Folk-Lore/Volume 15/Tradition and its Conditions

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

Tradition and its Conditions.

It is tradition, the oral handing on of oral knowledge, that is the means by which the most of our folklore material has been, and is being, preserved. Tradition as a process deserves examination. We ought to know what are its conditions, its limits, its possibilities. Little has been done, as far as I know, to investigate these matters. They have been left vague. The Benthamite, content with citing Russian scandal, is wont to deny the possibility of accurate tradition at all. The credulous sentimentalist of the Bernard Burke kind will set no bounds to the process. It has been gravely argued that because one of the names of the star Seirios may be interpreted the traverser, there is in this title a remembrance of the time, more than thirty thousand years ago, when Seirios was crossing the Milky Way; which (as Euclid would say) is absurd. And yet there are materials for the more accurate determination of the scope of oral tradition, as I hope to show by certain examples.

Now it is first to be noted that in many unlettered, that is, in my sense, bookless, communities, there are special means, pieces of social machinery, devised and practical for the preservation of the knowledge of the events and culture of the past. What Cæsar tells us about the Druid school of the Gauls in his day is but an earlier description of what Dr. Hyde and Dr. Joyce tell us, from mediæval Irish MSS., about the schools of ancient and mediæval Erin. Says Cæsar,^[1] "the Druids are not accustomed to take part in battle, nor do they pay taxes with other people. They are exempt from military service and everything they have is immune. Roused by the certainty of such privileges many congregate to their course of life of their own will, or are sent there by their kinsfolk and neighbours. They are said to learn a great number of verses, and some remain in their course as long as twenty years, nor do they think it right to commit these things to writing, although in other business both private and public they make use of Greek letters." Cæsar guessed that they did this because they wanted to keep their lore secret, and also because they wanted to assure good memories in their pupils. But this is merely his rationalistic theory. He goes on to say the Druids taught that souls do not perish, but after death pass from one set of persons to another; and this," says he, "they think a great incital to righteousness, seeing that the fear of death is put away. Besides this, they hold much reasoning over the stars and their motions, over the universe and the size of various countries, over the beginning of things, the power and the rule of the gods that die not, and all this they deliver, or hand on, to the youth they teach." Here we have a regular pagan university, in which by memorial verse during a course of many years a whole system of philosophy, mythology, and history is carefully handed down orally from generation to generation. The Vedic schools of India, where the early Vedas have been handed down from the days of the collection of the Rishis' songs, long before Alexander and Buddha, to our own days, by the carefully trained memories of master and pupil, give an example of the possibility of exact transmission in a stable society for many generations. Exact dates in the present uncertain state of Indian chronology are hard to get.

