aren't directly visible from real data and were devised purely as an exploration of mathematics in itself, yet they have numerous applications to describing real-world data. The language of mathematics appears to be the language of reality itself... says Wigner, at any rate.

Perhaps his most interesting point is that the "physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena". Or indeed to that of individual phenomena, as he then elaborates. Newton could only measure data to test his theory of gravitation to a precision of about 4%, but later data improved on this by many orders of magnitude before a discrepancy was found. That is, we don't need to use a new mathematical description each time our data improves a little bit; yes, eventually theories do tend to break, but we have to push observations much deeper than anything justified by our initial models to find their breaking point. Often, when testing models in realms for which they were never designed, "we got something out of the equations that we did not put in".

Wigner admits that we may never find an Ultimate Theory, no full unification of all our "laws". They may, in the end, only work well in the domains in which they were designed and be in outright conflict elsewhere. Nevertheless, he concludes that mathematics is so widely applicable, so beautifully elegant, that it is indeed "unreasonably effective". We have no reason to expect it to be as useful as it is.

But still, mathematical models do have breaking points – you can't use Newton's theory of gravity in all situations. The mathematics of the improvements from Einstein to correct what appeared to be small deviations are massively more complex than Newton's simple algebra, to say nothing of the truly horrendous process by which Einstein derived General Relativity or the massive conceptual leaps needed to make such a theory possible. Einstein broke Newton hard.

From that point of view, mathematics could be only said to be unreasonably effective until it isn't. We have no idea what sort of revolutionary thinking will be needed to replace GR or the kind of discovery it will take to categorically disprove it.

It feels perhaps... evolutionary. A crude light-sensing organ tells you something about your world, a direction-capability gives you considerably more information, colour and higher resolution still more. It allows you to create ever more accurate and more precise models of the external world, which can be perfectly adequate to describing your observations, but ultimately reach a breaking point. One could never infer the existence of galaxies beyond Andromeda from human vision alone. Eventually you just need better data, as you indeed need better mathematics. True, your existing models might do better than you expect for a while but not forever. At some point a discovery is world-shattering, paradigm-shifting. However good your simpler mathematics is at the earlier scales, in the new ones it becomes so much wasted ink. Wrong is, ultimately, wrong, even if the scale of the wrongness initially makes it hard to spot.

To try a different metaphor, it might be like painting a picture. If you can't make out the details of a distant hill, you can usually imagine them well enough to add them in anyway. And lo, when you go closer to the hill, most of the time you will find that yes, those yellow fields were indeed cornfields, because past knowledge is a pretty good guide in most cases. But every once in a while, you'll find it was something completely unexpected, like hundreds of people wearing yellow hats. Your ability to describe reality may have remarkable accuracy and precision most of the time, but even a single failure points away from its deeper truth.

This is all very Humean, more so than I'd like. Is it still interesting, from the Wignerian perspective, that your simplified view of the world does do better than expected most of the time ?

Possibly. The argument may be made that the world does indeed operate mathematically, but our mathematics is still too imprecise to give us a truly correct description (that is, the language we use to express it, not (just) the specific formulae and equations we contrive). We may yet reach a point where our data have such exquisite quality, and our mathematics so brilliantly expressed, that we devise a model so harmoniously perfect that it can be extrapolated and interpolated with infinite perfection. We would have painted the ultimate picture, majestic in its beauty, stupendous in its grandeur, terrifying to behold.

Or perhaps not. Time to move on to the QM piece.

It starts off badly, musing about how weird it is that our brains are able to do maths at all. You might as well wonder how it is we're able to do any form of cognition at that point : a fascinating bit of neuroscience, no doubt, but at useless starting point for any philosophy. You have to take it for granted that we can think. And that we, being evolved from the universe, should be able to apprehend it to some mediocre degree is scarcely a revelation either. 

It gets better. They link back to Wigner, noting the surprise is being able to predict hitherto-unexpected phenomena and to make those predictions with uncanny accuracy. But, they say, this only ever applies where all the variables are known. Newton might only have been able to observe planetary motions with finite accuracy, but the only variable at work here is gravity. As long as his observational systematic and random errors were sufficiently well-behaved, it's not surprising his theory came out to be so astonishingly accurate : he could see and model the underlying trend extremely well, and all other effects (e.g. thermal radiation) are negligible to the nth degree for something like this. His view of the data was already good enough to see the underlying principles at work; further observations only sharpened the image rather than changing the channel, so to speak.

This is why and when a reductive approach works, when there really are just a very few known and knowable processes at work. In this case you indeed get an "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", but even that stands revealed as unsurprising : simple processes lead to simple effects, provided everything is well-measured.

But if you don't have simple processes... "things that happen at such small scales inside a nucleon at very high energies have nothing to do with, you know, why a bird can fly or stuff like that."

