AtF: Not Gonna Happen

This is usually the time I'm writing an AtF post. Instead I'm sitting in Geneva, IL at the Fox Valley Folk and Storytelling Festival. Entertain yourselves for a while.

AtF: Who's Buried in Raedwald's Tomb?

So, this week on After the Flood, we find out that things that have nothing to do with anything are deeply, deeply important.  Let’s start this out.

During the summers of 1938 and 1939, there came to light one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the century. It was the Sutton Hoo burial ship of one of the great kings of East Anglia. It is commonly believed to be that of Raedwald (or Redwald) who became Bretwalda in the year AD 616 (his name appears on the genealogy).

Now, the Sutton Hoo burial ship was a fantastic archaeological find.  We’re talking King Tut’s Tomb fantastic here.  So let’s talk archaeology and what Sutton Hoo means.

In order to talk Sutton Hoo we can go with something people have heard of a little more about.  Like, say, King Tut’s Tomb.  Specifically, why King Tut’s Tomb mattered.

We all know about the Egyptian pyramids.[1]  The lesser story about the pyramids is why they disappeared towards the end of the Middle Kingdom.  Basically, they were giant targets for grave robbers.  See, that was the crazy thing about the Pharaohs.  They were gods on Earth, but they were also paranoid, and with good cause.  They built giant friggin’ mausoleums out in the desert as a way of saying, “Hey, look at me!”  They then filled said mausoleums with as much shit as they could stack inside.

Said shit then got stolen.  A lot.  And I’m not talking about the looting of archaeological sites like we see all over in the Middle East now.  I’m saying that pyramids were getting looted during ancient times.  That’s why there were all kinds of crazy traps and curses inside the tombs.[2]

So they moved to the Valley of the Kings, which was only marginally more successful.  And by “marginally more successful,” I mean, “rather than being entirely looted, the tombs of the Pharoahs were only mostly looted.”  This is why so many people know of King Tut.  It’s not that he was a great ruler, it’s that he was the only ruler who’s tomb had been found intact up until that time.  Period.

Let’s move two thousand years in to the future.  Pretend that in between now and then the writings of every single President have been lost save William McKinley.  Future historians know that there were a bunch of Presidents and have a general idea who they were, when they were in office, and what the fortunes of the United States were under them.  But then they find a stash of letters written by William McKinley and all of the sudden they’re all, “Holy crap, we know something specific!”  That’s what King Tut’s Tomb is all about.

William McKinley never makes the list of the best Presidents, nor does he make the list of the worst Presidents.  Mostly we just kind of forget that he was a President.  That’s basically where King Tut would have been in the list of Pharaohs.  But we remember him because of something that happened three thousand years after he died and because of an awful lot of coincidences that happened in between those times.  Such is the nature of archaeology.

This thought in mind, let’s talk Sutton Hoo.  It was a major archaeological find in exactly the same way King Tut’s Tomb was.[3]  It provided a snapshot of a bit of the Anglo-Saxon culture in England at the time of the burial.  Most importantly, it provided a snapshot where an awful lot of things that had not been found together were all in one place.  Of course this isn’t to say that we can learn everything about the East Anglians from Sutton Hoo.  But it taught us a lot more than we knew before.

There are limits to what we can learn from pure archaeology, though.  Especially if there is no language to speak of.  Imagine if your house were suddenly to become an archaeological site, but for whatever reason your books and junk mail and recipes or whatever you have floating around with words on it disintegrated between now and whenever it was found.[4]  So those future archaeologists have to wander in a decide who you were, what your social standing was, and how you spent your life based on a lot of circumstantial evidence.[5]

If you’re Bill Cooper, of course, you won’t think about Sutton Hoo quite like this.  Oh, no.

The royal title of Bretwalda appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MS. C - British Museum Cotton MS. Tiberius. B. i.) as Bretenanwealda, and means literally the one ruler of Britain. In other words, Raedwald was the supreme king to whom all the other provincial kings owed obeisance. Now Bede (4) tells us that Raedwald was born of the Wuffingas, as were all the East Anglian kings, and it is this title that tells us something of the seriousness with which the Anglo-Saxons kept their pedigrees.

Except that East Anglia never, ever, ever…ever, was in charge of all of Britain.  Ever.  It was – briefly and during the time of Raedwald – possibly the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but it never ruled all of Britain.  The other kingdoms maintained their integrities and eventually knocked it down a peg or three again.  Cooper’s own genealogy should show that East Anglia never, ever took over completely.  So…yeah.  Although I kind of wish I was a Wuffinga.  That’s an awesome family name right there.[6]

It’s possible, as I mention in footnote [6], that the so-called “Wuffing Dynasty” is actually a bastardization of a Norse clan from Sweden.  If this is the case -- which I’d consider highly likely, given the connections between the Sutton Hoo burial site and Sweden (also in footnote [6].  I’m being lazy about holding together complete thoughts tonight.  Sorry)[8] -- then the fascinating thing about Bill Cooper’s use of Sutton Hoo is this: it totally blows his actual argument out of the water.

I love it when he makes my (self-appointed and booze-soaked) job easier, especially when he goes and digs that hole just a little deeper.  This is a direct and egregious violation of the First Rule of Holes: When you find you’re in a hole, stop digging.  Of course I suppose that you need to acknowledge that you’re in a hole and Bill Cooper probably gave up on that acknowledgment the moment he said, “You know what I should do?  Write a book.”

See, the primary source of the Anglo-Saxon migration idea comes from the Venerable Bede, who lived and worked at the tail-end of the 7th Century.  By that point the Germanic tribes had been in charge in England for between two and three centuries.  That’s a lot of slack time.  And that’s a lot of time for things to get confused.

So can we say that the primary migration came from the people we think of as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes?  Yes.  Probably.  We’ve got an awful lot of evidence.  But the Scandinavians were most certainly involved.  For one thing, there’s some question as to whether or not the Jutes were actually Geats.  But that’s just splitting hairs.

Basically, the idea is this: the Romans never truly conquered Britain.  When they withdrew from the island it created a power vacuum that really wouldn’t be properly filled until Alfred the Great, although it’s possible to argue that William the Conqueror was the one who actually managed to do it.  So you had the Angle, Saxon, and Jute clans looking across the water thinking, “Hey, that looks like a pretty sweet place to go.”  But you also basically had the proto-Vikings of Scandinavia.

So let’s look at Raedwald and his East Anglian kingdom.  Let’s say some Angles and some Geats showed up at roughly the same time.  Somehow these people intermixed and we ended up with the Angles getting the place name and the Geats getting the dynastic name.  This is not a hard concept to imagine, given the idea that we’re looking at a mass migration of people who had a loose cultural connection to each other to begin with.

Then, by the time they actually start writing down their genealogies and folks like the Venerable Bede show up, time has destroyed part of the memories.  So they recall, vaguely, someone named The Wolf as a semi-legendary king, when “he” was, in fact, a Geatish clan known as the Wolf Clan.[9]

For the record, it’s no crazier than Bill Cooper’s theory.  And it’s backed up by a minimal amount of real-world knowledge…

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[1]Hopefully.  If you don’t, then you really, really need to re-think your education.

[2]The most famous curse, of course, being the one in King Tut’s Tomb, which supposedly ripped through Howard Carter’s entire team.  The second-most-famous was the one in Imhotep’s tomb, which very nearly killed Brendan Fraser on several occasions, but ultimately did not succeed due to merchandising concerns.  Then Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took over the franchise, in what I consider “the greatest idea ever had by anyone at any time, ever.”  Other than, y’know, Kitten Mittons.

Also, you know what’s awesome about The Rock?  He has, as best I can tell, zero actual acting talent.  He is the epitome of the “guy who plays himself.”  And he’s fucking awesome at it.  He’s basically been parodying his own acting career since he first showed up as the Scorpion King and didn’t have a single line.

[3]Just without the curses and whatnot.

[4]Now that I think about that, though, it’s a crazy thought.  I’m looking around my living room and there’s almost nothing that doesn’t have some words written on it.  Basically, future archaeologists would get a look at my couch, loveseat, coffee table, rug, and dining room table.  Also my random stuffed duck that sits on my left speaker.  And my talking Kick the Cheat.  But the point is that the ratio of things with words:things without words is quite high.  Such is the nature of living in a literate society.

This is actually one of those places where we can’t understand what it was like to live in the before times, the long long ago.  We take words for granted, to the point where we don’t usually notice them.  Try to conceive of living for a day in a world without written words.

I honestly cannot.

[5]Many, many years ago, like when I was 12 or something, my mother got me a copy of a book called Motel of the Mysteries about a future archaeologist discovering a motel room and attempting to excavate it.  My favorite prof at WIU used that same book to start out History 301 on ancient Greece.  I loved that.  This is also one of those places where it seems pretty obvious to say that parents should encourage their kids to learn and read.  I suppose I was somewhat precocious, but by the same token my parents were constantly buying me crazy books and encouraging me to learn.  Then one day I found my college prof using one of those books my mother had randomly gotten for me years before.  And I enjoyed the book a hell of a lot more the second time around because I got what it was all about.

[6]Wuffa, said ancestor who started the Wuffings, comes from the Old English word for wolf.  This is also one of those fascinating things, since the family name probably means that the Wuffings were an offshoot of a Geatish clan known as the Wulfings, who were mentioned in Beowulf and a few other Norse myths.  On the off chance you’re thinking, “Wait, wouldn’t that mean that the Wuffings were actually Scandinavian and not Anglo-Saxon?” you’d be right.  One theory actually holds that Beowulf was composed in East Anglia.

There were actually many items in Sutton Hoo that appear to have Scandinavian origins.  Artifacts at the site are linked to artifacts found at a gravesite known as Vendel at Gamla Uppsala in Sweden.[7]  This points to a much more complicated story of the settlement of Britain than the simple, “The Angles, Saxons, Jutes came over and set up shop,” that we usually get.  This should be surprising to no one, save, perhaps, Bill Cooper.

