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The Debate over the Trustworthiness of Oral Traditional History

The reliability of oral traditional history is one of the most controversial and even inflammatory questions to perplex humanists and social scientists. It has raged since Euhemerus in the fourth century B.C. argued that the gods of the myths were deified heroes of history. Under the allegorical and symbolical interpretations of myth prevailing from classical times on, euhemerism became a dirty word, until nineteenth century anthropology brought fresh new materials into the discussion.

During the last century the contretemps has divided historians, anthropologists, classicists, psychologists, folklorists, mythologists, literary scholars, and theologians. Ethnologists in the field, historians in the library, and psychologists in the laboratory have presented their conflicting evidence on the accuracy of oral genealogies, the trustworthiness of verbal report, and the vagaries of memory.

The issues of traditional history were cogently defined and formulated for the modern period by Alfred Nutt, the English publisher and folklorist and Celtic scholar. In two papers, “Problems of Heroic Legend” (1892), and “History, Tradition, and Historic Myths” (1901), Nutt tended to take a negative view on oral history, but called for more evidence before the problems could be attacked.

Sweeping claims have been made both assailing and upholding the validity of oral traditional history. On the one hand Lord Raglan, vociferous champion of the skeptics, denies any scrap of histor־ ical truth to traditions that have weathered a century and a half. The great folk epics, the cherished sagas, the heroic legends and ballads, even the Christ story itself, display the same mythic structure. These are stories once told about gods worshiped in fertility rites. In The Hero in 1937 Lord Raglan assailed the previous supporters of euhemerism in mythology and historicity in local traditions, such as George Laurence Gomme and William Ridgeway, with a broadside attack on all myths and sagas individually, and on folk-memory in general. He resorted to this strategy because the euhemerists customarily defended one hero in terms of another, saying that Siegfried was as historical as Achilles. Raglan asserted, and continued to assert at every opportunity, that savages and illiterates lacked any sense of chronology before their fathers’ lifetimes, and that their orally transmitted history is compounded with absurdities and anachronisms. How can the historicists winnow out fabulous monsters and dragons and call the residue fact? If part of the narrative is fiction, why not the whole?²

Raglan tested and to his satisfaction disproved all claims to historical truth in traditional genealogies (“pedigrees”), in local tradirions of historic events and personages, in celebrated heroes like Robin Hood, Siegfried, King Arthur, Leif the Lucky, Cuchulainn, Hengist and Horsa, Achilles. Raglan’s technique is to point out inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, impossibilities, and transposition of names and incidents in traditional sagas and stories, and then outline the common mythological structure which unites them all.

One example of Raglan’s criticism may suffice. He cites Gomme’s local tradition of buried treasure in the valley of the Ribble, in Lancashire, found at Cuerdale in 1840. Tradition ascribed the treasure to the Danes. History records that Danes raided Mercia in 911. Raglan writes:

The polemical and dogmatic nature of Raglan’s work has obscured the fact that a considerable body of more or less temperate scholarship supports his thesis.

The most impressive rejoinder to the literary critics of historicity is found in the worldwide examination by the Chadwicks of The Growth of Literature in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Africa. In their three solid volumes the authors view all the heroes of epic, by liny, and saga as truly historical and authenticated, even if legends have swelled their fame. In place of the ritual myths which Raglan sees as the source of epic poetry and traditional saga, the Chadwicks postulate an historical Heroic Age in the semi-nomadic, warring, raiding stage of cultural evolution, when oral literature flowers. By the time it is written down, a good deal of fiction has crept in, but the painstaking literary scholar can separate the historical from the unhistorical elements, and this is one of the major tasks the Chadwicks set themselves. Their recurrent thesis is unequivocally stated: “There is no doubt that many of the persons and events celebrated in stories of the Teutonic, British, and Irish Heroic Ages are historical”;⁴ and they advance the same claim for all the other literatures they explore.

To counter Raglan’s assertion that the presence of some fieritious elements in the traditional song or saga casts doubt on the whole, the Chadwicks point out that supernatural beings and deities are customarily introduced into narratives, even in recent times, as poetic convention. Thus a god appears in a folk poem about King Haakon I of Norway; the Serbian hero Marko Kraljevich, who died in 1394, was supposed to have married a Vila.⁵ The Valkyrie may derive from the women who accompanied early Teutonic and Celtic peoples to the battlefields and served as messengers.⁶ Some of the supernatural monsters in the Kiev cycle of Russian by liny have been identified with leaders like Polovtsky fighting against the heroes of Kiev.⁷

Turning from general propositions, we will consider four especially contentious areas of debate.

I. North American Indian

The strongest statement against traditional history on this side of the Atlantic was made by the well known anthropologist Robert Lowie. In 1915 he published a short comment in the American Anthropologist on “Oral Tradition and History” objecting to the prohistorical position taken in that journal the previous year by John R. Swanton and Roland B. Dixon. In their article on “Primitive American History” they had cited a number of American Indian migration legends to fill in the picture of prehistoric tribal movements. “I cannot attach to oral traditions any historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever,” Lowie pronounced flatly.⁸ Two years later in his presidential address to the American Folklore Society he returned to the subject to deal with the storm of protest that had descended around his ears. “Instead of being a high priest hurling anathemas against the unregenerate heathen, I found myself a prophet preaching in the wilderness, a dangerous heretic, only secretly aided and abetted by such fellow-iconoclasts as Drs. P. E. Goddard and B. Laufer.”⁹ Lowie accepted the psychological significance of traditional narrative—along with religious and social phenomena and archaeological specimens—in providing information about the general historical conditions of a tribal culture, but he categorically refused to concede any historical credibility to the details of the narratives. Aboriginal history was on the same level as aboriginal science, or even lower, since it depended not upon observation but selectivity, retention, and a sense of perspective. The assumption that people know best about themselves is monstrous.

