Google fusion table showing relationships of characters in Pwyll:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=15v6OMzslLUx80zrl54n2Y8kQQMs9w-E5vhOb47mj
Google fusion table showing relationships of characters in Owein:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1TwRls-WPKoz4LBa7lM5zSYyZKzA79jjad05_dQte
Digital humanities is all about maps. Unfortunately, while there are a myriad of programs available for mapping data onto real geography, I have not yet discovered a mapping tool that can handle journeys to and from the Otherworld… (If you know of one, please tell me!)
However, what “mapping” is really all about is discovering patterns. I first tried charting the journeys and events of Pwyll and Owein through graphing them, using Excel spread sheets. This is what I ended up with:
It gives an idea of overall pattern, but unless you know the story cold, it isn’t particularly helpful (or maybe my Excel skills are not all they could be).
I ended up making color-coded charts in an Excel spreadsheet, because that’s what gave me the most control over what I wanted to convey. The first set shows the events of the stories charted by place.
This second set charts the events, focusing on the characters:
I feel like these charts start to illustrate some of the patterning in the stories, but are not entirely satisfactory. For one thing, because they are so large, it’s hard to see what’s happening. Ultimately, what I would really like to do is map the travels of all the characters in the Mabinogion on layers that can be stacked up to see patterns across the stories. For instance, taking just the PKM, the stories alternate between North and South Wales, with characters traveling “within” Dyfed in the First Branch (i.e., to coterminus Otherworlds, the realms of Arawn and Hyfaidd); from Harlech in North Wales west to Ireland and back (with some roundaboutation at the end) in the Second Branch; from Dyfed east to Hereford and environs in England and back in the Third Branch; and from Gwynedd to Dyfed–north to south–and back in the Fourth Branch. Many people have written on the itineraries in these stories, with a great deal of effort to identify the places named, for example, in Gwydion’s pig-drive northwards in the Fourth Branch.
All well and good, but what about when you get to the Arthurian stories? Owein, Peredur, and Geraint all take off for the wildernesses in their respective tales, and while Arthur’s court serves as a focal point for them to come back to (and leave again), all their adventures take place Elsewhere. I am inclined to think that Owein’s adventures, which occur “beyond the limits of the world,” happen in Scotland, beyond the remains of Hadrian’s Wall, but this is an assumption based on the fact that the historical Owein ap Urien belonged to the kingdom of Rheged, which spanned the western end of the Wall. Even with that small assumption, it’s impossible to geographically map the events of these three stories.
I created these clouds by turning the texts of Pwyll and Owein (trans. Sioned Davies) into word lists, sorting them, and cleaning them up by 1) eliminating pronouns, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions; 2) turning all verbs to present tense; 3) consolidating similar terms (such as using kingdom for both realm and kingdom); and 4) deleting words that occur fewer than three times for Pwyll and four times for Owein (which, as a longer story, has a larger vocabulary).
created in Wordle (wordle.net)
As you might expect, our hero, Pwyll, is the name most mentioned, but far and away the commonest verb is a form of say, which reflects the amount of dialog in the story. Come, give, and see are important verbs, followed by get, know, sit; court, kingdom, and horse pop out as important nouns. Rhiannon and Teyrnon are the most important names after Pwyll, and Annwfn and Dyfed are about of equal weight as locations. There is also a lovely little cluster of company, carouse, and feast. Altogether, the cloud gives the impression of a story concerned with rulership and family relationships, which is hardly surprising to anyone who has read the First Branch, but also concerned with the passage of time (the size of year, for instance), and ideas about friendship and communication.
Here is the cloud for Owein:
created with Wordle (wordle.net)
Obviously, while the name of the main character is important in both stories, in Owein, our hero’s name is more important than anything, while in Pwyll, speaking (“say”) is even more important. The little cluster in the right center of knight, lion, and horse confirm that, like Chretien’s version, this is very much a story about a the Knight with the Lion. The big vocabulary is of an upper class world of knights, countesses, castles, and the ever popular brocaded silk; the characters come, go, and take, but they also hear noises (an over-all terms for shrieks, yells, wails, and other sounds), look, know, and fight.
I have to admit, however, that as I was creating the lists that underlie these clouds, I was increasingly aware that the frequency of some words was skewed by translation. I think Davies often used different English vocabulary to translate the same Middle Welsh word just to keep the English text from becoming tedious–which is, after all, a valid choice for a translator. The reason I didn’t go straight to analyzing the original Welsh texts is that I wanted to do a test run in English to see if it was useful. Creating word clouds entails making a regularized list of each instance of a word’s occurrence, which in turn involves a lot of sorting into alphabetical order. This is a long and tedious task in modern English; it is, to put it mildly, exponentially more work in Welsh due to initial mutation, and even worse in Middle Welsh texts with their unstable orthography.
Word clouds look snazzy, but for analyzing Middle Welsh prose texts, they may be more trouble than they’re worth.
A timeline showing the interrelationship of historical events and the stories of the Mabinogion.
