Having read a good chunk of the original stories, I turn away slightly from mythological themes and back to something more academical : the historical and archaeological evidence for the early world views prevailing in the British Isles. I begin with Ronald Huttons' Pagan Britain.
The Review Bit
Ronald Hutton is, like Dianne Purkiss, one of televisions' most distinctive historians. He doesn't have Purkiss' uniquely weird voice (though it is a bit odd), but his typical garb makes him look like a would-be follower of Matthew Hopkins. Apparently he is in fact a pagan himself, though he keeps that private and you'd never guess it from this excessively level-headed book.
I have to say it's a bit of a strange one. Really, I do mean "excessively level-headed" here, it's not a compliment. By no means could you call it a bad book, but it often becomes a right proper trudge. It's thorough to a fault. For the most part it's a good, meaty, detailed read, but it does sometimes become dry and on occasion tedious.
As a compendium of different interpretations I doubt you'll find anything better anywhere. The problem is that Hutton is resolutely noncommittal on almost everything, able to distil the different ideas, who believes them and why, all well enough, but Hutton himself hardly ever professes his own opinion. This can make it deeply frustrating. Hutton is trying much, much too hard to be even-handed, treating everything as equally credible when this is clearly not the case. Only at the very end, for example, does he decide to explicitly say that aliens didn't build Stonehenge, a process which feels like drawing blood from a stone.
Look man, crackpots are crackpots. It's okay to call them out on it. There's absolutely no need to placate the nutcases.
To me this is not the right away of doing a book like this. I much prefer Francis Pryor's view that it's necessary to venture strong opinions to test and debate – strong but weakly held, because you can freely abandon them. Having done a truly monumental amount of work in assembling the myriad of different ideas considered in this dense 400-page tome, for Hutton never to even give his best guess on almost anything becomes damned annoying. Worse, he doesn't seem to think we can even have opinions on anything : there's simply no way to decide, the evidence always too thin or inconclusive. He seems resolutely lacking in self-awareness of his own postmodernist attitudes.
Come off it man ! Look, it's fine if you're wrong. Just give me something to evaluate. I'd rather have a wrong answer than no answer, or more accurately, I want your opinion even if you aren't confident of it. Your opinion is valuable – don't sell yourself so short. At times, he seems to exalt personal choice to the status of actual evidence, which is damned strange. No, dammit, not every opinion deserves equal respect !
A more minor second point of irritation is Huttons' inconsistent and weird use of the passive voice. Like the man himself, this just comes across as damned odd. It's a popular text, and anyway the passive voice is a horrible and disingenuous thing that makes people sound artificially aloof and objective. Better by far to admit opinions are opinions than pretending you're above the fray, because I simply don't believe you. On the limited visitor numbers allowed at Sutton Hoo, for example :
This arrangement protects the site and does justice to it, and it is an unworthy emotion that makes the present writer remember fondly his boyhood image of the place, as a flock of low tumuli, deserted among the misty heath.
This is a weird mangling of academician-speak and solid narrative prose, made all the stranger by his sometimes using "I" like a normal person. His insistence that "nonetheless" is actually three separate words is equally grating.
Which is far from saying there's nothing of interest in here. Actually there's plenty, occasionally with moments of profound insight (a couple of which I'll cover below) which are eloquently expressed. It's just that this is buried in unnecessary and inconclusive depth. That said, he does give a first-rate history of histories, covering why people believed different things about the past at different times by placing them in a very interesting social context. But while it's good to be aware that evidence, beliefs and biases all change over time, and that our current findings are always provisional, I don't see any point in using this to justify holding no opinions at all. Just because the broader context might shape our ideas in ways we're not always aware of, doesn't mean that all of our ideas are wrong. You're still allowed to have preferences, for goodness' sake.
Overall, I give this one a solid 7/10. There's some genuinely great stuff in here, but it's a far heavier read than it really needs to be.
