Written in Stone

Sunkenkirk

Like most children’s authors, I make occasional school visits where I talk about ‘where ideas come from’ and tell some of the stories behind the historically based fantasies such as Troll Fell and Dark Angels which represent most of my output so far.   Usually at the end of each visit the children ask me questions, and though some require a certain amount of patience to answer (such as: ‘What made you start writing?’ when I’ve just spent forty-five minutes explaining that very thing), the majority are intelligent and thoughtful - even insightful.  The best question ever put to me was from a boy of 13 or so who asked, ‘If you could go back to anywhere in the past, where would you go?’

No one had asked me that before. No one has asked it since. I had to stop and think. Where would I go?  There’s a short story – could it be by Ray Bradbury? – about time-trippers who go back to the beginning of the First Century to try and witness the Crucifixion. It all goes wrong for them.  I thought about that; it didn’t seem appropriate: and suddenly I knew just where I'd want to go. ‘Stonehenge,’ I said. ‘I’d love to go back to when they were building Stonehenge, and find out what they were really doing there.’ The boy nodded seriously.  To him, too, it seemed a good time and place to visit.

We're gradually learning more and more about Stonehenge and its landscape: the story, whatever it is, is becoming ever more fascinating. But we’ll still never really know what they were doing there, will we?  Not for sure, even if we can speculate. Has any trace of what they believed come down to us?  What were their myths and legends? What hero stories did they tell?  

The archaeologist Francis Pryor, in his book ‘Britain BC’, writes of the Northern Irish Bronze and Iron Age site known as Navan Fort (County Armagh):

The Cattle Raid of Cooley describes how the mythical hero Cú Chulainn helps Conchobar, king of Ulster, based at his capital Emain Macha (pronounced Owain Maha) exact retribution for a cattle raid carried out by warriors of the rival power of Connacht, to the south.  Scholars are agreed that The Cattle Raid of Cooley refers to events in pre-Christian Ireland.  There can be no doubt that Emain Macha was the capital of the Ulster kings.  And it just so happens that it is also the Irish name for Navan Fort.
 

Navan Fort, Co Armagh (wikimedia)

In the early Iron Age a series of nine roundhouses were built at Navan Fort; but in the first century 100 BC these were replaced by a massive wooden structure of over 250 tall posts arranged in concentric rings. Shortly afterwards, it was filled with boulders and burned to the ground. From the air, the open excavation shows a regular, segmented, pizza-like appearance.  Pryor adds:
 

... Chris Lynn has made a special study of the symbolism and imagery surrounding Navan.  He considers that the huge, post-built structure that was erected in 94 BC was a bruidne, or magic hostelry; these have been likened to an Iron Age Valhalla.  According to the Irish epics the heroes were lavishly feasted in the bruidne, then at the end of the meal it was burned down around them and they were immolated where they sat.

Navan Fort, excavation

Here, perhaps, is a tiny glimpse of the significance of a prehistoric monument, preserved - as they say - in legend and in song. You can read about just such an immolation in part of the Ulster cycle, The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel  ("Da Derga" means "Red God"). Da Derga's Hostel, or inn, was in Leinster and as far as I know has no modern presence, but its story suggests possibilities for the burned structure at Emain Macha. 'Seven doorways there are in it, and seven sleeping rooms between every two doorways'.  in which Conaire Mor, High King of Ireland, dies, having breached the conditions of several geasa laid on him at birth.  Conaire is a heroic Iron Age figure:

The colour of his hair was like the shining of purified gold; the cloak about him was like the mist of a May morning, changing from colour to colour; a wheel brooch of gold reaching from his chin to his waist; his golden-hilted sword within his reach.

But he and his company are attacked by outlaws, the Three Red Hounds of Cualu and their ally Ingcel the One-Eyed:

 

...three times the Inn was set on fire and three times it was put out again... and at last there was none left in the Inn with Conaire but Conall, and Sencha, and Dubthach.  Now from the rage that was on Conaire, and the greatness of the fight he had fought, a great drought came on him, and such a fever of thirst, and no drink to get, that he died of it.

It’s exciting, stirring, it gives me goosebumps, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. What were the stories told by the builders of Stonehenge? We have none earlier than the medieval conjectures of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who thought Merlin built it with the help of Irish giants.