Created using Timeline.JS (timeline.knightlab.com)
This timeline looks nice, but what I really wanted was to show how the settings of the stories in the Mabinogion fit into the interstices of British history just before or after a period of conquest–the PKM occur in the period between Caesar’s first incursion and full Roman colonization; Maxen Wledig takes place at the very end of the Roman period, and all the Arthurian stories in the period between the Roman and Saxon eras; Rhonabwy takes place just around the time of Norman dominance and looks back to the Arthurian era; and the writing of the tales themselves in the White and Red Books occurred during a period of relative Welsh independence from the domination of the English.
In all, I think that a static timeline would have made my point better, but this kind of timeline is useful for making narrative points.
This is supposed to be the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff and I have to admit that today, I got nothin’. So instead of deeply insightful commentary on the worlds of literature, history, and myth, I offer you my cats, being rather bored.
Florrie really just can’t take it any more.
And neither can Nellie. Even the thought of raising her head is too much to take. Note, too, the elegant ennui of the paw.
Maybe there’s something real interesting going on over there?
No, probably not.
Nellie is entirely unimpressed by her appearance on Cute Overload. Fame is such a bore.
I’m not sure exactly how long steampunk bellydance has been a thing–I believe my first exposure started around the time that Beats Antique started adding Creepy Circus Music(tm) to their repertoire, about 2008-2009. What I find interesting, given my general bibliomania, is that this was my first exposure to the overall concept of steampunk, rather than finding the genre through fiction. But I think that’s significant, given the importance of making and costuming in the steampunk movement. There are a lot of different ways to do steampunk bellydance, and in some cases, it’s really a question of costume rather than anything inherent in the choreography.
Within the multitudes contained by the broad genre “bellydance,” steampunk falls squarely under “fusion.” It’s a matter of flavoring bellydance costuming and movements with bits and pieces of another genre and/or style. Take a look at this piece, the Dragonettes dancing to Abney Park’s song “Katyusha”:
(This is the first video that comes up when you search for “steampunk bellydance” on YouTube, by the way.) The base costuming is pretty standard-issue tribal style: multi-tiered skirt over full pants, choli-ish tops, head ornamentation. However, the details are steampunk: the iconic goggles rather than Central Asian metalwork, and the vest and boleros have a somewhat industrial look. Only one dancer is wearing a belt, but it’s studded leather with an attached pouch like a holster, rather than a shisha-embroidered, camel-tasseled sash. The way the skirts are tucked up resembles the ruched overskirts and bustles of mid-nineteenth century Western fashion.
The dancing, too, is typical tribal style group improv (and beautifully performed, I would add). The only moves that you probably wouldn’t find elsewhere in standard bellydance are the kicks, which add a taste of nineteenth century can-can but also seem like a bit of a nod to some European and American folk dance styles. The music is Abney Park, which is probably the steampunk band, and the song itself is a sterling example of folklorismus–something that did not arise spontaneously over time in an authentic folklore context, but is deliberately created in the style of folk music/dance/art, often for tourism purposes, usually to inspire feelings of authenticity and patriotism. This song was written in 1938 to inspire Russian patriotism in the face of the threat of German invasion during World War II, drawing on the musical and lyrical style of Russian folk song. From a contemporary perspective, then, it carries the same aura of exoticism also found in bellydance, and like bellydance, it is a construct composed of folkloric elements without being “folk” in the strict, academic sense. I think that’s one of the reasons this fusion works so well–the “Eastern” and “Western” elements are well-balanced in how they reference their respective base cultures.
This one is Alyssa and Aniqua dancing to Beats Antique’s “Roustabout,” the Creepy Circus Music piece mentioned above.
This is a good example of what has otherwise become, unfortunately, an extremely overused trope in steampunk bellydance: the dancing doll. The costuming is not at all bellydance, and to be honest, I rather cringe at the very idea of dancing in stilletto-heeled boots. Do note, however, that the dancer in white is wearing a corset, and both women are wearing tiny top hats at a saucy tilt–both elements typical of steampunk cosplay. The choreography runs the usual pattern of dancing doll numbers: dolls wake up, dance in jerky unison, run temporarily amok, return to submission to their mechanical imperatives, and finally run out of steam. My only criticisms here are that the costumes illustrate the main reason why most bellydancers wear outfits that hide leg movement–unlike ballet, where you want people admiring your legwork, bellydance legs generally support what’s going on up above, and are rather awkward when revealed to public eye–and the dancers’ arm movements are a little too soft for the mechanical motions they’re supposed to represent.
One reason that everyone does dancing doll numbers for steampunk bellydance is that they are a natural fit–“Roustabout” and other examples of Creepy Circus Music lend themselves well to jerky, “clockwork” moves that fit the themes of industrial technology, mad science, transgressive humanity, and displaced/repressed representations of slavery that are endemic to steampunk literature. Those moves provide a great opportunity to show off the pops, locks, and other isolations of bellydance. To that extent, the fusion fits. But I think they often fall flat because the dancers aren’t really paying attention to the underlying ideas of decay and corruption that drive the steampunk side of things here. Abney Park’s “Herr Drosselmeyer’s Doll” makes the connection between dancing doll and sex toy explicit, and I find it interesting that the mechanical dance works much better here as ballet–though when the dancer starts to get “sexy,” all of a sudden bellydance undulations and shimmies break through. I also like the way the tutu gets used with a nod to hoop dancing:
A big part of modern bellydance is dancing with props–veil, cane, sword, candle, fan–and a big part of steampunk cosplay is parasols, especially in the wake of Gail Carriger’s best-selling Parasol Protectorate series. It’s a natural progression to use parasols in steampunk bellydance, and I particularly like this performance to Beats Antique’s “Erase” by the troupe Umbra. (And I want those long lace-ruffled pants. Like, now.)
