Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

The necessities of history are obvious. There are considerable gaps in historical knowledge, and the further back we desire to penetrate the scantier must be the material at the historian's disposal. In any case there can be only two considerable sources of historical knowledge, namely, foreign and native. Looking at the subject from the points presented by the early history of our own country, there are the Greek and Latin writers to whom Britain was a source of interest as the most distant part of the then known world, and the native historians, who, witnessing the terribly changing events which followed the break-up of the Roman dominion over Britain, recorded their views of the changes and their causes, and in course of time recorded also some of the events of Celtic history and of Anglo-Saxon history. Then for later periods, no country of the Western world possesses such magnificent materials for history as our own. In the vast quantity of public and private documents which are gradually being made accessible to the student there exists material for the illustration and elucidation of almost every side and every period of national life, and no branch of historical research is more fruitful of results than the comparison of the records of the professed historian with the documents which have not come from the historian's hands.

All this, however, does not give us the complete story. Necessarily there are great and important gaps. Contemporary writers make themselves the judges of what is important to record; documents preserved in public or private archives relate only to such events as need or command the written record or instrument, or to those which have interested some of the actors and their families. Hence in both departments of history, the historical narrative and the original record, it will be found on careful examination that much is needed to make the picture of life complete. It is the detail of everyday thought and action that is missing—all that is so well known, the obvious as it passes before every chronicler, the ceremony, the faith, and the action which do not apparently affect the movements of civilisation, but which make up the personal, religious and political life of the people. It is always well to bear in mind that the historical records preserved from the past must necessarily be incomplete. An accident preserves one, and an accident destroys another. An incident strikes one historian, and is of no interest to another. And it may well be that the lost document, the unrecorded incident, is of far more value to later ages than what has been preserved. This condition of historical research is always present to the scientific student, though it is not always brought to bear upon the results of historical scholarship.[1] But the scope of the historian is gradually but surely widening. It is no longer possible to shut the door to geography, ethnography, economics, sociology, archæology, and the attendant studies if the historian desires to work his subject out to the full.[2] It is even getting to be admitted that an appeal must be made to folklore, though the extent and the method are not understood. After all that can be obtained from other realms of knowledge, it is seen that there is a large gap left still—a gap in the heart of things, a gap waiting to be filled by all that can be learned about the thought, ideas, beliefs, conceptions, and aspirations of the people which have been translated for them, but not by them, in the laws, institutions, and religion which find their way so easily into history.

The necessities of folklore are far greater than and of a different kind from those of history. Edmund Spenser wrote three centuries ago "by these old customs the descent of nations can only be proved where other monuments of writings are not remayning,"[3] and yet the descent of nations is still being proved without the aid of folklore. It is certain that the appeal will not be made to its fullest extent unless the folklorist makes it clear that it will be answered in a fashion which commands attention. It appears to me that the preliminary conditions for such an appeal must be ascertained from the folklore side. History has not only justified its existence, but during the long period of years during which it has been a specific branch of learning it has shown its capacity for proceeding on strictly scientific and ever-widening lines. Folklore has neither had a long period for its study nor a completely satisfactory record of scientific work. It is, therefore, essential that folklore should establish its right to a place among the historical sciences. At present that right is not admitted. It is objected to by scholars who will not admit that history can proceed from anything but a dated and certified document, and by a few who do not admit that history has anything to do with affairs that do not emanate from the prominent political or military personages of each period. It is silently, if not contemptuously ignored by almost every historical inquirer whose attention has not been specially directed to the evidence contained in traditional material. Thus between the difficulties arising from the interpretation of texts which, originating in oral tradition, have by reason of their early record become literature, and the difficulties arising from the objections of historians to accept any evidence that is not strictly historical in the form they assume to be historical, traditional material has not been extensively used as history. It has also been wrongly defined by historians. Thus, to give a pertinent example, so good a scholar as Mr. W. H. Stevenson, in his admirable edition of Asser's Life of King Alfred, lays to the crimes of tradition an error which is due to other causes. Indeed, he states the cause of the error correctly, but does not see that he is contradicting himself in so doing. It is worth quoting this case. It has to do with the identification of "Cynuit," a place where the Danes obtained a victory over the English forces, and Kenwith Castle in Devonshire has been claimed as the site of the struggle and "a place known as Bloody Corner in Northam is traditionally regarded as the scene of a duel between two of the chieftains in 877, and a monument recording the battle has been erected."[4] Mr. Stevenson's comment upon this is: "We have in this an instructive example of the worthlessness of 'tradition' which is here, as so frequently happens elsewhere, the outcome of the dreams of local antiquaries, whose identifications become gradually impressed upon the memory of the inhabitants;" and he then proceeds to show that this particular tradition was produced by the suggestion of Mr. R. S. Vidal in 1804. Of course, the answer of the folklorist to this charge against the value of tradition is that the example is not a case of tradition[5] at all. On the contrary, it is a case of false history, started by the local antiquary, adopted by the scholars of the day, perpetuated by the government in its ordnance survey of the district, and kept alive in the minds of the people not by tradition but by a duly certified monument erected for the express purpose of commemorating the invented incident. There is then no tradition in any one of the stages through which the episode has passed. It is all history and false history. Historians cannot shake off their responsibilities by looking upon the local antiquary as the responsible author of tradition. They cannot but admit that the local antiquary belongs to the historical school, even though he is not a fully equipped member of his craft, and because he blunders they must not class him as a folklorist. They must bring better evidence than this to show the worthlessness of tradition. In the meantime it is the constant definition of tradition as worthless, the relegation of worthless history "to the realms of folklore,"[6] which does so much harm to the study of folklore as a science.[7] Because the historian misnames an historical error as tradition, or fails to discover, at the moment he requires it, the fact which lies hidden in tradition, he must not dismiss the whole realm of tradition as useless for historical purposes.