Biological evolutionary results can't be derived from basic physics, for two reasons. First is simply the astronomically large number of processes at work. Second, more interestingly, are emergent phenomena like temperature and pressure that are physically meaningful but can't be reduced to molecular, let alone sub-atomic, physics. Conversely, you can approximate physical processes of enormously complex systems using extremely simple mathematics, e.g. Newton's gravity again, or thermodynamics. As the QM piece puts it, you can make "a model of a model of a model of a model" and it still works. Such gross simplifications don't happen in biology, or at least not as often as you can get away with it in physics.

Not all physics can be simplified, of course. Some of it is fantastically hard. And chemistry ? Let's not even go there. 

Which reveals another flaw in the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" : it often doesn't work at all. You can't do it for economics or sociology, even if you might be able to disentangle broad trends. It works really well, occasionally, in very simple systems, but is in no sense an inescapable truth. Things, they say, which are dependent on many other things, past histories and so on, will never be well-modelled with simple mathematics in the way that the gravitational field of a planet can be.

I would like to suggest that this non-reductive approach has a fun consequence : it reconciles infinity with physics. I've suggested this before (see also links therein) but I want to make it a bit more explicit and emphasise things a little differently. Suppose that there is no real smallest scale to reality, that if we could keep shrinking we would do so indefinitely. We go from the ordinary objects of tables and chairs down to the size of an ant, where water tension and airflow and static charges start playing a massively bigger role, down to the high-speed world of atoms and molecules where the whole concept of a solid substance vanishes, down to the realm of probabilistic electron fields, down, down, down through to the quantum foam itself, and find... 

Who knows ? Not us. Never us, in fact.

Reality below these scales ceases to be meaningful; the answer to "what would happen if we kept on slicing the smallest particle" revealed to be forever, "we'd have another smallest particle". Or more likely, something fully beyond human imagination. Nothing on this scale would have any direct effect on us at all.

All this I posited before, suggesting that this saves causation, but I'll go a step further here and say it allows the harmonious union of an infinite reality with a finite universe. Or if you prefer, you can think of the universe as both finite and infinite at the same time.

What I mean is that our observable universe would be finite, truly finite, with a limited number of stars and planets and elephants and whatnot. The numbers might be incomprehensibly large but they would be ordinary real numbers. But the broader reality itself would be truly infinite. It would not be a fractal but something of staggeringly greater complexity, with layers within layers, worlds within worlds each unknown and literally unknowable to the other. I mean that even in the strongest sense, that the one could never observe the other; the yawning gulf of physics between them forever unbridgeable.

Importantly, this would not be a multiverse in the "there's one where Hitler won WWII" or "where Kennedy didn't get shot" variety. No, in this scenario, Kennedy and Hitler were both absolutely unique, singular individuals; there's no problem whatever in asking "which is the the real Hitler ?" because there was only ever the one. Things would be infinite but not in a way that could be invoked as a statistical solution to any physics problem, e.g. inflation. It would be neither a fractal nor repeating in any sense, an infinite set of finite worlds. Each might have its own rules of operation but each would be utterly unique. This kind of non-foundational model (where the bottom literally falls out of the world) is of such wild insanity as to make a Simulation Hypothesis of infinite Hitlers look like a cosy tea party.

Wigner's Toolkit would be perhaps partially saved in this case. There would only be a finite number of different processes and circumstances, so it would be even less surprising that a small number of models could have a wide variety of applications.  Mathematics would only be "unreasonably effective" if those higher-order complexities were actually applicable to those other worlds, something we could however never know. There is perhaps a pleasing tangent to neutral monism here, but we wouldn't need to say that the other levels of reality consisted of our secret dreams or mystical visions or whatnot : this would give them no greater substance than their being imaginary in the everyday common-sense meaning of the word. Nevertheless, it would be make reality itself unknowable but observational reality comprehensible, which to me at least is rather satisfying.

And the depth of the Utmost Infinite extends in all directions... beyond the quantum foam lies no smallest scale nor a point of origin, beyond the superclusters of galactic filaments lies yet more unknown; and in time too, there is no shortest interval, no moment of creation, nor any longest duration, no end in any sight.

Brain fart over, you may go about your business.

Starmer, Starmer, Starmer

As the UK general election enters the endgame, a few quick thoughts on the overwhelmingly-probable next Prime Minister and his New-New-Labour party.

First, much has been made of the so-called U-turns despite Labour not being in actual power yet. I set this out here so I won't go through it again, but I do want to add just how unclear some of the positions are, yet how feverently people insist on believing them as being one thing or another. For example, back in April the Financial Times reported how Gordon Brown had been actively working with Keir Starmer on reorganising the Cabinet, only for Sky News to report that Brown hated the new idea. The two reports were so at odds it was hard to know what to think; one had Brown as being instrumental to the process, the other only as a reactionary commentator.

(If anyone really wants me to I will try and dig up the exact links, but this is irksome)

It's the same with some of the current Labour policies. And to be fair, some of the missteps have been of Labour's own making. Putting down a solid number of £28 billion per year for investment in green jobs, stating in no uncertain terms that the House of Lords would be replaced in the first term and then appearing to row back on this... the problem is not the change of policies, but the marketing around them. It's fine to realise you need to change direction, the problem is how confidently you express that you can deliver them initially. On the other hand, people hate politicians being non-committal, so to quite a large degree, this is a no-win situation.