The choreography is straightforward urban tribal style, as is the costuming, but with a dug-out-of-grandma’s-attic flair that nods to steampunk Victorianism. The parasols, though, are what I would say really makes this steampunk rather than urban tribal. Compare to this piece, by PURE Sarasota, which is not at all steampunk, but incorporates Japanese parasols used similarly to traditional folkloric Middle Eastern cane dance:
And finally (for the moment), some performances that are not, strictly speaking, steampunk, but that I think get more to the heart of the matter than many: Rachel Brice and her troupe Indigo did a show called Le Serpent Rouge in 2010 that nodded to vaudeville/honky-tonk/general nineteenth-early-twentieth century traveling entertainments. Although her dancing, along with partners-in-crime Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes (of Beats Antique), is urban tribal style, the music and show context have a steampunk vibe, especially the vaguely Eastern European, klezmer-verging-on-jazz, or outright jazz itself numbers. Some of these are kind of long, but man, are they worth watching. This, people, is how it’s done:
Greeting the summer solstice dawn at Stonehenge
photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/14472363215/in/photostream/
It’s the solstice (or it was when I started writing this), and once again, druids are convening at Stonehenge to celebrate. Good for them. Historically inaccurate of them, but good for them nonetheless. After all, there is a long history of people re-using the sites of previous religions to celebrate the rituals of new ones and, while the ongoing, amazing discoveries of the origin and context of Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments are fascinating in and of themselves, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that, without modern Druids and other pagans kicking up a fuss, people wouldn’t be as interested in doing–or funding–all that research.
But who are these druids, and how did they get the idea that Stonehenge belonged to them?
THE IRON AGE DRUIDS
I’ve long been interested in the ways people’s ideas about classes of individuals such as druids and witches have changed over time. Druids are the trickier of the two, because it’s impossible to state with absolute authority what, exactly, they were up to when they were a living element of Iron Age Celtic society. This is because, for reasons that apparently made good sense at the time, druids made a deliberate choice not to leave a paper trail, or much of a stone trail, or etched-on-metal-trail, or (probably) a scratched-onto-wood trail. You got the transient, ephemeral, spoken word from them, and if you didn’t remember it, tough luck. According to Julius Caesar–a biased witness, but you make do with what you have at this distance–druidic education consisted of 20 years of memorizing poetry, in which was encapsulated their religious, scientific, historical, and legal knowledge. Other classical commentators compared Celtic priests and their religious beliefs to those of the ancient Persians, Egyptians, and Hindus. Unfortunately, exactly how they are comparable is usually not very clear.
The original Wicker Man.
“Wicker man (Britannia antiqua illustrata)” by Unknown engraver – http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/early_books/pix/whicker.htm. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wicker_man_(Britannia_antiqua_illustrata).jpg#/media/File:Wicker_man_(Britannia_antiqua_illustrata).jpg
However, we can make some reasonable guesses. For instance, in terms of structure, the Celtic druids are grouped with the Persian magi, the Egyptian priesthood, and the Hindu Brahmins, which were what you might call organized, educated priesthoods: this was not a case of an inspired individual taking charge of a tribe’s religious life, like a Siberian shaman; or of a ritual position passed on solely due to inheritance. This was something you went to school for, something that had a hierarchy and specializations and some kind of international confraternity. Druids seem usually to come in flocks, a chief and an entourage. Sometimes, perhaps in their judicial mode, they sacrificed people–maybe.
The classical comparisons in terms of religious content are to other Indo-European religions–interestingly, to the easternmost Indo-European groups, the Indo-Iranians. But it should also be noted that, as the Roman Empire spread to encompass Gaul and Britannia, local deities were assimilated to Roman ones with, it would seem, relatively little cognitive dissonance for their worshipers. Sulis, the local goddess of Bath, turned into a form of Minerva; Mabon, “the divine son,” was worshiped at Corbridge as Maponos, Maponos Apollo, and Apollo Maponos. In other cases, a Celtic deity (often a goddess of a river or spring) was “married” to a Roman one and the pair worshiped as a divine couple: Rosmerta and Mercury, Sirona and Apollo Grannus, Nemetona and Mars Loucetius (the latter two male deities already assimilated to Celtic local gods). However, of all the Celtic deity names preserved through Roman inscriptions, that vast majority occur only once, and most of them appear to be associated with places rather than general concepts: a goddess of this spring, not the Water Goddess. So it is reasonable to assume that the druids were probably not that different from the Roman priesthood, either, and that their religion was part of the general pattern of Indo-European belief, with a a belief in some form of reincarnation rather than an afterlife and a penchant for localized, place-bound deities. The closest thing to a pan-Celtic deity, based on slim but geographically broad evidence, was Lugh, the many-talented god with shoes on.
![Rosmerta and Mercury, a cute couple. From Eisenberg, Donnersbergkreis, ca. 200-250 C.E. By QuartierLatin1968 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/mercurius_rosmerta_histmuspfalz_3513.jpg)
Rosmerta and Mercury, a cute couple. From Eisenberg, Donnersbergkreis, ca. 200-250 C.E.