Lowie argued that primitive man cannot distinguish between a trivial incident and a major fact worthy of remembrance. With so revolutionary a fact as the introduction of the horse, the Nez Perce tradition errs seriously, while the Assiniboine connect the horse with a cosmogonic hero-myth. The Lemhi Shoshoni possess no recollection of the visit of Lewis and Clark, but do relate a mythical encounter between Wolk as father of the Indians and Iron-Man as father of the Whites. The Indian’s historical perspective can be said to match that of the illiterate peasant who describes the European war from his own personal observation. As for the accuracy of migration legends, the chances are one in four (or six, if earth and sky are included) that they will guess right the direction of their travel. Even entirely possible trifling stories of wars and quarrels are now shown, by their geographical distribution, to be folklore and not fact. Therefore, . . as we cannot substitute folk-etymology for philology, so we cannot substitute primitive tradition for scientific history.” Hence “Indian tradition is historically worthless. . .¹¹

In the absence of written records to substantiate the testimony of oral traditions in prehistoric times or among preliterate societies, the evidence from archaeology and paleontology becomes all the more important. In a paper on “Myth and Mammoth in Archaeology” appearing in 1945 in American Antiquity, Loren C. Eiseley devalued Indian traditions of extinct monsters. Eiseley quoted from the study of 1934 in the American Anthropologist, “North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth,” by W. D. Strong, who concluded that oral traditions of fossil vertebrates could never take the place of objective data and were probably mythical rationalizations based on observations of fossil bones. In the ten years since Strong’s paper, the association of man with extinct animals in the New World had become accepted, but not on the “upper archaeological horizons” from which legends might have dated.¹²

Eiseley then advanced plausible speculations of his own to account for the multiplicity of aboriginal traditions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was an intellectual period of discovery and exploration of the virgin wilderness by white men, who eagerly questioned Indians about large undisturbed fossil deposits, such as the one at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, described by Thomas Jefferson. Indians responded sympathetically with accounts of these creatures. Memories of African elephants by Negro slaves may have contributed to Indian legends. “In fact, these stories seem to show a suspicious growth in numbers just at the time when white interest and enthusiasm were keenest.” Eiseley dismisses the traditions as “ghostly, disembodied, and unverifiable.”¹³

Writing on “Beginnings of Vertebrate Paleontology in North America,” George Gaylord Simpson (quoted by Eiseley) dismissed the traditions without a qualm. “Various reported Indian legends of fabulous beasts represented by fossil bones have little ethnological and no paleontological value; the data are sparse, often untrustworthy and carry little conviction of genuine and spontaneous (truly aboriginal) reference to real finds of fossils.”¹⁴

First-hand corroboration of Eiseley’s surmise that Indians fabricated legends to please the white man is given by Thomas C. Donaldson in his personal history, Idaho of Yesterday. Donaldson, who held a number of public positions in the Idaho territorial government, including that of special Federal agent in charge of a North American Indian census (1890), recounts in breezy style how the Moqui-Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico invented fables to amaze the white man. Donaldson says he was present when the well known author-collector Frank Cushing visited Tesuque pueblo in 1879 and was filled full of fantasies by ragged old Pedro, talking in Moqui through an interpreter for a dollar a day.¹⁵

The strong anti-historical pronouncements of Lowie against aboriginal historical traditions brought equally vehement rejoinders. Swanton and Dixon, whose original article had provoked Lowie’s assault, struck back vigorously.¹⁶ Swanton countered that in all the cases he could check, supplementary evidence confirmed the tradition nine times out of ten.¹⁷ Dixon called Lowie’s statement “amazing,” and held that oral tradition could be “extraordinarily accurate.”¹⁸ Goldenweiser, who now entered the controversy with a plea for “The Heuristic Value of Traditional Records,” thought Lowie’s position “erroneous,” and contended that traditions needed to be sifted out, to distinguish the wholly true, partly true, and wholly untrue. If a woman sees a street־car accident, should her testimony be thrown out because she believes in ghosts? Poor evidence was still evidence, and all the more valuable when no other evidence was available.¹⁹

Contradicting the negative judgments from archaeology of Eiseley, Frederica de Laguna wrote in American Antiquity for 1958 on “Geological Confirmation of Native Traditions, Yakutat, Alaska.” A file report of the United States Geological Survey of 1957 indicated habitable periods of the Icy Bay Yakutat area, confirming native traditions of great antiquity. Radiocarbon dates of wood from the end moraines dated one glacial retreat about 1400, and fitted a tradition of ice receding because Atna and Eyak Indians had thrown a dead dog into a crevasse. A corroborating legend told of a village on the west shore of Icy Bay overwhelmed when the ice advanced after 1400, because some young fellows jestingly invited the ice to a feast. De Laguna concludes by saying, “Other natives’ statements about the stages in the retreat of the ice in Yakutat Bay during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are in complete accord with geological evidence.”²⁰

II. Polynesia

In the vast oceanic reaches of Polynesia, a battle has raged over the historicity of traditions describing a canoe migration from the Society Islands to New Zealand many centuries ago. The most eloquent defender of oral traditional history, as taught and transmitted letter-perfect in the Sacred Houses of Learning, has been Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter H. Buck), who declares, “There is no comparison between the inaccurate writings of a globe-trotting European and the ancient traditions of a cultured barbarian.”²¹ Buck condemned as unscientific the disdain for the spoken word and veneration for the printed word. While relying on the basic veracity of the whare wananga genealogies and histories, Buck sought to buttress them with evidence from parallel traditions like botany, nautical science, geography, and any other scientific knowledge that could confirm points in the narrative. As one example of what he called “Cross-bearings on Tradition,” Buck cited widely separated Maori and Hawaiian traditional accounts of southerly voyages to Tahiti which support each other and are confirmed by modern geographical knowledge. “Our cross-bearing is now complete. When we consider that the Maori-sailing-directions are attributed by tradition to Kupe, who discovered New Zealand in approximately the year A.D. 950, and that for nearly nine centuries they had ceased to be of practical use to the Maori, we must be struck by the fact that oral tradition has retained in a surprising manner the records of so long ago.”²²