Yet the divide between Labour and the Tories is sharp in the extreme. My alignment with the parties based purely on their policies is 89% Labour, 36% Tory. So why people are making mountains out of molehills out of every Labour move to appeal to the centre / centre-right... I don't know. Allusion to the Nazis... FFS ! This kind of ultra-cynicism will be the death of us; truly, the perfect is the bitterest enemy of the good. I mean, it's completely fine to say, "I don't agree with this particular policy", but this inference that there's some kind of lurch to the right (let alone to appeasing racists !) is to literally fall off a slippery slope. There just doesn't exist anywhere near the level of clarity needed to make that assertion. A report one day is routinely contradicted by another the next, almost always because the journalists read far too deeply into the most marginal of evidence.

As I see it, the political calculus here is complicated. Labour could go all-in ideological, fire up their base, go for a high turnout... but this risks losing the centrists, and unifying the right against them. Or, as they've chosen, they go for an uninspiring (with caveats I'll return to) but unthreatening approach that lets the right tear itself to bits. Turnout might be lower but the right goes into free-fall and meltdown at the same time. 

The evidence that this is the correct approach appears obvious. They tried the hardline tactic under Corbyn and collapsed, whereas the safely-safely approach appears to be reaping a bountiful harvest. Yes, they probably could be a bit more left, but FPTP delivers highly non-linear results, so why give the right any ammunition ? Far better, as Zelensky did in his own election campaign, to say absolutely bugger-all about anything controversial, especially culture wars. The downside is that I guess people read in whatever they want to read about whatever breadcrumb of information does happen to issue forth. Much is made of "they haven't ruled out X" even when they've said nothing much at all about X.

Nazi analogies though. Srsly. That takes some nerve.

Politics, unfortunately, is an art not a science, and more unfortunately still requires a degree of... wait for it... faith. There's no getting around this : you need ideology for the process to work. 

Let me explain with an example. Starmer did himself no favours at all by saying he was certain Labour would lose the 2019 election, despite having been involved with the manifesto and saying that Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister. The problem is that this exposes the naked lie of political reality, that sometimes you have to say things you don't believe. There was no way at all he could have been in Corbyn's shadow cabinet and not sung his praises, even though it was very clear at the time they disagreed strongly on Brexit. And equally, he can hardly turn around now and say, "I didn't really believe it at the time". 

The act of faith required is that politics and policies can be differentiated. That politicians will make rhetorical claims to advance their own interests (as they must), but that actual policies will be formulated and enacted in accordance with the evidence. That if specific details change (again, as they usually must), then the overall direction of travel remains broadly similar. 

While Starmer was foolish to bring up the 2019 election, journalists are also being extremely silly in pretending that there aren't some areas where politicians literally cannot avoid lying. But lies about what you plan to do in office and lies about what you think of your colleagues are scarcely the same thing, as I suspect we've all found out at some point or other.

The idea that Labour are a sort of "Tory Lite" is nevertheless palpable nonsense. Since 2019 we've had them call for a federal system of government, greatly expanded powers for local councils (radical de-centrism), replacing the Lords with a Council of Nations, nationalisation of rail and energy, enormous investment into the green sector, calls for greater protection of workers, a commitment (albeit a weak one) to look into proportional representation, and recently a similar consideration for lowering the voting age. Now I'm somewhat against that last one personally, but nothing seems like a starker contrast : the Tories want young people to do national service and make them work for free, while Labour would prefer to give them greater choices.

Tory Lite, my foot. Sod off.

Not all of these proposals have made it thus far. I'm not sure what happened to the call for federalisation or what's going on with the Lords (I would rather they reformed it than replaced it). But nationalisation of rail and energy are very much alive and kicking (we can only hope water will go the same way), as is a commitment to net zero by 2030 (the specific investment sum being a distraction). Along with a program of house-building and increases in hospital and dental appointments, this might not be a revolutionary proposal, but it certainly seems like a dramatic one nonetheless. Consider also that Labour are accused by some of being too boring and under-ambitious and by others of aiming for the unachievable, and this strongly suggests they've got the balance right.

And this brings me back to those caveats about the campaign being uninspiring. I rather disagree. In terms of actual policies, I concede the point. I'd rather promises of a four-day work-week, UBI, re-joining the EU, cracking down on the big banks rather than supporting them, wealth taxes, and a commitment to send Nigel Garbage to Rwanda. But I also accept that this wouldn't get them into power, and without power, all the ideals in the world won't do you a whit of good. 

Moreover, there's something about the political campaign I do find genuinely inspiring, something that Starmer did almost immediately : agreeing with the government when necessary. Labour didn't oppose lockdowns, it even wanted to go further. At a stroke, the whole "you're just opposing us because you're the Opposition" mentality died; credibility skyrockets when you're seen to genuinely disagree and not just because you're fulfilling a perfunctory role. Quite honestly I've been waiting all my adult life to see politics done like this; if imperfectly, then at least with a measure of good sense.