By QuartierLatin1968 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
POST-CHRISTIAN DRUIDS
Where we have written accounts of who the druids were and what they were up to, it’s always from outsiders–first the Greek and Roman historians and ethnographers, and then the monks of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland who decided to write down hitherto oral traditions of their pre-Christian past for reasons that are open to debate–possibly to give themselves a native analog to the Old Testament, a history of their world before they saw the light. Possibly presenting druids as local versions of the pagan Roman authorities who persecuted the early continental Christians (although it should be noted that the druids who turn up in Irish hagiographies are more apt to be martyred by the saint under discussion, rather than vice versa). Or possibly because they just couldn’t pass up a good story, no matter what the religious underpinning.
In the medieval period, though, druids per se disappear from the literature and are replaced by magicians (hey there, Merlin!), bards (thanks for stopping by, Taliesin!), radically unorthodox “saints” (hi, Brigit!), and crazed kings (Sweeney, get out of that tree this instant!). Likewise, the Latin and Greek writers who noted the characteristics of Iron Age Celtic society seem to have disappeared from monastic reading lists. As far as I can tell–and I am more than happy to be corrected on this matter–medieval Irish and Welsh monks were not sitting around the scriptorium reading and copying Caesar’s Gallic Wars, taking careful note of the religious customs of the French Gauls, and then constructing stories about their own Irish or Welsh ancestors that bore tantalizingly evocative similarities to classical works about people they probably didn’t realize they were related to. Nor did they deliberately devise stories about their ancestors in order to manufacture startling resemblances to archaeological discoveries that would not be made for some 400 years or more. Whoever wrote down the story of the shoe-making Llew Llaw Gyffes in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi in the White Book of Rhydderch in the late fourteenth century is really unlikely to have been aware that, some 1200 years earlier, a guild of Celtiberian shoemakers had worshiped “the Lughs” in north-central Spain.
It still seems to me–despite several decades of archaeological disavowal of “Celticity”–that the archaeological finds of the modern age in Ireland, Britain, and France; the medieval literature of the Welsh, Irish, Scots, Bretons, Manx, and Cornish; and the observations, however biased, of literate contemporaries of the Iron Age inhabitants of those same areas all cohere into a reasonable whole. Yes, there are geographic and temporal variations; there are things in the archaeological record not explained by literature and vice versa, but all in all, it seems to me that the literature is talking about a people as unified as, say, modern Americans. Which is to say that sometimes groups of people behave in big, generally similar ways and sometimes in small, locally unique ways, but being small and unique does not obviate the big similarities.
EARLY MODERN DRUIDS
So, where was I? Oh yes, druids. And the changing eternal.
To get 1066-and-All-That-ish about it, the Renaissance happened, and everyone was reading Caesar like nobody’s business. And–now that they realized that their world had had, so to speak, layers of occupation over the years–starting to wonder what all those big lumps of stone hanging around the landscape were about, not to mention those hills that, now you come to think about it, really look at them and think about it, didn’t look all that … natural. So they started digging, and trying to correlate what they dug up with what had been written so many centuries ago. Voila: archaeology.
Also, in other breaking news, voila: the Church of England. Enter, among others, William Stukeley.
![What the eighteenth century thought a first-century druid looked like. Meta enough for you? From William Stukeley's Stonehenge (1740). William Stukeley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/abritishdruid.png)
What the eighteenth century thought a first-century druid looked like. Meta enough for you? From William Stukeley’s Stonehenge (1740).
William Stukeley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Stukeley was the big name in this line, but it is here, in the early modern period, roughly between the reigns of Charles II and George III, that the idea that the druids are responsible for Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments arises and worms its way inextricably into the public consciousness. This is when men in fancy dress start performing dawn rituals at Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice. Stukeley made the perfectly scientific observation that a Roman road cuts through the site of Stonehenge, and therefore Stonehenge must predate the Roman occupation of Britain; since, as far as anyone knew at the time, the only people in Britain before the Romans were the Celts, this “obviously” religious monument must have been built by and for the Celtic clergy: the druids. That was Stukeley’s conclusion, and he ran with it. And many still run with it, to this day.
Further reading
I am, of course, fond of my own Druid Shaman Priest: Metaphors of Celtic Paganism, which is out of print but still floating around. For further thoughts on the subject of druidic human sacrifice, my thoughts are laid out at length in a paper I presented at the UCLA Celtic Colloquium in 2000, titled “‘Hi, My Name’s Fox’?: An Alternative Explication of ‘Lindow Man’s’ Fox Fur Armband and Its Relevance to the Question of Human Sacrifice among the Celts.”
Ronald Hutton’s books on British paganism, real and imagined, are the go-to books on the subject; Blood and Mistletoe: A History of the Druids in Britain is obviously the place to start, but I’m also quite fond of The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (where it all started) and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.
It seems like every time you turn around, they’ve discovered something new about Stonehenge and environs. The most recent book by the guy in charge of the excavations is Stonehenge–A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument by Mike Parker Pearson.