It’s not just Stonehenge though. Over 1000 stone circles can still be seen in the British Isles, even if many are small and insignificant. I once took my husband and children to try and rediscover a little one on the moors above Malham in the Yorkshire Dales, where I used to live. It’s marked on the Ordnance Survey map, and I’d visited it by myself years before: a rough group of a few knee-high boulders leaning out of the moor-grass. We couldn’t find it, and not only that, there was an inexplicable, lowering, heavy gloom about the day which sapped our spirits. The children whined, we felt depressed: we gave up and returned home to discover, later, an eclipse of the sun had been happening during our walk. Not a total eclipse, but enough to explain the failure of the light, the doomy sense of pointlessness we’d felt. And whoever built that little circle, thousands of years ago – what would they have made of our experience?

In the Lakes last summer, driving back over Black Combe from the coast at Ravenglass, I spotted the tiny symbol of a stone circle marked on the route map. It took a bit of finding, diving up the tiny twisting roads and finally squishing the car into a hedge and tramping up a mile and a quarter of rough trackway towards a distant farm.  I wasn’t expecting much.  I thought it would be like the Malham circle, a small set of minor stones poking out of the turf.  As we drew nearer to the farmhouse, we saw this:

And getting closer, this:

This was no minor stone circle. It is Sunkenkirk, or Swinside Stone Circle, on the north-east side of Black Combe, and it's almost complete, containing 55 stones. (I made it 58, but that included some broken bits.)  We tied the dog to the gate, as there were sheep and cattle in the field, and went in.

 

Once inside, I tried to photograph it in quadrants. The circle lies - like Castlerigg - on a high, flattish plateau surrounded on all sides by a horizon of noble hills. It feels like a dancing floor or a theatre.

It even has a sort of  ceremonial porch on the southeastern side, a set of double stones flanking the entrance.

It was a beautiful, serene afternoon. The worn stones glowed in the late sunshine.  The circle was so complete, it felt as though the people who built and used it had only just gone away, instead of being dust for 5000 years.

But who were they?  Why did they build it and what did it mean to them?  We have only the name Sunkenkirk, and a tale - for we will always tell tales - that it was built by the Devil, who busied himself at night in pulling down and removing the stones of a church which was being built in the day.  That's a new, young story, perhaps a hundred years old. We will never know what stories were told about this circle immediately after it was built, or through most of the rest of its long, long history.

In an essay called 'Burning Bushes' (from 'In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination', Virago 2011), Margaret Atwood speculates on the value of art to early societies: that those who possessed

                                                 

... such abilities as singing, dancing and – for our purposes – the telling of stories – would have had a better chance of survival than those without them. That makes a certain sense: if you could tell your children about the time your grandfather was eaten by a crocodile, right there at the bend of the river, they would be more likely to avoid the same fate. If, that is, they were listening.

Language and narrative are inextricable one from another.  Every sentence we speak lays a narrative template over experience and alters our perceptions.  In the beginning was the Word: we create our own worlds in our own images. If you can tell a ‘true’ story about the crocodile at the bend of the river, fiction and myth spring at once into existence.  Because you can tell another story, about how bravely your grandfather fought the crocodile (even if you weren't there yourself): and that leads almost inevitably to the question of where he is now - surely not mere crocodile food, but a hero in the world of ancestors, who passes his wisdom down to you and maybe speaks to you in dreams.

Some years ago I visited this grassy barrow.  There it is the in the middle of the photograph, looking just like so many I've seen in England: but we know who lies there, and who buried them, and when, and why.  It's the burial place of the Plataean forces who fought alongside the Athenians commanded by Miltiades, against the Persians under Darius, at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.  We know, because the story was written down. And knowing it sent prickles down my spine.

The battle of Marathon was written as history (though maybe not history as we conceive of it today) not too long after the events themselves.   'The Cattle Raid of Cooley' was only written down centuries after the events it purports to describe, after the oral tradition and mythification process, the business of turning fact into fiction, had got well under way.  Yet as in the tales of Troy and Knossos, some truths were preserved in the storytelling, like flies in amber.  But there are no such stories for Stonehenge, no hero tales from Sunkenkirk. And that's why, if I could travel back in time I'd still go to the the third millenium BC and visit them.

Because I want to know their story.

Picture credits

All photos copyright Katherine Langrish except the photo of Navan Fort which I found at Navan Fort Archives Digital Key
and the photo of Marathon: Wikimedia Commons.

The Value of Mythical Thinking

Myths (so runs the myth) belong to past ages, when people were naïve enough to believe in them. Today, in scientific modern times, we’ve put away such childish things. So why bother with fantasy? Isn’t it just puerile escapism? Even children are expected to grow out of myths and fairytales, and surely any adult found reading or writing the stuff cannot expect to be taken seriously? Can fantasy really have anything meaningful to say?

These are interesting questions. As I try to answer them in what may seem a round-about way, I’ll begin with an even bigger question:

What makes us human?