This has gone on longer than I intended but I'd like to direct your attention to three long-piece interviews with Starmer : one from the Sunday Times, one from the Financial Times, and one from the Guardian. They're all character pieces, but a few things might be of note :

• He's actually funny. All three interviews say this, with some of his closet aides not understanding his political persona or why he can't be himself in front of the cameras. 
• He's not introspective and doesn't give a damn about some of the more personal stuff – no phobias, no favourite novel. He really is very grey and bland in that sense.
• He loves football and beer, but doesn't see any need to connect this with politics. He genuinely sees politics as a time to be serious, not for small-talk and jokes. 
• He's extremely competitive, but wants respect from colleagues but not deference. He's extremely focused on winning power, and will ruthlessly cut down colleagues and policies alike in pursuit of this. As perhaps he should, given Labour's longer track record of dismal electoral failure. He certainly understands a basic lesson of British politics : win the centre, win the game. And equally importantly, be seen to be winning the centre.

Starmer may in some ways be incredibly boring as a politician, but largely this is to the good : he isn't proposing bridges over munitions dumps or any of the other fantasy politics of the Johnson era. He isn't necessarily conventional either, just constrained by circumstance. When Biden was elected I was wondering what "radical centrism" would look like for the UK : in just under a fortnight, barring a truly monumental upset, we'll begin to find out.

And to those who are still skeptical, that's okay. But look me in the eye and tell me Labour are no better than the Tories. Go on, I dare you. 

This mood among some that no change is either possible or desirable without an outright revolution... to my mind, this kind of fantasy "both sidesism" deserves an ugly death. Actual change, so long as overall positive, is worth any amount of impossibly utopian dreams of a magical wonderland that has no chance whatever of being realised.

Review : Femina

Thanks to some Amazon confusion, my reading order is all out of whack. When I originally ordered Janina Ramirez's Femina it got lost in the post, which led to the happy replacement with Lost Realms. So when I saw this book in a physical bookshop, I immediately bought it. My mythology readings are now all intermingled with history, and I'm still waiting for that Celtic Myths That Shape The Way With Think... but first world problems, I guess.

Femina isn't a bad book by any means. The problem is the author somewhat reminds me of Michael Wood : excellent on the screen, but nothing special as an author. Not as extreme as Wood though – I watched all of his "In Search Of..." shows on TV, but could never finish a single one of the books. Or maybe Judith Herrin's Byzantium : The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, which was in absolutely no way whatever surprising. No, that's still unfair... Femina is better than that. For one thing, I easily finished it, whereas Byzantium I gave up about a third of the way through in outright disgust at the utter lack of anything even mildly unexpected.

The problem is that Femina just isn't the revolutionary tome the author thinks it is. It's decent, yes, it's just not at all Earth-shattering, and doesn't offer the world-changing view of medieval history that Ramirez really quite clearly seems to think that it should. As I've said before, the impact of some books can feel immediate whereas others are only felt after many years have passed. But in all cases some of the lessons of any good book are instantly obvious, even if their fully importance requires some time to gestate.

With Femina I'm struggling to think of a single profound take-home point regarding Ramirez's central message. I suppose the archaeological evidence that medieval London has a similar racial distribution as today's is one, though this is nothing much to do with women; evidence of cross-dressing and transgender roles is another but isn't really any sort of surprise. I'm coming from a background of reading of blatant homophillia and even borderline paedophilia in Plato (and considerably worse than this from the Roman emperors), so that there was a medieval male prostitute who dressed like a woman... yes ? And ? That's about as surprising as a gay rugby player. Oooh, a big burly man wearing tight shorts who likes grappling with other men, and he's gay, you say ? Well, I'm SHOCKED !

Of course there were issues of gender fluidity in the medieval period, why wouldn't there be ? Sexuality is and always has been complicated. It's nice to have evidence for this, but there's much more interesting stuff on the History Hit podcasts.

I did wonder if I was really the target audience for this book though. If you're of the persuasion that Hollywood history is basically accurate, being exclusively male-dominated until all these pesky "feminists" showed up in the 20th century, then you might well get a good deal more out of it : provided you're proceeding from a position of mere ignorance and not bias. For these people I'd recommend Femina very strongly. But for history enthusiasts, I wouldn't, for the simple reason that its main message contains precious little of anything I wasn't previously aware. 

And if you're the sort of person who clings to a nostalgic fantasy of a rosy medieval Europe in which women spent all their time in the home attending to their brave menfolk, then this book definitely isn't for you at all, being deliberately designed to wind you up the wrong way. You deserve it, to be sure, but it won't help.

Taken purely as a history book and ignoring the author's lacklustre delivery of her main theme, this isn't a bad book by any stretch – but it isn't a good one either. Oh, it's got good bits in it to be sure, and they aren't few in number. In particular, the history of the Cathars was well-told and new to me (Ramirez is perfectly capable of writing an engaging history when pinned down to a specific task). The detailed examination of how the Bayeux Tapestry does not show Harold being shot in the eye was also carefully considered and well-explained. And there are plenty of bits of intriguing analysis scattered throughout, such as (provocatively, and I think not definitively) how the plague engendered a new kind of more hateful racism towards foreigners, and how the biblical Three Wise Men were assigned different racial characteristics to indicate different traits.

