Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

It is well to understand what this condition of things exactly means as an element in the study of early beliefs. It will be dealing with beliefs from their place in the social habitat; housing them, so to speak, within the groups of human beings with which they are connected. It will be considering them as part of the living organism which the social units of man have created. All this indicates a method of treating the subject entirely different from what has hitherto obtained. Students of early English institutions are content to construct elaborate arguments from the often conflicting testimony of historical authorities; students of early beliefs construct elaborate systems of religious thought far above the custom and rite with which they are dealing. The two branches of the same subject are never brought together to illustrate each other. Early institutions cannot be separated from early beliefs. Early beliefs cannot properly be separated from the society of which they form a component part. We require to know not only what beliefs a particular people possess, but in what manner these beliefs generate custom and rite and take their place among the influences which affect the social organism. Early man does not live individually. His life is part of a collective group. The group worships collectively as it lives collectively, and it is extremely important to work out the dual conditions. If the several items of custom and belief preserved by tradition are really ancient in their origin, they must be floating fragments, as it were, of an ancient system of custom and belief—the cultus of the people among whom they originated. This cultus has been destroyed, struggling unsuccessfully against foreign and more vigorous systems of religion and society. To be of service to history each floating fragment of ancient custom and belief must not only be labelled "ancient," but it must be placed back in the system from which it has been torn away. To do this is to a great extent to restore the ancient system; and to restore an ancient system of culture, even if the restoration be only a mosaic and a shattered mosaic, is to bring into evidence the people to which it belongs.

In the previous chapter it was necessary to lay somewhat special stress upon the system of social organisation known as totemism, which was not founded upon kinship. This was traced in survival among the pre-Celtic peoples of Britain. If we now turn to the Celts and Teutons of Britain we shall find that we have to deal with a social organisation founded definitely upon kinship; and if there are survivals of belief, custom, and rite, derived from this kinship system, existing side by side in the same culture area with survivals from the kinless system, it will be necessary to explain how two such opposite streams can have been kept flowing.

It is not difficult in the case of countries occupied by Celtic or Teutonic peoples to ascertain what the particular institution was which linked together the beliefs of the people, though it is not easy to trace out all the phases of it. It is the tribe—that system of society which appears as the means by which Greek and Roman, Celt and Teuton, Scandinavian and Slav, Hindu and Persian, were able to conquer, overrun, and finally to settle in the lands which they have made their own. We know something of the Celtic tribe, less of the Teutonic tribe, but all we know is that it possesses features in common with the tribe of its kindred. There is no fact more certainly true as a result of comparative research than that the tribe is the common heritage of those people who have become the dominant rulers of the Indo-European world. I use this term "tribe" in no formal sense, not in the sense of its Roman derivation and use, which shows it quite as a secondary institution, but as the most convenient term to define that grouping of men with wives, families, and descendants, and all the essentials of independent life, which is found as a primal unit of European society in a state of unsettlement as regards land or country. The tie which bound all together was personal not local, kinship with a tribal god, kinship more or less real with fellow-tribesmen, kinship in status and rights. We meet with this tribal organisation everywhere in Indo-European history. It made movement from country to country possible. It made conquest possible. Celt and Teuton did not conquer in families any more than Greek or Hindu did. They conquered in tribes, and it was because of the strength of the tribal organisation during the period, first of migration and wandering and then of conquest, that the settlement after conquest was possible and was so strong. Everywhere we find these people conquerors and settlers. In India, in Iran, in Greece and Rome, in Scandinavia, in Celtic and Teutonic Europe, in Slavic Europe, they are moving tribes of conquerors come to settle and rule the people they conquer.[430] When Dr. Ridgeway asks whence came the Acheans,[431] he answers the question much in the same fashion as that in which Dr. Duncker describes the settlement on the Ganges:—

"The ancient population of the new states on the Ganges was not entirely extirpated, expelled, or enslaved. Life and freedom were allowed to those who submitted and conformed to the law of the conqueror; they might pass their lives as servants on the farms of the Aryas (Manu, i. 91). But though the remnant of this population was spared, the whole body of the immigrants looked down on them with the pride of conquerors—of superiority in arms, blood, and character—and in contrast to them they called themselves Vaiçyas, i.e. tribesmen, comrades, in other words those who belong to the community or body of rulers. Whether the Vaiçya belonged to the order of the nobles, the minstrels and priests or peasants, was a matter of indifference, he regarded the old inhabitants as an inferior species of mankind.... In the new states on the Ganges therefore the population was separated into two sharply divided masses. How could the conquerors mix with the conquered? How could their pride stoop to any union with the despised servants?"[432]

These two divided masses thus so clearly described were, in fact, tribesmen and non-tribesmen, just that distinction which we meet with in Celtic and Teutonic law, and described in the same terms which Bishop Stubbs was obliged to use when he set forth the facts of the Teutonic invasion of Britain.