The answers to this one keep being refined. A special creation in the image of God – for centuries a popular and satisfying answer? Difficult to sustain as it became clear that we’re only one twig on the great branching tree of evolution. Language? Perhaps, but the more we study other animals and birds, the more we realise many of them communicate in quite sophisticated ways. Toolmaking? Not that distinctive, as chimpanzees and a variety of other animals employ twigs and stones as tools. Art? It depends what you mean by ‘art’ – if you think of bower-birds designing pretty nests to attract their mates, it seems clear that some animals do have an aesthetic capacity. So are we different from other animals at all?

Common sense says yes – at the very least, we have taken all these capabilities incomparably further than other animals – but is that really the best we can do for a definition? What was the point at which our ancestors became recognisably ‘us’, and in what does that recognition rest?

Innovation is one answer – the development and bettering of tools. Homo habilis and homo heidelbergensis lived with one basic design of hand axe for about a million years. When, on the other hand, we see signs of people messing about and tinkering and trying out new ideas, we recognise ourselves.

Related to this is another answer: symbolic thinking. Maybe some of our closest relatives are partially capable of it – a chimpanzee can recognise a drawing or a photograph, which means nothing to a dog. But wild chimps don’t indulge in representational art. Sometime, somewhere, somebody realised that lines of ochre or charcoal drawn on stone or wood could stand for a horse or a deer or an aurochs. That in itself is an amazing leap of cognition. On top of that, however, there had to be some fascination in the discovery, some reason to keep on doing it – some inherent, achieved meaning that had nothing directly to do with physical survival. What? Why?

I think it may be because, somewhere along the line, human beings became sufficiently self-aware to be troubled by death. When you truly understand that one day, you’ll die, the whole mystery of existence comes crashing down on you like the sky falling. Why are we here? What was before us? Where did we come from and where will we go?

The ‘mystery of existence’ is an artefact. We choose to ask an answerless question, and that question is at the core of our humanity. The before-and-after of life is a great darkness, and we build bonfires to keep it out, and warm ourselves and comfort ourselves. The bonfire is the bonfire of mythical thinking, of culture, stories, songs, music, poetry, religion, art. We don’t need it for our physical selves: homo heidelbergensis got on perfectly well without it: we need it for humanity’s supreme invention, the soul.

Karen Armstrong claims that religion is an art, and I agree with her. In her book ‘A Short History of Myth’ she examines the modern expectation that all truths shall be factually based. This is what religious fundamentalists and scientists like Richard Dawkins have, oddly, in common. A religious fundamentalist refuses to accept the theory of evolution because it appears to him or her to disprove the truth of Genesis, when what Genesis actually offers is not a factual but an emotional truth: a way of accounting for the existence of the world and the place of people in it with all their griefs and joys and sorrows. It’s – in other words – a story, a fantasy, a myth. Its purpose is not to explain the world, like a scientist. Its purpose is to reconcile us with the world.  Early people were not naïve. The truth that you get from a story is different from the truth of a proven scientific fact.

'A Short History of Myth' is one of a series of titles on myths published by Canongate, and I love the creative freedom they have extended to their authors. Among the others are Margaret Atwood's 'Penelopiad', the woman's take on the events of the Iliad and Odyssey; Jeanette Winterson's 'Weight', a reworking of the myth of Atlas who holds up the world, Philip Pullman's 'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ', and - most recently - A.S Byatt's marvellous 'Ragnarok', her testament to the impact of the Norse myths when she first encountered them as 'the thin child in wartime'.  That these are all personal approaches - blends of personal experience, personal understanding of science, philosophy, myth, religion and storytelling - is the whole point. This is the human way.

Any work of art is a symbolic act. Any work of fiction is per se, a fantasy. In the broadest sense, you can see this must be so. They are all make-belief. Tolstoy’s Prince André and Tolkien’s Aragorn are equal in their non-existence. Realism in fiction is an illusion – just as representational art is a sleight of hand (and of the mind) that tricks us into believing lines and splashes of colour are ‘really’ horses or people or landscapes.

The question shouldn’t be ‘Is it true?’, because no story provides truth in the narrow factual sense. The questions to ask about any work of art should be like these: ‘Does it move me? Does it express something I always felt but didn’t know how to say? Has it given me something I never even knew I needed?’ As Karen Armstrong says, “Any powerful work of art invades our being and changes it forever.” If that happens, you will know it. It makes no sense at all to ask, ‘Is it true?’

This is my credo: fantasy deserves to be taken seriously - read and written seriously - because there are things humanity needs to say that can only be said in symbols. Here’s the last verse of Bob Dylan’s song ‘The Gates of Eden’ (from ‘Bringing it All Back Home’):

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true:
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.