Here’s an abridged (but still rather lengthy) version of what I said on Radio Maria England this week:
It struck me last week that when Queen Elizabeth died the natural response was to tell stories. Stories about her life and reign. Some of these stories were funny. Some were moving. And they all contributed to the larger story of the country she ruled. But now Charles III is king and so new questions are being asked. What sort of king will he be? What sort of place will Britain become during his reign? Only time and stories will tell.
It seems an appropriate time, then, to think about the stories of Britain, for it is the stories we have told (and sometimes the stories we have forgotten) that have forged our island nations.
History and stories belong together. In fact, in many languages “story” and “history” are the same word and we often experience history and stories as flip sides of the same coin. One of my favourite books when I was in primary school was Stories of the Ancient Britons by Margery Morris, a book which interspersed history with stories. Another was My Favourite Escape Stories, edited by Major Pat Reid. Stories about Colditz, but also stories about Charles I’s attempted escape from Carisbrooke Castle and Fr John Gerard’s successful escape from the Tower of London during the reign of Elizabeth I. But the merging of history and stories reached a new level when I started secondary school. At the age of 11, we were taught about the Roman invasions of Britain. I loved those lessons: the Catuvellauni; the elephants; the battles. It was years later that our teachers admitted, rather sheepishly, that they’d got their information from I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves and that he’d made most of it up. Not that these fictions did me any harm. A few years later I was studying history at university.
And I think the reason those stories didn’t damage my historical prospects is because stories really matter. They teach and entertain. They teach because they entertain. So, by extension, we can truly say that if we want to understand our country and its history we need the stories of Britain.
But why stories plural? One of the most popular history books for children when I was growing up was R. J. Unstead’s The Story of Britain. Story: singular. These days we are much more aware that history is contested. There isn’t just one story: there are many stories. History isn’t a single thread: it’s a multi-coloured tapestry. A tapestry composed of folk tales, like the ones collected by Joseph Jacobs or, more recently, by Kevin Crossley-Holland. A historical tapestry made up of books like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain or Geraldine McCaughrean’s Britannia: 100 Great Stories from British History. A tapestry of stories that seem to grow from the British soil itself. I’m thinking here of The Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows, The Borrowers, and Stig of the Dump.
The stories of Britain are both multi-lingual and multi-national. The Arthurian myth is as much French as it is British, as much Welsh and Irish as it is English. We need Le Morte D’Arthur, which C. S. Lewis once called “a sacred and central possession of all who speak the English tongue” but we also need the Mabinogion and The Tales of the Elders of Ireland and Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon. Whatever the Stories of Britain are, they were never mono-lingual. They were never insular.
But it’s also true that the stories of Britain have been widely forgotten. This isn’t simply the fault of our modern education system. It’s not a problem we can blame entirely on technology. R. M. Wilson wrote a book called The Lost Literature of Medieval England many years ago. Some of our greatest tales have been forgotten for hundreds of years.
In fact, it is this sense of loss that underlies Tolkien’s entire life’s work. Part of his motivation in writing The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion was to give England its mythology back, to recover the fragments and piece them together again. We now accept elves and orcs and ents as part of our national story but forget the painstaking work Tolkien did over many years to recreate them from the little that has remained of Old English literature.
As Tom Shippey points out in his wonderful book, The Road to Middle-Earth, “England must be the most demythologised country in Europe, partly as a result of 1066 (which led to near-total suppression of native English belief), partly as a result of the early Industrial Revolution, which led to the extinction of what remained.”
Tolkien himself wrote in one of his letters that “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found … in legends of other lands.”
And so he made a decision: “I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.”
He came to think this ambition “absurd” but, of course, what he eventually created helped revive and extend the national stories in ways which would have seemed unimaginable when he began his great task.
And he wasn’t alone. One of my favourite C. S. Lewis books is That Hideous Strength which brings Merlin back into the modern world. We cannot simply ignore the old stories, Lewis suggested. Like Merlin and Arthur, they may appear to be dead and buried, but they’re simply biding their time, waiting to burst out again when we most need them.
So let’s not beat ourselves up about the fact that children no longer know the stories of Britain. Let’s look at ways of retelling them instead. The books of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are a great place to start but we might want also to look at books like Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, which has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Amy Jeffs’ Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain. I’m trying to do my bit as well. My next children’s novel – Meg, Mog and Gog the Dog – features a family which begins to dream the stories of Britain with dramatic consequences for their everyday lives.
But here’s another question: why is Britain called Britain? The answer, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, is because it was named after Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas who escaped from the disaster at Troy and then founded Rome. Aeneas’ heroic deeds are recorded in the Aeneid, the founding epic of Ancient Rome, but his great-grandson seemed to struggle in his shadow. After a series of disasters in Italy he and his companions headed off to the edge of the world in their boat, picking up a few helpers on the way. I’ll tell you about one of them, Corinaeus, in a minute. Eventually, when they feared that they had come to the very edge of the world, they saw land ahead. A land infested by giants.
