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.