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.