The Novel of Constantly Mutating Title takes place in June 1920, and although I’m writing a decidedly alternate universe from the one we all inhabit, I am trying to adhere to the general outlines of our world. There are a number of reasons that led me to settle specifically on 1920: I’m fascinated by the 1920s in general, I wanted to tie the story into my theoretical Madocian settlement of the New World and 1920 was a nice round 750 years after that legendary event, and, not to put too fine a point on it, I really like the clothes. The stereotypical flat-chested, short-skirted flapper and her sheikh of a boyfriend had not yet materialized, but they loomed on the horizon. So were many of the other trademarks of the decade: Prohibition, Hollywood, commercial aviation, organized crime, jazz, Art Deco … the Lost Generation was only slightly discombobulated at this point, the ink on the Treaty of Versailles only a year dry. Yes, the war had decimated the old order of things, but surely that grand clearing of the boards offered the opportunity to start from scratch and raise a newer, better world from those ashes?
In 1920, the overall silhouette was straight up and down, but many dresses had some kind of drapery around the hips. The short bob was just coming into style.
Evening Dress by Madeleine Cheruit. Artist Umberto Brunelleschi. via http://bertc.com/subthree/i38/38-3.htm
You can imagine my excitement to discover a book just published that focuses on that very year: 1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar
Man, was I disappointed. The continuing thread of the book is the anarchist Wall Street bombing of September 16, 1920–an unsettling parallel to the 9/11 bombings eighty-one years later, and Burns is strongest in delving into the political resonances between the two. In an era of gross economic inequality and unprecedented technological change–especially in communications–an act of terrorism perpetrated against America’s financial hub by swarthy foreigners justifies a government crackdown entailing sweeping civil rights violations and hysterical accusations against any convenient Other. But from this promising opening, Burns continues on an erratic career through, not just the year that is his ostensible theme, but the decade as a whole, with little regard to tying it in to a coherent thesis.
Here’s the structure of the book: Part 1: the Wall Street bombing; the “homeland security” response. Part 2: Prohibition; women’s voting rights; black civil rights (or lack thereof); the robber barons and labor relations; Carlo Ponzi and his eponymous scheme. Part 3: Prohibition redux, i.e., Not A Good Idea After All; Margaret Sanger and birth control; Ponzi redux: Another Bad Idea After All; Woodrow Wilson’s collapse and his wife’s tacit assumption of control; radio broadcasting begins, in the context of Warren Harding’s election; Harding and his Teapot Dome-ly corrupt cohorts. Part 4: back to the investigation of the Wall Street bombing: Unsolved; “the arts,” by which he means literature; jazz and Harlem; and finally, the flapper–“a kind of footnote in this book because that is precisely what they were in their time.” Followed by a discussion of Babe Ruth.
So there we have it: a book on the 1920s that does not mention the movies. At all. Or vaudeville, or any of the visual arts.
And the choice of what is discussed seems … scattershot, at best. The literary lions included in the chapter on “the arts”: Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, T.S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Eugene O’Neill, and the Algonqiun Club. (Black writers–W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke–are exiled to the chapter on jazz, for some reason.) Why Hemingway–who had not published much up to 1920–and not, say, Virginia Woolf as our representative of ultimately suicidal writers? It’s hard not to suspect that the reason circles back to that “footnote to their time” dismissal of flappers. Because what are women up to in this book? Shoving their way into the political process, with dubious results; insisting on access to birth control; and blowing it all on the election of a dapper but ethically compromised president and an overindulgence on bathtub gin and scandalously skimpy wardrobes. (“Flapper,” Burns takes care to inform us, was a late-nineteenth-century British term for a prostitute.) After barely acknowledging that there is a world outside of the US–except as a source of anarchists–what is Agatha Christie doing there? And–sorry to be a nitpicker but–how the hell did no-one catch this blooper: “[T.S.] Eliot, an Englishman who moved to St. Louis as a young man …” Really, no. Just stop. (And in light of this, it’s hard to know how to take the acknowledgement of the copy editor, whose “diligence … resulted in several fewer errors in the finished product. Thus, any errors that remain are entirely [his] fault.” Har har har.)
The underpinnings of the book are even more slipshod. References that appear in abbreviated form in the end notes are missing from the bibliography (and therefore unfindable, for those geeks who actually use the notes and bibliography to read more deeply on the subject). There are huge chunks of direct quotation from secondary sources that really should have been paraphrased–there’s nothing particularly brilliant in the original, it’s just, you can’t help thinking, that Burns was too lazy to bother expressing the information in his own words. Not to mention that it’s really confusing for your readers to quote someone who is already quoting someone else. And then there are the huge chunks of direct quotation from Burns’s own works on Prohibition and smoking–first of all, rather tacky; secondly, if you’re going to reference yourself, you could (again) at least go to the effort of rewriting rather than recycling the material; thirdly, do you really want to expose so blatantly the fact that you haven’t bothered to update your research at all in the meantime? Going back to that tactless acknowledgement of the copy editor, I’m inclined to view the problems and errors in this book not as evidence of a bad copy editing job, but as an indication of what an unholy mess this manuscript must have been when the editor got it.