The problem is that the main message is almost relentlessly unfocused. All the good bits are jumbled up and Ramirez continuously goes off on tangents to nowhere, leaving a narrative that's frequently all over the place. With an opening profession of deliberately trying to write women back into history, it spends far too much time giving potted histories of incidents which have little or no female involvement. The problem often isn't that it's too agenda-driven (I would have left it on the shelf if I didn't like history with an axe to grind !) but that it doesn't do this enough. 

It feels a lot like a television script that ended up in print by mistake : the kind of non-linear topic-jumps that can enliven a documentary don't work well in a book at all. She often ends up repeating basic points quite unnecessarily, like introducing a Viking warrior woman and then restating her femininity a couple of pages later as though this were still a point of revelation. Or that the Bayeux Tapestry isn't really a tapestry, a interesting little factoid that really didn't need any special emphasis but got mentioned almost as a magical incantation*. To do what, I'm not sure... summon the ancient wisdom of the embroiders, perhaps ? 

* Much as how Keir Starmer perpetually insists on saying that his dad was a toolmaker, as though there can be possibly be anyone left in the country who wasn't viscerally aware of this totemic detail. 

But the biggest flaw by far is that Ramirez doesn't know what to do with all the stories she assembles. Now I would think the obvious approach is to look for broad trends in how women acted and were regarded in society, and illustrate this using individual, representative examples. But Ramirez almost never connects any of the stories to the bigger pictures. The result all too often ends up as a series of unconnected anecdotes which say little or nothing about how women were regarded more generally in their different roles. 

I also take issue with Ramirez's throwaway claim that this generalisation isn't possible because life was too varied between individuals : surely we can we can generalise what life is like for modern women just as we can for men* – and surely, especially, recognising that prevailing social attitudes have a gender bias is the book's raison d'etre, and trying to understand past attitudes should be front and centre of a book like this ? Ramirez has quite a few other throwaway claims like this which in the end come across as just a bit weird.

* We can certainly generalise how the genders regard each other, at any rate.

For all these reasons I see no point in doing the kind of in-depth summaries I've been doing a lot lately. Overall, I'm giving this one a 6/10. Some interesting stuff, all readable enough, but badly in need of editing. Rather than feeling enthusiastic it comes across as uncontrolled and sometimes plodding. Worse, it also verges into accusative, judgemental language as though talking to children – at one point I was convinced she was about to launch into a tirade about how the word "pagan" was offensive, but thankfully this didn't happen. It can on occasion be exposition of the worst form, directly telling the reader how to think and how to feel, rather than just laying out a narrative for their consideration. 

I do feel duty-bound to at least give some very brief descriptions of the more interesting points in the book, however.

---

Bede : Like Bates. but unlike Morris, Pryor and Williams, Ramirez sticks to the view that Bede was a reliable witness regarding the genocidal invasion of the Anglo-Saxons. Whereas Morris and Williams try and put some nuance into this, thinking it through critically with different strands of evidence, Ramirez does so only in a hotchpotch sort of way : emphasising Bede's intelligence and provable reliability in other areas when she wants to support him, but then excusing him on the rarer occasions she doesn't believe him. It needs a self-consistent, generalised framework to properly accommodate everything. Bede undoubtedly was, like everyone else, at times reliable and at times less so, but as it stands, this is a blatant case of pick-and-choose.

I also take issue with Ramirez's statement about Marc Morris saying the lives of Anglo-Saxon women are "unrecoverable". This is misleading : he actually said there wasn't enough material to dedicate an entire chapter to an individual woman, which is not at all the same as saying that nothing is known of their lives at all.

The ever-changing past : Sometimes Ramirez offers an interesting insight into how the past has been continuously re-written, nicely complementing Larrington on how Viking culture has been inappropriated by the far right. She also explains what the "great man" theory really means, and I have to say this was one point I found genuinely shocking : it means not just that history is strongly influenced by pivotal moments and people, but is overtly masculine in that they are great men. Even worse, in this notion history is utterly dominated by a handful of these unlikely figures, with the rest of us being mere playthings of the gods. This is a prospect demeaning to men and women alike.

Full marks to Ramirez on this score, but I was less impressed by her commentary on how everyone, not just the far right, has supposedly inappropriately rewritten history for their own times. I think we all inevitably do this from our own perspective, and we can't blame the Victorians for seeing history through their own imperial lens. It's this sense of judging our ancestors as though we could still do something about it (by no means unique to Ramirez) that I find very strange and distracting. 

