War
of the Ghosts
 |
| F. C. Bartlett |
At the March 1920 meeting of the Folk-Lore
Society, all three papers were delivered by Cambridge men. A.C. Haddon gave the
presidential address, W.H.R. Rivers discussed the conception of ‘soul-substance’
in New Guinea and Melanesia, and F.C. Bartlett reported on ‘Some Experiments in
the Reproduction of Folk-Stories’.
Does this have anything to do with Tolkien?
It depends how you look at things; which is
really what I want to talk about in this post. Tolkien studies are full of
‘influences’ – as highlighted in the recent flurry of discussion over the state
of Tolkien scholarship. Personally, I don’t get ‘influence’, a seemingly occultist
notion of action at a distance. No doubt the confusion is subjective.
Another perspective draws upon notions like
context and conversation. These are my preferred terms of art, reflecting my
training as an intellectual historian. I’ll illustrate how they work by first
discussing Bartlett and his 1920 paper, and then pointing to its possible significance
for how we think about Tolkien.
Anthropology at Cambridge was established
in the wake of a university expedition to Torres Straits in 1898. Returning
from the expedition, Haddon and Rivers joined forces with more traditional
scholars, notably the classical archaeologist William Ridgeway and the
Anglo-Saxonist H.M. Chadwick, to establish a new faculty of anthropology.
Ridgeway and Chadwick were working on a novel approach to early European
history, which combined archaeology with the study of old literature, such as
the Iliad and Beowulf. Haddon and Rivers introduced to this
approach the folktales of contemporary ‘primitives’. Bartlett’s 1920 paper was
a contribution to an emerging account of the relationship between story and
society in history.
Bartlett was a psychologist. His paper on
the reproduction of Folk Stories discussed an experiment in which members of
his university read a Chinook folk tale, ‘The War of the Ghosts’, and, after
varying intervals of time, reproduced it. Reproduction, Bartlett showed, was
actually reconstruction: over successive retellings familiar elements were
substituted for unfamiliar and the plot structure changed to remove (seemingly)
inexplicable connections. As such, Bartlett’s paper contributed to the study of
cultural diffusion by way of a psychological experiment on memory.
So what does this tell us? If we approach
Bartlett’s paper in terms of influence, pretty much nothing. Tolkien may
possibly have read the paper, but probably did not; and even if he did, any
direct connection we might establish would probably sit all too easily between
the trivial and the vacuous.
Approaching Bartlett’s paper in terms of
context is another matter. To begin with, we see immediately that disciplinary
divisions were not then what they are now. Under the broad umbrella of
‘anthropology’ we find a sustained interaction between students of Classical
and Old English literature, archaeologists, experimental psychologists, and practitioners
of a new participant-observer method of ethnological fieldwork. This was not an
exercise in what today is called ‘inter-disciplinary studies’; rather, it
reflects the fact that before the 1930s the borders between scholarly
disciplines had not yet ossified.
Subsequent closing of the borders between
academic disciplines has fostered a distorted image of the recent intellectual
past. If you search for Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ on the internet you will
find many accounts by modern psychologists of a celebrated chapter in the
history of their discipline. Unless you open up the original report of the
experiment in Folk-Lore, however, you would never guess that this psychological
experiment was designed to illuminate the processes of cultural diffusion.
Something similar has happened to Tolkien,
whose intellectual context is very largely missing from modern Tolkien studies.
Verlyn Flieger is better than most, and has correctly identified the
discussions of the Folk-Lore Society as important background to Tolkien’s 1939
lecture on ‘Fairy Stories’. Yet even Flieger presents these discussions as
focused simply on explaining the unpalatable elements of ancient stories. This
is to project the concerns of a modern discipline (English) onto a past in
which such narrow and restricted focus would have seemed an inexplicable
voluntary myopia. The Folk-Lore Society brought to the table a wide range of interconnected
contemporary debates, ranging over issues of comparative religion, racial
ethnology, social history, and much else besides.
The context of intellectual debate was
different back then. Disciplinary divisions counted for less, and the scholarly
mind roamed over a much larger intellectual terrain. Scholars from a wide
variety of specialized fields were engaged in the same or similar
conversations.
Reading Bartlett can tell us something
about the nature of these conversations, which form a vital (yet passed over)
context of Tolkien’s thought. Of course, Tolkien was not part of this Cambridge
project, nor were his methods, interests, or conclusions aligned with theirs.
Yet his were responses to similar questions, and it is easy to locate ground
shared by Cambridge psychologist and Oxford philologist.
Consider the ‘Origins’ section in ‘On Fairy
Stories’, where Tolkien introduces his notion of individual sub-creation,
alludes to the debate over diffusion, and then introduces his metaphor of the
Cauldron of Story. The Cauldron presents an image of diffusion at work, with
invented elements of fantasy blending with elements of stories significant
parts of which have been forgotten. It is the fact that we forget elements of
the old stories that allows invented elements of fantasy to be blended into
them to make fairy stories.
Whether or not Tolkien was ‘influenced’ by
Bartlett is largely irrelevant. The point is that the two men were both
participants in a wide-ranging and ongoing conversation. Their work, or at
least parts of it, emerged from a shared intellectual context. Bartlett was
particularly arrested by the distortions introduced by memory, Tolkien was
concerned especially with forgetting. But reading their texts together reveals
a wider scholarly community grappling with the relationship of memory and story
in history.
One could go further (much further), had we
but world enough and time. Suffice it here to point out that while Bartlett’s
most famous book was entitled Remembering (1932), Tolkien’s Elves, with
their immortal memories and seemingly perfect recall, can be viewed (in
addition to many other things) as an intensive and prolonged thought-experiment
on what human memory might aspire to, yet palpably is not.
Again, I suggest no influence of Bartlett’s
psychology of memory upon Tolkien’s Elves. What I do suggest is that reading
Tolkien in context reveals much about the kind of questions that stand behind
his writing, just as Tolkien’s highly idiosyncratic answers illuminate the
intellectual and cultural concerns of the twentieth century far more than is
usually suspected.
Whatever the present state of Tolkien
studies might be, it leaves much to be desired from the point of view of the
intellectual historian. I submit that, alongside established methods, the
cultivation of a contextualist reading of the history of ideas has the
potential to transform our understanding of what Tolkien was about.
Some bibliographical references
On the recent ‘state of Tolkien studies’
debates, my favourite contribution, which contains links to others, is ‘Tolkien Criticism Unbound’.
Bartlett’s 1920 paper (as also those of
Haddon and Rivers) can be accessed here,
via the (wonderful) archive.org (make sure to turn to the second half of the
volume).
Flieger has written about the Folk-Lore Society
in several places. See for example the first chapter of her Interrupted
Music (Kent State University Press, 2005).
You can no doubt access Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy
Stories’ without need of biographical reference from me.
Those who wish to read more on Bartlett and
Cambridge anthropology in the first decades of the twentieth century can soon
turn to two papers available on my Academia.edu page: ‘The Tragedy of Cambridge Anthropology’, forthcoming in History of
European Ideas, and (with Tiziana Foresti) ‘War of the Ghosts: Marshall,
Veblen, and Bartlett’, forthcoming in History of Political Economy.
__________________________
Another excellent piece of work by Simon Cook that I would recommend to readers is the monograph, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology, Thank you for agreeing to publish your post here first, Simon.