All in all, the book reads like “I did a lot of research [rather: got a lot of librarians to do a lot of research for me] and slapped it all down on the paper any old which way.” It isn’t even as though Burns starts from events and ideas that were current in 1920 and traces them forward and backward into their sources and outcomes. An awful lot of this stuff wasn’t even relevant until well after 1920. It might have been better framed as a book about the decade, specifically the decade from the perspective solely of the United States, but then the omissions and wonky focuses would have been even more egregious. I can’t say that I learned anything here that previous reading hadn’t already told me. If I were a historian of the early twentieth century, you might be excused for thinking, well, so what–if you’re going to get a quick overview of the 1920s, why not start with this book as well as any other? But I’m a medievalist, so if this is stuff even a medievalist knows, then why bother at all?
A book like this always leaves me wondering, why did nobody stop it before it got out of hand? As I said, it starts off well, and there seems to be some sense of organization around political events and issues with parallels in the contemporary world. Terrorism strikes New York City! Washington DC: A cesspit of crony corruption! Carlo Ponzi: the Italian Bernie Madow! (Are we then supposed to read: Hillary Clinton: Edith Wilson all over again?) But if Burns’s strong suit is politics, why bother shoving in the random final chapters on books and music, and yet not even bother with the massive media game-changers of film and radio (outside of political coverage)? Sure, the movies got started well before the 1920s, but if he can go back to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in discussing woman suffrage, it’s certainly worth hitting the highlights of cinematic history before getting down to the explosion of Hollywood after its European competition was knocked back to the Stone Age as one of the aftereffects of the war. Yeah, yeah, we get it, the Roaring Twenties and jazz. Doesn’t mean you have to write about it, if your real focus lies elsewhere.
![Prince Madoc Leaving Wales, by William Cullen Bryant / C. Scribner's Sons (1888) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1024px-madoc_leaving_wales_depiction.jpg)
Prince Madoc Leaving Wales, by William Cullen Bryant / C. Scribner’s Sons (1888) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
So here’s the story: after the death of Owein Gwynedd in 1170, his five million sons immediately began fighting over who would reign over the kingdom of Gwynedd in his stead. One of these sons–Madoc–decided that he was not interested in internecine warfare and set sail to the West, where he eventually landed some-undetermined-where on the shores of North America. Pleased with what he found, he returned to Wales and spread word of this Elysium to the West, gathered together a couple of shiploads of colonists equally fed up with intrafamilial squabbling, and sailed back into the West, never to be heard from again … until the more well-known colonization of the Americas in the early modern period, when stories of “Welsh-speaking Indians” began to spread, with some interesting results.
Okay, five million sons is a bit of an exaggeration; the whole population of Wales in the late thirteenth century has been estimated at about 100,000, so presumably the population was even lower a hundred years earlier, and even less than that in the kingdom of Gwynedd. However, Owein Gwynedd did have some thirteen children, at least seven of them sons, both legitimate and illegitimate. In medieval Welsh law, acknowledged illegitimate sons were equal heirs in a system that divided the inheritance among all male offspring (daughters got their cut as dowry), rather than the eldest-takes-all system of primogeniture. On the surface, this seems like a much more equitable–dare one say, socialist–method of providing for one’s progeny; the problem arises when some smartypants thinks things through, sees that even the most wealthy parent’s estate is still finite, and realizes that they will be better off in the long run with fewer siblings. Likewise, the medieval Welsh theory that a king should be elected by the kinship group of the previous king’s extended family sounds nascently democratic; the lingering archaic notion that a king must be physically whole and perfect, however, led ambitious warriors to industriously scuttle the chances of their brothers and uncles by blinding and/or castrating as many as they could get their hands on. They usually tried to avoid actually killing any of their rivals, though, because that would be murder! (See Thomas Charles-Edwards on Welsh dynastic succession in his Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, chapter 6.) Madoc was said to be one of Owein’s acknowledged illegitimate sons, and an unlikely heir to his father’s throne, but he realized that his chances of reaching a ripe old age with all his bodily members intact increased exponentially the further he got from the bosom of his loving family.
“Excalibur novel” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Excalibur_novel.jpg#/media/File:Excalibur_novel.jpg
I first encountered the Madoc legend when I was about 14, in the novel Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laubenthal–one of those life-changing novels you pick up almost by accident in your early teens and nothing is ever the same. My father covered motor sports for Sports Illustrated at the time, and it was decided that the whole family would accompany him to Florida, where he was covering the Daytona 500, and then proceed to visit my grandfather and his new wife in Naples. I have about three vague fragments of memory of sitting in the stand at the Daytona Speedway, a relatively vivid one of going shopping for crates of oranges to send back to the other grandparents up in the frozen wastelands of suburban New York, and a conglomerate, ineradicable memory of the bookstore in a shopping center down the street from our hotel that I think we must have visited every day we were there. Because that’s what we do, we Joneses, when we are on vacation: we go to bookstores, buy books, and sit together in a room, reading. The bookstore was utterly charmless–as far as I can reconstruct from my memory, it was an old supermarket where they had swept away the canned goods and filled all the shelves with books, or that’s what it felt like. (It was probably a nascent Barnes and Noble, before they got the idea of setting different book sections at angles to each other.) But it was huge. I had never seen so many books all in one place outside of a library–in other words, it was a library that all could, potentially, be mine. Forever. And they had pretty much the entire run of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which is where I found Excalibur. I think I read it in one swallow, out by the hotel pool and late into the night in bed.