If Buck can be expected to uphold the accuracy of his own Maori history, support from other quarters is not lacking. Roberton in papers on “Genealogies as a Basis for Maori Chronology”²³ and “The Role of Tribal Tradition in New Zealand Prehistory”²⁴ arranged Tainui genealogies in chronological form and crosschecked three independent narratives of Hawaiki expansion. He regarded his findings as “extremely strong evidence of the reliability as historical material of the traditions in general and of the accuracy of the genealogies in particular.”²⁵

On the opposing side Ralph Piddington rejects Maori traditions out of hand, likening them to the Arthurian legends, intriguing to read and revealing of cultural values, but worthless as history. In his contribution to Essays in Polynesian Ethnology (Cambridge, 1939, Part II), Piddington replied point by point to the powerful case presented by Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) in defense of the accuracy of his Maori oral history. Buck had quoted a Maori song to illustrate his thesis that the ancient narratives are to be interpreted metaphorically:

A European could never accept this literally, contends Buck, but the poet simply intended to convey the historic fact that Kupe was the first man on record to sail between those islands and prove they were separated from the mainland. Piddington then raises the question how the metaphorical and poetic inner thought can always be correctly detected.

When Buck points out how the institution of the whare wananga, the sacred houses of learning, protected the accuracy of the oral traditions with severe supernatural punishments in case of hapa, or broken ritual, for even a single incorrect word, Piddington rejoins that similar taboos against heresy have not produced a uniform Christian dogma, even in a society with written as well as oral records to preserve its religious lore.

The pride of race that Buck invokes in support of his Maori traditional history, Piddington turns against him with the thrust that racial pride intensifies the natural human tendency to exaggeration and self-glorification. And where is the line to be drawn between poetic metaphor and miraculous phenomena? Piddington cites Buck’s own reference to old Maori who believed that the islands of Matiu and Makaro were the actual petrified remains of the daughters of Kupe, who historically had once visited the islands which were then named for them.²⁷

Genealogies are liable to distortions from expansion and suppression, and even the confirmation of “Cross-bearings” may simply cross-document error. A comparison of genealogical traditions from Mangaia and Rarotonga reveals a discrepancy of two hundred years, since figures belonging to the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries appear as contemporaries. Through an ingenious reconstruction, Buck reasons that the Mangaia were kept in social subjugation for two centuries by the Rarotongans, and have simply omitted that period from their legends, substituting a mythical land for Rarotonga, claiming descent of their chiefs directly from the high gods, and demoting and humiliating the Rarotonga deity Tangaroa. Accepting Buck’s interpretation as correct, does not this tampering reveal the manipulation of oral history for ethnocentric ends?²⁸

Piddington ultimately discards primitive “history” in favor of “probable episodes in the past,” meager, scattered, and unrelated.²⁹

Overviewing all Polynesian mythology and hero-cycles, the anthropological folklorist Katharine Luomala takes a median position in noting the interplay between historical and mythological narratives. She sees a patterning process influencing and conventionalizing both types of traditions, especially in the older periods. Thus “the Tongan chronicles of the first Tui Tonga are simply localized variants of the Polynesian hero-pattern. . . .”³⁰ Heroes like Maui and Tahaki enter the genealogies and chronicles of real families. Nevertheless, these intrusive elements can be dated, by determining at which point they appear in local genealogies, and considering how the mythical heroes act toward historical characters. “Tahaki and his relatives appear on Hawaiian genealogies about the time when contact was resumed, after several hundred years separation, between the Society and Hawaii groups.”³¹

III. Icelandic Sagas

One of the chief proving grounds to test the historical content of oral narratives is provided by the Icelandic sagas, and again the disputants have ranged heatedly on opposite sides.

The folklorist Knut Liestøl in The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas (1929, translated 1930) discussed the historical core of the sagas, whose events belonged chiefly to the period 930-1030, and were written down in the period 1120-1230.³² He used a number of techniques to test the reliability of the incidents preserved in the sagas: comparing variant examples of the same incident in different sagas, to ascertain the original oral tradition; analyzing stylistic devices of oral narration, to see which of the written sagas reveal the marks of oral style; evaluating the amount of recognizable folklore material in the sagas; considering the social conditions and historical background from which the sagas developed. The chief value of the study proves to be its close analysis of oral traditional history as a form of historical record-keeping separate and distinct from written historical records. Students of history, the argument runs, should not apply the rules of evidence belonging to documentary history in their evaluation of unwritten history.

Liestøl does address himself only to oral history among more advanced peoples. He accepts the verdict that “family traditions of primitive races” do not extend beyond more than one hundred and fifty or two hundred years, save for especially significant events, a judgment he takes from Arnold van Gennep’s well-known work La formation des legendes (Paris, 1910). But in Liestøl’s view the group memory of peoples at a higher level of civilization may be more tenacious and reliable. As an example he cites traditions of north Abyssinia collected by Johannes Kolmodin in the province of Hamasén, where the purely oral tradition has been checked for accuracy against written sources as far back as fifteen generations. Children had family history drilled into them at home, and oral-history researchers made a practice of collecting all the traditions of their tribe. The historian of north Abyssinia, Conti Rossini, placed considerable dependence on these traditions.³³

Turning to the Icelandic sagas, Liestøl devotes his attention first to establishing their oral nature. He concludes that the sagas do represent unbroken oral traditions committed to writing, rather than literary compositions. The monotonous style, repetition of set phrases, anacolutha, and similarity of variants all strongly indicate that the sagas were written down directly from the recitals of storytellers, and are in effect equivalent to modern field-collected texts.