The secular or bardic schools of mediæval Ireland comprised a twelve-year course; that is to say, a pupil could not compass it in less than twelve years. These schools were undoubtedly the successors of the kind of school that Cæsar's Druids kept. We have some certain information as to the work they did.^[2] In the first year the pupils, memory was tested by the learning of twenty tales in prose, seven as Ollaire, three as Taman, ten as Drisac, so that when he became Fochluc he had learnt elementary grammar, certain poems, and ten more tales, and was regarded as a person capable of the minor kinds of poetry. In his third year as Mac Fuirmedh he went on with grammar, philosophy, poetry and ten new tales. In his fourth year as Doss he began law, learnt twenty more difficult poems and ten more tales. As Cana, in his fifth year, he went on with his grammar and learnt ten more tales. As Cli, in his sixth year, he learnt forty-eight poems and ten tales, and began to study the difficulties of the oldest Irish poetry. He now became Anradh (something like a Master of Arts) and was qualified as a Bard or ordinary poet. For three years he learnt poetry, acquired old Gaelic, and had to compose in various difficult metres and to learn one hundred and five tales. For his last three years he was studying to be received as Ollamh (equivalent to our Doctor's degree), and to be known as File (a poet), or Eces (a learned man). He had now mastered a hundred poems of the highest class, and 175 tales (making 350 in all) which he was prepared to repeat accurately at the call of his audience. The degree was conferred by the king on the report of the examining doctor. The Ollamh thus knew poetry, history, law, and the older language, which had now passed into another stage and was rapidly becoming unintelligible. He had learnt the geography, history, and mythology of his native land. He had acquired great privileges, the musical branch corresponding to his degree, of gold as Doctor, of silver as Master, and of bronze for the lower grades. He was entitled to carry the riding whip of state, to wear white garments, and a mantle (in the case of a chief poet) made of birds feathers, white and partly coloured from the girdle down, and upward green-blue, made from the necks and crests of drakes; a very old-fashioned species of honorary clothing. He had a right to entertainment and guerdon, and even as anradh had a train of twelve persons, and rode on horseback. At the banquet the head poet's portion was the haunch. His worth-fine was that of a king or bishop, he was free from all taxation, he was believed to possess many of the supernatural powers the Druid or magus had possessed. His satire could bring out black, red, or white blisters on the face of his victim. His poetic curse performed in heathen fashion, with one foot, one hand, one eye, and one breath, could cause death. He was an augur and could interpret dreams and find lucky days. He could hide his clients from their foes under magic fogs or by means of shape-changing. He could make a lethe-drink, could raise the elements, and by his magic wisp, the dlui fulle, he could cause insanity or idiocy.^[3] The privileges of the poets were so great, and such full advantage was taken of them, that they were twice publicly attacked, and only saved by powerful intercession. Public banquets were made in honour of the poets as late as 1451, and their circuits were continual sources of easy emolument. There was every encouragement for a man of good birth, fine wit, to enter the Ollamh's school, and become historian, poet, tale-teller, or judge, to his clan.^[4] For from the ranks of trained scholars the hereditary poets and judges (brehons) were chosen. Remnants of this organisation went on to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when it passed away after at least 1800 years of existence from the days of Cæsar to those of James II. The oral teaching in the little dark huts of the scholars that flocked from various quarters, the system of memorising vast masses of verse and prose, dealing with various natural and human phenomena deemed of the highest importance, the privileges of the doctors and the generous maintenance of the scholars, were alike under the discipline of the Druid and in the Bardic schools of distracted Ireland in the sixteenth century.

Irish mediæval manuscripts have preserved to us only a small part of the lore of the schools, but the legal Tracts, the Dinsenchus, the Dialogue of the Ancients, the many fragmentary Tales (often jotted down merely as memoranda) are specimens of the kind of traditional matter handed down by the organisation. But it is evident that the acceptance of Christianity must have profoundly disturbed the subject matter and importance of the pagan schools, so that for the last twelve centuries before the end came the greater part of the old teaching must have been modified or omitted; but though many of the spells and stories of the gods and the mass of heathen cosmogony and eschatology vanished, the method remained, and we have still much genealogy, law, romance, history and poetry of the old days. The place of the heathen religious matter was filled by the sacred history of the Church schools, where the interpretation and language of the sacred books of the Christians, and the rules and law of the Church Catholic were assiduously taught, where reading was, of course, permitted, and the degree attained was that of Sai or Doctor of Divinity.

But it is in the antipodes that by far the best example of the heathen university for an unlettered people is to be found. In the excellent and invaluable Maori history of John White, we have an account of a system of schools by which all valuable knowledge was accurately and orally handed down. Chief of these was the Red House, Wharekura, raised in a sacred place, consecrated by a living sacrifice in which need-fire was employed, the sons of priests, having had spells recited over them, occupied this place from nightfall to dawn in the Autumn, and studied from sunset to midnight for four or five months in succession. They were fed at the public expense, they were strictly disciplined, they were kept apart from the rest of the people, so that no distraction should interrupt the effort of memory. Spells and legends formed the greater part of the course, much of which consisted in the learning of verse. No man could become a teacher in less than three years, inapt pupils were at once dismissed, which with constant tests secured efficiency. Besides the Red House there was a School of Star-lore, where priests and chiefs of the highest rank taught the omens, the calendar, proper times and observances connected with feasts, hunting, and the times at which crops should be planted and reaped. The teaching time was always night, the school was under tabu and opened and closed ceremoniously like the Red House. There was also a less formal establishment which one might call a School of Agriculture, where people of all classes learnt the necessary knowledge for the procuring of vegetable food, and the incantations which secured good supplies.

