Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
MODERN MYTHS AND LEGENDS
It’s possible that millennia ago, on the shores of Asia Minor, there was a trade war between a couple of small kingdoms or tribes. Every trade war requires a casus belli to make it look good, so maybe a woman from one tribe was roughed up by a man from the other tribe and then it was game on. Who knows how long the war lasted. Weeks? Months? Maybe on and off for a couple of years? But as the centuries passed, popular rumour and fabulation turned this little squabble into the great War of Troy, with Prince Paris purloining Helen, all the Greek states and all the gods joining in, and the conflict lasting ten years.
It’s possible that in the 4th or 5th century AD there was an obscure Romanised Briton warrior who led cavalry in a few small skirmishes against the invading Saxons. But over the centuries, this tiny kernel of reality was expanded and elaborated and fabulated into the legend of the otherwise non-existent King Arthur. And it’s possible that, approximately when Charlemagne ruled, there were a couple of soldiers who distinguished themselves in various services but not in any wars. But minstrels and poets gradually turned them into Roland and Oliver and presented them as fighting heroically against the (Muslim) Saracens.
All these are examples of legends which, as properly defined, mean stories that have a very tiny drop of historical truth, but are largely imaginative fiction that has been devised and elaborated long after the foundational historical events. Far be it from me to belittle the power and majesty of the world’s greatest legends – I’ve revelled often and often in stories of Gilgamesh, the Trojan war, Odysseus, Aeneas, Arthur, Roland and Oliver, Siegfried, Horatius and others. Legend has inspired many of the world’s greatest poems and epics. But the historian in me has always to set a bar and say “This is imagination. It’s not history.”
Quite different from legends, but often confused with them, are myths. Myths are always designed to explain something, and usually involve the activities of gods and heroes. Why are there so many languages in the world? Because God was angry at the hubris of the builders of the tower of Babel (= babble) and messed up their plans by making them all talk in different languages. Why are there seasons? Because the goddess Demeter’s daughter Persephone was kidnapped by Dis, ruler of the underworld, so Demeter weeps and mourns in the half of the year when she can’t be with her daughter (= autumn, winter) and rejoices when she can be with her daughter (= spring, summer). Why does the sun go slowly and in a stately fashion across the Sky? Because Maui and his mates got sick of the sun flashing across the sky so that they didn’t have enough daylight to do all the work they had to do. So Maui went to the cave where the sun resided and beat the sun up good and proper so that, ever since, the sun has limped slowly across the sky. And so on and so on. Unlike legends, myths are entirely the work of imagination and have no foundation in historical reality – but like legends, myths have inspired some of the world’s great literature. Read your Ovid sometime.
But here’s the ongoing problem. In the modern world we too easily believe we are beyond myths and legends. We too often believe that they are things only from the deep past. Yet the reality is that legends and myths are created and then perpetuated every day.
Consider how public figures, politicians and people in showbiz are glamourised, airbrushed and in effect turned into legends, not only in totalitarian states where legends are common currency (Uncle Lenin, Mao the Great Helmsman, the Dear Leader etc. etc.) but also in states that regard themselves as democratic. No, telegenic JFK was not the great hope for America inaugurating a new era. He was at best a mediocre president legend-ised only because of his youthful good looks and assassination.
Consider too how myths are devised – that is, simplified explanations for complex phenomena, and often popularised in simplistic slogans. No, an evil patriarchy is not the cause of all women’s woes. No, immigrants and foreigners are not the cause of the unavailability of jobs and your country’s declining economy. No, religion is not the cause of all the problems in the world. No, that conspiracy theory you have embraced does not explain why there is a pandemic or why we have to get vaccinated. No, the pandemic is not a hoax that the government had devised to control the population. For once in his life, the very cynical and bigoted journalist H. L. Mencken said something truthful when he remarked: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” That is almost the perfect definition of a modern myth.
But if we have diagnosed both legends and myths as largely the work of imagination and simplification, how do we deal with modern myths that claim to be based on history?
Some time ago on this blog, I rather ineptly dissected a popular modern British nationalist myth – the one that says Britain (meaning in this case England) was always victorious in war, had not been successfully invaded for nearly a thousand years, and was never anything other than a force for good. (Look up Remember Only the Good Bits) This myth is often used to bolster the Brexit mentality, which concentrates on historical victories such as Agincourt, the Spanish Armada and Waterloo. If challenged, promoters of the myth say angrily: “But this is history!”. Yes, it is history, but only a very selective history, decontextualising events, ignoring the nation’s many defeats and setbacks, ignoring the negative truths of British empire-building and in effect, by its simplifications, creating a myth.
And here the word “myth” is used legitimately.
Some years ago I had a nasty contretemps with the author of a rather simplistic book about pacifism in New Zealand in the First World War. Reviewing it, I praised the book’s vividness, but said it indulged in some “myth-making”. It claimed that there was an unbroken thread of pacifism in New Zealand from the First World War to the present day. In other words, the book was co-opting early conscientious objectors of the First World War to current views on militarism, ignoring the fact that many supposedly pacifistic movements in New Zealand in the 20th century were merely tactical “anti-war” movements and not genuinely pacifist. Almost inevitably, the author wrote a letter to the editor damning my “glib and patronising” review and accusing me of “myth making” because, he said, his book was based on historical facts. Like those who use the pro-Brexit mythology in England, he clearly had not understood that myths can be manufactured out of selected, decontextualised fragments of history, no matter how authentic those fragments may be.
A simplistic argument, lacking nuance, ignoring inconvenient truths, cherry-picking facts, is a myth. Even if nowadays some people call it “controlling a narrative”.
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