As a next step Liestøl undertook to determine the degree of historical validity in the sagas. He developed a thesis to account for two opposing forces at work in reshaping orally transmitted narratives, forces which altered but did not negate the historical content.

So all was not necessarily art. Axel Olrik in his persuasive paper on Epic Laws (Danske Studier, 1908), had presented the theory of the trinary law, or successive repetitions of three incidents, as one of the fundamental principles in the structuring of the folktales, but Liestøl, while recognizing the principle, contended that triads occur in fact as well as in superstition. Thus the tale of Knut Skraddar contains eleven triadic events within fourteen octavo pages, surely a suspiciously large number, some of which seem evidently folkloristic, e.g., the hearse-horse at Knut’s funeral making three attempts to pull the coffin. Still the documentary records do support certain triads: that Knut Skraddar owned hides of land at Austegard; that he had three or more sons, one of whom was also called Knut and had in turn three sons; and that Austegard was at one time divided among three children of one of the Knuts.³⁵

Then again, an individual oral historian may possess scientific and artistic qualities of the kind which distinguish the great documentary historians. In some unusual comparisons, Liestøl considers Scott and Macaulay, Trevelyan and Prescott as scientific but imaginative historians, whose powers of memory and skill at seizing upon dramatic and graphic incidents, and arranging them artistically, suggest the techniques of the Icelandic sagamen. In particular William Hickling Prescott, historian of post-conquest Mexico and Peru, as a consequence of his near blindness, was compelled to train his memory as a receptacle for storing the source materials he drew upon for his histories, and composed some sixty pages at a time in dictation, a length equivalent to a medium Icelandic saga. Liestøl sees in the sagaman Snorri Sturluson a chronicler of breadth and insight comparable to the great historians.³⁶ Modern conditions among literate societies do not favor the training of the historical memory, and such traditions as are remembered rapidly take the character of short anecdotes. But even in the twentieth century under appropriate conditions talented oral historians can be observed, and Liestøl describes the artistry of “a famous peasant storyteller, Svein Hovden of Bykle in Saetesdal,” whom he encountered in 1923. Svein could render into lively and thrilling form accounts of contemporary events which on other lips held relatively little interest.³⁷ In the saga time in Iceland, this kind of talent received the tribute of society, and was especially fostered and encouraged. The society was socially and politically well advanced, and populated from a section of Norway, Telemark, known for the ability of its people to transmit heroic poetry and saga. In Iceland the units of society were close and familiar, brought together by such institutions as the thing, or court sittings, and local news became the property of the whole society. Even the topography supported the tenacity of the sagas, for across the flat treeless stretches the eyes of the storyteller could sweep over long distances and see sites and places mentioned in the sagas. Other checks upon historicity are found in the multiple sources of the saga, the saga being an amalgam of the reports of many observers and eyewitnesses, somewhat like the modern news report, and in the response of the audience, who from their own familiarity with the events of the saga could refute deviations or point out omissions. The saga is a told narrative and must satisfy its audience, but historical tradition differs in its appeal from the fairy tale and other folk forms; its appeal is that of scientific history.

Liestøl also discusses unhistorical elements in the sagas, such as substitution of names and incidents, magnification and enlargement of episodes, ethnocentrism, and assimilation of folklore motifs. The Norwegian folk hero of the fairy tales, Askelad, the low-born unwanted youngest son, has influenced the careers of the saga-heroes. Yet Liestøl believes that these factors can be appraised and allowance made for them by the analyst of historical tradition. As an example of a nonhistorical tradition that has preserved its stability for over a thousand years, with only a few detectable alterations, Liestøl points to the tale of “Kaiser und Abt,” subject of a wellknown monographic study by the eminent folktale scholar Walter Anderson. If this is true of a nonhistorical narrative, the inference is justified that an historical saga may similarly retain its basic features over the centuries. Nor is the passage of time as long as the span of years may indicate, for a storyteller who relates the tale to his grandson cuts the generations in half. “Knut Skraddar might have described events which happened around 1580 to his grandson Olav, who lived until about 1720. Hallvor Bjaai was born in 1777 and related stories to Svein Hovden, who lived until 1924.”³⁸

Yet Liestøl’s persuasive arguments met with strong counterblows in the analyses of Sigurdur Nordal, The Historical Elevtent in the Icelandic Family Sagas (Glasgow, 1957), Peter Hallberg, The Icelandic Saga (translated by Paul Schach, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1962), and Theodore M. Andersson, The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins (New Haven and London, 1964).

In his work Andersson summarized a series of sharp rejoinders to Liestøl by Walter Baetke in “Über die Entstehung der Isländersagas.” Baetke’s criticism fell under the following heads. References to oral tradition are actually literary formulas of the saga writers and so to be discounted. Even the allusions to oral variants is a stylistic device. Accurate references to local topography could easily be introduced by an Icelandic author and prove nothing about tradition. The realistic tone and style of sagas reflect not an oral epic but the literary idiom of the writer. These seemingly realistic touches camouflaged the artistic construction of the sagas which, like the French chansons de geste and the Arabic epics, were simply literary imitations of historical chronicles.

Andersson himself contributed to the undermining of the historicist position by pointing out the lack of necessary connection between the freeprose theory and the defenders of historical truth in the sagas. Exponents of the freeprose doctrine like Liestøl hold that the saga manuscripts reached written form after a complete development in oral tradition. In opposition, the upholders of the bookprose theory maintain that individual authors composed the sagas during a literary flowering in thirteenth century Iceland. While admitting the compelling arguments to support the existence of a powerful oral narrative art in twelfth century Iceland, Hallberg still challenged Liestørs claims, saying that he begins with the assumptions he is trying to prove. The various stylistic features typifying oral style in the sagas—the repetition of conventional phrases, anacolutha, similarity of themes—could also be employed by the first generation of Icelandic writers who would naturally reproduce the oral idiom they knew. For an instance, Liestøl considered the frequent use of pithy dialogue in the sagas as evidence of a highly developed mode of oral history giving immediacy and color to the recital. He cited the following specimen of a realistic dialogue between the cowardly bully, chieftain Guômundr inn ríki, and Ófeigr, who is seated next to him at table, as related in the Ljøsvetninga saga.