[7]Gamla Uppsala was also the location of the Thing of all Swedes, which was a general assembly of sorts.  And, yes, the word that we use to describe random items that can’t really be properly defined descend directly from that word.  Considering the current state of affairs in Congress…

[8]Hmm.  That sentence included a comma splice and parenthetical thought within a hyphen within a nested clause.  I’m reasonably certain I just broke the English language with that one.

[9]I’m going to go out on a limb and assume they had BattleMechs.

AtF: Wherein Geds Discusses Beards

So, as we covered last time on After the Flood, Bill Cooper’s prized Anglo-Saxon genealogy is a work of imagination and myth.  It’s now time to figure out why Cooper thinks it’s a worthwhile pursuit.

To be fair, the Saxons do not seem to have brought over with them a detailed chronicled history of their nation like that possessed by the Britons or, indeed, the Irish Celts which we shall examine later. That is not to say that none existed, of course just that none has survived to the present day from that pre-emigration period. What has survived, however, is a detailed genealogy of the pre-migration, and hence pre-Christian, kings of the Saxons, and this enables us to take Saxon history back, generation by generation, to the earliest years after the Flood. But this is no new discovery. It was everyday knowledge to the historians of previous centuries. On Thursday 6th July 1600, for example, a certain Elizabethan tourist, Baron Waldstein, visited London's Lambeth Palace. His journal tells us that in one of the rooms there he saw:

'...a splendid genealogy of all the Kings of England, and another genealogy, a historical one, which covers the whole of time and is traced down from the Beginning of the World.'

By now we should all know exactly how I’m going to respond to this.  In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m going to let everyone else do the heavy lifting.  Look over the previous explanation and ask yourself, “What would Geds say while bitching about this?”  If it helps, pour yourself a nice bourbon.[1]

Anyway once you’ve decided what I would say, feel free to go down to footnote two.  You’ll have your answers.[2]  I’ll wait.  I have delicious bourbon at my disposal.  While we’re waiting, perhaps I should discuss facial hair.

See, I grew a beard several years ago.  At the time I was in the habit of naming random objects in my possession, mostly of the computer and car nature.

Anyway, I was still with (for whatever definition of “with” you want to use) Her at the time.  I don’t remember how, precisely, it came up.  Either I said I needed a name for my beard or she asked if I was planning on doing so.  Either way, I was immediately forbidden from naming my beard.  This, of course, meant that it needed to be named, specifically the most absurd thing that came to mind.[3]

Right then and there I named my beard “Lorna.”  It was not a well-received decision.[4]

Some time after I moved to Texas I decided I needed a change.  You know, beyond, “Hey, I just moved a thousand miles away.”  This was also before I bought a new car in a fit of, y’know, even more change.  Either way, I switched from the full beard to the goatee.  I promptly named my goatee, “Lorna, Jr.”

A few weeks ago tragedy struck.  My hand slipped while I was trimming Lorna, Jr. and I was forced to go clean-shaven.  The following day at work my co-workers were rather adamant in their insistence that I look better while clean-shaven.  It also occurred to me that clean-shaven is actually much lower maintenance than a goatee.[5]

I was thinking of going with the porn ‘stache.  But, um…no.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, right.  I was talking about Bill Cooper and his somehow-less-edifying-than-my-stories-about-facial-hair bullshit.  Also, that was a lot of hyphens.  But I digress.  His good buddy the Baron Waldstein continues:

Later, arriving at Richmond Palace on 28th July, he saw in the library there:

'... beautifully set out on parchment, a genealogy of the kings of England which goes back to Adam.'

Yuh huh.

In case anyone’s wondering, the Baron Waldstein was an eighteen year-old Moravian tourist in England.  There’s about a 103% chance that he didn’t have the historical background to understand what he was seeing, assuming that he was even attempting to skeptically analyze the things he saw.

Cooper then goes to beat that most familiar drum.

Such genealogies were immensely popular, and as fascinating to the general public as they were to historians and other scholars. As tables of descent, they provided a continuous record of human history from the Creation, through the post-Flood era, down to modern times. But it was these very attributes that made these records unpalatable to certain scholars who delighted to call themselves Rationalists, and who sought from the 18th century onwards to replace such history with certain anti-biblical notions of their own. (3)

I don’t generally include the footnote pointers, but that footnote number 3 points to a book called The Rise of the Evolution Fraud.  It’s got two five-star reviews on Amazon!  Also, it’s got two reviews on Amazon!

Anyway, this is tiring, really.  I tossed in the facial hair stuff not because I thought it was interesting, but because I thought it was more interesting than, “Cooper sees anti-Christian conspiracies everywhere: film at 11.”  Although it is kind of funny the way he seems to find it necessary to vary his attacks against, y’know, real historians.  This time anyone who dares suggest that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t directly descend from Adam “delighted to call themselves Rationalists.”

First of all, if we’re talking Rationalists, um, they were around before the 18th Century.  There was this guy named Descartes and this other guy named Spinoza, for instance.  I’m just going to take a shot in the dark and say that this is a veiled shot at David Hume, which is kind of funny, since Hume wasn’t really a Rationalist and, in fact, was the one who influenced Kant’s thinking enough to lead to the writing of the Critique of Pure Reason.  Hume was an empiricist and a historian who can probably be credited with an awful lot of the changes in British history Cooper rails against, however.

Second, “delighted?”  Really?  That particular word choice bugs me for some reason.

Either way, we’re just about to start having fun.

The pre-migration records that have come down to us are in the form of genealogies and king-lists, and I have assembled the table of descent which opens this chapter from each type. That table shows the (sometimes simplified) descent of six of the Anglo-Saxon royal houses of England. The houses are those of Wessex (Occidentalium Saxonum); of Lindsey (Lindis fearna); of Kent (Cantwariorum); of Mercia (Merciorum); of Northumbria (Northa hymbrorum); and of East Anglia (Estanglorum). But it is the treatment that these records have received from the hands of modernist scholars that is as fascinating, and as telling, as the records themselves, and we shall here consider the veil of confusion and obscurity that modern scholarship has thrown over them.

You know what’s really confusing?  The question of why the Anglo-Saxons were recording their genealogies in Latin. Although I suppose we could offer the benefit of the doubt and say that it was later scribes recording in Latin.  So…yeah.  Let’s move on.

We are commonly asked to believe that these six royal families concocted these lists, and that the lists are thus rendered untrustworthy and false. We are asked to accept that, say, the House of Kent concocted a list of ancestral names that just happens to coincide in its earlier portions with that of, say, the House of Northumbria, in spite of the fact that the two kingdoms lay hundreds of miles apart, spoke different dialects and whose people hardly ever wandered beyond their own borders unless it was to fight.

Um, yes.  I am, actually, asking you to believe that the lists were made up.  If we go back two weeks, we’ll see that actual historians have found that this is exactly what happened.  The term “East Anglia” didn’t exist until the 800s.  Northumbria was a kingdom that came in to being with the merging of two other kingdoms.  And, in both of those cases, the “houses” are named after geographic locations and would, therefore, not have been the names of anyone or anything until well after the migration.  And with the story of the genealogy of Alfred the Great of Wessex being stolen from Ida of Bernicia I introduced you to the Sisam Hypothesis, which introduced the possibility that, yes, the Anglo-Saxons stole genealogies from each other.

Either way, I’ll cut things short here.  I’m just too damned sober to handle the next bit…

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[1]The alcohol of choice tonight is Buffalo Trace.  I also have Rahr & Sons Buffalo Butt beer at my disposal.  I was in a very Buffalo-y mood during my last alcohol purchase.  Also, Rahr & Sons was having some problems this spring after a storm blew their roof off or something.  It’s good that they’re back up and running.

[2]First:  Just because something was once common knowledge does not mean it’s correct.  It was once common knowledge that there was nothing between Europe and Asia but unnavigable ocean.  It was also once common knowledge that the Americas were a part of Asia.  Also, there was a long period of time where people thought there was a flood that covered the entire Earth.  But no one takes that seriously any…oh…wait.

Second:  There is an assertion that the Anglo-Saxon genealogies were once common knowledge.  Assertion without proof is useless.

Third:  The Anglo-Saxon genealogy offered by Cooper as evidence ends in 899.  Anglo-Saxon domination of Britain ends, by necessity, in 1066.  A genealogy seen buy a guy in 1600 means next to nothing without corroborating documents.  The fact that he saw it on a Thursday, meanwhile, means jack shit.  That’s the sort of detail one adds in when attempting to bolster a bad argument with arguments that sound accurate.

Fourth:  The diary entry, or whatever it was, doesn’t even say anything other than, “I saw this one thing.”  It has no citations and offers no reproduction.  So we can’t know if it even supported Cooper’s fanciful genealogy from just above it.  Considering that I’ve seen several different Anglo-Saxon genealogies in the past couple weeks, I strongly suspect it mostly doesn’t.

Fifth:  Once again, even if the genealogy is accurate to the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate to the time of Noah.  Especially when you’re looking at a genealogy that only goes back SEVENTEEN GENERATIONS.

Seriously.  Math.  How does that work?

[3]I still haven’t really decided if this was a sign that the relationship was a turrible idea or that the idea of dating me is a turrible idea for, well, anyone.

[4]I once knew a guy who had a beard named Lorna.  She had the worst gay-dar in history.  But that’s a story for another day…

[5]At one point my boss asked if I was planning on sticking with the clean-shaved thing.  I said I was going to for a little while, since the goatee is really the second-highest maintenance form of beard.  She asked what the highest maintenance beard is.  I said, “The beard of bees.  I mean, you’ve got to keep them fed and constantly carry epi-pens around with you.”

There’s about a 90% chance I shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

AtF: Anglo-Saxons Borrowing Genealogies

Bill Cooper loves him some genealogies.  Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using genealogies.  Most historians covering large stretches of history toss one in occasionally.  They act as road maps through the odd collection alien sounding names and seemingly random connections between major characters and houses.