One of the places where Madoc is said to have landed is Mobile, Alabama, where the Daughters of the American Revolution raised a plaque in his memory in 1953 (eventually removed in 2008). Laubenthal’s story takes place in Mobile, where a Welsh archaeologist is searching for the remains of Madoc’s settlement–and for the treasure Madoc brought with him: Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The archaeologist is opposed by the undying sorceress, Morgan le Fay, and his quest for the sword, interwoven with another character’s quest for the Grail, proceeds on several levels, pagan and Christian, Welsh and American, this-worldly and Otherworldly. I was already vaguely interested in Arthurian literature and early medieval British archaeology; this is one of the books that set me firmly on the road to studying the Welsh stratum of Arthuriana.
Here’s the problem: Owein Gwynedd had too many sons, but until about the fifteenth century, none of them was named Madoc. Madoc doesn’t appear in any of the Welsh genealogies–and the medieval Welsh were serious about their geneaologies–and the story bears a striking resemblance to Irish legends of both pagan and Christian seafarers setting off to the West and discovering wondrous lands. The Voyage of Bran, son of Febal and The Voyage of Saint Brendan are the two most famous of these. Medieval Welsh princes who found the homeland too hot for them often set off to the West with an entourage, but usually only made it as far as Ireland–where they would likely have heard stories like those of Bran and Brendan. It’s probable that the story of Madoc began as a Welsh version of this kind of voyage tale.
![Humphrey Llwyd's Cronica Walliae, the first printed reference to Madoc's voyage. By David Powel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/history_of_cambria_1811_cover.jpg)
Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae, the first printed reference to Madoc’s voyage.
By David Powel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
As a propaganda point, the late-Tudor legend of Madoc exploded from whatever backwater it had inhabited into the mainstream. It was particularly attractive to the Welsh, many of whom had followed their Mab Darogan (“prophesied son”), Henry VII, to London in search of greater opportunity. English people thus became somewhat accustomed to the sounds–but not the sense–of the Welsh language, and when immigration to the Americas brought them in contact with other peoples speaking equally incomprehensible languages, it appears that they frequently jumped to the conclusion that these guttural babblers were speaking Welsh. The Welsh, meanwhile, not finding quite as many opportunities as hoped for in England and becoming increasingly oppressed in Wales, began to dream of another prophesied land in the Americas, where they would be reunited with their long-lost Welsh-speaking brothers. By the eighteenth century, there were Welsh-backed expeditions mounted to discover these Welsh Indians–who always lived just over the mountain or just down the river from whoever had told the story to whoever was telling it now–and while they never did find Welsh-speaking Indians, they did trek through large swaths of the interior of the continent in the attempt. Thus, while it is unlikely that a twelfth-century Welshman discovered the Americas, the search for traces of him led to the discovery of much about them.
But what would have happened if “Madoc” and his followers did settle and prosper in North America in the twelfth century? The whole interface between Europeans and Americans would have gone down a completely different path. For one thing, these settlers would have arrived looking for a quiet place to live, rather than a source of riches to haul back home. Presumably they would have had the sense to approach the natives of the place with somewhat more humility and a cooperative mindset. There would not have been as big a difference in the two peoples’ respective military technologies in the age before the invention of muskets, and since the Welsh were not traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, their inadvertent importation of Old World diseases might not have had such a catastrophic effect on the Americans. Perhaps a less drastic introduction to diseases like smallpox would have served to immunize the Americans rather than decimate them. By the time early modern European navigation and the exploratory mindset had developed, Americans might have been much better ready to stand up to them. Think of Madoc and his Welsh as a hypothetical Euro-vaccination for the New World.
I like to think, on absolutely no evidence at all, that the Madocian Welsh landed in the vicinity of Cape May, New Jersey, where they would have first encountered the Lenni-Lenape, an Eastern Algonquian-speaking group whose culture had some interesting consonances with the traces of ancient Brythonic culture and mythology that survive in the medieval Welsh tales of the Mabinogi (which were probably in their early stages of being compiled and/or written down from oral tradition when Madoc left Wales). Chief among these is “the avunculate” (see Tomas O Cathasaigh, “The Sister’s Son in Early Irish Literature,” Peritia 5 [1986]:128-60) in which the raising of children is the primary responsibility, not of their father, but of their mother’s brother. And if, as I have absolutely no evidence for proposing, the real reason Madoc left Wales was that he was the chief of the last Welsh druids, the leader of a band of pagan Pilgrims, perhaps the structure of the Celtic religion was more consonant with that of the Lenni-Lenape. The chief god among Algonqiuan peoples took the form of a large rabbit; Dio Cassius implies that Andraste, the goddess of the Iceni, was linked with the hare when he describes Boudicca releasing a hare to take omens from its running before declaring war on the Romans. The clannish structure of medieval Welsh kingdoms was certainly congruous with the clans and phratries of the Lenni-Lenape. And one can’t help thinking that the Lenni-Lenape’s somewhat underdog position among their neighbors, nonetheless united with a status as the oldest group, the “grandfathers,” of the area, is consonant with the status and reputation of the Welsh among the English.
At any rate, it’s fun to think so.