Let us freely admit that the historian is not altogether to blame for his neglect and for his ignorance of tradition as historical material. He has nothing very definite to work upon. Even the great work of Grimm is open to the criticism that it does not prove the antiquity of popular custom and belief—it merely states the proposition, and then relies for proof upon the accumulation of an enormous number of examples and the almost entire impossibility of suggesting any other origin than that of antiquity for such a mass of non-Christian material. Then the great work of Grimm, ethnographical in its methods, has never been followed up by similar work for other countries. The philosophy of folklore has taken up almost all the time of our scholars and students, and the contribution it makes to the history of the civilised races has not been made out by folklorists themselves. It does not appear to me to be difficult to make out such a claim if only scientific methods are adopted, and the solution of definite problems is attempted;[8] and if too the difficulties in the way of proof are freely admitted, and where they become insuperable, the attempt at proof is frankly abandoned. I believe that every single item of folklore, every folk-tale, every tradition, every custom and superstition, has its origin in some definite fact in the history of man; but I am ready to concede that the definite fact is not always traceable, that it sometimes goes so far back as to defy recognition, that it sometimes relates to events which have no place in the after-history of peoples who have taken a position on the earth's surface, and which, in the prehistory stage, belong to humanity rather than to peoples. Folklore, too, is governed by its own laws and rules which are not the laws and rules of history. These concessions, however, do not mean the introduction of the term "impossible" to our studies. They mean rather a plea for the steady and systematic study of our material, on the ground that it has much to yield to the historian of man, and to the historians of races, of peoples, of nations, and of countries.

We cannot, however, show that this is so without facing many difficulties created for the most part by folklorists themselves. In the first place it is necessary to overtake some of the earlier conclusions of the great masters of our science. The first rush, after the discovery of the mine, led to the vortex created by the school of comparative mythologists, who limited their comparison to the myths of Aryan-speaking people, who absolutely ignored the evidence of custom, rite, and belief, and who could see nothing beyond interpretations of the sun, dawn, and sky gods in the parallel stories they were the first to discover and value. We need not ignore all this work, nor need we be ungrateful to the pioneers who executed it. It was necessary that their view should be stated, and it is satisfactory that it was stated at a time early in the existence of our science, because it is possible to clear it all away, or as much of it as is necessary, without undue interference with the material of which it is composed.

The school of comparative mythologists did not, however, entirely control the early progress of the study of folklore. There was always a school who believed in the foundation of myth being derived from the facts of life. Thus Dr. Tylor, in a remarkable study of historical traditions and myths of observation,[9] long ago noted that many of the traditions current among mankind were historical in origin. Writing nearly forty years ago, he had to submit to the influence, then at its height, of Adalbert Kuhn and Max Müller, and he conceded that there were many traditions which were fictional myths. I think this concession must now be much more narrowly scrutinised, and preparation made for the conclusion that every genuine myth is a myth of observation, the observation by men in a primitive state of culture, of a fact which had struck home to their minds. The question is, to what part of human history does the central fact appertain? Here is undoubtedly a most difficult problem. What the student has to do is to admit the difficulty, and to state, if necessary, that the fact preserved by tradition is not in all cases possible to discover with our present knowledge. This is a perfectly tenable position. Human imagination cannot invent anything that is outside of fact. It may, and of course too frequently does, misinterpret facts. In attempting to explain and account for such facts with insufficient knowledge, it gets far away from the truth, but this misinterpretation of fact must not be confused with the fact itself. In a word, it must be borne in mind by the student of tradition that every tradition which has assumed the form of saga, myth, or story contains two perfectly independent elements—the fact upon which it is founded, and the interpretation of the fact which its founders have attempted.