This, it should not be surprising to learn, is not how Cooper uses genealogies.  He trots out an Anglo-Saxon genealogy that supposedly goes back to Noah to prove that, um, the Anglo-Saxons knew they went back to Noah.  It’s ridiculous, but we’re used to that by now…

Handling this, though, is an interesting proposition.  Cooper uses his genealogy to trace six houses of Anglo-Saxons: Kent, East Anglia, Lindsey, Northumbria, Wessex, and Mercia.  Kent, East Anglia, Northumbria, Wessex, and Mercia were all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that still lend their names to locations in Great Britain today.  I don’t know what Lindsey is doing in that list, though.[1]

Further, there are recognizable names on the genealogy that we can look at.  Specifically for this entry I’m looking at Ethelbert of Kent, Raedwald of East Anglia, and Alfred the Great of Wessex.

First, let’s get this out of the way.  According to the genealogy given by Cooper, there were 38 generations from Noah to Alfred the Great.  Further, there were seventeen generations from Noah to the scions of the Anglo-Saxon “houses.”  For those doing the math at home, if we go with a generic 20 year generation, that means there were 760 years between Noah and Alfred the Great…who was born in the year 849.  So Noah, according to the Anglo-Saxon genealogy that proves the veracity of the Bible, was born right around the time the Gospel of Matthew was being written.  Although that whole world flood thing would have accounted for the decline of the Roman Empire pretty handily…

Now, I’ve played the genealogy game with Cooper before and won.  Last time around I even hemmed and hawed and pretended there were a bunch of different ways we could define “generation.”  This time I offer no such quarter because I have a fixed date to work with: the year 400.

The Anglo-Saxon migration to Great Britain started in about the year 400.  Therefore, any number we work with when looking at the genealogy advanced by Cooper has to put that first generation of Anglo-Saxon house founders within 20 years of that date.  As it turns out, that 20 year number becomes quite handy.

Take Raedwald of East Anglia.  According to Cooper’s genealogy, he was nine generations removed from the scions.  We know that Raedwald ruled Kingdom of the East Angles in about 520.  So he followed the Anglo-Saxon migration by about 120 years.  Nine generations isn’t all that hard to believe, especially since some kings had bad habits of dying quickly.  Anglo-Saxon leaders who sat back in the great hall and sent their soldiers out to fight on their behalf would not have lasted too long, as the Anglo-Saxons were a warrior culture through-and-through.  I strongly suspect, too, that the idea of a king not going out with his warriors and leading them from the front would have never crossed anyone’s mind.  Kings, then, didn’t exactly live to ripe old ages.

That, though, leads us to Ethelbert of Kent, which is a much more confusing story.[2]  According to the Venerable Bede, “Ethelbert was son of Irminric, son of Octa, and after his grandfather Oeric, surnamed Oisc, the kings of the Kentish folk are commonly known as Oiscings. The father of Oeric was Hengist.”[3]

Cooper gives us Hengist, Oise, Irminric, Ethelbert.  I think we’re missing a generation in Cooper’s world.

Either way, we can learn two things here: first that the genealogy Cooper has tossed against the wall is based on some known account.  Second, the genealogy is at least somewhat believable.  At least, as far as the Anglo-Saxon kings are concerned.

But we have two gigantic problems, one of which I have already pointed out and a second which is extremely related.  There is the minor problem that there was no such thing as “East Anglia.”  There is also the equally minor problem that there was no such thing as Northumbria until around 600.  Basically, in 604 King Aethelfrith of Bernicia conquered Deira.  Then the East Angles got involved, Aethelfrith was killed, Bernicia and Deira fractured, and it wasn’t until 654 when Oswald, a son of Aethelfrith, re-conquered the whole area and expanded.

Even then, Northumbria wasn’t safe and wasn’t particularly long-lived.  But the point is that there was no “House of Northumbria” amongst the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain in the post-Roman world.  In fact, there could not have possibly been a “House of Northumbria.”

As best I can tell, the etymology of the term “Northumbria” is this: the lands north of the River Humber.[4]  Similarly, the etymology of “East Anglia” is, “That place over in the east where the Angles live.  When it gets right down to it, neither “Northumbria” nor “East Anglia” are particularly Germanic words.  “Anglia,” at least, comes from German roots.  But “Humber” pre-dates the Anglo-Saxon migration and is probably Celtic in origin.

The point is, there wouldn’t have been a family called “Northumbria” or “East Anglia” in northern Germany.  But that may well be considered splitting hairs.  So let’s go jump over to Alfred the Great’s House of Essex.

This is where it gets interesting.  Or, perhaps, tedious.  Depends on your levels of fascination with Anglo-Saxon chronology, I suppose.

Let’s go back two generations before Bill Cooper’s split in to the various houses.  The line goes like this:

Wooden
Baeldaeg
Brand
Freothogar
Freawine
Wig
Gewis
Esla
Elesa
Cerdic
Cynric

And we’ll stop with Cynric for reasons that are shortly to become clear.[5]  This is basically the same genealogy offered by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a history of the Anglo-Saxons commissioned right around the time of Alfred the Great.

Now, this is deeply interesting for those looking in to the history of Wessex.  See, the founder of Wessex is given as one Cerdic, who may or may not have been a real figure.  Cerdic popped in to history in the year 519 at the head of a tribe known as the “Gewisse,” from which I guess we get the word “Wessex.”  Conveniently, there is a guy named “Gewis” (or Giwis in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) just a couple generations before Cerdic.  This is astoundingly convenient…

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the genealogy of one Ida of Bernicia.[6]  The first three generations are exactly the same as the first three for our good friend Cerdic up there.  It is, I suppose, possible that Ida and Cerdic were cousins.  But it’s far more believable to think that a later chronicler just kind of borrowed Ida’s genealogy and appended it to Cerdic’s.

And what a genealogy it is, too.  Cooper lists one of his ancestors as a fellow named “Wooden.”  That’s a pretty odd name for a king, if you think about it for a moment.  In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (and, for that matter, in the work of the Venerable Bede, also carried on by Nennius in the Historia Brittonium), however, that individual appears, but with a slightly different name: Woden.  You might recognize him better according to his Norse name of Odin.  Or, possibly, by his name in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: Wednesday.[7]

Yup.  Woden.  This was, of course, that weird period of early Christianity and its clashes with Norse paganism when attempts were made to turn the gods in to semi-mythological heroes and to, thus, diminish them.

That doesn’t make it any more believable that the Anglo-Saxons descended from Woden.  And something tells me that if I’m not about to believe they came from Woden, I’m probably not going to buy the idea that they descended from Noah a mere 16 generations prior.

The question then comes up, “What could have driven the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers to create such a genealogy?”  More, “What could have caused later historians to continue the line?”  It’s simple, really.

Alfred the Great was the first of the tribal Anglo-Saxon kings to style himself as king of all of England.  But Wessex was a comparative upstart with absolutely no history before 519.  He needed a better lineage than that.  So either Alfred or his chroniclers borrowed from a different genealogy.  And no one was apparently the wiser.[8]

Unfortunately, though, no one apparently thought of the poor, credulous Bill Cooper’s of the world when they were making up genealogies.  So someone who wants to remain ignorant was able to find a convenient source of convenient ignorance.  And I got to spend a week of my life trying to understand Anglo-Saxon genealogy.

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[1]During what I guess we could call the “classical” period of Anglo-Saxon control of Britain, there was what is known as the “Heptarchy.”  These were Northumbria, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, Kent, Sussex, and Essex.  There were also minor kingdoms, among them Lindsey.

Now, this idea is considered problematic.  However, if we’re talking about a random genealogy from somewhere (specifically somewhere Bill Cooper thinks is reliable), then the idea that it would take five of the Heptarchy, discard two, and then throw in a random minor kingdom is problematic at best.

Further, the idea of some sort of “House” of East Anglia, specifically, is difficult to swallow.  There was no Bob East Anglia.  The term “East Anglia” quite literally refers to “the Angles who live to the East.”  It’s like saying that South Carolina was founded by the scion of the House of South Carolina.  Further, during the Anglo-Saxon period it was known as the “Kingdom of the East Angles.”  It didn’t officially become “East Anglia” until a Danish conquest in 869.

But, other than that, the idea of a “House of East Anglia” is totally believable.

[2] There are two Ethelberts listed in the Cooper genealogy.  The first is listed as Ethelbert(I)  The second is just Ethelbert.  There's nothing that's not confusing about that…

[3]Yes, I stole this from Wikipedia.  You don’t actually want me to put effort in to this, do you?

[4]Wikipedia informs me that Geoffrey of Monmouth, who we probably all remember, claimed that the River Humber was named after a “Humber the Hun,” who drowned in the river while attempting to invade Britain.

[5]And not just because Cerdic and Cynric were the bad guys in the King Arthur movie starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley.  But that’s reason enough, right?

[6]Conveniently enough, Cooper’s genealogy does not include Ida, as it completely ignores the existence of Bernicia, instead putting in a genealogy for Northumbria that is both impossible and not replicated anywhere else I’ve seen.

[7]It strikes me, having read both American Gods and Neverwhere in the last, like, week, that you can get better lessons in history from Neil Gaiman than Bill Cooper.  And actual gods are actual characters in Gaiman’s work.  But the man does his research.  I mean, as a life-long Midwesterner who was aware of the existence of the House on the Rock but didn’t actually care, I was reading the bit of American Gods that takes place in said book and thinking, “No way, he made that up.”  Then I looked it up.  Next time I’m back in the Wisconsin area I shall be visiting the House on the Rock.  That place is fucked up.

[8]If you want to know more, I present to you the Sisam Hypothesis.  Historical detective work can be fun.

AtF: On Hold

Yeah, so I'm about halfway through an AtF post and trying to puzzle my way through Anglo-Saxon dynastic succession.