The terms are indeed necessary terms. Tribesmen capable of retaining the tribal organisation during the period of migration and conquest did not lightly lose that organisation when they settled. In Sir Alfred Lyall's pure genealogic clan of Central India[433] I recognise the unbroken tribal formation before the family group has arisen as a political unit. In Mr. Tupper's argument against the conclusions of Sir Henry Maine I recognise the Hindu evidence that the tribe was the earliest social group, breaking up, as later influences arose, into village communities and joint families.[434] In Bishop Stubbs's masterly analysis of English constitutional history the tribe appears at the outset—"the invaders," he says, "came in families and kindreds and in the full organisation of their tribes ... the tribe was as complete when it had removed to Kent as when it stayed in Jutland; the magistrate was the ruler of the tribe not of the soil; the divisions were those of the folk and the host not of the land; the laws were the usage of the nation not of the territory."[435] And so I agree with Mr. Skene as to the Celtic tribe that "the tuath or tribe preceded the fine or clan,"[436] and with the editors of the Irish law tracts that "the tribe existed before the family came into being and continued to exist after the latter had been dissolved."[437]

We need not go beyond this evidence. The tribe is the common form into which the early Indo-European peoples grouped themselves for the purpose of conquest and settlement. It was their primal unit. It may have been numerically large or small. It may have been the result of a combination of many smaller tribes into one great tribe. But in any case and under any conditions there stands out the tribal organisation, that great institutional force from which spring all later institutions. Its roots go back into the remotest past of Indo-European history; its active force caused the Indo-European people to become the mightiest in human history; its lasting results have scarcely yet ceased to shape the aspirations of political society and to affect the destinies of nations. The whole life of the early period was governed by tribal conditions—the political, social, legal, and even religious conceptions were tribal in form and expression.

The tribal institution of the Aryan-speaking peoples includes a life outside the tribe. That was an outlaw's life, a kinless outcast, whom no tribesman would look upon or assist, whom every tribesman considered as an enemy until he had reduced him to the position of helot or slave, but for whom every tribe had a place in its organisation and a legal status in its constitution. But it was the legal status imposed by the master over the servant, and the kinless included not only the outcast from the tribe, but the conquered aboriginal who had never been within the tribe. It is important to notice this, for it to some extent measures the strength of the tribal organisation. It not only allowed for a special position for all tribesmen, but it allowed for that position to have a definite relationship to persons who were not tribesmen, and it is in the combined forces of tribesmen and non-tribesmen that the tribal organisation which swept over part of Asia and over all Europe obtains its greatest power. There are tribal systems outside the Semitic and the Indo-European, but these do not have the distinctive features that the tribal systems of these two great civilising peoples possess. Like the Semitic and Aryan tribal systems, savage tribes are fashioned for conquest, but, unlike them, they are not fashioned for settlement and resettlement, and perhaps again and again conquest and resettlement. They spent all their power, or most of their power, in their one great effort of conquest, and whether we turn to the American Indian tribes, to the African tribes, or to the Asiatic tribes we find the same facts of frequent dissipation of power after sudden and complete conquest of it. The tribal system which led to civilisation has a different history. It has, too, a different constitution in that to the strength of tribesmen was added the subordination—politically, industrially, and economically—of non-tribesmen. They were the people who, in the terms of the northern poem,

"Laid fences,
Enriched the plough lands,
Tended swine,
Herded goats,
Dug peat."[438]

Unfortunately the institution of the tribe has never been properly studied by the great authorities in history, and students are left without guidance in this important matter. And yet in any attempt to get back to the earliest period of history in lands governed by an Aryan-speaking people we must proceed, can only proceed, on the basis of the tribe, and it is the failure to understand this which has made so much early history unsatisfactory and inconclusive and compels us to the conclusion that the master-hand is still needed to rewrite in terms of tribal history all that has been written in terms merely of political history.