Hutton's Pagan Britain
There are two points Hutton makes which I think are almost make the book worth reading by themselves. The first is a question : how come invasions only seem to start at the beginning of (written) history ?
More worrying, in view of the complete abandonment of the invasion hypothesis during the later twentieth century, is that invasions are a major theme of actual ancient history. As soon as Britain emerged into history, parts of it were occupied successively by Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Vikings and Normans. The undoubted arrivals of new goods and technologies in [late prehistory], however, are now ascribed wholly to travelling salespeople, traders, friendly foreigners looking for work... This picture certainly fits the apparent archaeological and genetic record, and it may well be that everything did change as soon as history began... [but] it deserves more consideration, and explanation, than it has so far received.
This is a fascinating observation that I've never heard discussed before. A related point is that Hutton is firmly against Pryor's pacifist view of prehistoric Britain, calling this simply unsustainable. If we can't be sure of the causes or even the exact modes of violence specifically (e.g. it's almost impossible to distinguish, archeologically, between the rituals involved in killing a criminal as judicial punishment versus for ritual sacrifice to the gods) then we can be at least sure that large-scale violence did happen. I tend to agree with this. Pryor's arguments that ancient Britons would build such monumental hill forts, with clear defensive capabilities, just for shits and giggles rather than actual defence never seemed very credible to me. If you're going to build something as sheer statement of power, you don't opt to make it a defensive structure unless you have some need for defence. Otherwise you'd go for the prehistoric equivalent of a triumphal arch.
I detect in Hutton an undertone of skepticism that military-scale invasions didn't happen in prehistory, though he never claims this directly. But if there is this correlation between the use of writing and the occurrence of invasions, what's the connection ? Is it just that they're now better attested by the records ? This is problematic, as I'll return to at the end. Could it be that writing is needed for the formidable logistics involved ? Maybe.
The second point is the nature of paganism. It takes a while for Hutton to state this, but when he does, he puts things with commendable eloquence.
This was a form of religion which embodied no divine revelation and depended on no books, dogmas or orthodoxy, resting instead entirely on prescribed ceremonies. It had no specific founder or leader, no concept of conversion, made no demands on foreigners and was centred on the community and not the individual. It left ethics to society to prescribe, freed worshippers to decide how to venerate their own deities, and aimed for earthly well-being, not salvation in the next life. It had no concept of sin, though a very active one of blasphemy and impiety.
Just as politics isn't necessarily related to morality, so too can religion be a quite separate part of a person's world view. Tom Holland made it clear that Christianity and later Western thinking tended to create other religions by saying "these people believed in this god, therefore they were of such-and-such a faith", whereas for the actual believers, their world view wasn't nearly so clear-cut. In paganism, which god one prefers to worship has an entirely different significance compared to, say, the difference between theists and atheists. There was no set doctrine or dogma concerning any particular pagan deity (as is abundantly clear from all the mythology books I've been covering here lately), no particular set rituals to observe or way of acting the god would approve of. For pagans, the gods were simply there. They provided an explanation for how the world worked, far more than they provided any guide to right action (but see Hamilton's Mythology).
This, though, could be a weakness. Just as politics coupled to morality creates fierce polarisation but also passion among adherents, so too does the same happen when spiritual beliefs combine with ethics.
Pagans simply did not take religion as seriously as Christians did, because they did not regard it as embodying divine law or carrying a choice of salvation or damnation as a consequence... It seems that the more aggressive, determined and monopolist religion had the edge over its rivals, simply because it cared more about winning, and demanded absolute victory.
By contrast the pagans didn't see anything special about Christianity at first, for a while quite freely reverting to paganism when the Christian god failed to deliver. The mindset that religion wasn't actually very important took a while to shift... but not that long. Hutton reckons Britain was pretty much entirely Christian by 600 AD (or 700 at the absolute most), invasions by the Scandinavians notwithstanding.