It's giving me a headache and I've totally lost track of what I'm doing.  So I'll probably have to regroup on this one and finish it some other time.  I'd like to extend my sincerest apologies to the two of you who deeply, deeply care about the AtF series...

AtF: Descent in to Madness*

So I was seriously considering not doing After the Flood tonight.  I just wasn’t, y’know, feeling it.  It’s hard to feel After the Flood, really.  Also, I spent the entire day watching Doctor Who, which really sapped my enthusiasm for being reminded that Brits are also capable of creating things with absolutely zero redeeming value.

I decided that I was going to open the new chapter and see what I felt.

About five seconds later I was saying, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”  So here we are, doing After the Flood.  For fuck’s sake.

Chapter 6 is called “The Descent of the Anglo-Saxon Kings.”  It’s about…are you ready?  The Anglo-Saxons.  No, srsly.

Cooper starts out with a high school history paper introduction (he’s quite good at those).

It would not be difficult to go out and buy literally hundreds of books that deal with the history of the Saxons in England. It is a fascinating and popular subject, and the market abounds with books ranging from the seriously academic to 'coffee-table' books filled with pictures of Anglo-Saxon weaponry and other relics.

I don’t really have a problem with this.  I just put it there so we can laugh at it.  Oh, also because one teeny little bit of it is going to be kind of important in a few seconds.  Because, see, Cooper does that thing he does where he manages to transfer from “pedantic but benign” to “oh, for fuck’s sake!” over the course of a paragraph.  At least he got in a full sentence this time around.

Virtually all the popular works on the subject begin with the middle of the 5th century AD when the Saxons began to migrate to this country from their continental homes. Some books may even refer briefly to those continental homes in order to demonstrate to the reader that the Anglo-Saxons did not simply materialise but actually came from somewhere real. But that is virtually the only mention that is given to the pre-migration history of the Saxons. All that came before, we are left to assume, is lost in the mists of antiquity, and the pre-migration history of the Saxons is simply left as a blank page. Now why should this be?

Ooooh, I know this one!  Because we don’t know a whole hell of a lot about the Angles, the Jutes, or the Saxons?  Illiterate Germanic tribes weren’t big on the whole record keeping thing, after all.

There’s also that bit about how Cooper starts out talking about getting books about the Saxons that are limited in scope to the Saxon emigration to Britain.  Now, take it from me, when you’re doing history you have to figure out how to limit yourself.

I, for instance, once did a series of posts about battleships.  I originally wanted to write a post or two about a specific battleship.  But I realized that in order to write about that one specific battleship I would have to explain how battleships came in to being.  Then I realized that the story was only half over by the time we reached the USS Texas, so I had to carry it on to the end.  Still, I limited myself in that I only talked about non-battleship developments if they were necessary and only as they related (the development of the cruiser from the jeune ecole’s long-range surface raider to the protected cruiser to the light cruiser/heavy cruiser split in WWII to the modern cruisers we see today, for instance, is probably quite fascinating.  And it had absolutely nothing to do with anything).

I’m currently working on a series of posts about Byzantium.  It’s lead to much discussion about the topic.

Anyway, the point is, if you’re going to write about the Saxons in Britain, it’s a really good idea to limit your topic of conversation to the Saxons in Britain.  It’s also really, really easy to do that.  We know they came from the continent.  We know they were Germanic tribes.  We don’t know much else.  So if you slap on a quick introduction that basically says that, then you can go on to talk about what they did to Britain after moving.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of works out there about the Germanic tribes in northern Europe.  Some of those works might even be covered in the list of hundreds that Cooper just casually tosses out.  We, of course, don’t know this because he used the high school history paper introduction.

Now, I’ve probably tossed some variation on the term “high school paper introduction” out during this project.  I don’t know if I’ve ever actually properly discussed it, since it seems like the sort of thing that goes without saying.  Of course, the high school history paper introduction often says thing that seem to be the sort of thing that goes without saying.  So, yeah…

Either way, I’m sure anyone who was forced to write a paper or an essay back in high school knows how much of a pain in the ass they are.  You’re handed a topic, like the development of agricultural practices in the Fertile Crescent.  You don’t care about the development of agricultural practices in the Fertile Crescent.  You’ll never care about the development of agricultural practices in the Fertile Crescent.  And if you do get an A on a paper about agricultural practices in the Fertile Crescent the head cheerleader won’t fall madly in love with you and make out with you, so why the fuck should you care?[1]

If you’re a smart high school student you’ll know a few things.  First, you’ll know that there’s a format your teacher is looking for.  I was taught you need an introduction with three points and a thesis statement, three body paragraphs which covered each of those three points, and a conclusion that re-stated the thesis sentence.

If you can come up with three points and a thesis you’re 90% of the way there.  But in order to really make that grade you need a whiz-bang introduction statement.  It should be something that’s vague but on topic.  It should be something that’s catchy.  It doesn’t have to be cited, since it won’t be graded, so you can also get away with some flowery (and space filling) prose.  If all else (and I mean ALL ELSE) fails, it can include, “Webster’s Dictionary states that…”

You’re much better off stating the complexity of the problem, though.  Or the fact that everyone in the world is really, really interested in learning about the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.  So if you’re smart enough to not define agriculture according to the handiest dictionary, you’ll probably end up with something like, “Everyone can agree that human society would not be where it is today without the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.”

High schoolers can get away with that sort of utter crap.  If you try to pass it through in a three or four hundred level history course, well, you’re basically going to get graded down.  And your professor will probably take it as a sign that the rest of your thinking is equally as sloppy and sophomoric.

And if you attempt to write a book, chances are you’re going to be self-publishing on the internet for some snarky asshole to dissect at a later point in time.[3]

Point is, Cooper tossed out a statistic (hundreds of books) to defend his point (they don’t talk about a topic that he says they should).  We have absolutely no way of checking this, though, because he’s just making the sweeping generalizations we’d expect out of a high school history class and not someone who is, theoretically, serious and educated about the study of history.  Of course, we know that Bill Cooper is not actually particularly educated or serious about the study of history, so that makes sense.  Especially when we get to the conclusion of his high school introductory paragraph.

Is it because the Saxons themselves left no record of what came before? Or, as in the case of the early Britons, is it because what the Saxons did have to say about their own past, runs counter to the modernist creed?

Can Bill Cooper ever take Option 1?  No, of course he can’t.  We always have to go through the looking glass in to Crazy Cooper Conspiracy World[4] where illiterate societies left perfect records going all the way back to the Bible itself, but the evil modernists have taken it upon themselves to destroy all records and make the baby Jesus cry or whatever the hell it is that those of us who understand history were doing while he was eating tree bark during recess.[5]

After this random vomitus, Cooper tosses up one of his sweet, sweet genealogies.  Apparently it was written by the Saxons.  And apparently it goes all the way back to Noah.  As proof, he offers two quotes from the year 1600 and “evidence” in the form of the fact that the Saxons’ favorite book of the Bible was Genesis.

No.  Seriously.  I’m beginning to see this as the plot to some novel or horror movie (like, I dunno, House of Leaves or any number of Stephen King novels or something) where the reader is actually watching a character slowly go from engaged in a fascinating puzzle to bugnuts fucking crazy.  Cooper just gets nuttier with every chapter.

But we’ll get to that next time.

-----------------------

[1]Stupid high school.

[2]Interestingly enough, that’s still basically a useful format.  I mean, it requires hefty modification to be properly used outside of a high school classroom, but the format fits.  That’s probably why they taught it.

[3]Yeah.  I went there.

[4]I tried to come up with a full alliteration for that.  Nothing struck me.

[5]I’m mean tonight.  Probably because I’m out of bourbon.  Yeah, that’s right.  I’m a mean drunk of a historian, but I’m also a mean sober historian.  In completely unrelated news, I’m also single.

*Totally unrelated to, well, anything: the movie Descent was on the station formerly known as "Sci-Fi" today.  I've never watched the movie for more than about a minute and have no intention of ever watching the movie. But the description on the DirecTV guide was something about a woman plotting her revenge against a rapist, which fascinated me because it looked like a movie about a bunch of women in a cave, and from half-remembered previews from the better part of a decade ago, I think they ended up being chased by...y'know, cave things.  So I looked it up on IMDb.  There were four different descriptions, none of which agreed with each other and none of which seemed to have anything to do with the movie as I understand it.

What the hell is up with that?  Is Descent like the Doctor's magic pad, where people look at it and see whatever they want?  Because I have to admit, I looked at it and saw Doctor Who, but that's just because I then pressed play on, well, Doctor Who...

AtF: Stupidity Matters

I’ve been running chapter 5 of After the Flood around in my head for the last week.  Well, not really.  I’ve given it about as much thought as it deserves, which is about ten minutes whilst trying to figure out two things:

1.  Should I just skip it over completely after only giving it about a page worth of deconstruction, and
2.  Why do I hate this chapter so much?

I mean, it’s not like I don’t have reason to hate it.  It’s a terrible chapter in the middle of a terrible book meant to defend a terrible supposition.  But there’s something about this chapter that’s even less worthwhile than the others but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

At first I thought it was because it was just a reiteration of things that have already been discussed.  Then I realized that it’s a reiteration of things I have already discussed.  It’s not really Bill Cooper’s fault that I worked ahead.

Then I thought that it was because the chapter is unnecessary.  It just basically reads like a Bible genealogy.  Such and such king did this, then was replaced by this guy, who did that.  But if you’re planning on arguing that this one genealogy is the truth when no one else agrees, you kind of have to do shit like that.

The problem with it, really, is that it’s neither interesting nor informative.

History always has to combine interesting and informative in some way, shape, or form.  Interesting, of course, is always good.  People like interesting.  They buy interesting, tell other people to buy it, get it on the New York Times Bestseller list.  I make it a point to give a run-down of any interesting history books I run across on this blog.  But if something is simply interesting without actually being informative, then it fails as history.  There is absolutely no reason to read a book that is exceptionally well-written that tells you things you already know and presents arguments you already agree with.  At that point your time is better spent with a good novel.[1]

So we get to this horrid, hateful chapter in After the Flood.

