Alfred Nutt

“ Increase of the medium of sustenance, whether it be mainly vegetable or mainly animal, increase in the capacity for offence and defence alike of the community and of the individual against other men, against other animals, against the invisible forces which ever, as storm and drought and pestilence, war against mankind, increase in the capacity for augmenting individual or communal sway over the more primitive human passions, lust and hate and greed—such are the objects aimed at alike by the peasant, the hunter, or the warrior. His philosophy is to help him to achieve them. ”

“ The country in which the ballads were chiefly found offered, in its material and social conditions, a soil admirably suited for their germination and growth. A wild, trackless March-land, a fierce, passionate, daring breed of men, with tenacious national and family feuds, with undiminished energy of primitive passion—the very conditions, in fact, we could postulate from the ballads themselves, had they come down to us without note of their locality and surroundings. ”

“ Whether the idea of survival necessarily belongs to the conception of folklore used in its widest significance is a question that need not be discussed here; in connection with a community like the British, the more advanced members of which have entirely or almost entirely outgrown the philosophical and artistic ideas embodied in folklore, survival must be regarded as the dominant and characteristic note of the latter. Folklore, then, I treat this evening as a survival of elements of culture. ”

“ The instrument of comparison between tradition and conscious literature is almost the first that offers itself in any quest after racial characteristics; and comparison is fruitful because in literature, even in its highest and most complex manifestations, there is a continuity, lacking in modern Europe at all events, in such departments of creative thought as religion, philosophy, or law. ”

“ Chief among them is the existence of a vigorous professional literary craft, with the inevitable accompaniment of rigid literary conventions. Thus alone can the collective fancy and wit of the community assume definite shape and form, thus alone are they assured of permanency. Traditional literature, collective in its appeal to the sympathies of the community, reflecting, as it must, collective emotion and judgment, is even more dependent than conscious, individual, deliberately artistic literature upon the strong organisation of its professors. ”

“ Cycles of tradition crystallise around the famous leaders, as duchies and kingdoms take shape under their mighty hands; older, outworn cycles have new blood infused into them, suffer transformation, and acquire a fresh lease of life, as did so many political organisations when the Norman with his combination of strong practical sense and daring imagination mastered them for his use.
As far as Britain is concerned, we can substantiate the hypothesis of Scandinavian influence on romance by the testimony of figured monuments. ”

“ Man in the folklore stage philosophises with a view to action; it is in the last degree essential that his philosophy should be sound, as it is to result in action the effects of which involve life or death, dearth or plenty, weal or woe for him. Philosophical speculation in the air, without any definite relation to or bearing upon the practical conduct of life, is one of those benefits of progress which man in the folklore stage not only contrives to do without, but the excellence of which he fails to grasp. ”

“ If the folk-literature of the Celtic-speaking area seems to afford scant warrant for the theory of racial as distinguished from linguistic and literary influence, that of the English-speaking area is more favourable to it. Where within that area the presence of a strong Scandinavian or Celtic element is apparent, there also story, legend and ballad are alike more numerous and more romantic in tone. ”

“ Of all the Gaelic-speaking districts the Isle of Man has probably the largest admixture of Scandinavian blood. The commingling of the two most imaginative and romantic strains of our mixed population would, one must think, have produced a specially rich folk-literature, yet as a matter of fact if such ever existed it would seem to have utterly died out. Man has retained customs and superstitions in fair abundance and vitality; stories of the saga type, anecdotes that is about supernatural and half-supernatural beings, are fairly numerous, but romantic tales and ballads have disappeared. ”

“ The legends that humanity tells in its childhood not only survive, but are a living inspiration, whilst the beliefs dwindle down to mere museum-specimens.
It is for many reasons likely that the artistic products of the folk-fancy should betray racial influence more readily than the products, designed for severely practical purposes, of folk-speculation. Differ as unwritten, collective, traditional folk-literature does from the individual conscious literature of advanced communities, yet both are children of man's imagination, both share certain essential characteristics. ”

“ Sensible men—and man in the folklore stage is infinitely more common-sensible than his civilised descendant—will not allow even such a master-passion as the love of change to interfere with rites upon which depends, as they believe, the welfare of the community. ”

“ I must at the outset state that the sense which I attach to the term folklore in the present connection is that of elements of culture surviving among the less advanced sections of the community, but discarded by the more advanced. ”

“ But in Wales, where the people has retained its Celtic speech, where it is certainly more homogeneous than in South-west Britain, where it has preserved its national literary class, in Wales, which possessed in the Middle Ages a romantic literature second only to that of Gaelic Ireland, romance has almost wholly vanished. Is there some underlying racial influence at work; is the Brython less tenacious than the Gael of his traditional romance? He has shown himself possessed of the rarest tenacity in other respects. ”

“ A community will accept the outcome of a train of speculative reasoning if it thinks it has a practical interest in so doing, although the reasoning be alien to its average feeling, and never wholly taken to its heart; but literature, especially in the traditional stage, must make as wide and as sympathetic an appeal as possible if it is to subsist and transmit itself. ”

“ The homogeneity which is so marked a feature of Gaelic is lacking in Welsh literature, and whilst the one community has preserved the traditional romance with marvellous fulness and accuracy, the other has allowed it to perish almost utterly. ”