This passage appeared to Hallberg to represent a literary convention rather than a transcript of actual talk. In his phrase, it is too “finely chiseled.” Liestøl’s position has therefore suffered two set־ backs. First, the freeprose theory he supported has lost ground to the bookprose theory advanced by the school of Sigurdur Nordal, which saw considerable influence on saga style from the Latin literary language. In Nordal’s 1940 study of the Hrafnkels saga, he presented striking arguments to demonstrate that this saga, formerly considered one of the most trustworthy accounts of a native hero, devoid of exaggeration or foreign influences, was actually a highly developed literary epic. For instance, two chief protagonists, sons of Pjostarr, are never mentioned in other sagas which do mention their father, while the land supposedly theirs as chieftains was known to be already occupied.⁴⁰

Secondly, even should the freeprose theory be countenanced, the question yet remains whether the orally transmitted sagas contain much if any history. Andersson has said flatly, “There is however no logical connection or interdependence between the view that the sagas are documentary history and the theory of oral transmission.”⁴¹

IV. Victorian Folklorists

Although products of the same intellectual background, the talented Victorian folklorists divided sharply over the issue. Edwin Sidney Hartland, author of The Legend of Perseus, in a closely reasoned article analyzing the accuracy of certain African traditions struck a forthright blow against oral history. Hartland’s legal training is apparent in this paper, “On the Evidential Value of the Historical Traditions of the Baganda and Bushongo,” printed in the journal Folk-Lore in 1914. His purpose was considerably broader than the refutation of claims to historicity by two African ethnologists, for in his opening comments he takes note of the creeping advance by champions of oral history during the past half century, to recapture ground long occupied by skeptical critics of Roman and Biblical history. The ethnologists were driving back the seientific historians. Hartland wrote:

Hartland speaks of special institutions among preliterate peoples, such as the griots of Senegal and the Moaridi of the Bushongo in the Congo, designed to safeguard dynastic memories of the royal families through rigorous training and secret precautions. But he distrusts these traditional narratives “locked up in the bosoms of a close corporation/’ and gives greater trust to public narratives in free daily circulation. In commenting on the similar Polynesian institution, Piddington agreed with Hartland’s view in suspecting private aristocratic traditions, but regarded unchecked common narratives as even more untrustworthy!

The limits of historical reliability in oral tradition among African peoples were estimated at one hundred, or at the utmost two hundred years, according to Hartland, who reached this figure after surveying the near unanimous testimony of travelers, explorers, and missionaries on the ancestral poverty of nonliterate African races.

Hartland’s close coworker, Alfred Nutt, displayed an increasingly negative attitude toward the historicity of tradition. He queried whether there was on record anywhere any historic myth among “barbaric peoples . . . living in an oral-traditional mythopoeic stage of culture.”⁴³ For centuries the story of Troy was regarded as gospel truth, but now it is known to be “sheer, absolute fiction . . . destitute of any and every kind of basis, historical, racial, archaeological, or linguistic.”⁴⁴ Basically Nutt doubted that storytellers commemorated collective actions of a people, such as tribal wanderings, conquests, and cultural innovations, in tales of individual heroes.

If Hartland had defected and if Nutt were wavering, there were plenty of recruits on the side of Euhemerus among the English folklorists in the energetic Folk-Lore Society founded in 1878. Writing in the Folk-Lore Record in 1881 on “Folk-Lore Traditions of Historical Events,” Lach-Szyrma spoke from his own knowledge of the selective process of folkmemory in the West of England. Tradition clustered around Oliver Cromwell, the Bloody Assize, the Battle of Sedgemoor, and the persecution of Monmouth’s followers. Yet of such important events in Cornish history as the revolt of Perkin Warbeck and the Cornish religious rebellion of 1549 against Edward VI, he could find no trace. He explained the first lacuna on the grounds of sheer forgetting when the YorkistLancastrian rivalry and its ensuing bitterness died out, leaving no wounded feelings to nurse the tradition. In the second case, Cornish Methodist miners did not care to tell their children they had fought against the Reformation.⁴⁵ Tradition did not tell the whole story but it told a part. David MacRitchie in an 1891 paper on “The Historical Aspect of Folk-Lore” gave instances of verified local tradirions, such as the belief of countryfolk in Wigtownshire that a cave in the vicinity had been inhabited fourteen centuries before by Saint Ninias.⁴⁶ In his own book, The Testimony of Tradition (1890), MacRitchie upheld folk traditions of European dwarfs with archaeological evidence from chambered mounds. York Powell in 1904, speaking on “Tradition and Its Conditions,” dwelt on the traditional dramas of the Hervey Islanders, performed and remembered by hundreds of natives, which preserved such events as the visit of Captain Cook in 1777, and other historic occurrences handed down for eight generations and corroborated.⁴⁷ John Myres in his presidential address of 1926 on “Folk-Memory” developed a thesis of the power of folkmemory in such societies as the Icelandic and the Polynesian, where “family history, communal history, and regional history were matters of practical concern and common knowledge.”⁴⁸ In these isolated, stable, homogeneous, orderly, and preliterate societies, folkmemory was toughest and strongest.