It basically comes across like Cooper did a cut and paste from Nennius, or possibly Tysilio itself, since I’m pretty sure that they’re basically the same.  Then, having done that, he cut it all down to the most boring possible parts of Nennius/Tysilio.

See, here’s the fascinating thing about pre-modern history:[2] it’s filled with crazy stories about super-human heroes, monsters, and grand environmental changes.  There’s a simple reason for this:

People actually believed all kinds of crazy crap.  They believed, in short, in dragons.  Now, no one actually saw a dragon.  However, something happened and a legend was associated with a particular person or place.  That legend was subsequently embellished and all of the sudden there were dragons and giants and water-logged women tossing scimitars at any king who happened to be passing by.  It’s just what happens.  And, of course, sometimes the people involved actively encourage such beliefs because it makes them that much cooler and more legit.[3]

Also, if you happen to have recently usurped a throne, “I’m the son of a god,” is a much better explanation than, “I’m an opportunistic scumbag,” for getting people to go along with it.  I’m just sayin’…

Either way, there isn’t any fantastical crap in this chapter, except for one brief mention of a “monster.”  But there should be fantastical crap because I saw it in Tysilio.  So either Nennius cut it out after stealing Tysilio’s work or Cooper did.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying, “And this story pops up, but it’s probably not believable because, y’know, there aren’t any dragons.”  But to copy the entire genealogy in order to support your point that it records the succession of kings that proves that Nennius was right then not mention that, oh, hey, it mentions a bunch of dragons and shit, is intellectually dishonest.

Which makes it exactly the sort of thing Bill Cooper would do.

Again, history should be either interesting or informative.  Now, when we talk about “informative,” it’s often limited to data points.  I read something and I learn that Person A was actually related to Person B, which I did not know before, or Battle C was fought on Date D, which resulted in the death of Person E.  This is information in its most basic form.

But good history can provide a level of information that’s far, far more interesting.  By discussing why dragons would pop up or all those kings seem to be children of gods, the historian can provide information about why people in a particular place and time thought the way they did.  And in learning why people in the past thought the way they did, we can learn why they built the societies they did.  And in learning about that, we learn about why we live the way we do, for we are inheritors of the past.

This, I just realized, finally gets around to why Bill Cooper is neither interesting nor informative.  There’s nothing to be learned from any of this.  It’s just an angry rant against modern scholarship and a defense of a static universe.

In Bill Cooper’s world there shouldn’t be progress.  So the society that was created by god some five thousand years ago is all we need and any progress we’ve made is inherently evil.

He doesn’t want us to learn anything.  He just wants us to know that he is right and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong.  And, beyond that, he just wants everyone to stop thinking.

This, too, works as an overall critique of conservative religion.  I managed to think myself right out of Evangelical Christianity, partially because I learned too much about history to take the Bible literally or even particularly seriously.  And once I realized that I couldn’t trust the Bible and there wasn’t anything particularly special about it or the Israelites when compared to other societies and their holy books from the same time, the desire to keep going to church pretty much disappeared.

The only way to get people to stay in such religious systems is to make sure they never learn anything.  So rather than, say, encouraging people to learn the social and political pressures that went in to the creation of the European Union, the conservative religious pedants would rather encourage people to be freaked out because the European Union is actually the many-headed beast from the sea from Revelation and the world will shortly be ending.  It’s fuck stupid to anyone who can actually dedicate thought to the topic, but that doesn’t matter if you refuse to let that happen.

It’s also strangely helpful that there are so damn many interpretations of scripture and so many different denominations and sects.  If everyone is wasting their time arguing about whether Baptists or Catholics are the real, true Christians, then no one is wondering if Christianity itself is a worthwhile pursuit.  If the Evangelicals are trying to run the Presbyterians out of the fold for being too damn liberal, the Evangelicals are going to close ranks and fight, rather than wander off to go learn things about their world.

And that’s why demolishing Bill Cooper’s stupidity matters.  It’s not about the idea itself, it’s about the system that allows such stupidity.

----------------------------------

[1]Not to disparage the novel.  I’ve actually been getting a little antsy about how long it’s taking me to finish John Julius Norwich’s fantastic Byzantium trilogy because I’ve got Neil Gaiman’s American Gods in the hopper.  The simple point is that I’m not expecting to learn anything about history from Gaiman’s book.  So if the choice were between, say, American Gods and a book that was just a synthesis of everything I already knew about Byzantium, I’d have skipped to the fiction long ago.

[2]Um, this isn’t a blanket statement.  But, basically, if we’re talking about history outside of the Greco-Roman tradition there’s a damn good chance there will be some crazy shit involved.  In Medieval Europe, as the learning of the Romans and Greeks disappeared, superstition and crazy monster stories worked their way back in.

There’s actually a fairly simple lesson to be drawn from this: the learned Greeks and Romans largely relied on logic and empirical evidence and recorded their observations about the universe accordingly.  Ideas that came out as, “This happened because of the will of the gods,” still showed up in the Greek and Roman histories and things weren’t done without attempting to divine various portents, but you simply don’t see Herodotus, Thucydides, or even the Xenophons and Julius Caesars talking about mythological creatures as characters in their stories unless they’re talking about how a place is connected to a myth.

Once you get out of that empirical tradition, however, all kinds of crazy crap pops up.  And when you talk about a society that has lost a lot of its learning and replaced it with a single-minded pursuit of a single source of knowledge that is, itself, suspect, then, well, there’s a lesson to be learned.

We can always have a second Dark Age.  It takes a lot less for us to lose our history than we’d like to think.  And when we lose our history, we lose our minds.

[3]We know, for instance, that Alexander claimed to be the son of Zeus and his mother passed on all sorts of rumors about portents at his birth.  If we take this back to a legendary ruler like a Perseus who was also supposedly a demi-god it’s not all that hard to imagine that there might have actually been a proto-Perseus who encouraged people to think he was a child of a god.

Of course we also have places like Egypt, where the Pharaohs were gods on Earth.  The Chinese Emperors had the same deal going.  And the end of the Pacific War during World War II was complicated by the fact that the Japanese Emperor was still regarded as being divine.

AtF: Kinda Half-Assing it...

So I didn’t let Bill Cooper harsh my Rogapalooza buzz.  Hell, I didn’t let anything harsh my Rogapalooza buzz.  On the Fourth of July I declared independence from After the Flood.  Also, I watched Doctor Who on BBC America in a fit of patriotism most excellent.[1]

Either way, AtF is back.  But I kind of have a problem with the current chapter.  See, all this chapter does is detail the stories of the British kings as handed down by Nennius.  Y’know, Brutus of Troy through Yvor and Yni, with stops along the way at Leir and Uther Pendragon and Arthur, so I find there’s very little I can say about this chapter that I haven’t already said.

It’s just this massive, massive pile of bullshit.

Interestingly enough, though, at no point in the chapter does Cooper mention that parts of the origin story for Britain as handed down by Nennius include stories of dragons.  Or Merlin.  Or, as best I can tell, giants.  It’s as if Cooper’s worried that mentioning such things might, y’know, ruin things for him.

It’s a tad disingenuous to not bring those things up, I think.

Either way, I’m trying to come up with reasons not to skip this chapter and nothing really comes to mind.  So I think I might just do that.

But as a delaying tactic before I go and do anything else, it seems that this might be a good time to discuss something else.  Very few Christians actually believe any of this shit.  Even the Christians who believe in Biblical literalism probably don’t.  This, unfortunately, is not an excuse.  It’s an indictment.

Now, there are those Christians who take the Genesis accounts as a sort of allegory.  For them the universe doesn’t have to actually have popped in to existence some 6014 years ago for the story to make sense.  It’s a big harder to engage these folks on grounds of real history.  In many cases I don’t actually want to.  Some of the best people I know are Christians or Jews who understand the idea that you don’t actually have to take the Bible literally and yet still live a life that includes religion.

I’ve come to understand that the people who don’t take the Bible literally but still think of religion as important are generally the folks who believe that religion basically says, “Be good to each other.”  I have no quarrel with that category of humanity.  Quite frankly, I believe that those of us who don’t believe do ourselves a disservice when we antagonize them.[2]

Then there are the literalists.  Some literalists, to be honest, are harmless.  They just think that the Bible is right and they should follow it.  They’ll tend to evangelize, but tend to not attempt to engage in social reforms to turn the world Christian.  Oh, believe me, they’ll sit in church and listen to sermons about it.  But that’s slightly different.  Some literalists, however, are not so harmless.  They’re the ones trying to ruin education standards and whatnot.

I only bring this up because, um, I’m bored, I guess.

I dunno.  Many, many months ago I had a well-meaning, self-appointed defender of truth from my former life tell me that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with After the Flood because most Christians don’t actually believe in the crap that Cooper spews.  This is true.  I, myself, cannot imagine taking Cooper seriously at any point after my freshman year in high school.[3]

But, of course, this series isn’t about disproving Christianity.  It’s about disproving Biblical literalism.  And talking about how real historians do their thing.  And drinking bourbon on Sunday nights.[4]

I’ve kind of forgotten why I’m writing this post.  It started out as an explanation, but as I’ve gone through the explanation I’ve realized that I’m pretty sure I’ve already explained all of this before.

So, I’ll assume that anyone reading this gets the point, since there’s also far less of a point than I thought there was.

Instead I’ll tell a story.

I took a nap this afternoon.  Naps are always weird for me, as I generally take them accidentally and I decide upon waking up that I don’t want to do anything.[5]  This particular nap involved a nightmare (erm, afternoonmare…).  And I loved it, because, well, allow me to explain.

The nightmare was this: I was back in Rogapalooza.  I’d ended up staying at an Opryland-esque themed resort hotel.  Over the course of my dream I was convinced there was one more show I could get to, but I wasn’t sure.

