LL-L "Oral tradition" 2004.07.21 (01) [E]

Wed Jul 21 20:03:25 UTC 2004

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Oral tradition" [E]

> From: Andrys Onsman <Andrys.Onsman at CeLTS.monash.edu.au>
> Subject: LL-L "Oral tradition" 2004.07.19 (04) [E]
>
> From: Andrys Onsman
> Subject: Oral Tradition
> To: Sandy et al
>
> >And why do archeologists still keep digging in Wales for evidence of
Arthur
> >when they never manage to find anything?
> >
> I'm not sure that such is the case. In /The Keys to Avalon: the true
> location of Arthurs Kingdom revealed /(Blake, S & Lloyd, S;
> Shaftesbury: Element, 2000) the thesis that the stories of Arthur and
> Camelot are localised in northern Wales is posited. Although I wasn't
> entirely convinced by their argument, and some of the detail became
> somewhat trivial, it's an interesting theory, with numerous lowland
> language area precedents. Well worth a read, if you're interested in
> such things - but nowhere near as spectacular as the movie!

That sounds interesting, although I'm extremely sceptical about the value of
trying to reconstruct lost history without very solid evidence (as opposed
to, say, toponymic or etymological evidence).

Although aware of some of the pitfalls, I'm inclined to give more (though
not necessarily much) credence to oral tradition. An example of why is the
tradition of Old King Cole. While the Scottish oral tradition of King Cole
is quite strong  (as, for example, when Scottish poets refer to Scotland as
"Coila"), in England there is a Colchester so everybody believes he was
based there, without a shred of evidence. In fact Burns believes King Cole
to be associated with Kyle in Scotland, and refers to Kyle thusly (in "The
Two Dogs"):

'Twas in that place o' Scotland's Isle,
That bears the name o' auld King Coil,

You'll note that Burns Rhymes "Coil" with "Isle" just as in modern Scots
"voice", "boil", "choice" &c is pronounced "vyce", "byle", "chyce" &c. He
means "Kyle".

On the whole, though, I think this sort of thing - oral tradition - should
be taken much more seriously than simply matching "Cole" with "Colchester",
or "glass" with "Glastonbury". Yet there seem to be many books putting
forward theories that are based on little more than a few approximate
pattern matches.

Another pitfall with lost history is that the legends tend to build - people
spot connections that really don't exist, and like the canals of Mars an
Arthurian landscape is built right across the island. But just because
legends of Arthur are everywhere doesn't mean Arthur was everywhere. The
idea that the literature of Arthur moved from Ediinburgh to Wales at least
involves a route over which refugees are known to have taken other works of
Brythonic literature. This might spread "Arthurmania" over a wide area and
the connections would begin to be built. And of course the notoriously
self-publicising monks of Glastonbury Abbey made more of it than most!

The association of Camelot (though not Cole!) with Colchester is very
striking, though.

It's also true that the Welsh tended to write up stories from other areas as
if they had actually happened in Wales. For example, the traditional Welsh
story "The Drowning of the Bottom Hundred", tells how a series of sea-dykes
stretching along the west coast of Wales were left in such neglect that the
sea broke in and submerged the town of Aberdovy, so that sometimes the
famous "Bells of Aberdovy" can be heard ringing below the sea, obviously
couldn't have happened in Wales. In fact it relates actual incidents that
occurred on the Dutch coastline.

All this talk of Arthur still leaves me wondering why there's such a strong
tradition of Merlin in Berwickshire, though. It might be worth considering
how the other two wizards I mentioned - Michael Scot and John Napier - fared
in oral tradition. It might not actually cast light on Merlin, but could
give us an idea how large a pinch of salt we need with oral tradition.

John Napier (pronounced "Naper" /ne:p at r/ in Scots) owned Merchiston Castle
just outside Edinburgh. His household (you know, the servants and suchlike)
observed him day after day and night after night moving tablets with arcane
markings on them over a mysterious board, also covered in arcane markings.
He kept a black cockerel as a familiar, which everyone feared because
anything it saw, John Napier would also see. Criminals had been arrested and
found guilty simply because the master wizard had caught them red-handed via
the cockerel. Later in his life, wizards from the furthest reaches of the
island would visit Napier, not to work with him or learn from him, but just
for the honour of meeting him and paying reverence to him for his powerful
works.

Michael Scot was a wizard from the Scottish Border country, born aound 1180.
He was of fairy parentage and is mentioned in many supernatural tales, where
he duels with witches and even defeats the Pope. He and the Devil built
Watling Street in England in a single night, and it was he or one of his
familiars who split Eildon Law in three (Eildon Law is a dramatic
triple-peaked mountain near Melrose in the Scottish Borders). Like Merlin,
Michael Scot never died, his whereabouts are simply unknown.

John Napier is of course recent history. When a theft was committed in the
castle, he covered a black cockerel in soot and led the servants one at a
time into a dark room where the were instructed to stroke the cockerel,
which would cry out when touched by a thief. The thief was caught because he
hadn't dared touch it and his hands were still clean (this also happens in
an episode of M*A*S*H but Napier seems to have done it for real!). Napier
spent much of his time slidign counters over a board as he attempted to
devise effiecient methods of calculation. He eventually devised a system of
calculation by logarithms that was so successful it extended the working
life of astronomers ten or twentyfold and they would come up to Scotland
from Cambridge just to meet him and pay their respects.

Michael Scot studied in Paris and was tutor to Frederick II who later became
emperor.  Michael distinguished himself as an alchemist in Spain. On visits
to Spain he read many of the great Arabic works and a treatise on algebra is
credited to him. I suppose it's possible that the Scottish Lowlanders were
simply overawed by his learning and the strange sort of books he wrote and
read. Such wonders as Eildon Law and Watling Street (actually a Roman road)
were attributed to him, although the Roman name "Trimontanum" for the Eildon
area seems to give the game away to us moderns! I've read varying accounts
of his death - either he died in obscurity amongst the ordinary folk of the
Scottish Borders, or he met with some mischance on one of his trips to
Spain.

Even so, I think that with oral tradition there's usually a real person
behind it no matter how warped the truth becomes, and I think that oral
tradition might be a better guide to the location of an obscure historical
character, when you consider that oral tradition tends to stay put (unless
there's a mass migration) whereas once something's written down it might end
up anywhere. Oral tradition can be seriously warped, but perhaps it's sheer
incredibility makes it less misleading than the doctoring of written texts
with its synthetic credibility, or modern scholars on a treasure hunt for
similar names and suchlike.

Anyway, it all leads me to wonder if there really isn't something _behind_
the oral tradition of Merlin in Berwickshire. But perhaps we just sometimes
have to accept that lost history really is lost.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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