The paradox of historical imagination

 

The Vikings probably went to the moon
- David Mitchell, QI S17E14

Truth, it is often said, is stranger than fiction. As a medievalist I have often found this to be correct, in the sense that the source material with which I engage has confounded my prejudice or my neophyte imagination time after time, and continues to do so. It is partly this never-ending itinerary from revelation to revelation – moments both big and small – that makes it so very fulfilling to immerse oneself in the past, and to have one’s comprehension of reality expanded by this unsteady pulse of learning and discovery. Truth is strange – but mostly because how we conceive of truth is laughably narrow, and because our ability to measure truth is hemmed in by our expectations of what is possible. This often yields strange results in how we conceive of the past, or at least certain iconic moments of aspects from the past, because very often we tend to conceive of these as they have been handed down from previous generations, as a second- or third-hand idea shaped by the prejudice and state of the art of a bygone period. The past provides a template for how the future thinks of an even more distant past, and it can be difficult to realise how that template needs to be altered to fit with the knowledge and understanding that have accumulated in the interim. This inability to properly modify the received template often leads to a paradoxical thinking about the human potential in historical epochs: We sometimes tend to think both too broadly and too narrowly at one and the same time. Our historical imagination often becomes like a lake bursting from a dam and spreading broadly in all directions, but without creating the depth needed to sustain it or to acquire substance.     

In an attempt to write this in a clearer way, I will take as my example how neatly people tend to categorise humanity into different nations, groups, tribes, ethnicities, or – to those who cling to an anachronistic, unnecessary and harmful lexicon – races and civilisations. This very neat categorisation – too neat for reality to fit into it – has provided a foundation for ideas about the immutable relationship between ethnicity and geography. This foundation has been used to build delusions such as the one that the concept of the nation-state is somehow natural and old, as suggested by well-known demagogue Nigel Farage, or that there is such a thing as an Urheimat, an original home, for certain ethnicities. The human past, even if we only look to the last two millennia, is infinitely more complex and brimming with nuance than such neat categorisations can capture.          

In the field of medieval studies, this neat categorisation along ethnic lines has recently sparked a lot of controversy, because people bottle-fed on nationalistic notions inherited from the nineteenth century struggle to accept the idea of the Middle Ages as a temporal space that can be conceived as multi-cultural. The idea that the cultures of medieval Europe kept to themselves and were separated by these neatly demarcated categories has presided over a lot of historical thinking, both within academia and without, and this idea has been shaped by very modern notions of ethnic differences. In short, it is very difficult for a certain type of modern humans to envisage a medieval past in which ethnicity – or its perverted double, “race”, – was not such a wall-maker as that type of modern humans would wish it to be. The racist ideologies of the modern world are simply incompatible with the truth of the source material, and truth becomes much stranger – or at least much more complex – than the fictions these people tend to weave. 

The limited nature of this historical imagination, an imagination that cannot imagine a Europe that is not monolithically white in its skin, is paradoxical. And what makes the limitation of this historical imagination so paradoxical is that the very figureheads by which they seek support for their ideas are proof of the exact opposite of what they believe. The figureheads in questions vary, but very often they tend to be Vikings or crusaders, Europeans who are best known and even celebrated by these racist groups for the well-documented breadth of their travels. We know that the Norse reached the coasts of modern-day Canada, and connected with the trade routes of Central Asia. We know that the crusaders established themselves forcefully in the Levant and attempted to gain footholds in Northern Africa. And there are fantasies about these figureheads reaching even further. There are fantasies about Vikings and Knights Templars reaching further south along the American landmass. In some cases, these fantasies are just that, fantasies, and they revel in an imaginative exuberance that can easily be enjoyed without the need of embracing them as facts. We have, for instance, Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant who joins a Viking expedition into the forests of West Africa. Or the case of Hugo Pratt’s Mu, the latest instalment in his series about Corto Maltese, in which the lost continent of Mu is found in the depths of Amazonas – or perhaps the depths of the earth, it’s not very clear in the story – and we learn that it was reached by both Vikings and Templars. Similarly, there are several Italian Disney stories in which proof of Viking settlements are found near Duckburg – and as aficionados will remember, Duckburg is located in the fictional state of Calisota, located somewhere along the Pacific coast, an entire continent away from where we know that the Norse actually landed.          

The ability of popular culture to envisage a medieval world that is in effect boundless and in which cultures from very different geographical locations can meet one another is boon to the historical imagination. This pop-cultural vision is of course tempered by reality, in which we know that the Norse never reached the Pacific Ocean, the subterranean depths, or the moon, yet this vision provides is with a reminder that we should not think too narrowly about the possibilities furnished by the world of medieval travel. And because we should not think too narrowly of this world, we also come to the realisation that the cultures that comprised the medieval period, the groups and tribes and peoples whose histories we try to comprehend through a frustratingly incomplete source material, they were part of a unified geographical world – the Afro-Eurasian landmass – whose connectedness and whose roads and infrastructure facilitated cultural encounters and sustained contacts that were probably much deeper and long-standing than we often realise. This reminds us, in turn, that we should not think too narrowly along the lines of modern concepts of ethnicities, because people of the Middle Ages were not – at least to the same extent.

Granted, we know that the peoples of the medieval period – as people have always done to various extents – had clear ideas about geographical belonging. I am currently reading Jordanes’ Gothic History (translated by Mierow), in which the sixth-century Gothic scholar unequivocally locates the Gothic place of origin in the island of Scandza, calling it a womb of nations, an idea that has fuelled later ideas about the Urheimat. In this sense, the historical imagination of Jordanes is quite narrow, in that we today would – or at least should – hesitate to accept such a clear geographical starting point for any group identified by an ethnic label, unless – of course – one belongs to those groups who pathetically cling to fictions of belonging as if their worldview depended on it (which it does).         

Yet at the same time, Jordanes also paints a picture of the history of the Goths that envisage a known world in which cultures met, interacted and intermarried. In the first few chapters of the History, we learn how the Goths left the island of Scandza – often identified as Scandinavia – and then roamed across the known world, coming into contact with, and often marrying into, peoples such as the Scythians, the Seres (traditionally but not uncontestedly identified as the Chinese) and the Persians, and even pushing as far south as into Egypt, hindered only by the fortifications erected to keep out the Ethiopians (a reminder that the term “Ethiopian” meant something less precise in the world of Late Antiquity than it does today). In short, the historical imagination of Jordanes had no problem accepting as truth these ideas that a people from an island in the far north could, in the course of generations, reach distant corners of Asia and even into Egypt, and that these northerners established relationships with and married into people very different from themselves. The historical imagination of the learned medieval world, in other words, as far less narrow in its limits and constraints of geographical thinking than several of those of the modern era who venerate idealised figures of that same medieval past.       

This is the paradox of historical imagination: To accept, and to even expand, the geographical vista suggested by the medieval source material, yet to deny the very human implications of that vista for how we think about culture, cultural exchange, and multiculturalism. This is the paradox of a type of modern mind that embraces the forgery of the Kensington rune stone as authentic, yet that struggles, or refuses, to understand that the Roman Empire of the time of Jordanes, for instance, was a hodgepodge of ethnicities and cultural impulses that demonstrated the interwoven world of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, connecting through a range of intermediaries all the different coasts of Africa, Asia and Europe. It is in this refusal to accept cultural contacts as sustained and having a long-term impact rather than being ephemeral or interpreted as proving the dominance of one’s favoured culture, that the modern racist mind fails to comprehend that truth is both much stranger and much more interesting than the fictions of its narrow confines.