In the wake of the Victorians, a group of British archaeologists has avowed support for the historical basis of oral tradition. In a little volume titled Myth or Legend?, printing radio talks delivered over the British Broadcasting Company in 1953 and 1954, the various specialists presented generally affirmative answers to the question of the authenticity of classical traditions. Writing on “The City of Troy,” D. H. Page offered evidence to substantiate the myth and reverse Nutt’s vehement rejection of the epic tale as sheer fantasy. Page summarizes the accounts of excavations by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Doerpfeld, and later by Carl Biegen, uncovering seven Trojan cities.

Page concludes that we can now distinguish in part between the fabric of history and the embroidery of poetic imagination, between the actuality of Troy and the enigma of the Wooden Horse.

In another script, Sir Leonard Wooley reaches a similar position on the Flood story. His excavations at Ur in southern Mesopotamia in 1929 dramatically testified to a Deluge before 2600 B.C. and the Erech dynasty, drowning the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This was the flood of the Sumerian king-lists and of Genesis. But Noah and the Ark remain perplexing.⁵⁰

Comments

What are we to make out of such conflicting views and testimonies? At this stage I would suggest two sets of comments, one dealing with the circumstances and the other with the theme of the debate.

(1) First, the observer is struck by the compartmentalization of the controversy. Each discipline has examined the issue in its own terms in seeming oblivion of the similar discussion being carried on elsewhere. Lord Raglan never learned of the identical views of Lowie until Lowie’s 1915 paper was reprinted in a volume of his collected writings in 1960, and not until that year did Raglan enter the American arena in a communication to the Journal of American Folklore. Further, the observer notices the severity and rigidity of the opposing positions in fields so widely separated. My recommendation here is that the problem of historical tradition deserves the attention primarily of the comparative folklorist, who is accustomed to handling the materials of tradition from many different quarters. Even the Victorian folklorists never addressed themselves comprehensively to the question. The gaps between the disciplines and specialties will not be bridged by a specialist. Test cases a-plenty are ready at hand in archives and published collections for the consideration of the folklorist, although the genre of historical legend remains hazy and ill-defined. Of all the disciplines, that of the folklorist is most pertinent. Even Jan Vansina, the historiananthropologist, in his skilful study of Oral Tradition (1961) speaks vaguely of “stereotypes” and makes only one fuzzy reference to Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature.

A striking instance of patterning in the oral tradition of recent local historical events came to my attention during a field trip to northern Michigan. In 1946 I heard accounts of a brutal lynching in Menominee, a sawmill town on the Wisconsin border, which had taken place in 1881. The general outlines of the affair seemed familiar to all the townspeople, and in particular the dénouement, that every member of the lynch party, though they were never brought to trial, “died with their boots on.” After a number of interviews I was able to piece together a dozen of these mysterious and violent deaths, by burning, drowning, falling into machinery, or without apparent cause, even when the victims had sworn to beat the curse.⁵¹ The structure of this episode, which I published under the title “The Lynching of the McDonald Boys,” suggested analogues, but while the motive of retributive justice is common enough, and of the curse (in Catholic versions of the lynching a priest warns the lynchers who are dragging the corpses down the main street that they will die unnaturally), I never could find a close analogue in the scanty collections of local historical traditions. Then in the summer of 1959, while participating in a joint seminar on “American Folktales” with Dean Hector Lee of Chico State College, Chico, California, an experienced collector of Western and northern California traditions, I heard him relate the counterpart. His narrative of the Lynching on Lookout Bridge, perpetuated in 1901 in the now deserted village of Gouger’s Neck in northeastern California, contained the same skeletal themes: the town resentment against a family of half breed ruffians, their arrest, the storming of the jail, a fight and the lynching, the exoneration of the lynch party, and their macabre deaths. In the phrase of the elderly townspeople, “Hell overtook ’em, every one of ’em.” One walked in front of a train, another developed a cancer of the throat, a third died from a rotting in the stomach as if he had been kicked there.⁵²

Here are historical events occurring within the memory of eye-witnesses, perpetuated orally, and already taking on the common outlines of a morality tale. What will happen to the narration should it endure for another century by word-of-mouth transmission? Will the elements presently verifiable (Calvin Hall, lynched at Lookout Bridge, was a sergeant with General George Crook during the Civil War, and has left journals of ethnological value) be replaced with more familiar names and places when the generation who knew the main actors has all died?

Visible evidence of the patterning effects of tradition upon recent historical events can be observed in oral accounts of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil, in 1746, in which the army of George I under the Bloody Duke of Cumberland crushed the Jacobite followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie and obliterated their Highland culture. The events of the ’45 have burned deeply into Highland race-memory. A narrative of “The Battle of Culloden” not known to conventional history comes to light in the magnificent compendium of Scottish local history traditions recorded for Campbell of Islay in the 1870’s and only published in 1964 as The Dewar Manuscripts. In this stark and powerful tale, a Highland stripling taken prisoner after Culloden fights a duel for the lives of himself and his fellow-prisoners with the champion British swordsman. The Bloody Duke has wagered their lives against so many bottles of wine with General John Campbell, a supporter of the Highlanders’ soldiering ability. When the lad slays his opponent, the Duke in anger orders that every Highlander subsequently found wounded on the battlefield be put to death and everyone captured be hanged.⁵³ (See chapter 3.)

We think of other epic single combats, such as David against Goliath, and of the folktale contrast between the ogrish Duke and the undersized hero. Yet the episode is set within the frame of a well documented battleground and well-known military figures.