Further reading:
The best book on the Madoc legend is still Gwyn A. Williams’ Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford University Press, 1988), which is the only work I’ve come across that digs deeply into what the legend meant to the Welsh. The Wikipedia article on Madoc is quite good for a quick introduction. Ronald H. Fritze discusses the Madoc legend in the context of other legends of pre-Columbian European discovery of the Americas in Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Sciences, and Pseudo-Religions (Reaktion Books, 2011). There have been a couple of recent biographies of Dr. John Dee–The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Doctor John Dee, Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I by Benjamin Woolley (Henry Holt, 2001) and The Arch Conjuror of England: John Dee by Glyn Parry (Yale University Press, 2013)–that touch on his promotion of the Madoc legend and thus place the story in the larger context of Elizabethan empire-building and propaganda.
A couple of recent interesting books on Lenni-Lenape society are The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley by Tom Arne Midtrod (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by Jean R. Soderlund (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), both of which illustrate how the Lenni-Lenape interacted with neighboring peoples and with the Europeans when they did arrive.
The Romantic poet Robert Southey wrote a long epic poem, Madoc (1805) (his prince’s first American encounter is with the Aztecs–well, hey, the druids are supposed to have been nearly as enthusiastic human sacrificers as the Aztecs, come to think of it), hoping that he would earn enough money from its publication to emigrate to America and start a new society based on his Romantic political principles. The modern Irish poet Paul Muldoon composed his poem Madoc: A Mystery (1990) in reaction to Southey’s work, imagining that Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in fact succeeded in creating this Utopia.
Sadly, Sanders Anne Laubenthal’s Excalibur is pretty seriously out of print, but there seem to be a fair number of used copies available on Amazon. I still have that copy I bought in Daytona in 1974, and it will never leave my clutches. Madoc features prominently in Madeleine L’Engel’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978); an eighteenth-century search for the lost Madocians drives the plot of Matthew J. Kirby’s alternate history YA novel The Lost Kingdom (Scholastic, 2013), which I have to confess is lingering on page 16 of the “still to be read” collection on my Kindle.
Once upon a time (1987, to be precise), there were three little teaching assistants: Leslie, Susan, and Dan. In those days, when Folklore was a discipline in which you could get a Masters or PhD at UCLA, the field was going through one of its periodic convulsions in which everyone and his youngest brother was arguing about what folklore “really” is. A useful side effect of this exercise is that, once you have defined folklore to your fancy (which generally boils down to “what I like to study”), it becomes possible to define people who don’t fit that definition as “not real folklorists.” For it is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among folklorists, that all folklorists are good folklorists, and anyone whose work isn’t up to snuff isn’t a bad folklorist, or a sloppy scholar, or a just plain annoying person who won’t shut up at faculty meetings, but isn’t really a folklorist at all.
Jacob and William Grimm–a couple of real folklorists! Don’t they look interesting?
Susan studied how people told stories about things that had happened to them in the course of daily life. Dan studied people who saw visions of the Virgin Mary, space aliens, and other things that probably don’t exist in mundane reality. Leslie studied comparative mythology, especially medieval Celtic stories about journeys to the Otherworld. And all of them had been told at one point or another that they weren’t real folklorists. One day, as they were sitting around in the TA office, they came to the conclusion that all this arguing about “real” folklore was a waste of time.
“We study this stuff because it’s interesting,” one of them said.
“So why don’t we just change the name of the Center for Folklore and Mythology Studies to the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff and get down to studying it rather than wasting time arguing about it?” said another. (I’m pretty sure it was me, but Susan or Dan may dispute this. It wouldn’t be a myth worth its salt if there weren’t variants.)
“Yeah!” said the third, because there had to be dialogue for everyone. “As long as it’s real interesting, you can come here and study it.”
And thus was born the idea for the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff.
![The Gundestrup Cauldron. You could spend a lifetime thinking about the imagery on this thing. Nationalmuseet [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://leslieellenjones.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/gundestrupkarret.jpg)
The Gundestrup Cauldron. You could spend a lifetime thinking about the imagery on this thing.
But the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff (CSRIS) never really left me. For the last two years, I’ve been working on a Novel As Yet To Be Securely Titled that mashes up a lot of Celtic mythology with steampunk, alternate history, and anything else that takes my fancy. It’s set in 1920 in a world where, due to a concatenation of circumstances, the New World was colonized by the Welsh in the late twelfth century and, rather than having a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, Northern Europe reverted to its various indigenous paganisms. Oh yeah, and there are Galatian bellydancers.(“What do I want to have in this novel?” I asked myself. “Prince Madoc! And Druids! And … and bellydancers!” And for a while I thought I was sunk, until I remembered that there was a tribe of Celts who, in the second century BCE, made it as far east as central Anatolia and were still speaking a recognizably Celtic language in the fourth century CE, but who surely picked up some local habits as well ….)
It strikes me that a CSRIS is a perfect venue to talk about the background to what I’m writing, through essays, musing, rants, book reviews, and imagery: Celtic mythology, Welsh history and language, 1920s fashion and design, bellydance (particularly of a Turkish bent) and its music, Bollywood item numbers, alternate history and steampunk, paganism (neo- and otherwise), the most interesting cats in the world, and all the other shiny, pretty stuff there is to think with.
Because as long as it’s interesting, we don’t need no steenkin’ academic disciplines.
Florrie and Nellie, the Most Interesting Cats in the World
The Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff 
