I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept.
The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages, by Brian Bates
Though this book is a muddled cornucopia of flaccid ideas masquerading as history, anthropology, mythology, psychology, and spirituality, I am not going to spend much time outlining just why this book is incompetent and just what are the many mistakes its author makes; that task has been done much better than I ever could have done by a user named Jan-Maat on the Goodreads site, and you can find his review here. I wanted instead to only quickly eviscerate this tome by quoting a few passages and by bemoaning the academic standards of a world in which the University of Brighton gives the author of The Real Middle Earth a professorship and a world where such a man can teach “an award-winning course in Shamanic Consciousness”. Mr. Bates’s predilection for finding a fictive enchantment in an imagined past is only compounded by his penchant for a double mis-naming/mis-interpretation as he tries to rebrand the Medieval period as “the real Middle Earth” and as he tries to shoehorn Tolkien into every aspect of Celtic/Norse/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Pagan life as seen though eyes which insist on magic at the expense of toe-stubbing reality. About a quarter of the book are passages wherein he seeks to wax rhapsodic over places he visited in preparation for this book—reconstructed houses at West Stow, mounds where the Sutton Hoo treasure was found, an ancient (perhaps the ancient) yew tree near Runnymede—but his gift for poetry is no better than his poor camera work featured in a color section in the center of the book. The Real Middle Earth is a frustrating bungle of a book, but—and it is a big ‘but’—it has a very interesting bibliography.
All around me elder and sweetbriar shrubs flaunted petals in colors softened by the filtered sunlight. I breathe their sweet fragrance warmed and wafted by the summer breeze. Chaffinches flitted nervously from bush to bush, chattering to each other in harsh warning notes as I passed. When today we glimpse the breathtaking beauty of a woodland setting, it is hardly surprising to us that the people of the historical Middle-earth imbued nature with a spiritual presence. But, of course, for them it was far more than a matter of aesthetic beauty. Landscapes are taken in by the eye but actually perceived with the brain. That is where interpretation and meaning make sense of the signals from our sensory receptors. And they saw more than we would, gazing at the same scene. They thought of nature not only as an objective world, external to themselves, but as also reaching internally, with magical powers and imbued with the full richness of their imagination. Features of nature had many layers of meaning, levels of significance, allusions and messages. The forest was alive with the chatter of another world.
Oh! To be in England!
Well, maybe…
Bates gives no more evidence for the conclusions he draws in this paragraph than his bald assertion. So … maybe so … maybe not
As I say, if you have this book in your library, I highly recommend that you read the books in his bibliography—most of them, at least—and skip his nearly random musings altogether. Mr. Bates uses the sources sparingly, without footnotes and with only the lightest of citing in text, but has little hesitation in using another author’s book as a reason for the most speculative conclusions about a culture and a place and a time far divorced from the source he pleads to. Thus he will cite Tacitus on the German tribes to make assertions about practices in Britain over half a millennium later, references studies of Siberian and South American shamans of the current day to draw conclusions about magic beliefs in his ‘Middle-earth’, and never uses a footnote so that you can check up on his intellectual honesty. In the case of those cited sources which I had already read, I saw that the conclusion of Mr. Bates were often quite a long way distant from those of the original book, and in some cases seem to be almost diametrically opposed. In all cases, the Celts, the Norse, the Germans, the Goths, all the pre-Christian and non-Roman peoples are all good, and the Romans, and the rising Christian polities which followed them, are bad. Mostly.
The Romans are counterpointed elsewhere in this book as lacking some of the imaginative sensitivities of Middle-earth culture. However, they also honored wells.
At least there’s that, then
“Middle-earth culture” becomes a catch-all for all the good stuff, and Rome and Christians become the bad guys, trying to destroy those wonderful, primitive people with their closer attunement to the true wonder of nature. And maybe it’s so, but this book doesn’t make a case for this assertion; it only makes the case that the author would like very much for this to be so. Mr. Bates plays fast and loose with everything he says or mentions, as when he speaks of the “more intimate perspective on animals” of the “indigenous people of Middle-earth”—which completely ignores the fact that the ‘people’ he is discussing (though we cannot quite pin him down) were engaged in pushing out the previous occupants in almost every land, and certainly in the British Isles this is so, where the Picts, Irish, Scots, Angles, Danes, and who-knows-who-else were all violently taking over and kicking out each other in a continual struggle all through the first millennium of the Common Era.
One of the rides on [Odin’s eight-legged horse] Sleipnir was taken by the god Hermothr, whom some scholars think to be an alter ego of Odin. I shall therefore refer to Sleipnir’s rider here directly as Odin.
Whereupon Bates then relates the account of the ride to the Underworld by Hermothr. Who was Odin’s son. The sources mentioned in the notes to the chapter where this passage is found do not, unsurprisingly, have anything to say about this Hermothr/Odin confusion.
Some of the works, particularly the more recent books, which he cites are a little bit credulous, I think, but they seem to play fair with their readers, unlike The Real Middle Earth. Not content to cite text from 1st Century Romans to bolster accounts of British practices from the latter half of the first millennium, Bates has no compunction against stating such breathtaking absurdities as “an account from thirteenth-century Denmark provides a glimpse of what probably went on in similar form all over Middle-earth”, then citing an erotic dance with an Ox as evidence for the power of women in his imagined British world. This isn’t evidence, it is wishful thinking. One can forgive some simple mistakes in a work such as this—as, for example, when he cites The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic by R. Merrifield as “…of Religion and Magic“—but those are honest mistakes. However, as the annoying insistence on speaking of “Middle-earth” when talking about Medieval Britain shows, Mr. Bates is not a historian, nor an anthropologist, not even close. The level of insight into this long ago time never rises above that one might expect from an episode of What’s New, Scooby-Doo? At least the latter would be brief and to the point.
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