Another Culloden tradition clearly reveals the grafting of an international tale type onto the skein of history. This Gaelic narrative was collected by Calum Maclean from Angus MacLellan and deposited in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. It contains Type 1281A, Getting Rid of the Man-eating Calf, known in northern and eastern Europe. I collected variants from a Yankee lobsterman on the Maine coast and from an elderly lady of French-Canadian ancestry in northern Michigan.⁵⁴ An unpublished Finnish-American text from Utica, Michigan has been collected by Aili Johnson. In all these American texts (but with only a suggestion in the Maine one), a preceding episode has a messenger take a bottle of the man’s urine to the doctor, spill it and substitute cow’s urine, and report back that the doctor has said he will have a calf (Type 1739, The Parson and the Calf). The ignorant man flees town, finds the boots on the corpse, and takes them with him to the farmhouse where he is given shelter. On awakening in the barn to find a new calf beside him, he thinks he has given birth and flees again, leaving the boots behind him. In the Angus MacLellan text, Type 1739 with its doltish protagonist is eliminated, and the Laird of Bernera, although forced to flee the battlefield, plays an heroic role, killing an Englishman and cutting off his legs to secure his boots.

(2) Secondly, the judgment may be offered that blanket judgments should be avoided. Tradition is not cut from one cloth. The question has been incorrectly posed. It is not a matter of fact versus fiction so much as the social acceptance of traditional history. Africanist ethnohistorians such as Ian Cunnison, Meyer Fortes, and Paul Bohannan have recently been pursuing this line.⁵⁵ They recommend that Western cultural historians discard their ethnocentric concepts of time and history and accept the African idea of historical truth in dealing with African traditions. Speaking of the Tallensi, Fortes writes, “They do not think of the lapse of time as being associated with cumulative changes in their culture or social structure but rather as a periodical or cyclical rhythm of eternal repetition. . . . There is a direct correlation between the time perspective recognized by the society and the social structure.”⁵⁶

Bohannan makes a similar point in discussing “Concepts of Time among the Tiv of Nigeria.” Events and incidents in myths and legends explain the social process not the historical past. “The most common incidents all cluster about a standard situation which arises time and again in the dynamic of Tiv social process: particularly fission and fusion of lineage territories. . .”⁵⁷ The Tiv think in terms of social space rather than time. Their genealogies are true because they correlate with the existing realities of the political structure.

These suggestions are pursued to book length in the sophisticated treatise of Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition, A Study in Historical Methodology (1961, translated from the French, 1965). Vansina examines in close and precise detail all aspects of the processes and functions of oral traditions in African societies. As one of his main findings, Vansina demonstrates the contrast in attitudes toward historical knowledge displayed by societies even in the same culture area. The Rwanda abounded in family and local histories while the Burundi, with their much more fluid governmental system and uncertain provincial boundaries, lacked the coherent political organization to generate oral histories. In the end Vansina states, “Each type of society has in fact chosen to preserve the kind of historical traditions suited to its particular type of structure, and the historical information to be obtained by studying these traditions is restricted by the framework of reference constructed by the society in question.”⁵⁸

This statement may well summarize the conclusions of the ethnohistorian for Africa but it will not serve the purposes of the comparative folklorist for literate societies. The astonishing historical tales related by W. H. Barrett in Tales from the Fens (1963) and More Tales from the Fens (1964) are not the product of a particular political organization, although they may be explained in part by the social conditions of the sequestered Fen country. But the political structure of the Fens is the same as for the rest of England.

All this is not to say that the quest for history must be abandoned. Some criteria can be offered for judging the historical content of traditions: corroborating testimony from archaeology, ethnology, history, geography, linguistics, physical anthropology; the support from mnemonic devices; the presence of professional chroniclers and sagamen; and continuity in the locus of transmission, as opposed to the migration of peoples and their histories. The absence or discounting of egoistic and folkloristic elements can also strengthen the case. While these criteria have been attacked singly, in combination they carry weight, and evidence exists that oral tradition can lead us to the site of Troy or even, with Plato as tradition-bearer, to the lost Atlantis.⁵⁹

Notes

1. Alfred Nutt, “Problems of Heroic Legend,” The International FolkLore Congress 1891, Papers and Transactions, ed. J. Jacobs and A. Nutt (London, 1892), p. 113; Nutt, “History, Tradition, and Historic Myth,” Folk-Lore 12 (London, 1901): 336-39.

2. Lord Raglan, The Hero, a Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama (New York, 1937). For a recent continuation of the controversy, see William Bascom, “The Myth-Ritual Theory,” Journal of American Folklore [hereafter JAF] 70 (1957): 103-14, especially 105, citing Charles Edward Fuller, “An Ethnohistoric Study of Continuity and Change in Gwambe Culture,” Northwestern University dissertation (Evanston, Ill., 1955); Raglan, “Reply to Bascom,” JAF 70 (1957): 359-60; Raglan, “Myth and Ritual,” JAF 68 (1955): 454-61; Stanley Edgar Hyman, “The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic,” JAF 68 (1955): 462; Raglan, “More on Myth and Ritual,” JAF 10 (1957): 173; Hyman, “Reply to Bascom,” JAF 71 (1958): 152-55; Bascom, “Rejoinder to Hyman,” JAF 71 (1958): 155-56.

3. Raglan, Hero, p. 40.

4. Hector Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1932-36), vol. I, p. 133. H. M. Chadwick first analyzed historical and fictional elements in heroic poetry in The Heroic Age (Cambridge, England, 1912).

5. Chadwick, Literature, I, p. 211.

6. Ibid., 215.

7. Ibid., II, 119.

8. Robert H. Lowie, “Oral Tradition and History,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 17 (New York, 1917): 596-99; reprinted in Robert H. Lowie, Selected Papers on Anthropology (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), pp. 115-18.

9. Robert H. Lowie, “Oral Tradition and History,” JAF 30 (1917): 161-67.

10. Ibid., 163.

11. Ibid., 165, 169.

12. Loren C. Eiseley, “Myth and Mammoth in Archaeology,” American Antiquity 11 (1945-46): 84. Strong’s paper appeared in American Anthropologist 36 (1934): 81-87.

13. Eiseley, “Myth and Mammoth,” 87.

14. G. G. Simpson, “Beginnings of Vertebrate Paleontology in North America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 85 (1942): 132.

