History, fiction and the strange relationship between the imagined and the known.
Part one: ‘History’ revisited.
I’ve finished the first draft of the story of Vortigern. And I’m still nagging away at what I can learn by trying to rewrite a 12th century story. I’ve tracked the story of Vortigern (see the legendary history on the main menu of this site) and how it changes from Gildas, via Nennius to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, to Laȝamon.
Chapter one of my ‘versioning’ appeared in Long Poem Magazine, chapter two, three and four in the Brazen head.
To make the story work as a modern narrative, I’ve had to make changes. It’s the reasons for these that intrigue me.
But the more I do this, the more I’m beginning to believe that while there are many, obvious differences between the middle ages and now, if you strip away the technology, sometimes the differences are not as profound as they first seem.
Take the twin ideas of ‘History’ and ‘Fiction’. It’s obvious twelfth century writers didn’t treat these ideas the same way we do. But who is the ‘we’ in that sentence.
Laȝamon’s version of history, like all the other medieval writers in my list, is a record of individuals and their actions. The Picts attack Britain because Vortigern betrayed them. Roman Britain falls because Vortigern can’t control his lust for Hengist’s daughter.
A modern Historian might explain the fifth century in terms of ideology and economics, as the inevitable result of internal and external pressures working on a weakened western empire. They will debate migrations, elite take overs, continuity vs change etc. They are unlikely to look to the actions of a single individual for explanations.
Which brings home the nature of ‘History’ as a modern discipline. For all its basis in facts and evidence, it is still an attempt to narrate the past, but to narrate it in order to know it in a peculiar way. If it ever succeeds, ‘it’ will ‘know’ the fifth century with a precision no one living in it ever did. Firstly because the fractured, localised experience of life in the fifth century cannot compete with the Historian’s overview. The written materials that do survive were written by people who could only write what they knew and what they knew was limited.
Secondly, modern technology can measure time to a Zepto second: That's a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1, and it looks like this: 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001. It’s unlikely that anyone is aware of time passing in such small increments. A modern ‘History’ of the fifth Century in Britain often seems to be based on the assumption that the past can be known with such objective precision. We have DNA testing, increasingly sophisticated dating techniques etc.etc. which leads to an increasing unwillingness to accept anything unless ‘scientifically proven’. And in extreme cases the strange attitude that says since there’s no evidence for roaming war bands in the archeological records there were no roaming war bands.
But just as you can’t remember a zeptosecond that occurred last week, people living through the fifth century responded to what they thought they knew, not to the objective ‘truth’ of the situation. Modern history may well prove them all to be deluded, and their writers were mistaken, exaggerating, or lying.
But before we dismiss Laȝamon’s approach as ‘medieval’ it would be instructive to compare his treatment of Vortigern with journalistic treatments of the recent Trump Presidency, or of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or even Scott Morrison. (I’m not going to do that, reading about these gentlemen is depressing enough without spending more time thinking about them than necessary.)
Power, politics and current events are presented by the modern news media in terms of personalities. The systems that made a Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson inevitable are rarely discussed. Their personality, actions, words are. Laȝamon and his audience would be completely at home.
And before we dismiss the medieval writer for his willingness to include the obviously fantastical or irrational, some of the vociferous responses to the Government’s attempts to get everyone vaccinated against Covid might qualify the idea that we are living in a rational age.
For most people ‘History’ as a discipline is something they brushed against at school. It’s not the way they think about the present or the past.
And watching the state governments respond to the threat of Covid-19 in Australia, I’m not convinced that the actions and choices of the individual players aren’t capable of affecting history.
In the next post, Fiction medieval and modern.