So, basically, I spent the entire nightmare attempting to get to the Peacemakers’ website and confirm.  But my iPhone wasn’t taking me where I needed to be and I couldn’t get a good wi-fi connection with my laptop.  Also, there were weird interludes where I was doing random things like taking boat tours and freaking out because I wasn’t on the internet.

Also, there was a commercial break.  It was an ad for some sort of anti-virus computer service and all of the visuals involved Chinese construction workers filling holes with rubber cement whilst Triad members attacked them.

Once I woke up (and realized I was in my own bed, and that it wasn’t 7:14 in the evening), all I could think was, “Man, it’s awesome living in the 21st Century.”

I mean, even a 21st Century nightmare is about crazy technological shit.

Also, that’s way more interesting than Bill Cooper.  At least it is to me.

--------------------------------

[1]Okay, so I’ve seen all of, like, six episodes of Doctor Who.  Maybe twelve at the most.  But pretty much everyone over at Slacktivist watches and discusses the show, so I feel like I have a pretty strong grounding in what it’s about.  Here’s the thing, though.  The atmospherics on the show can be fantastic.  The reason I watched it on the Fourth was because the night before I was watching the weeping angel episode and walked away thinking, “Holy shit, what a mind fuck.”  And I love a good mind fuck when it’s done right.

And then the Daleks show up.  Seriously, those things are slightly less frightening than R2-D2.  I mean, I’m guessing it’s one of those things where the Daleks showed up back in Series 1 in the ‘70s or something, and rolling trash cans seemed all, um, within budget.  But wow.  Couldn’t they have done what Star Trek did with the Klingons and just, y’know, brought newer, scarier, and less laughable Daleks out with just a hand wave?

Also, Karen Gillan is gorgeous.  Just thought I’d throw that out there, since I’m sure you all care.

[2]Man alive.  Now I’m one of those terrible appeasers that everyone hates on at Pharyngula.  Allow me to make this distinction: science is science, history is history, and religion is religion.  If science says something that goes against religion, teach the science.  If history says something that goes against religion, teach the history.  Period.  There should be no quarter given where truth is involved.  But if the religious folks want to tie themselves up in knots figuring out how to reconcile one with the other, let them.  I don’t so much care.

What it basically boils down to is this: many religious people are decent folks who just want everyone to live their lives and understand that there are people who disagree with them and it’s okay.  I’m cool with that.

[3]Of course, in my case that was one of the many data points on my long slide to non-Christianness.  If you can’t take Genesis literally, then you can’t take the story of Adam and Eve literally, then you can’t take the whole thing about sin entering the world through Adam and Eve literally.

Oops.

[4]Mmmm, Woodford Reserve.  Still the only bourbon recommended to me by Stephen Fry.

[5]It’s really quite odd.  Let’s say that there’s something that’s going to happen that I’ve been excited about for weeks.  Months, even.  I have to leave at six to get there.  I take a nap and wake up at 5:30.  I’ll then spend the next ten or fifteen minutes having to convince myself to go, because for some reason I’ve awakened from the nap thinking, “I so totally don’t want to go do that thing.”

AtF: Persecution, Persecution Most Foul!

And here we go. Another chapter, another collection of pointless and bizarre non sequiturs waiting to be explored. I’m well armed with some New Belgium Skinny Dip and I’ve got some St. Arnold Brown Ale to back it up if need be. And as we all know, need will be.

Fortunately, though, Bill Cooper starts the new chapter by making well-supported points backed up by proper citations. It’s really quite refreshing. I’m deeply impressed.

I had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?

What he actually begins with is a bunch of unsupported supposition.

What follows is a summary of the history of the early kings of the early Britons as it is given in both Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh chronicles. It is a recorded history that was consigned to oblivion after the massacre, at the instigation of Augustine, of the British monks at Bangor in AD 604 and was thus entirely unknown or ignored by the later Saxon and Norman chroniclers of England. Consequently, it came to be generally and unquestioningly assumed amongst English scholars by the 16th and 17th centuries that no such record had ever existed, and that works such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's or the Welsh chronicle were forgeries and fairy tales. That opinion persists today.

Think about the image being presented here. Specifically, let us consider the narrative being advanced by Mr. Cooper in terms of his larger goal in presenting After the Flood.

Christianity took root in Britain between the period where it was adopted as the official Roman religion and the withdrawal of Roman forces from the British Isles. When the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes arrived they drove what Christian communities there were in to hiding, leaving the main Christian enclaves on the island in Wales and Cornwall. At the tail-end of the Sixth Century the Pope sent a mission to Britain to bring the island under Papal authority. This mission was lead by Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo, who was kinda dead at the time).

Augustine built up support in Kent and Essex, specifically with Ethelbert of Kent. But reaching the Christians in Wales and Cornwall was going to be far more difficult. In their time of separation from Rome they’d developed their own customs and traditions, a notion that’s roughly as surprising as the fact that the sun rose this morning.

One of the not-so-deep, dark secrets of Christianity is the sheer number of varieties of Christianity that existed throughout history. Denominations are not a modern invention by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, if you read between the lines of the New Testament, the first sects of Christianity appeared basically from the moment of Jesus’s death. There was the Pauline idea of Christianity, which clashed with Peter’s group in Antioch and James’s group in Jerusalem. There was the conflict between the followers of Paul and the followers of Apollos. There were also the Gnostics and the Judaizers, who got a lot of play as opponents but don’t have their own voice. But the point is that there were already sects of Christians from the very beginning.

So the idea that there wouldn’t have been some division between the Welsh churches and the Roman church after a couple centuries of non-communication is laughable. When the Welsh bishops showed up to talk to Augustine in 603 he was all, “Hey, join us,” and they were all, “Nah, thanks, we’re good.” Legend has it that they consulted with a wise old hermit who told them that if Augustine didn’t rise to greet them then that meant he was a disrespectful jerk and they shouldn’t hang out with him. Chances are that the mention of disagreements over the observance of Easter and the tonsure (although, maddeningly enough, I haven’t managed to find anything that says what, precisely, those disagreements were) that were actually the source of the continued schism.

The monks of Bangor, as best we can tell, then went back to their monastery and did monkish things. Augustine of Canterbury let slip the mortal coil in the year 605. Ethelbert did the same in 613.

Then, sometime around 616, the monks of Bangor were killed. It’s just that they were killed by AEthelfrith, a pagan king. And what their slaughter had to do with an ecclesiastical council from the previous decade escapes me completely. But since when has Bill Cooper been willing to let logic and the real story get in the way of a good narrative about persecution?

Because, you see, that’s what Bill Cooper’s real narrative is. It drips from every paragraph, every sentence, every word of every sentence: persecution. Those evil intellectuals are persecuting the people with the real story to keep them quiet. And according to Cooper that persecution goes back to the very point when the Roman Catholic Church put the brave Welsh monks to the sword to force them to toe the party line. It doesn’t matter one bit that Augustine had been in the grave for more than a decade and a pagan king killed the monks of Bangor.

The facts are inconvenient to the story. And, really, who is going to go to all the effort of fact checking? We should simply believe Bill Cooper because he is a man of truth who is presenting the Truth and there is nothing else to be considered.

Anyway, he continues:

We have seen, however, in the previous chapter how these records enjoy a great deal of historical vindication in spite of modernism's cursory and fashionable dismissal of them. But here, plain and unadorned, is the story that the chronicles themselves tell, a story that no child will have learnt at his desk in any school of this land. It spans over two thousand years, and its survival to the present day, being little short of a miracle, is a tribute to those Welsh scholars of old who recognised its importance and preserved it entire for our reading.

Yeah. Not so much. But do you see it? Do you see the persecution brought about by that horrible modernism? Do you see the way the lie to the children? Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?

Anyway, we’re now going to get the same goddamn story we got in the last chapter. No. Seriously.

Anchises, known to us from other histories[1], fled with his son, Aeneas, from the burning ruins of Troy, and they made their way to the land that is nowadays called Italy, settling with their people on the banks of the river Tiber around what was later to become Rome. The indigenous population was ruled over by Latinus who received Aeneas and his people with kindness and hospitality, in return for which Aeneas defeated Latinus' foe, Turnus, king of the Rutuli.

Here’s a tip for deciding on the veracity of any historical origin story: if there’s an eponymous ruler, chances are it’s not real. Rome was not founded by a dude named Romulus. There was probably nobody named Latinus, either. I knew a guy named Troy in high school. Chances are really, really good that he did not found the city of Troy.

I mean, imagine if, for a moment, you walked in to a history class and learned that the initial ruler of the United States of America was George Americus. You’d think that’s crazy (I hope). Civilizations are generally not named by a single ruler. Most civilizations are named by other people, but those who actually had the wherewithal to name themselves generally go with some variation of “all of us who live right here” or “the people who were made the most awesome by [insert god here],” but in their native tongue.

The lesson, which a lot of people seem to miss out on, is that civilization is not the work of an individual. The concept of one man starting a city, or a nation, or an empire, is the very antithesis of the idea of civilization. Say you’re looking at the book of Genesis. There’s a bit where it says that Cain went off and founded a city somewhere. This is a confusing passage to those of us who understand the idea of what a city is. One guy by himself does not a city make. What the writer of Genesis was attempting to do was connect Cain to a specific geographic location. But to take that story as an indication that Cain actually founded a city when he was one of three people on the planet is utter foolishness.

Of course our good friend Bill Cooper believes this to be true. So he has no problems with the idea that there was a Roman king named Latinus, nor does he have a problem with the idea that there was a fellow named Brutus from which we can derive the word “Britain.”

It’s sheer intellectual laziness. Of course by pointing that out I’m persecuting the poor man.