“ There is, however, this difference: the philosophy of early man, logical and coherent as it is, once its starting point is granted, is to us not only foolish but frequently atrocious. With his artistry, on the other hand, we remain perennially in touch through our children, and it still constitutes the most profound and permanent source of literary achievement. ”

“ But as a whole the more unmixedly Low-German our English people is, the more it would seem to have forgotten the old traditional romance, the less capacity it would seem to have shown for transforming and endowing it with fresh life. As a matter of fact, the traditional romantic element which enters so largely into modern English literature is Celtic and not Germanic in origin. ”

“ I have already stated that communities living for a long lapse of time in the same stratum of culture will naturally develop special details of practice suited to their special needs. A community of fishermen of several centuries' standing brought suddenly into contact with one of nomad herds, or of fixed tillers of the soil, will certainly have a vast number of folklore items to exchange with its newly-found neighbours, but the philosophy under which these items have assumed form will be found to be largely identical. ”

“ If there is such a thing as racial expression, as a mode of conceiving and representing the thoughts and imaginings which arise from the contact of man's mind with the outer world, common to bodies of men linked together by ties of kinship and polity, it should surely make itself felt in their artistic creations, designed as these are to please, and dependent upon their success in this respect for their power to reach a wide circle and a later posterity. ”

“ And if ever a community seems at first sight wholly devoted to warfare as a means of livelihood, it is that of the Vikings who harried the remainder of Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. There is, moreover, abundant evidence that the warlike character of their social organisations did profoundly affect the mythic system they possessed in common with other Teutonic people, and that Eddaic mythology presents the beliefs not of Teutondom generally, but of those portions to which were due the Viking raids. ”

“ The conditions under which Gaelic traditional literature has come into being are precisely those I have previously indicated. The professional literary class was strong, and very well organised; it elaborated and handed down extremely rigid literary conventions; it effected a compromise with the representatives of Christian classic culture which enabled the preservation in large measure of the traditional romantic material, and it remained for some fifteen hundred years, at least, in close touch with every section of the community whose emotions and imaginings it faithfully interpreted. ”

“ The only marked variation that is likely in my opinion to take place in the practical philosophy of communities living in the folklore stage is when one of them devotes itself exclusively or almost exclusively to war as a means of winning food and gratifying passion. ”

“ A little while back I said that the earlier students who essayed to distinguish varying elements in British folklore referred them either to a Teutonic or a Celtic source. The point of view has changed. We now seek not for the Aryan-Teutonic or Aryan-Celtic, but for the Aryan and the non-Aryan, and the very instances I have cited would be urged in support of the contention that Aryan and non-Aryan can be separated. The rude stone monuments are, it is argued, non-Aryan, and so are the beliefs and rites connected with them. ”

“ In the discussion of racial elements in folklore and literature, we must first possess material which we can clearly refer to the various elements, and upon the basis of which we can sharply define them. In the case of the Aryan elements of our population, this indispensable requisite is present in however imperfect and confused a form; in the case of the assumed non-Aryan element it is altogether lacking. ”

“ It would, however, be unfair to measure Anglo-Saxon influence upon English traditional romance solely by its extant literature. The local tradition, noted in Berkshire within the last 200 years, concerning Wayland's smithy most certainly goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, is equally certainly independent of anything in extant Anglo-Saxon literature, and testifies to a considerable mass of legend centering round the primeval smith whose fame was great in all Teutonic lands. ”

“ It nearly always implies dominance of one, and the conceptions and ideals of the dominating supersede and oust those of the dominated race, but rarely to such an extent as to prevent their survival as folklore. Do the known facts of British history, using the term in its widest sense, justify the hypothesis of varying racial elements as a dominant factor in the production of existing British folklore, and is that hypothesis further justified by a searching and unbiassed examination of our folklore itself? ”

“ The objects of that philosophy are universally human—man must eat, must defend himself, ever seeks to gratify the overpowering impulses Ave style passion. It is a priori unlikely that different groups of mankind should elaborate markedly distinct philosophies, and this unlikelihood is intensified by examination of such groups or individuals as still live, or have lived in the the past, in the folklore stage. ”

“ I have already suggested that communities in which warfare and conquest had become the practical business of life would be likely to develop a philosophy differing more from that of the peasant or the hunter than did either of those two classes among themselves. ”

“ Comparing the three main streams of Continental immigration, pre-Christian Celtic, post-Christian fifth-century Low-German, and ninth-tenth century Scandinavian, we have strong grounds for believing that the Celts brought their women with them to a greater extent than was the case with the Low-Germans, and certainly to a far greater extent than was the case with the Danes. So far then as race be taken in a purely physical sense, the postChristian German invasions are likely to have had a more mixed outcome than the pre-Christian Celtic ”

“ To talk, for instance, of the pre-Aryan matriarchalism of the Picts, of the pre-Aryan druidism of the Gael, is to confound hypothesis of a highly questionable nature with fact. It is very probable that the Celts found non-Aryan-speaking peoples in these islands, though after all the fact is not absolutely certain. It is highly probable that these peoples possessed both a folk-philosophy and a folk-literature, fragments of which have possibly, very probably, survived. ”