We have both in the Irish and Maori tales many examples of the regular formulae that helped the reciter, just as the formal lines that so often recur in the Homeric poems and the Chansons de geste, descriptive of common operations, helped the rhapsode and the trouvere.

Among the Eddic poems we find examples of the poetic Dialogue, a form of didactic composition dating from the last days of Scandinavian heathendom in the ninth century, giving instruction of the kind then deemed most important. These poems prove that the Scandinavians had also their method of handing down folklore, though there were no Medicine-men or Druids in the heathen North, and though Scandinavia was never greatly given to regular superstitions, admodum dedita religionibus, like the Gaul of Cæsar's time.

What comes out of all this (and there is much more that could be said on these archaic arrangements for securing the correct transmission of knowledge and science without the use of letters) is that, unless interrupted by a revolution, such as the incoming of new religion and culture, conquest from abroad, or enforced emigration, a certain number of traditions (larger probably than we should commonly expect) may be handed down in a form little changed for several centuries at least. Each New Zealand tribe still remembers the canoe of settlers from which it took its descent as far back as the twelfth century or earlier, if we may judge from genealogies numerous enough to afford fairly safe means of comparison. For if we get sufficient pedigrees running side by side, with traditions dependent from each step, in one or another, synchronisms will become apparent that will help us to ascertain within a few years the date of a battle or the accession of a chief.^[5] It is these synchronisms that in Mangaia (the biggest of the Hervey Islands) enabled Mr. Gill to get back to within a few years of the dates of occurrences that took place as far back as the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, though the Hervey Islanders were wholly unlettered and had no special means save their dramas for preserving tradition,^[6] These dramas of theirs are exceedingly remarkable; they are dramas persistent in the precise stage of that the Greek drama had reached before the coming of Aischylos; dramas performed by means of a reciter, a chorus-leader, and a large chorus; dramas dealing with history and mythology, with the tragedies of kings and gods and famous men and women, death-songs, and celebrations or remembrances of striking occurrences. These dramas were composed by regular poets, hundreds of people took part in the performances, and if a drama was successful it was learnt and remembered by hundreds more. So that in the middle of the nineteenth century Mr. Gill was able to collect from his cultured converts a great number (probably the finest) of these plays. They were performed at night only, in time of peace, after preparations that sometimes took more than a year. They were played in groups, and some twenty would be played between sunset and sunrise by the light of fires and torches. They seldom extend beyond one or two hundred lines. They are as allusive as the odes of Pindar himself, and the explanation of many of the oldest could only be given by chiefs and priests who were constrained to become acquainted with the legends gathered about the religious functions which formed their daily duties or about the personal titles of their predecessors in office. That the Play of Captain Cook and Omai (made soon after their arrival in 1777) should be remembered a hundred years later is not surprising, though the accuracy of the native tradition as tested by Cook's own journals is noteworthy; but we have earlier instances proving the accuracy and scope of native tradition. At the end of the sixteenth century in the time of Shakespeare and Elizabeth, Tekaraka was exiled from Mangaia with his family and friends in two large double canoes, on the advice of the oracle-priest of the god Motoro. Nothing was known of the fate of these outlaws, until, after the conversion of the Hervey Islands, certain New Zealanders, Christians, were able to visit in peace a land that had always shown itself especially inhospitable to strangers. These Maoris brought the news of Tekaraka's landing in their own islands, where many persons traced their descent to him and where many places kept the old Mangaian names he brought there.