Convenient trap of logic, that…

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[1]Fun fact: in Greek mythology Anchises was the lover of Aphrodite, making Aeneas the son of Anchises and Aphrodite.  While the idea of a classical Greek goddess being loved by a Trojan is kinda silly (what with the Trojans not being Hellenes.  And the inhabitants of Greece not really being Greeks in that sense yet, either), there's a bigger issue at play.  Is not Bill Cooper tacitly allowing for the existence of the Greek Pantheon here?  I mean, he's telling the story of a son of a Greek demi-god as the founder of Britain...

AtF: LOST in Time

There's not AtF this week.  I was too busy watching LOST.

For the record, I've given six years of my life to that show.  It's been, at times, infuriating and aggravating.  But the finale was as satisfying a conclusion as I could have asked.

Oh, and for the record:  called it.  Way back in, like, season 2.

AtF: How Icarus Got His Groove Back

We’re back for more.  And by “we,” I mean, “me.”  I made the mistake of engaging in a foolhardy bet, though, so there’s going to be some rough terrain ahead.

See, I made a bet that it’s possible to find a line Glenn Bek won’t cross and from the moment I could find incontrovertible proof that he has no line, I wouldn’t drink for a month.  Well…



 So I’m completely sober.  But I must soldier on because…um, something something contractual obligations…?

Either way, we’re fortunate to be at one of the funniest interludes in William Cooper B.A.’s comedy of erroneous logic.  See, apparently Brutus’s travelogue mentioned that he visited an island called Levkas.  Apparently Geoffrey of Monmouth mentioned the oak forests on said island.  Cooper then makes an utterly obvious leap of logic.

For Geoffrey of Monmouth to be aware of these woods, they must have been mentioned in the original and ancient source-material that he was translating, and we can only ask ourselves whether the presence of oak forests on this sacred island which the Britons long remembered, and the fact that the early Druids of Britain ever afterwards held the oak tree to be particularly and peculiarly sacred, are entirely unconnected.

Now, I’m no expert on the druids.  Technically speaking, nobody is an expert on the druids.  We know absolutely nothing about them, as the Romans weren’t really big fans of running comparative religion symposia.  The druids were outlawed, pushed back, marginalized, and basically driven to extinction from Julius Caesar’s time.  However, what Cooper seems to think we know of the druids comes from Pliny.  To wit:

The Druidae... esteeme nothing more sacred in the world, than Misselto, and the tree whereupon it breedeth, so it be on Oke... they seem well enough to be named thereupon Dryidae in Greeke, which signifieth ... Oke-priests.

I’ve got approximately three problems with this.  First, mistletoe does not come from oak trees.  That’s like saying moss comes maple trees or mushrooms come from beech logs.  Second, although there is a connection between dryads and oak trees, that comparison on the part of Pliny is specious at best.  Third, what was Pliny doing naming a bunch of British priests using a Greek word?  I won’t find out the answer to that final question, though, because Cooper, as he so often does, gives me the source he took the quote from without telling me where he got the Pliny quote.

The answers to my questions don’t actually matter, though.  The idea that it actually matters that there was an island with oak trees in the Mediterranean and that druids liked oak trees are connected require you to believe, well, that a Trojan hero had a grandson who wrested Britain away from giants.

By the way, one of the big pro-Brutus arguments is that Brutus named the island after himself.  So, y’know, Brutus/Britain.  Except that was the name given to the island by, wait for it, the Romans.  I just thought I’d toss that little nugget in to the discussion.  Chew on it for a while we go back to Levkas.

However, of added interest is the fact that both Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh chronicle record the presence on the island of a ruined temple that was dedicated to the goddess Diana. There then follow the descriptions of a most complex ritual performed by Brutus and the nature and attributes of the goddess Diana that could only have come from a pagan source. But there is an added aspect to all this. Diana was considered to be the personification of the moon, and although there is no apparent trace remaining today of the temple of Diana on the island, there are the ruins of a temple to Diana's theological husband, the sun god Apollo.

Okay, four things strike me about this particular bit.  First, the rampant incuriosity displayed by Cooper with the descriptions of ritual “that could only have come from a pagan source.”  Actually, it’s not just incuriosity, it’s a sniffy, haughty, dismissiveness.[1]  Second, the idea that it doesn’t matter that there’s no archaeological proof of a temple to Diana doesn’t matter, since there is a temple to Apollo is hilarious.  It’s like getting directions to a McDonald’s, then insisting that you’re in the right place because there’s a Burger King and they’re both places that sell shitty hamburgers.[2]  Third, um, Diana was Apollo’s twin sister, not wife.  Theologically speaking, Cooper’s dead wrong.  Also, sister makes way more sense than wife from a “theological” perspective.  Furthermore, is that really an appropriate use for “theological?”  Fourth, if we’re talking about the island of Levkas in the period where Rome hasn’t yet asserted itself in Greece, shouldn’t that have been a temple to Artemis?[3]

The thing is, though, that he uses this to set up what may well be the official dumbest thing I have read so far in my slog through Cooper’s dreck.  That temple to Apollo was up on a cliff, which apparently meant it was associated with an awesome ritual:

... it was from here that the priests of Apollo would hurl themselves into space, buoyed up - so it was said - by live birds and feathered wings. The relationship between the ritual and the god seems obscure, although there was an early connection between Apollo and various birds. Ovid confirms that the virtues of the flight and the healing waters below the cliff had been known since the time of Deucalion, the Greek Noah.[4]

In case you’re wondering, his source for that story is Ernie Bradford’s The Companion Guide to the Greek Islands.  If you’re thinking, “Gee, that sounds like some sort of Lonely Planet-esque travel guide,” well, you’d be right.  This reminds me of that one time my Illinois history prof gave me a zero on one of my essay answers on a test because I attempted to use Zagat’s Chicago Restaurants as a source on the Black Hawk War.[5]

Awesomely, though, the hits just keep on coming.  Tonight’s entry is a murderer’s row of teh stupid.

Now there are definite echoes of this curious and most ancient ritual in the story of one of Brutus'not far removed descendants, king Bladud (Blaiddyd in the Welsh chronicle. See next chapter). Bladud, it is recorded, made himself pinions and wings and learned how to fly. He only had one lesson and the flight was predictably a short one, but the important detail is that Bladud was killed as he struck the temple of Apollo that once stood in the city known today as London.

No.  Seriously.  We’ve just played out Johnny Dangerously’s grapevine[6], history-style.  The story of Brutus mentions an island with a temple to Diana and some oak trees.  The island in question doesn’t actually have a temple to Diana, but it does have a temple to Apollo and oak trees are sacred to druids.  There’s a legend associated with that temple that the priests would jump out the window, borne by birds.  A descendent of Brutus tried to build his own wings and fly, but crashed in to a temple of Apollo, instead.  Ergo, Cooper’s stupid premise is absolutely correct.

We’re almost to the end of the chapter.  Cooper throws out a couple more craptacular gems that are too short for their own entries, so I’ll deal with them here.

Yet this is not the only curious detail to emerge out of the early British record. What, for example, are we to make of the mention of Greek Fire in the story of Brutus? This appears as tan gwyllt in the Welsh chronicle, and as sulphureas tedas and greco igne in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account. (27) As Flinders Petrie rightly points out, Greek Fire was entirely unheard of in Europe before the time of the Crusades. Did an early medieval forger have a lucky guess?

I already dealt with this.  Greek Fire didn’t exist for nearly two thousand years after the supposed journey of Brutus.  So, um, I’m going to go with not a lucky guess on the part of some forger.

Further, there is the name of the king against whom Brutus fought in order to win the freedom of his followers. His name is given as Pendrassys in the Welsh chronicle and as Pandrasus in Geoffrey. (29) I have seen no attempt whatever to identify this king, and there is now no possibility of tracing the name in the surviving records of ancient Greece, although such tracing would itself be futile.

Do you know why you haven’t seen any attempt, Bill Cooper?  Because the only place he gets mentioned is in Tysilio.  And he didn’t exist.  But that doesn’t stop Cooper from coming up with an awesome explanation.  Did we doubt him for even a moment?

Pandrasus is not, it seems, a proper name at all but a title - pan Doris - meaning king of all the Dorians. Again, archaeology tells us that the Dorian Greeks overran this part of the Grecian mainland at just about the same period (12th-11th centuries BC) in which the story of Brutus begins. [7] So it is clear that the name Pandrasus belongs firmly and authentically to the times that are dealt with in the opening portions of the British account.

This, again, is a fail on every possible level.  You don’t get to just make up linguistic naming conventions whenever they suit you.  I mean, unless you’re a thirteen year-old attempting to write an epic book about elves and fairies and shit.  Then you can, but only if you promise to be embarrassed about it later in life.

Either way, the funny thing is that one of the possible etymological origins of the word “Dorian” is actually dōris, which could, theoretically, create the word Cooper is blindly fumbling about for.  Except that would mean that there’s a dude running about named King All-woods.  And I’m not sure how you get from pan-Dorian to “Pandrasus,” anyway, unless you’re running a Babelfish translation filter through Welsh, Old English, and modern English.  Or you're just making shit up.

Oh.  Right.

-

[1]Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I gloss over passages of such things myself.  Many ancient authors did very much love their descriptions of ritual.  I’ll also tend to skip over long letters that authors toss in to the middle of explanations of things where it’s, “So-and-so disagreed, sending a letter to his opponent saying that he would not do it, as we can see here: [insert three or four paragraphs from said letter].”  However, the reason I tend to skip over such things is because they’re not necessary for whatever I’m working on.  If I were quoting such things I’d mention that I was skipping a bunch of stuff.  But it’s a far cry from, “There’s a bunch of here that’s not relevant to the subject at hand,” to, “There’s a bunch of stuff that nobody should give a shit about because it’s written by a silly old pagan.”

[2]Shitty, strangely delicious hamburgers.  Seriously, what’s up with that?  There’s absolutely no way that you can make an objective argument that a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is actually good in any way, but it’s still fucking delicious.

[3]It’s astounding how much utter fail is packed in to that single paragraph.

