Myths and Scottish Fairies

In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong offers her interpretation of the nature and role of myth, and of the way in which changes in the myths we tell reflect wider social, cultural and civilizational changes – changes in the ways in which we lead our lives.

Karen Armstrong starts by attempting to define myth, and then traces its history from the Palaeolithic Period to the modern and contemporary Western world, in which, she says, myth’s divorce from ritual and its subjection to logos resulted in its decline.

Along the way, she interprets several myths and exposes her ideas about the complementarity of myth and reason. According to her, mythology and rationality are different ways of making sense of the world that do not have to oppose each other. She says that one of the problems with contemporary Western culture is the refusal to acknowledge that mythology can be a valid framework through which we can make sense of our experiences.

A Short History of Myth is intelligent, very readable, and full of interesting ideas, but it is more of an interpretive history than a rigorous one. The one problem I had with the book was the fact that Karen Armstrong sometimes makes categorical affirmations about things that can only be speculation. For example, about the Neolithic period she says:

We can sense the awe, delight and terror of these pioneering farmers in the mythology they developed as they adapted to their new circumstances, fragments of which were preserved in the mythical narratives of later cultures.

This claim is unsourced, and I can’t help but ask myself, which fragments? How do we know that they come from the Neolithic period? We are talking prehistory here, so can we know this for sure?

Another example:

“n early Neolithic mythology, the harvest was seen as the fruit of a hierogamy, a sacred marriage: the soil was female; the seeds divine semen; and rain the sexual congress of heaven and earth. It was common for men and women to engage in ritual sex when they planed their crops.

Again, there is no source for this statement, and so I have to ask myself those same questions once again. It’s not that I am accusing her of making things up out of thin air – she is obviously a very knowledgeable woman. I just wish the book were more rigorous when it comes to that. I am very interested in ancient myth and ritual, and in this case I would have been very grateful for a reference letting me know where I could read more on the topic.

The conclusion Karen Armstrong reaches is one that I agree with. She says that art in general, and literature in particular, has these days the role that myth had in past societies. Art, like myth, “helps people understand their own humanity”. I am just included to think of this as a continuous process, rather than a post-Enlightenment break and later recovery. What she defines as "myth" is what I tend to think of as "stories" in a more general sense. The way in which we tell stories has changed, but it only makes sense that the reasons why we tell them, why need them, haven't. Despite my complaints, I do think that A Short History of Myth is very much worth reading, and I will leave you with a few favourite passages:

Mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it

Myth is about the unknown; it’s about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.

A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. It is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to ‘feel with’ others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it do so, it can change us forever.

(Don't you just love this last one?)

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In the introduction to Scottish Fairy Belief, Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan state the purpose of the book clearly:

This book is concerned with the ‘real dramatis personae of fairy narrative, the people in them’. We are not concerned with proving the reality, or otherwise, of fairies; such an endeavour would be as futile as it is irrelevant. What we can prove is that many Scots people, who lived mainly in the period from c.1450 to c.1750, had no doubt that fairies actually existed.

I knew from this paragraph alone that I was going to love this book. I have a great interest in Scotland and in folklore in general, but so far I had been unable to find a good book that combined both things. I have pondered reading Evans-Wentz’s classic The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, but I was a bit put off by the speculative approach it uses. What I wanted was not a book that speculated about the nature and origins of fairies, but rather a book about what people believed, and how that belief helped shape their lives and their society. Scottish Fairy Belief is that book.

Using sources like traditional ballads, witch trials records, and several treaties, Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan trace the history of fairy belief in mostly sixteenth and seventeenth century Scotland. The book covers such areas as locations associated with fairy sightings, fairy enchantments, changelings, the post-Reformation demonization of folk belief, fairies in literature, and Robert Kirk and the reinstatement of fairy belief. Scottish Fairy Belief is mostly concerned with the common people’s version of events, but of course that folk culture was often appropriated and changed by the ruling classes, and then re-introduced in a transmuted state. The book covers this as well.

The book is clearly very well researched, and everything is rigorously sourced and referenced. At only 215 pages, it could not cover the subject exhaustively, but it’s a great introduction, and the long list of primary and secondary sources at the end lets you know exactly what to look for if you want to read more.

I was impressed with how easily the authors managed to combine academic rigour and accessibility. This book is definitely not dry. Of course that my passion for the subject makes me somewhat biased, but really, it's very readable and enjoyable. The only slight problem that I found had to do with organization. I found that sometimes two chapters with different titles ended up covering more or less the same ground. But I imagine that this is hard to avoid in a subject in which things are so hard to delimitate.

For those interested in folklore, in Scotland or in social history, this is a very good book to have around.