Nearly fifty years later, Iro, of the Tongan tribe, raised a great conspiracy against the leading chiefs of his day. The plot was discovered and he, too, was condemned by the priest of Motoro to exile. With plenty of provision, he and his friends, forty souls, sailed in their two double canoes from the west of the island on their uncertain voyage, and lost sight of their native land, lit up that night by the torches of their sorrowing friends. No tidings of the exiles reached Mangaia for 155 years, but Iro's sad fate was the subject of a drama by the famous poet Koroa, played as late as 1791, amid the sympathy of a great audience. In 1826, when Christianity had just been introduced to the Hervey group, a Raratongan, who came with John Williams the missionary to Mangaia, told the Hervey people that Iro's canoe had reached Raratonga, where a chief named Kainuku had given them a home and a welcome, repaid by their raising Kainuku' s tribe to regal position through their wonderful valour in battle, so that this tribe alone could eat turtle and royal fish, the prerogative of the chiefs only in other tribes.

Here are instances where corroboration exists to prove the facts tradition has preserved. This corroboration cannot be looked for in every case, but here is an authentic example of events accurately recorded and handed down for eight generations without special means of record, for if the dramas preserve facts, yet the facts in this case had to be remembered without letters or even regular oral teaching. There may have been earlier dramas on the subject than those of Koroa (composed many generations after the exile of Iro), but analogy does not point to this as a necessity. Most of the dramas date from the eighteenth century, though there are dramatic songs of far older date, and obscure by reason of the old language.

At the end of the eleventh and the early part of the twelfth century long poems, based on oral tradition, were being composed in France and England on events and persons of the eighth and ninth centuries; while in the thirteenth century a vast body of romance grew up round oral legends attached to persons who, if they existed, must, some of them, have lived and died in the sixth century. In both these cases the foundation of the new literature was certainly oral. For the Britannic Book, like the British History, can but have contained the substance of oral traditions. It is true^ as Carlyle said, that beyond a limited time (no greater perhaps than three centuries) all the past tends to be viewed as on one plane. These are the old times

"Far in the pristine days of former yore,"

as the parody has it; but even then a certain order is remembered. The two Cromwells may be confused, but they are known to be later than the Danes, and the Danes themselves younger than the "old Romans." In the far-off landscape only a few peaks catch the sun, only a few names survive, but we must remember that with us in England, since the Conversion which began in the late sixth century, there has been no systematic tradition, no organisation that secured the handing down of that great mass of heathen history and knowledge which the Teutonic settlers must have brought across the North Sea in the fifth century. Kings (like Alfred and his exemplar, Charles) may have busied themselves with the collection of the old songs, but the change in religion, in language and in culture, and the long disgrace under which all that had affinity to the Old Faith had so long lain, must have prevented their collections (of which so little now remains) from being at all adequately representative of the vast mass of traditions that belonged to the past. Spells have survived in out-of-the-way places, and a few curious penmen (to whom we owe great gratitude) took the trouble to write down some few compositions in which they were personally interested. It is to such a stray Scandinavian collector that the preservation of the two chief collections of the Eddie poems is due. But the mass of old lore in Britain has perished, and in the field of folklore it is only from tinyfragments that we can gain a knowledge of how far our ancestors were able to maintain and transmit their own knowledge of the past.

Personally I think the transmission-power of tradition has been very much undervalued,^[7] since we, in modern days, have so little experience of its possibilities and scope. But unlettered tradition will always be at the mercy of a slight cataclysm. It is not till tradition is committed to letters that its preservation is at all definitely assured. And this is a truth that, even in this century, is not yet sufficiently recognised. Societies such as ours must be the recorders. Our function as Recorders and Remembrancers is even more important than our function as Interpreters. Our opportunities for record are swiftly and silently slipping past. There will always be time for the Systematisers, but at present the Duty of Collection is to my mind paramount.