Now these giants are very interesting. Just outside Cambridge, where we’re broadcasting from, you can see the Gog Magog Hills. Gog and Magog. Two separate names. But Geoffrey of Monmouth merged them into one. Gogmagog was the leader of the giants, he said. A fearful adversary who had no desire to allow these upstart Trojans to take over his island. The fighting went on for years until most of the giants were wiped out. Finally Corinaeus, who now ruled Cornwall for Brutus, tracked Gogmagog down and the final battle began. It lasted for hours and seemed to be going the giant’s way. He picked up Corinaeus and cracked three of his ribs. But this enraged Corinaeus so much that he fought back, hauling the giant onto his back and then hurling him into the sea. The giants had been defeated. Albion was renamed Britain. And Brutus set up his capital city: Trinovantum. New Troy. The place we now know as London.
It’s a stirring story. A patriotic story. But it’s also a story that gives our national story an international context.
But that context wasn’t simply classical. It also became Christian. Later writers told how Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury where it disappeared. Years later, one of Joseph’s descendants, Igraine gave birth to Arthur, who later became King Arthur. Arthur and the knights of the round table took part in many quests, but the greatest of them all was the quest for the Holy Grail, a story of Britain that is told most movingly by a Frenchman, Chrétien de Troyes.
I won’t dwell on the Arthurian tales, because they are still widely known, though not perhaps as widely as we might like. Instead, I want to take you to Sherwood Forest and one of the earliest surviving tales of the outlaw: Robin Hood and the Monk, which I discuss in 50 Books for Life.
Robin Hood and the Monk is a really intriguing story because it begins with Robin longing to attend Mass.
“Hit is a fourtnet and more,” seid he,
“Syn I my Savyour see;
To day wil I to Notyngham,” seid Robyn,
“With the might of mylde Marye.”
Attending Mass in Nottingham was clearly a risky business, but, ignoring the advice of Much the miller’s son to take twelve outlaws with him, Robin set out with only Little John for company. Unfortunately the two soon quarrelled, leaving Robin to continue on his own. Knowing the risk, he prayed for protection and went to church anyway. There he was spotted and betrayed to the Sheriff of Nottingham by an avaricious monk.
The news that Robin had been thrown into prison prompted Little John to forget his anger. Together with Much the miller’s son, he ambushed the monk while he was on his way to London and, taking the monk’s place, delivered the Sheriff of Nottingham’s letters to the king himself, explaining the original monk’s absence by saying that he had died on the way. In a great comic twist, he returned to Nottingham with a letter from the king that commanded the sheriff to hand Robin over and this time explained the monk’s absence by saying that the king was so pleased with him that he “has made hym abot of Westmynster.” He then set about drinking the sheriff’s finest wine before freeing Robin during the night and bringing him back in triumph to Sherwood Forest. And so the tale ends with right restored, true religion confirmed, and Eden remembered as the outlaws enjoy a feast under the trees.
If the Arthurian tales are our chief national epic the stories of Robin Hood must run them close as foundational stories of Britain.
But what about our modern stories? What are the stories of modern Britain? There are many stories we might want to consider, from the heroic deeds of Grace Darling to the Battle of Britain, but I want to mention one that is only half-known. The story of Eric Liddell, a Scotsman who was born in China. A man who played rugby for Scotland and won gold for Great Britain in the Olympics. A sprinter who refused to compete in the event he’d trained for because the heats were run on a Sunday. We know the story because of Chariots of Fire and we shall hear a lot more about it in two years time when the Olympics return to Paris a hundred years after Liddell’s unexpected triumph in 1924. But what happened next? That’s the story I wanted to tell in The Race, my first children’s novel.
Eric Liddell could have made a lot of money from his Olympic success but instead he went back to war-torn China as a missionary. He worked first in a school, then in a hospital while warlords and Japanese invaders fought around him. He saved at least one wounded soldier from certain death at great personal risk. And then Pearl Harbor was attacked and Eric was interned along with many other Brits and Americans.
His last and greatest race took place in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in rural China. He competed in a sports day because he loved the children in the camp and wanted to keep their spirits up. He ran even though he was desperately ill. He ran his final race and shortly afterwards he died of a brain tumour, far from home.
His story is as much part of the national story as are the books of Geoffrey of Monmouth or Sir Thomas Malory. Our national stories were always international stories. Maybe we’re now more aware of that fact.
But let’s finish with The Lord of the Rings. One of my favourite moments in the book is when Sam sees an oliphaunt for the first time. He is almost killed but he is still filled with awe. An oliphaunt!
It’s not a word Tolkien made up. It first appears in English in a 12th-centruy poem called Brut, a story about Brutus, about whom I spoke earlier. Brut is also known as The Chronicle of Britain. Oliphaunts are also part of the stories of Britain.
And so are elephants. This is what R. J. Unstead wrote in his The Story of Britain:
In AD 43 an army of some 40,000 men under Aulus Plautius landed in Kent. Following Caesar’s line of advance, it forced its way across the Medway and the Thames into the strongest part of the island. The Emperor himself arrived to encourage his troops by his presence and dismay the Britons by the sight of his military elephants.
And here’s Claudius speaking in Robert Graves’ Claudius the God:
Our cavalry and elephants were sent in the direction of Colchester, to prevent fugitives from rallying on the road. They overtook Caractacus at Chelmsford, where he was trying to organize the defence of the River Chelmer. The sight of the elephants was enough to send the British scurrying in all directions.
Suetonius and Tacitus wrote absolutely nothing about Claudius fighting the British with elephants but never mind: elephants are now part of our national stories. The stories of Britain continue to surprise us.
What a wonderful post (and an even better interview!). Thank you very much indeed. Have you listened to "The Rest is History" podcast on Tolkien?