For example : come on, horned helmets are a harmless myth of Viking battle attire, not something to badger modern people about as though they themselves were Nazi sympathisers. Just because some far right loonies associate themselves with this symbolism doesn't mean the rest of us do; the attitude that "oh, it's a racist symbol now, we can't use it" is something that I find all too strange and strangely common among certain segments. I say no. Fuck the racists. They don't get to tell you what to do and they certainly shouldn't get to tell us what symbols mean. Stop telling people off for doing things for perfectly innocent reasons just because some other people want it to mean something else entirely.

The Vikings : Sticking with the theme, Ramirez does have some interesting details to add. She shares with Larrington a hatred of the drinking-out-of-skulls myth, so I'm left feeling I must be the only person in the world who never really heard of this. Unlike Larrington, she mentions the female counterpart to Valhalla (Folkvangr) ruled over by Freya. Ramirez has an interesting take on the supposed surplus-male population leading to Viking raids, saying this may have arisen from patriarchal polygamy : with not enough women to go around, and the need to enhance one's status for any chance of marriage, it was this social practise rather than the actual demographics that may have contributed to the Viking era. Interestingly, despite this male-dominated drive to raid and conquer, there's evidence not just of shield maidens but also female naval commanders. 

All to the good, but calling them "orally literate" just feels cringe. I absolutely accept, unhesitatingly, Ramirez's assertion that Viking culture was complex and sophisticated despite a severe deficiency in writing, but there's no reason to mangle the words thus.

Heterogony : Overall, I think Ramirez makes the point very well that past societies were no more monocultures than we are today. The Church was not the all-powerful institution we think of it, with beliefs varying widely within the general Christian framework. Even for the Cathars, attitudes to sex and marriage and child-rearing varied dramatically, with some espousing total abstinence and others thinking that families were a perfectly normal affair. In England, Margery of Kemp lived in a separate house from her husband, which was apparently not that uncommon, but also seems to have dearly loved him and yet at times not liked him very much : and never wanted sex with him, but deeply desired it from others. She also seems hugely annoying, wailing for no good reason and judging everyone harshly for minor misdemeanours. Truly a singular embodiment of how complex individuals can be and how they can defy their cultural norms.

King Jadwiga of Poland : Again Ramirez presents a disorder and disjointed account, first introducing this extremely important and unfairly overlooked character before going off on one about her handbag. Only then does she turn to the history. Jadwgia (a.k.a. Hedwig) wasn't queen of Poland, nor even an "absolute princess", but an outright king. She had a famous and complicated romance, taking an axe to a door to see her betrothed but ultimately deciding on the political match arranged for her by the nobles instead. She was instrumental in converting the last pagans in Europe, personally commanded armies, and played a crucial role in founding Poland's first university. If she hadn't tragically died young, she might be better known in the west today, as she surely deserves. And in like vein, I full accept that there are a great many female figures of the past who have been unfairly neglected, and should be written back in to our stories : but unfortunately, Ramirez isn't the one to do it.

Review : The Real Middle-Earth (2)

I continue exploring the world views of the Dark Age peoples of Britain by looking at Brian Bates' The Real Middle-Earth. Last time I gave the review part, noting that the book is often very humdrum in its style and questionable in its facts, but with more than enough interesting analysis to compensate. I looked at what Bates says about Christian suppression of magic and how the abandonment of Roman cities might be at least part due to a Dark Age psychology that the Romans never fully overcame. 

This last gets philosophical, raising questions about what counts as a "real" experience. To modern usage, only what we see and verify in the waking world counts as real, whereas in the Dark Ages, shamanistic rituals were believed to genuinely access other realms rather than merely confuddling the brain. Part of this is due to a terminology problem : yes, we really experience stuff, but no, those experiences aren't all of the same order. In this concluding post things will continue along a philosophical track, but this time looking at those other great unresolved issues of fate and free will. 

Before that, though, I need to say a few things about the Dark Age world view in which everything was interconnected and interdependent, but how this wasn't necessarily any sort of New Age paradise.

Universality

And it was, truly, a world view. Or possibly, worlds view. It's worth remembering, as Bates points out, that not everything was done out of belief, that jewellery of Thor's Hammer would often have been worn for the style, not because the wearer wanted to invoke the thunder god or even believed in him as a literal figure. People, then as now, would have been heterogenous, with most of them probably not caring just that much, most of the time. 

Nevertheless, when they did stop to think about it, they could have pointed to magic all around them. Water, as we've seen, was a liminal place associated with thought, perhaps helping to explain how scrying developed. The forest too was a place of spirituality, inhabited by the elven* spirits of nature (who would occasionally shoot you with arrows that made you sick). Ridges in the mountainside were the backs of dragons, rogue boulders the work of giants. Birds were seen as prophetic messengers who could travel between the worlds. Trees, with the word derived from "trust", were places for signing important arrangements like marriage. 

* Perhaps Bates' only interesting comparison with Tolkien is that the Dark Age peoples believed elves existed fully independently of mankind, tending to their own concerns and not much bothered with ours as a rule. This is something Tolkien fully embraces in his essay On Fairy-Stories, though only partly so in his novels.