F. York Powell.

1. "Illi rebus divinis intersunt, sacrificia publica et privata procurant religiones interpretantur ad hos magnus adolescentium numerus disciplinae causa concurrit, magnoque hi sunt apud eos honore. "Druides a bello abesse consuerunt, neque tributa una cum reliquis pendunt militiae vacationem omniumque rerum habent immunitatem. Tantis excitati praemiis et sua sponte multi in disciplinam conveniunt et a parentibus propinquisque mittuntur magnum ibi numerum versuum ediscere dicuntur. Itaque annos nonnulli xx in disciplina permanent. Neque fas esse existimant ea litteris mandare, cum in reliquis fere rebus, publicis privatis que rationibus, graecis litteris us tantur .... In primis hoc volunt persuadere non interire animas sed ab aliis post mortem transire ad alios, atque hoc maxime ad virtutem excitari putant, metu mortis neglecto. Multa praeterea de sideribus atque eorum motis, de mundi ac terrarum magnitudine, de rerum natura, de deorum immortalium vi ac potestate disputant et juventuti tradunt."
2. Dr. D. Hyde, Literary History of Ireland, p. 528, &c., gives from the Memoria of Clanrickard, London, 1722, an account of a bardic school in the latest days. It began at Michaelmas lasted till the 25th March. The pupils all brought gifts to the chief Ollamh. Those who could not read and write Irish well or had bad memories were at once sent away. The rest were divided into classes according to their proficiency and past studies, the juniors to be taught by inferior professors, the seniors by the head Ollamh himself. They were only taught at night by artificial light, they composed and memorised each in his own dark windowless room where was only a bed, a clothesrail and two chairs. Hence, Luidhe i leabdibh sgol, to lie in the beds of the schools, meant to be studying to become a poet. Before the supper, candles were brought round for the student to write down what he had composed. Each then took his composition to the hall, where they all supped and talked till bedtime. On Saturdays and holidays they went out of the schools into the country, quartering themselves on the country people, who supplied their daily food and that of their professors. Obviously there are remains of the older disciplina still to be recognised in this description.
3. It is curious but not at all wonderful that much of the reverence and awe felt for the magus in Ireland has descended upon the priest, who is firmly believed to "know the word" and to be able to make anyone he wishes to afflict insane, or paralytic or epileptic, or to "change" him. And this fear of the priest's anger and secret powers is no small element in the veneration and obedience he unquestionably gets. In mid England I know of a case in which a village wizard was believed to be able to cause the falling sickness, and have heard an instance of his power and the way it might be defeated.
4. It was not till the days of the high-king Concobhar Mac Nessa, at the beginning of the Christian era, that the office of poet no longer of necessity carried with it the position of brehon or judge, in consequence of the obscure pleadings of Fercertné and Neidé when they contende for the office of High Ollamh of Erin, before the kings of Ireland.
5. It was by these synchronisms in the parallel pedigrees of Landnáma bóc that Dr. Vigfússon was able to solve the puzzle of Are Frode's chronology. See Corpus Poeticum Boreale, vol. ii.
6. Basil Thomson concludes that the people of Niné must have been established in that island before 1300, because they have no "certain tradition" of their origins, and the only clues to their provenance are their customs (such as mock circumcision, absence of tattoo, a moko totem, kava preserved for the priests alone, etc.), and the prevalence of certain definite racial types (one, like the Cook Islanders, wavy-haired Polynesian; one, lank-haired Malayo-Micronesian, not more than 10 per cent.; one, in the South West, in Avatele, with some Melanesian characteristics). He would, therefore, believing traditions oral and unassisted to go back no further than 500 years, put the arrival of the first settlers on Niné no earlier than five centuries ago.
7. If I may be permitted to refer to the Grimm's Centenary Papers, Oxford, 1886, I believe that my master, Dr. Vigfússon, made it most likely that the recollection of Sigfred was a thousand years old when the Northern colonist in Greenland made a Lay about the revenge taken for him, and when in these "Western Isles" of Britain, other Northern colonists made the Lays that deal with his fall, his wife's widowhood, and the death of his murderers. I hope ere long to print a conjecture of Dr. Vigfússon's as to another Teutonic hero of whom the memory has been supposed to have perished. I have not alluded to the well-known case of the gold-clad giant of Mold, a tradition that lived orally through several centuries at least, and the remarkable preservation of place-names in England through many centuries (frequently more than ten), merits more special notice than I can give here.