History is the stories of the past. We used to tell these stories from generation to the next. Unfortunately, we creating writing, and suddenly, facts became linked to written evidence. If it wasn’t written, it didn’t happen!
Writing was invented around 4500 years ago in modern day Iran. These skills slowly moved to Europe over the next few thousand of years. By the time the Greeks and Romans were travelling around Northern Europe, they wrote about it. As these people were better at looking after their books, its their words that have as the ultimate truth of the state of the world.
The non writing tribes of Europe had an oral tradition that meant that the past came alive when they told their tales. The stories we have these days of those times are called myths and legend. My favourites are the Mabinogion, which are the stories of ancient Welsh tribes.
The one I best remember is the story of Bendigeudfran, who was huge. He was so big, he was able to walk all the way from Wales to Ireland. This really caught my imagination, and I’ve always remembered it as a story which I wish was true.
Zoom into the picture above and see how the UK has lost a lot of land in the last 16000 years. Notice how thousands of years ago, there was no Irish sea. This got me thinking that if the Mabinogion was, maybe 15000 years old, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal to walk to Ireland.
Obviously, it was still a big story, but what if the story was repeated, word for word, for generations, and it didn’t take the creation of the Irish Sea into consideration? That could be considered proof of a number of points. One being that myths were actually history lessons. Second point being that people have lived on the British Isles for a very long time, and many of the current ideas we have of the past are not correct.
However, with the focus we have on written words, we are stuck with facts we have about the British Isles from a bunch of tourists, and who ever took a tourist review seriously?