The long tongues of tradition

The World of Books

The picture which illustrates this article represents an old story-teller and his young listener as engraved as a tail-piece by artist Thomas Bewick, and comes from Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795), a celebrated collection of the medieval materials about that notorious British bandit.

It is a charming scene, which I like to think shows a grandfather talking to his grandchild. But it also represents one of the most important, indeed elemental, transactions in human culture, the moment of passing on of traditions, the traditions of a place, a people, a party, or indeed a religious belief.

We often say, in an unthinking way, that our own family stories are passed down from father to son. But this in fact is quite untrue, as we really know.

The tale teller, the culture carrier, the sort of person that in West Africa is called a griot, or in west Kerry a seanachai. Some of these people have some 400 tales off by memory, and could repeat them word for word.

Family

But for family history the people involved are most often the grandparents; those as a poet Beddoes remarked:

“… As out of life, each side do lie,/against the shutter of the grave or womb”.

They are the ones with the liberty and time to sit and talk to the young, whose mothers and fathers have throughout history been occupied elsewhere with work and with supporting their clan. Parents are often too overwhelmed and engaged with the present to have any care for the past.

Wherever people are totally occupied with work, with working at any time of the day or night, every day of the week to make the fortunes of people such as Elon Musk, traditions as they have been known since the dawn of culture simply die on the branch withered and uncollected fruit. Or worse begin to be abused as “fun facts” or “horrid histories”, or “interactive entertainment”.

The Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep held that among societies without writing, the memory of an historic event was maintained without corruption, for five or six generations, which is to say 150 year or 200 years at most. He was allowing three generations to a century, but is this right?

I first became interested in the passing on of tradition in connection with a project on the murder of William II (William Rufus), the king of England who first mooted the idea of the Norman invasion of Ireland, long before it was mounted by his brother Henry who succeeded him. That he was the victim of a conspiracy by his brother is by no means accepted by all historians of the period. But traditions of the event are strange: including the claim that his body when carried out of the New Forest on a charcoal burners cart into Winchester it still bled; only living bodies bleed…

Allowing that tales are passed not from father to child, but from grandfather to grandchild as in the Bewick’s picture, this would  cover the period from 1100 to 1900 in a mere 14 or even ten repetitions over the eight centuries, and not the 24 repetitions that van Gene would have mooted. Indeed a descendant of that charcoal burner took part in the 1950s in a commemoration of the king’s death.

But realise also: that to preserve the stories of the life of Jesus orally, between 50 AD and 350AD required only six relations. It makes one think a little more closely about the historic doubts that have affected what scholars think about the past.

If for instance the Celts conquered Ireland about 300 BC, this 800 years before writing came to Ireland with Christianity, which means 16 repetitions before it was written down.

But word of mouth was important for faith as well. An Irish missionary who had worked in the Philippines told us about the difficulty he had with preparing children for Communion. This proved difficult through the schools, but if the children had been prepared by their grandmothers, he was content.

As regards the Gospels, which were written in Greek the literary language of Europe then, written between 70 and 110 AD. Though the authors were not scholars, we think, but eye witnesses, they already depended on tradition, but the time was brief, a single generation.

Now looking back I deeply regret the things I failed to ask my parents about, for my grandparents were beyond my reach even as a boy.

But it also suggests we should switch off our electronic media and simply talk about the past as known and experienced by our families – it would be a benefit to us all.