15. Thomas C. Donaldson, Idaho of Yesterday (Caldwell, Idaho, 1941), pp. 325, 326.

16. The article of John R. Swanton and Roland B. Dixon appeared as “Primitive American History,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 16 (1914): 376-412. See especially pp. 377-80.

17. John R. Swanton’s reply, American Anthropologist, n.s. 17 (1915): 600.

18. Roland B. Dixon’s reply, American Anthropologist, n.s. 17 ( 1915): 599-600.

19. A. A. Goldenweiser, “The Heuristic Value of Traditional Records,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 17 ( 1915): 763-64.

20. Frederica de Laguna, “Geological Confirmation of Native Traditions, Yakutat, Alaska,” American Antiquity 23 (1958): 434.

21. Te Rangi Hiroa ( = Peter H. Buck), “The Value of Tradition in Polynesian Research,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 30 ( 1926): 182.

22. Ibid., 193.

23. J. B. W. Roberton, “Genealogies as a Basis for Maori Chronology,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 65 (1956): 45-54. Includes tables.

24. J. B. W. Roberton, “The Role of Tribal Tradition in New Zealand Prehistory,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 66 (1957): 249-63.

25. Ibid., 251.

26. Quoted by Ralph Piddington in his essay “The Evidence of Tradition,” Essays in Polynesian Ethnology, ed. Robert W. Williamson (Cambridge, England, 1939), p. 285.

27. Ibid., pp. 284-86.

28. Ralph Piddington, “The History of Mangaia,” Essays in Polynesian Ethnology, 292.

29. Piddington, “The History of Primitive Peoples,” Essays in Polynesian Ethnology, p. 342. Other pertinent essays of his are “The Value of Historical Ethnology,” pp. 344-50, and “The Positive Value of Polynesian History,” pp. 350-53.

30. Katharine Luomala, “Notes on the Development of Polynesian Hero-Cycles,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 49 (1940): 371. The whole article covers pp. 367-74.

31. Ibid., 371.

32. Knut Liestøl, The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas (Oslo, 1930).

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., pp. 62-63, 66.

35. Ibid., pp. 77-79.

36. Ibid., pp. 118-25.

37. Ibid., p. 61.

38. Ibid., p. 203.

39. Peter Hallberg, The Icelandic Saga, translation, introduction, and notes by Paul Schach (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1962), pp. 59-60. The whole chapter “Oral Tradition and Literary Authorship, History and Fiction in the Sagas of Icelanders,” pp. 49-69, is pertinent.

40. Ibid., pp. 67-69.

41. Theodore M. Andersson, The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins (New Haven and London, 1964), p. 50.

42. E. S. Hartland, “On the Evidential Value of the Historical Traditions of the Baganda and Bushongo,” Folk-Lore 25 (1914): 428-29. The whole essay covers pp. 428-56.

43. Nutt, “History, Tradition, and Historic Myth” p. 339.

44. Ibid, p. 337.

45. W. S. Lach-Szyrma, “Folk-Lore Traditions of Historical Events” Folk-Lore 3 (1881): 157-68, especially p. 159. An editor’s note, p. 159, cites Sir John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (London, 1865) on the absence of traditions about recent, well-known events in savage history.

46. David MacRitchie, “The Historical Aspect of Folk-Lore,” The International Folk-Lore Congress 1891. Papers and Transactions, ed. Joseph Jacobs and A. Nutt (London, 1892), pp. 105-6.

47. F. York Powell, “Tradition and Its Conditions,” Folk-Lore 15 (1904): 12-23, especially pp. 19-21.

48. John L. Myres, “Folk-Memory,” Folk-Lore 37 (1926): 28. The whole article covers pp. 12-34.

49. Denis Page, “The City of Troy,” in Glyn E. Daniel, ed. Myth or Legend? (London, 1956), pp. 26-27.

50. Sir Leonard Wooley, “The Flood,” in Daniel, Myth or Legend?, pp. 39-47.

51. Richard M. Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers (Cambridge, Mass, 1952), pp. 169-76.

52. Hector Lee, “The Shadows from Lookout Bridge (a television script broadcast from Radio Station KPAY, Chico, California, 9 January 1960), bound with other scripts in the series under the title “Campfire Tales of Northern California” (1959), 41, no. 13.

53. The Dewar Manuscripts, vol. 1, Scottish West Highland Folk Tales, collected by John Dewar, trans. Hector Maclean, ed. John MacKechnie (Glasgow, 1963), pp. 233-36.

54. Richard M. Dorson, Buying the Wind (Chicago, 1964), pp. 87-88; Western Folklore 6 (1947): 27.

55. Ian Cunnison, “History and Genealogies in a Conquest State,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 49 (1957): 20-31; “History on the Luapula, an Essay on the Historical Notions of a Central African Tribe,” The Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, No. 21 (Capetown, London, New York, 1951); The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia: Custom and History in Tribal Politics (Manchester, England, 1959).

56. Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi (New York, 1945), p. xi.

57. Paul Bohannan, “Concepts of Time among the Tiv of Nigeria” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9 (1953): 260-61.

58. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition, a Study in Historical Methodology, trans. H. M. Wright (London, 1965), pp. 170-71.

59. Possible verification of the tradition of Atlantis, identified as the Aegean island of Santorin, is discussed in John Lear, “The Volcano that Shaped the Western World,” Saturday Review 49 (New York, 1966), no. 45: 57 ff. While attending the Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research in Athens in September, 1964, I lunched with Professor Angelos Galanopoulos, the seismologist who has advanced this theory, and heard him expound his views, which are now receiving considerable attention.

Reprinted from Volksüberlieferung, Festschrift für Kurt Ranke, edited by Fritz Harkort, Karel C. Peeters, and Robert C. Wildhaber (Göttingen, Germany: Otto Schwartz and Company, 1968), pp. 19-35.