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CHAPTER XV.

HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.

Tradition, 373-Poetry, 375-Fact in Fiction, 377-Earliest Poems and Writings, 381-Ancient Chronicle and History, 383-Myths, 387Interpretation of Myths, 396—Diffusion of Myths, 397.

HISTORY is no longer looked to for a record of the earliest ages of man. As the first chapter of this volume shows, we moderns know what was hidden from the ancients themselves about the still more ancient ancients. Yet it does not at all follow that ancient history has lost its value. On the contrary, there are better means than ever of confirming what is really sound in it by such evidence as that of antiquities and language, while masses of very early writings are now newly opened to the historian. It was never more necessary to have clear ideas of what tradition, poetry, and written records can teach as to the times when history begins.

The early history of nations consists more or less of traditions handed down by memory from ages before writing. Our own experience does not tell us much as to what such oral tradition may be worth, for it has so fallen out of use in the civilised world, that now one knows little of what happened beyond one's great-grandfather's time, unless it has been written down. But writing has not yet quite

overspread the globe, and there are still peoples left whose whole history is the tradition of their ancestors. Thus the South Sea Islanders, who till quite lately had no writing, were intelligent barbarians, much given to handing down recollections of bygone days, and in one or two cases which it has been possible to test among them, it seems as though memory may really keep a historical record long and correctly. It is related by Mr. Whitmee the missionary that in the island of Rotuma there was a very old tree, under which according to tradition, the stone seat of a famous chief had been buried; this tree was lately blown down, and, sure enough, there was a stone seat under its roots, which must have been out of sight for centuries. In the Ellice group, the natives declared that their ancestors came from a valley in the distant island of Samoa generations before, and they preserved an old worm-eaten staff, pieced to hold it together, which in their assemblies the orator held in his hand as the sign of having the right to speak; this staff was lately taken to Samoa, and proved to be made of wood that grew there, while the people of the valley in question had a tradition of a great party going out to sea exploring, who never came back. Among these Polynesian traditions the best known are those handed down by the Maoris as to the peopling of New Zealand by their ancestors. They tell how, after a civil war, their forefathers migrated in canoes from Hawaiki in the far north-east; they give the names of the builders and crews of these vessels and show the places where they landed; they repeat, generation by generation, the names of the chiefs descended from those who came in the canoes, by which they reckon about eighteen generations, or 400 to 500 years, since their taking possession of the islands. Notwithstanding that, as might be expected, the traditions of various districts disagree a good deal, they

are admitted as the title-deeds by which the natives hold land in the right of their ancestors who landed in the canoes Shark (Arawa) and God's-Eye (Mata-atua), and it can hardly be doubted that such genealogies, constantly repeated among people whose lands depended on them, are founded on fact. Yet these Maori traditions are about half made up of the wildest wonder-tales; when the builder of one of the canoes cuts down a great tree to make the hull, on coming back to the forest next morning he finds that the tree has got up again in the night; and when the canoe is finished and puts to sea, a certain magician is left behind, but on getting to New Zealand there he is before them on the shore, having come across the ocean on the back of a sea-monster, like Arion on his dolphin. These traditions of a modern barbarous people may give us not an unfair idea of the mixture of real memory and mythic fancy in the early history of Egypt or Greece, where it has come down by tradition from the distant past when there was as yet no scribe to engrave on a stone tablet even the names of kings.

Traditions are yet more lasting when handed down in fixed words, which is especially when the poets have set them in verse. Even now in England some notable event may be made into a ballad and sung through the length and breadth of the land. In days before printing, the importance of the poet as historian was far greater, and many an old European chant has touches of true chronicle. The old songs of Brittany are often very true to history, as where in one there is mention of Bertrand du Guesclin's hair being like a lion's mane, and in another, Jeanne de Montfort (Jeanne-la-Flamme) going forth from Hennebont with sword and burning brand to fire the French camp, is described as putting on her suit of armour, which history

men.

But though the

elsewhere records that she really wore. poet or minstrel preserves many picturesque incidents like these, he has not the historian's conscience about facts. Eager to rouse and delight his audience, to flatter the national pride of his people and the family pride of the chieftain in whose halls he sang, the singer brought in real names and events, but he shifted them as would best suit his dramatic scenery, or he even made his own history outright. The great German epic, the Nibelungen Lied, begins in Burgundy, where the three kings hold court at Worms on the Rhine, their sister is the lovely Kriemhilt, whose husband Sifrit is treacherously slain at the well by Hagen's spear; afterwards she marries Attila the Hun-king, and the tale of blood, ending with her vengeance and death, leaves Attila and Theodoric of Verona (Etzel and Dietrich von Bern) weeping together over the slaughter of their Here are places and personages historical enough to make a poem history, if history could be made by such means; but the reader of Gibbon knows that Attila really died two years before Theodoric was born. In fact the poem is a late version of a story preserved in an earlier shape in Scandinavia as the saga of the Volsungs; the court at Worms, and the tournament, and the rest of the historic names and local circumstances, are worked in to give poetic substance and colour. If poets ventured thus to falsify history in the middle ages, when the chronicles were there to convict them, how are we to tell fact from fiction in the poems of ages where the check of history is wanting? The Iliad and the Odyssey may contain many memories of real men and their deeds, an Agamemnon may have reigned in Mykēnai, there may have been a real siege of Troy, perhaps round the very mound where Schliemann has dug out the golden cups and necklace. But it is too hard

a task to sift out historic truth in Homer, where natural events are as hopelessly mixed up with miracles as in the Maori legends. It is too hard to judge how far chronicles. of old nations are impartially preserved by a bard whose rule it is (as Mr. Gladstone points out in his Primer of Homer) that no considerable Greek chieftain is ever slain in fair fight by a Trojan. Were nothing to be had out of ancient poetry except distorted memories of historical events, the anthropologist might be wise to set it aside altogether. Yet, looked at from another point of view, it is one of his most perfect and exact sources of knowledge.

Although what the poet relates may be fiction, what he mentions is apt to be history. In the names of nations and countries and cities, he is unconsciously pourtraying for us the world and its inhabitants as they were in his time. The catalogue of ships and men in the second book of the Iliad is a chart and census of the Mediterranean. Homer knows of the Ægyptians, their irrigated fields and their skill in medicine, and of the ship-famed Phoenicians and their purple stuffs. The name of Kadmos belongs to the Phoenician tongue, and signifies the "Eastern," while the "seven-gated" Thebes built by his people shows that they had that reverence for the mystic number seven, which has its origin in the worship of the seven planets in Babylon. The poet can hardly have thought, when he told his wonder-tales with the circumstances of the actual world around him, how future ages would prize for itself that record of real life. Odysseus, clinging under the belly of the great ram, or sailing to the land of Hades to the weak shades of the dead, is mere myth. Yet the description of Polyphemos is one of the few ancient pictures of the manners of low barbarians, and the visit to Hades is a chapter of old Greek religion, recording what men thought of the dull ghost-life beyond

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