Review : The Real Middle-Earth, Part 1

I now return to my regular series "Rhys Does Mythology" with a look at Brian Bates' misnamed The Real Middle-Earth. Having almost no connection to Tolkien whatsoever, and generally being rather badly-written, the compensation is a really thorough look at Dark Age beliefs. At least, insomuch as we can gleam anything at all about pre-Christian ideas, this is well done. Covers how Christianity stole pagan ideas for itself, why Roman cities remained largely uninhabited despite being in a serviceable state, and then veers off into more philosophical territory... musings on the similarities between virtual reality and mystical experiences and suchlike. But what else are you going to read ? The news ? Hah !

What Bates notes repeatedly is that Christianity rarely claimed that the magical beliefs of the locals weren't real. Rather Christian missionaries didn't seek to persuade anyone that dragons or witches or fairies didn't exist, because everyone knew perfectly well that they did – including Christians themselves. Instead they reframed the beliefs. Magical things now became the purview of God, or the angels, demons or the Devil (Christianity, as I've said, never really being all that fully-fledged in its professed monotheism). Indeed some early missionaries were even given explicit instructions to incorporate the local beliefs this way. A letter from Pope Gregory to St Augustine (594 AD) instructed him to rededicate temples rather than destroy them, replace pagan idols with saintly iconography, and allow people to "build their booths of green leaves and slay their bulls".

It wasn't all noble inclusivity though. What Christianity did, with increasing vigour, was attempt to seize a monopoly on magic. It would literally demonise anyone practising magic who wasn't a Christian : hence, for example, wise women becoming witches. It didn't do away with the supernatural but it recast it morally, from fundamental, normal beliefs that everyone accepted, into something divisive, something to fight against... unless, of course, the Church deemed that it was a work of God. I suppose you could call it a Dark Age culture war.

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Once again, I've messed up with my interpretation of Beowulf : very stupidly, a few posts ago I said, "the hoard in Beowulf is just an ancient, pre-existing collection that the dragon takes over to nobody's disadvantage." This was a dumb thing to say, because Bates emphatically emphasises the point of burying hoards and other grave goods : they were returned to the realm of the ancestors.

Crucially, the dragon doesn't do anything until the hoard is disturbed. Even Tolkien, who pointed out the cosmic symbolism of the dragon through its inherently magical nature, didn't really pick up on this, being more concerned with the literary power of the work than its historical insight into Dark Age thinking. But if we accept that goods were returned to the earth (as they were in other liminal places like lakes and streams) as a way of giving them back to the ancestors, then the symbolism of the dragon is only enhanced. The dragon protects the past. Bates argues it even represents the end of one cycle of time and the beginning of another, with other dragons being notably more mythological in scale and scope.

#Mythology
#History
#Archaeology
#Religion

https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2024/06/review-real-middle-earth-1.html