I'm not entirely convinced by that. Firstly Thomas William's Lost Realms did an incomparably better job of charting the shifting beliefs in Dark Age Britain, which as Hutton also acknowledges, happened very inhomogeneously. But secondly Hutton's own arguments about paganism as more a world view than a religion proper. He says that witches do not represent the survival of paganism because there was no ordered structure or community of belief, but surely that's hardly a black mark against it given the very nature of the pagan world view.
Perhaps a compromise can be reached here. After an unnecessarily thorough dismissal of many ideas which Hutton argues (often persuasively) do not represent pagan ideas persisting after the domination of Christianity, he concludes that some ideas did survive the conversion. Magical thinking is one, especially the idea that certain objects could have inherent magical power (much, much more on this when I'll cover Keith Thomas' Religion And The Decline Of Magic). Pagan symbols are another, e.g. dragons and giants certainly predate Christianity. Furthermore certain festivals definitely have pagan origins, while fairies are perhaps one of the strongest persisting beliefs. Fairies and fairyland weren't inherently good or evil but certainly had no place in Christianity either. Since they were more-or-less orthogonal to Christian belief, causing little or no interference with what the Church saw as correct behaviour, Christian priests were content to let people believe in them : they weren't rival gods, they were just things people thought existed for some reason.
So maybe we could say that pagan thinking persisted long after the rise of Christianity, even if most of its specific beliefs fell away. Perhaps people have an innate tendency to see magical behaviour in the world, and if left to itself (without a monotheistic, organised, morality-driven Church to actively refute these ideas, or equally a powerful, evidence-based academic organisation) this eventually leads to paganism proper : the rise of the small gods.
Certainly there does seem to have been muddled thinking in Dark Age Britain, despite Tolkien's eloquent protestations to the contrary. Not only was there frequent backsliding to paganism and confused mixtures of symbols, but elsewhere there were ideas which look bizarre from the perspective of modern Christianity. Italy, of all places, saw some of the weirdest ideas, like the benandanti : Christian shamans who were believed to send forth their spirits to battle witches. Or the idea that the planets were governed by magical spirits whose powers could be drawn on by earthly wizards. Again, I leave the confused distinction between wizard and priest to a future review.
For a third and final point I turn back to history. In large part the book is, often frustratingly, about archaeology more than paganism, and it's pretty decent at that, even while Hutton so often refuses to commit to any opinions. But there is one memorable case in which he does decide the evidence is clear enough to pass judgement, and I have to say it's damned odd.
I've mentioned the varying beliefs about the reality or otherwise of the Anglo-Saxon invasions in many of the history books I've read recently, with it now quite clear that professional historians and archaeologists have rather a strong mix of opinions. But Hutton, strangely, persists in the view of the invasions as a) definitely having happened and b) causing wholesale genocide. This in spite of the fact that he acknowledges the genetic evidence doesn't support it and the actual textual evidence is extremely limited : three sources, all writing long after the events. Of all the times, of the most minor of details, where the evidence seems abundant and he says that things are just far too unclear to decide anything, on this the grandest of issues he becomes very decisive on the flimsiest of reasoning ! And surely, the compromise here is obvious : localised, brutal massacres are easily mythologised as truly genocidal, even when nothing on such a scale actually took place.
It is indeed an altogether strange book. In the footnotes he often protests angrily that he's been misquoted or misunderstood, but I have to say I came away sympathetic to his detractors : if he'd just commit to something like a normal person, we could all have a jolly good argument and go away happily. He tries to weasel out of things so much that the reader is almost forced into putting words in his mouth or he'd have said very little at all.
Again, I don't want to say it's bad : it isn't. The context he presents for the shifting beliefs of historians is excellent and provocative, his thoughts on the nature of paganism insightful, the sheer breadth and depth of his review downright extraordinary. It is, in fact, a very good book. But I'm not at all sure I'd want to read more by the same author. We'll see.