All this was interconnected, sometimes explicitly so. The waters of the the Well of Wyrd (see next section) flowed into all wells, everywhere, a sort of "Well-Space" to Terry Pratchett's "L-Space" (connecting all libraries). And modern tribal cultures believe in a sort of "Tree Space", where all trees are ultimate extensions of the World Tree. The interconnected web-like patterning of much Norse and Celtic art represents their belief in this complex, unknowable intricacy of the connections between all things.

There were practical applications of this. Odin's journey along the World Tree gave him insight into the Nine Realms, but also, Bates suggest, may have been the origin of the wizard's staff : all staffs sharing in that connection, as branches of the Tree. Less plausibly, he even suggests this may be the "true" origin of Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse. Yggdrasil can be translated as "Odin's Steed", and the eight legs of the horse plus the one rider may be symbols of the Nine Realms, with Sleipnir's origin as the offspring of Loki being a later evolution of this. I found this one interesting but unconvincing.

All of these deep connections between nature, of man being of nature rather than its overlord as sometimes claimed by Christianity, may have a large whiff of New Age happy-clappy woo-woo about it. And, well, it certainly is woo-woo is as much as mysticism is necessarily so. But happy-clappy ? Hardly ! Everything might have been interconnected but it still wasn't very nice. Consider Disney's Pocahontas song :

The rainstorm and the river are my brothers,
The heron and the otter are my friends !
And we are all connected to each other,
In a circle, in a hoop that never ends.

Now, can you also imagine Pocahontas singing about Loki being bound in the entrails of his own children ? Of dragons bringing about the ruin of her people because they'd disturbed the Underworld ? Of how the other realms were inaccessible and populated with monsters, or how warlords were in a state of near-constant and endemic warfare, or how human sacrifices were hung in trees in symbolic representation of Odin's knowledge quest ? Which, by the way, involved him hanging himself in the tree without food or water for nine days.

No, in the Dark Ages, the rainstorm would have washed you into the river, the heron would have pecked your eyes out, and the otter would probably have stolen your shoes, the tricksy bastard.

These were violent myths for violent times. Just because everywhere was connected didn't mean that those places were any the better for it, it was just the way things were. There was no intention for the world view to be either positive or negative in the way New Agers seem to insist upon.

Which, to segue into the next bit, brings us to the spider spell. In this initiation rite for an apprentice wizard, incantations are sung to call the spirit of a spider to wrap the apprentice in a web for a spiritual journey. It's not a pleasant experience but a terrifying one, described as a nightmare. Interestingly, Bates notes that the Navajo have the concept of a Great Spider Woman, the "original weaver of the universe". If the Dark Age Europeans didn't have a carbon-copy of the myth, then the concept of fate as a woven tapestry was omnipresent. Sometimes, your life could literally hang by a thread. And that brings me to the final section : the wyrd.

Universe

There are some parts where Bates greatly improves on Larrington's description of the Norse myths. One is the origin of the universe, which Larrington only touches on, e.g. the Earth either rising from the sea or made out of the giant Ymir, and the first deities nourished by a cow. Bates says that this is really only the origin of the gods and other divinities, not the cosmos itself. For that, he says, the mythology is surprisingly atheist, postulating not some directing, purposeful deity, but energy and forces. Fire and frost collided in the Yawning Gap to produce Ymir emerging from the melting ice.

Larrington's view of time is largely one of cycles of constant renewal against relentless decay. Bates for the most part takes quite a different approach, though he does also mention a rhythmic aspect. Day, he says, was literally born of Night, a giant who married the Sun. Thereafter Night and Day rode around on chariots, a common theme in cosmic myths. Bates' interpretation fits quite well with the "experiential reality" discussed last time :

The story gives the impression of a universal version of mind-rhythms, in which the nocturnal came first, a deep darkness in which 'external' images were no longer visible, and allowed the Earth's imagination to roam freely. In this dreamlike state, the realms of spirits were created. And then Day was born, and people awoke into a perception of what had been formed.

As for time, there's an intriguing connection with Fenrir. Larrington's description of the wolf who grows to distrust the gods only due to their own fear and ill-treatment of him focuses very well on the psychological appeal of the myth, but Bates adds a great deal to the story*. He says that first the gods tried a series of ever-stronger and stronger bonds, all of which Fenrir was able to break. The final bond, which looked extremely flimsy, was made of five things that didn't exist (such as the breath of a fish) and only one (the sinews of a bear) that did. As a metaphor this is superb : the main things that restrict Fenrir are not physical limitations, but magical, non-physical ones, the mental barriers he constructs himself. He is literally spellbound.

* Interestingly, in stark contrast to Larrington, he views Loki as a straightforward villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

The strands which bind are also a theme of the wyrd, fate or destiny. This is a complex concept, with the forces of life, death and free will all literally intertwined. As Tolkien depicted death as a gift that brings mortals to Ilúvatar, the Norse had the concept of life as a debt that must ultimately be repaid. Managing the strands of destiny were the three Wyrd Sisters. The ferociously complex web that they wove on the "loom of life", represented in the tree-like artworks, was utterly beyond mortal ken. Everything indeed happened for a reason but that reason was often well above human understanding.

