England's Mythology?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Saurreg

As I have mentioned the tale of Robin Hood was set in a time when the common nature of England was closely interwined with that of the rest of Europe. The orders of those days were religious piety to the Catholic Church and regional feudalism. So instead of thinking of Robin Hood and the characteristics of that tale as solely English in nature, I think of it more of European in nature. Reasons have been stated as before.

Robin Hood is a folk tale, and the ordinary people of England at that time wouldn't have been European in any way. In fact tales like Robin Hood ran contra to the European aristocracy and church that had been imported to the island; they are closely linked to faerie and ideas of belonging to the land. Feudalism is key to understanding this as the ordinary people simply through survival instinct would have had to do whatever they were told to do, including attending church, there was no option; but storytelling, in the relative safety of the home, retained their older memories, passed on through generations.

As I've said, there are probably similar tales from other countries in Europe, but folk tales take on a local aspect by their nature, especially ones which grow up on an island. I'd argue that England (and indeed Britain) is even today not really 'European' in terms of cultural outlook. If we look at roots of archetypes and legends then we must go quite far back to the races which managed to get here over thousands of years, and even then there is archaeological evidence that incursions didn't really begin until the Romans came - the latest evidence suggests that the so-called Celts were just native Britons, who'd probably come here when we were still joined to France. And that's probably how far back we'd need to go to get to common pre-Roman ancestors.

Then you need to add to the mixture the incoming Vikings and Saxons (Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes etc as they are today) and how they may have added to folk tales. For Scots the Irish are also important as they gradually took over from the Picts.

Anyway, where am I going with this? Just I suppose to make the point that as Britain is an island, its folklore is quite special, we can identify when different peoples came here and we can still identify where they exactly went, as place names are still either British, Viking, Saxon or French (actually quite rare ). I think you can even identify this in Tolkien. lmp makes a guess at which middle-earth cultures might correspond to the various distinct cultures which came to Britain, and I think there's something in that, that Tolkien may have attempted in some way to deal with those distinct groups and how they made a new identity.