George Laurence Gomme

“ And after dinner up and down to see his house. And in a word, methinks, for his perspective upon his wall in his garden, and the springs rising up with the perspective in the little closet; his room floored above with woods of several colours, like but above the best cabinetwork I ever saw; his grotto and vault, with his bottles of wine, and a well therein to keep them cool; his furniture of all sorts; his bath at the top of his house, good pictures, and his manner of eating and drinking; do surpass all that ever I did see of one man in all my life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In all cases it is the duty of the student to note the stage of arrested development in the primitive rite, custom, or belief, whether it be caused by antagonism or by absorption. It is at this point, indeed, that the history of the survival begins. It is here that we have to turn from the polity, the religion, or cultus of a people to the belief, practices, or superstition of that portion of our nation which has not shared its progress from tribesmen to citizens, from paganism to Christianity, from vain imaginings to science and philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ History and tradition are in accord, not in conflict; the gaps of history are filled by tradition—that tradition which was suitable and worthy of so great a hero, namely the ancient tradition told of all heroes. ”

“ The custom or belief which is not arrested by an opposing culture becomes a part of the religion or of the institutions of the nation, and the history of its development becomes, as a rule, lost in the general advance of religion and politics—custom develops into law, belief develops into religion, rite develops into ceremonial, and tradition ceases to be the force which keeps them alive. ”

“ 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 explanation of this myth is simple. Unaided by the facts of science, the New Zealand savages could only think of the facts of their own experience. Only two personalities could produce the various products of the world; therefore the earth was the mother and the sky the father. But they are now separated and apart. Only a personality could have separated, and the forest, root-sown in the earth, branch-up in the sky, is evidently the means of this separation. And so, satisfactorily to their own minds, these rude savages settled the question of the origin of heaven and earth. ”

“ Just as the little black baby of the negro, the brown baby of the Malay, the yellow baby of the Chinaman, are in face and form, in gestures and habits, as well as in the first articulate sound they mutter, very much alike, so the mind of man, whether he be Aryan or Malay, Mongolian or Negrito, has, in the course of its evolution, passed through stages which are practically identical. ”

“ As much as almost anything else it has led to false conclusions as to the evolution of the family, conclusions which seem to entangle even the best authorities in a mass of contradictions. I cannot think of a family group in savagery with father, mother, sons, and daughters, all delightfully known to each other, in terms which also belong to the civilised family, and still less can I think of these terms being used to take in the extended grouping of local kinships. One of our greatest difficulties, indeed, is the indiscriminate use of kinship terms by our descriptive authorities. ”

“ It cannot be too often impressed upon the student of tradition that the tradition itself affords the chief if not the only sure evidence of its age, its origin, and its meaning; for the preservation of tradition is due to such varied influences that the mere fact of preservation, or the particular method or date of preservation, cannot be relied upon to give the necessary authority for the authenticity of the tradition. Tradition can never assume the position of written history, because it does not owe its origin, but only its preservation, to writing. ”

“ It is the function of folklore to correct this error, to restore the Hebrew tradition to its proper place among the myths of the world which have answered the cry of early man for the knowledge of his origin. There is no degradation here. Science is no longer in doubt as to the origin of man within the evolutionary process of the natural world, and it rightly rejects the first chapter of Genesis as of value to modern research. ”

“ All at once, Roar, who was not seated, came to his father and said, 'Father, you are getting old; let me take your place.' 'Oh, no, my son,' was the answer, 'I am not too old to work; it is not yet time: wait awhile.' Then, with an entreating look, Roar said, 'Oh, father, all your children and myself are often sorry to see you look so tired when the day's labour is over: the work of the farm is too much for you; it is time for you to rest and do nothing. ”

“ This is exactly the position, and all that I have advanced for the purpose of aiming at a classification of the various kinds of tradition is in accord with this view.
All that I am anxious to prove, all that it is possible to prove, from these considerations of the position occupied by myth, is that myths constitute a part of the serious life of the people. They belong to the men and women, perhaps some of them to the men only and others to the women only, but essentially to the life of the people. ”

“ They see that side by side with agricultural economics is agricultural religion, of great rudeness and barbarity, of considerable complexity, and bearing the stamp of immense antiquity. The same villagers who were the observers of those rules of economics which are thought to be due to Roman origin were also observers of ritual and usages which are known to be savage in theory and practice. Must we, then, say that all this ritual and usage are Roman? or must we go on ignoring them as elements in the argument as to the origin of agricultural institutions? ”

