Merlin's Island
Merlin's Island. Essays on Britain in the Dark Ages. By T. C. Lethbridge. (Methuen. 10s. 6d.) HERE is a book to be read by everyone interested in the ancient history and material culture of the British Isles. It will be especially welcome to those who have for years hoped that Mr. Lethbridge would set down in book form the stimulating ideas he has developed in a quarter-century of excavation and fieldwork, and which have for so long informed his lectures and learned articles. Here he gives us six connected essays dealing with various aspects of Britain in the Dark Ages. All are notable for their originality and cogency, and are written freshly with a wealth of discursive anecdote and many a tilt at orthodox scholarship. Mr. Lethbridge provides a brilliant sketch of the change from Roman Britain to Saxon England, stressing the devastating results of freeing the slaves as a consequence of the great Pict War of A.D. 367. Throughout his essays he attempts to minimise the exaggerated effect of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking invaders on Dark-Age Britain ; he stresses the British contribution to English history, and would have most of us conscious of our Romano-British ancestry.
Britain is as much the island of Merlin, he rightly avers, as it is the land of the barbaiian Angles. He urges fresh researches on the Western and Atlantic aspects of early British history in the Dark Ages, and suggests that the Celtic inhabitants of Western Britain, Ireland and Scotland had, in pre-Viking and, perhaps even in Roman, times, not only travelled to Iceland, but also to Greenland, and had discovered America. These new ideas he supports with a compara- tive analysis of Eskimo archaeology. He urges that it was the "Celtic influence on the Viking that led him to Iceland and to Greenland," and that the Welsh tales of the discovery of America are not myths, but legends embodying historical truths.
Mr. Lethbridge's treatment of survivals is particularly stimulating. He reminds us that the scaffie and plaid are survivals of Roman culture in an area outside Roman occupation, and sees in the up- tilted gable ends of thatched East Anglian barns and cottages, and in the triangular patches painted on the bows of Dutch vessels, Norfolk wherries and Iceland codboats, skeuomorphs respectively of decorated wooden finials or dragon heads, and of the Mediter- ranean oculus. From surviving boat forms, Mr. Lethbridge traces the history of boats in N.W. Europe back to the primitive coracle, and studies the inter-relation of boat and house types, deriving all from the primitive skip tent, and making the long house an upturned boat. But this subject needs greater study. There were long,houses in Neolithic times—Haldon for example—and the inter-action of barrow forms needs considering. Is the long barrow a form derived from the upturned boat ? Its formal resemblance to a curragh is very striking ; the Balearic long barrows are even called ravetas locally.
Mr. Lethbridge is a protagonist of what he calls the "common sense " attitude to archaelogy, by which he means a steady refusal to regard as indisputable facts what are only workine hypotheses based on shaky typologies, incomplete distribution maps or an exaggerated reverence for earlier archaelogists. He calls his book a collection of " damnable heresies " ; they blow like a breath of fresh sea air through a room musty with the smell of text-books and museum exhibits. Mr. Lethbridge quotes Dr. Palmer, the Cam- bridge antiquary, as saying, " No man ought to write a book until he has studied a subject for at least twenty years." Mr. Lethbridge has followed this severe advice, and the results more than justify it. But let us not have to wait so long for another sample of Mr. Leth- bridge's distinguished, rare and fertile scholarship.
GLYN E. DANIEL.
Previous page