[4]The story of Deucalion is that Zeus had decided to end humanity with a flood.  Prometheus warned Deucalion, who built an ark, provisioned it, and hopped aboard with his wife.  And no one else.  No animals, either.  When the flood waters receded he was instructed by an oracle at Themis (how there was a living oracle is somewhat beyond me…) to throw stones over his shoulders.  So Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, did so.  His became men, hers became women, and in so creating they re-populated the Earth.  Fortunately, though, no ancient Greek mythology apologist has seen fit to write a book called After Deucalion’s Flood, arguing that those stone people eventually settled in Britain…

[5]Because, yes, I am that stupid.

[6]It’s good stuff.  Also, that movie contains one of my favorite movie lines of all time: “Did you know your name is an adverb?”



[7]For this bit he cites Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary.  I’m not even sure what to make of that.

AtF: National Rent-An-Epic

So I’m doing something different with AtF this week.  Last week’s critical shortage of beverages of an alcoholic nature has turned in to a complete lack of any beverages of an alcoholic nature.  I can’t work under these conditions.

Well, I can and often do work under these conditions.  I, in fact, make a habit of doing it for at least 40 hours a week.  It’s the “work on After the Flood” part of the conditions that cause problems.  So tonight we’re going to put After the Flood itself on hold and talk about something that neither Bill Cooper nor the writer of Tysilio seems to understand: the National Epic.

Now, the primary difference between the writer of Tysilio and Bill Cooper is this: Bill Cooper doesn’t have a freaking excuse.  I think I mention that bit once a week or so in reference to some random aspect of this stupid book, but it comes up so very often that it seems like something worth mentioning regularly.  Because we in the modern world have the ability to look at a document and say, “Hey, this isn’t actually history.  It looks a lot more like some sort of ahistorical legend.”

Enter the National Epic.  We’ve got two to work with just within the realm of After the Flood, so to keep it simple I think I’ll stick with them.

Let’s start with Homer.  He sure loves his donuts…wait.  Wrong Homer.  We want to see the blind poet guy here.

Homer’s great two-part poem is very much a National Epic of the Hellenistic people.  It sets forward an idea of who the Hellenistic people are, or who they should ideally be.

In the Illiad we primarily see Achilles as the hero.  He knows that if he’s to go to Troy he will die, but his name will be remembered forever.  So he goes, seeking glory and victory.  This is the Greek ideal of arête.  Glory matters above all else.

Achilles is counterpointed by Agamemnon.  The king is craven and cowardly, sending his men forward to die while taking their spoils for himself.  There’s a fantastic bit in Christopher Logue’s War Music where he compares Agamemnon addressing the troops to a modern head of state boarding a helicopter while the press shouts questions that can’t be heard over the rotor wash.

In the Odyssey we see Odysseus as the hero.  He’s constantly faced with terrible dilemmas that can only be overcome with cunning.  Of course we’ve already seen Odysseus’s cunning with the Trojan Horse, but in the Odyssey that cunning is allowed to come fully out.  We also get a notion of the Greek ideal from Penelope, waiting for Odysseus to return while all the suitors line up to gain her hand.  Of course Odysseus has no such prohibition, but, hey…

When Virgil wrote the Aeneid he saw Odysseus in a very different light.  When the Trojans find the Horse drawn up outside their gates the seer admonished all to, “Beware Greeks bearing gifts.”  He was, of course, ignored, and that fatal gift was brought in to the city.

Aeneas escaped the destruction and went on his own wanderings before finding himself in Italy.  Over the course of his epic poem, then, Virgil used Aeneas to set forth the ideals of the Roman citizen.  He also set forth the things that Romans shouldn’t be.  Strong and forthright were in.  Scheming liar, not so much.[1]

Either way, Virgil’s poem wasn’t about the founding of Rome any more than Homer’s poem was about the actual destruction of Troy.  I suppose we have no real way of knowing if either poet actually believed that he was telling an actually historically accurate story, but I strongly suspect that historical accuracy wasn’t the goal of either poet, either.  They were more concerned with the now than the then when they put their works together.

As such, evaluating the historical accuracy of any of the three works is folly.  We know Rome existed.  We also know that Mycenae and Troy existed.  But beyond that the stories don’t actually make much sense.

The Trojan War as told by Homer took place some time around the 12th Century BCE.  We know that we can say there might have been a germ of historical truth in this because we know when Mycenae existed.  We also know when the successive periods of Troy started and ended.  And because we know this, we can know a few other things.  So let's talk about religion.

In Homer’s epic the classical Greek gods participated in the fight on both sides.  Both sides also seemed to recognize the supremacy of these Greek gods, with Apollo apparently quite active on the Trojan side.  Unfortunately for anyone who wants to believe such things, there’s pretty much no way the Trojans could have been followers of the Greek pantheon.  If anything, they probably followed some form of Hittite religion, as Troy was a part of the greater Hittite Empire for quite some time.[2]

The other issue at hand, though, is that the Mycenaeans didn’t follow the Hellenistic pantheon, either.  They probably had some mixture of Egyptian, Minoan, and old-school Indo-European polytheism.  This may well have been the start of the traditional Greek pantheon, but it wasn’t set in the way Homer’s epic would seem to indicate it was during Mycenaean times.

Again, though, it doesn’t matter.  We’re not meant to see Homer’s poem as history.  It’s not so hard a concept to conceive of, either.  We do it all the time.  Think of how many times New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo have been utterly destroyed by space aliens or earthquakes or giant rubber monsters in the movies.  We are storytellers by nature.  But we still want to have those stories we tell rooted in something familiar, something identifiable.  It’s much easier to say, “It takes place in New York,” and have everyone get what that means than to have to invent a whole new fictional city for every stupid movie that needs a city to destroy.

The biggest problem we have when looking in to the past is we seem to think that the ancients didn’t get that.  It’s like we think they were credulous morons who didn’t get the difference between reality and fiction.  Well, I’ve got news for you.  The Greeks basically invented the theater.  The very first thing written down when written language became sophisticated enough to record abstract concepts was a poem.  People got fiction.  Especially the Greeks.

When Virgil wrote the Aeneid he was probably aware of the fact that there was no Aeneas, or at least not an Aeneas who escaped from the sack of Troy only to end up wandering the Mediterranean.  He also probably didn’t care.  It made for a good story.  But, again, we have no way of knowing if he actually believed his own press.  Still, I consider Virgil to be a likely candidate for being in on the joke.

As we progress farther afield from that, however, it’s harder to tell.  Snorri Sturluson had a bunch of Trojans becoming the great Norse heroes, then being elevated to the status of gods in the Prose Edda.  Then, of course, there’s Tysilio.

The biggest problem with Tysilio (and, therefore, Nennius and Geoffrey) is that Brutus of Troy doesn’t appear anywhere else.  I’m not just talking about history, either.  He’s not in any poem or play anywhere outside of that narrow, parochial British tradition where Cooper found him.  So I cannot comment on where the Tysilio account would have come from.

In fact, it may well have been invented whole-cloth by the Brits themselves.  I’d even say it’s exceedingly likely that something like that happened.

Tysilio, after all, functions as a National Epic.  Brutus takes on the role of Aeneas, or Odysseus, or Achilles.  But unlike those poems, Tysilio attempts to tell the rest of the story.  It is this confusion that seems to have lead Flinders Petrie and Bill Cooper astray.

Well, either that or they wanted to believe it badly enough that they didn’t really think about the implications too much.  We can’t rule that out with Petrie.  And we pretty much have to assume it’s the case for Cooper.

Really, though, this is what must be expected from someone who believes the Bible is completely accurate history.  According to the Bible the entire world flooded right in the middle of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and some of the earliest of the powerful Mesopotamian city-states.  And please, please don’t get me started on the Bible’s idea of Archaemenid succession again.  It won’t be pretty.[3]

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[1]Um, in the interests of full disclosure, I have not so much read the Aeneid.  I actually have a really nice copy of it that’s been sitting around for a couple of years and is probably somewhere among the as-yet unpacked boxes of books in my second bedroom.  I know the Illiad and the Odyssey far better, having read both.  Also, I saw Troy.  Wow, what a terrible movie.

[2]The Hittites, for the record, are a fascinating group that I know basically nothing about.  Considering that they were basically one of the first two superpowers in the world, though, they’re impressive.  Also, the first two wars and peace treaties between groups that could be considered nations were between the Hittites and the Egyptians.  That’s something, right?

[3]I had an interesting conversation over at Ken Pulliam’s blog last week.  The original post was about presuppositionalism v. appealing to evidence in Evangelical apologetics.  One of the more recent regular commenters, who at one point claimed to have a degree from Bob Jones popped in immediately and claimed that evidence leads to reasonable faith.  He then followed it up by claiming that the evidence further weakens non-belief.  I tossed my Persian succession argument against the idea that the Bible is an accurate historical record, just to see what the response would be.  He ignored me, preferring instead to accuse BeamStalk of not being willing to look at the evidence with open eyes or some other such silliness.  Eventually he came at me with this:

Ged,[4]

The Bible has been tested historically and archeologically thru the ages. It has always come out unscathed. There are stories from 18th cent that only now are proved, in 1990 Caiphus discovered....

I would say to you that altho you doubted, you should not stop looking. Although you are smart in history, there are some who are more knowledgeable who have come to a different conclusion. They too would've observed the errors you mention and would have 'disproved' the Bible.

For the record, I absolutely love it when people get all condescending when they’re telling me that the Bible is an infallibly accurate historical document.  It just makes my day.  Especially when I then get to go right back to the Cliffs Notes version of how the Bible actually contains three different accounts of Persian succession, none of which are actually right.  And then I get to point out that, “There are stories from the 18th cent that only now are proved,” isn’t actually an argument.  Or a complete thought.  Or a particularly useful clause.

The lesson, as always, is, “Don’t be smarmy and condescending in the presence of people who know more than you.”  We really enjoy it when we get to return the favor.  With interest.

[4]It’s Geds.  GEDS.  Why is it that everyone seems to drop the “s?”