“ It is not conceivable that it suddenly arose at a particular period before which "mere superstition" did not exist, and all, both peasant and chief, were philosophical and moral. It is not conceivable that the mere superstition of to-day has replaced bodily the mere superstition of other ages. Every succeeding age of progress has influenced it, no doubt, but not eradicated it, and hence the mere superstition of to-day has just such an unbroken continuity of history as language or institutions. ”

“ The influence of modern ideas is gradually doing away with much of the parade and renown of the Common-Riding. But 'Tyr-ibus ye Tyr ye Odin' retains all its local power to fire the lieges, and the accredited method of arousing the burghers to any political or civil struggle is still to send round the drums and fifes, 'to play Tyribus' through the town, a summons analogous to that of the Fiery Cross in olden times. Apart from the words of the slogan, the air itself bears in its wild fire all the tokens of a remote origin. ”

“ The savage of Britain cannot with this evidence before us be considered as the mere product of the literature of Greece and Rome. He is part and parcel of the savagery of the human race. Anthropology has shown us that savagery reached the land we now call Britain as part of the general movement of people which has caused the whole earth to become a dwelling-place for man, and now that we know this we must appeal to anthropology whenever we find that the problems of folklore take us out of the culture period of a civilisation known to history. ”

“ The cruel stepmother in this dreadful weather bids the poor girl to go out in the forest, and not to come back till she brings some violets with her. After many entreaties for mercy the orphan is driven out, and goes out in the snow on the hopeless errand. As she enters the forest she sees a little way on in the deep glade, under the leafless trees, a large fire burning. As she draws near she perceives around the fire are twelve stones, and on the stones sit twelve men. The chief of them, sitting on the largest stone, is an old man with a long snowy beard, and a great staff in his hand. ”

“ It is only here that we can discover the point where we may properly commence the work of comparative folklore. An item of folklore which stands isolated is practically of no use for scientific investigation. It may be, as we have seen, that the myth is in its primary stage as a sacred belief among primitive people, in its secondary or folk-tale stage as a sacred memory of what was once believed, in its final or legendary stage when it does duty in preserving the memory of a hero or a place of abiding interest. ”

“ Although the great mass of folklore rests upon tradition and tradition alone, an important aid to tradition comes from certain psychological conditions which we must now consider. At an early stage all students of folklore will have discovered that it is not entirely to tradition that folklore is indebted for its material. There are still people capable of thinking, capable of believing, in the primitive way and in the primitive degree. Such people are of course the descendants of long ancestors of such people—people whose minds are not attuned to the civilisation around them ”

“ One can never be quite sure to what extent civilised man is free from creating fresh myths in place of acquired scientific result, and to what extent this influences the production of primitive beliefs, or allows of the acceptance of traditional belief on new ground. The great mass of traditional belief has come through the ages traditionally, that is, from parent to child, from neighbour to neighbour, from class to class, from locality to locality, generation after generation. ”

“ If tradition is not entirely mythology it is certainly not all founded on sociology, and the mythic tradition in the possession of a people advanced in culture has to be considered and accounted for. It is myth in contact with history, and the contact compels consideration of the result. ”

“ Scotland, until the most modern date, was an utter stranger to civilisation, presenting a sterile country with a famished people, wasted by hordes of mendicants readier to seize than to solicit—void of ingenious arts and useful manufactures, possessed of little skill and learning, plunged in constant war and rapine, full of insubordination, disturbing public rule and private peace. ”

“ We shall be repeating in anthropology what the analytical jurists accomplished in law and jurisprudence, and it will then soon become necessary to do for anthropology what Sir Henry Maine did for comparative jurisprudence, namely, demonstrate that the analytical method does not take us back to human [Pg 226] origins, but to highly developed systems of society. Law, in the hands of the analytical jurists, is merely one part of the machinery of modern government. Social beginnings in the hands of conjectural anthropologists are merely abstractions with the whole history of man put on one side. ”

“ Traditions which are properly classed as myth are those which are too ancient to be identified with historical personages, and too little realistic to be a relation of historical episodes. They are rather the explanations given by primitive philosophers of events which were beyond their ken, and yet needed and claimed explanation. In this class of tradition we are in touch with the struggles of the earliest ancestors of man to learn about the unknown. Our own research in the realms of the unknown we dignify by the name and glories of science. ”

“ I would not urge the correctness of the views I have put forward as applicable to every part of the world, or to every phase in the history of tradition; but I would urge that in the great centres of traditional life they are practically the only means of arriving at the position occupied by tradition, and that in all cases they form a working hypothesis upon which future inquirers may well base their researches. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These people simply did not understand civilised thought or civilised religion. To escape from the pressure of trying to understand they turned to think for themselves, and thinking for themselves merely brought them back to the standpoint of primitive thought. ”