But was it fixed ? The answer is an interesting "probably not"; there would be little point in magical practises if it were truly deterministic. Magical rites accessed the worlds in which the ordinary mortal rules did not apply. The influence anyone could hope to have over their own destiny was limited, but some level of negotiation with the Wyrd Sisters does seem to have been possible.

The strong sense of 'woven' fabric as carrying the image of life-change means perhaps that when they did change aspects of people's lives, it was in harmony with their original life-design : the shape, colour, texture, pattern, theme and so on... the overall pattern of threads could be adapted, developed, re-arranged – so long as it honoured the basic theme with which it originated.

Elsewhere the wyrd provides the "why" while physical observations provide the "how", as we saw with the abandoned Roman cities. There is a distinction between truth and reality here : it was, in a sense, "true" that the cities were abandoned due to the decree of the Fates, but this wasn't observationally "real". You couldn't see the Wyrd Sisters in the waking world but that didn't mean they were non-existent. 

In Dune, at least as I read it, Frank Herbert postulates that to know the future is to be constrained by it. Others disagree*, but I always felt this was a very strong and clear theme of the book, that Paul has no choice in how he acts precisely because he knows the awful results that follow from all of his possible actions : like Spinoza's God, he is rendered into useless omniscience. Choosing anything other than the lesser of the evils available, accepting that his prophetic visions are accurate and real, would be unthinkable.

* Of course, the ambiguity of how Herbert deals with free will is part of the literary appeal.

Sadly, the "Weirding Way" in Dune has little obvious direct connection with the Dark Age concept of the wyrd, and is probably no more than linguistic happenstance. Indeed the wyrd might be interpreted as the exact opposite of Herbet's conception. If you don't know your future, you're constrained by your own ignorance, literally spellbound by your own destiny. It's only knowledge of what will happen that offers any hope of changing the future ("only the educated man is free", in one of Epictetus' more lucid moments). You might not be able to reshape the entire cosmic web, but you could at least change your little patch of it. This form of free will is limited but real, and to me at least, rather appealing.

Conclusions

I can understand why Bates chose the Tolkien angle for marketing appeal. Tolkien synthesised many different mythological concepts into his own coherent whole, and Bates has attempted something similar. The difference is that Tolkien required an ultimately Catholic result, not overtly so but deeply implicit, whereas Bates has no such constraint. He seeks to try and understand how the peoples of the Dark Ages saw the world on their own terms, whereas Tolkien may have been interested in this but wasn't trying to recreate it. Tolkien's analysis was literary, not historical. Though there's a strong overlap the two fields are not identical.

On reflection it's perhaps better that Bates didn't include a detailed comparison with Tolkien after all. A proper comparison would have had to have made the book about twice the length, and his token examinations may be annoying but they don't, in the end, actually detract from anything.

Whether Bates is successful in his goal is very much an open question. All of these mythology books, especially the Norse, make it clear just how uncertain we are about what our ancestors really believed. The Greeks wrote down their theology at a time when it was a vital living force, whereas most of the written Norse tales come from the era when they were already Christianised. Even the Greek stories, though, were extremely fluid, lacking any sort of equivalent to a Bible. They could be and were endlessly retold and reinterpreted. What we see of these old ideas is not much more than glimmer. By no means should anyone go away thinking of Bates' account as being in any sense a definitive description of how the Dark Age peoples actually saw the world.

But it's no less interesting for that. Taken on its own, the world view presented here is a fascinating bit of psychology-philosophy, one which works well in combination with historical studies of the period. That there are common themes among so many ancient peoples (three spinners of fate, chariots pulling the Sun, precursor divinities to the gods of the Titans/giants) suggests that at least some of our modern inferences about ancient beliefs will not be too wide of the mark. Human psychology is complex but not entirely unpredictable; that the centuries-old stories are still relevant for contemporary technology and science fiction is testament to this.

Which means that Bates may well have a point when he says that we've lost touch with this aspect of ourselves. This is a point he over-repeats, but still, we don't need to abandon rationality to acknowledge and incorporate the emotional resonance of the older symbolism. Personifying the forces of nature and making them intuitively comprehensible will always have a deeper, more primal appeal than parameterising them into numbers and equations. Indeed, for public outreach, we still tell stories of the robotic spacecraft as adventurous little explorers; we give remotely-operated submersibles ridiculously silly and adorable names. 

Do we actually need to believe in more spiritual and less rational processes ? I'm not sure we have a choice. As in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, perhaps there's a finite quantity of belief in the universe, that, in the Nietzschean death of god, inevitablly results in a transference when we stop believing in something. Whether we should actually encourage a belief in the mystical-cosmic forces as Bates seems to suggest, however... there I'm not so sure. It seems to me that people are plenty irrational as it is, and trying to divert their irrationality might only heighten it instead. Human psychology might not be entirely random, but like meddling with the underworld, deliberately trying to manipulate it is not for the faint-hearted.

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. 

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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.

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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.