The Famous Druids
Oxford University Press: 1962
|264 pages; 4 illustrations||March 2009|
English literature describing Druids?
[The Druids] leave an unbounded liberty to pure imagination, & fiction (our favourite provinces) where no Critick can molest, or Antiquary gainsay us. & yet (to please me) these Fictions must have some affinity, some seeming connection with that little we really know of the character & customs of the People.Thomas Gray, 1757
The Famous Druids by A. L. Owen is not exactly a history of the Druids, for the plain and simple reason that the Druids left precious little by way of historical record or archaeological artifact. What the book is instead, though, is quite fascinating and expansive: A survey of three centuries of English literature on the Druids. There are a few surviving Greek and Roman references to Druids (Pliny, Tacitus, Julius Caesar, etc.), but what we popularly think we know was largely imagined, fabricated, mistranslated, misinterpreted, or downright forged during early modern times.
We should see this clearly. The Druids maintain a solemn existence in their holy groves of good solid oak, on the basis of quite fugitive and evanescent sources. The Famous Druids shows us a thicket of luxuriant fancy and entangled error, with scarcely a mistletoe-sprig of truth to be seen in twenty centuries.
This all reminds me of S. Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives, a study in the literature about Shakespeare as a person, pseudo-biographies which wander through improbabilities as though the Bard were a multiply-replicated character in a universe of parallel timelines. The Druids offer something for everyone but none of it solid. As for the Druidist scholarship, it's like trading in financial derivatives, where one tries to grasp not a commodity but an emanation:
John Smith, the Gaelic scholar, states that he had spent about twelve years collecting the manuscripts which he published in Galic Antiquities, 1780. As their editor, he claims that he had found distinct references to Druidism in these poems. There can be no better authority, for he had himself first written the poems in English, and after translating them into Gaelic, he then published the translations as originals, and the originals as translations.The Druid universality
So what then remains to us of those Druids of wild rumor and fanciful scholarship? Those priests, philosophers, peacemakers; spreaders of Greek wisdom, teachers to the Greek philosophers; heirs of the Hebrew Patriarchs in Britain, teachers to the Hebrew Patriarchs; engineers of megaliths, rustic woods-dwellers; brave leaders of resistance to Christianity, wise converts to Christianity; their order died out, their secret rituals still maintained?
The oaken groves of academe were not immune to extending their pedigree:
(Of course, with no prejudice among universities, we here at Troynovant must come down firmly for the clear priority and obvious significance of the Trojan contingent.)
I suggest that the theme for this Gaelic-Welsh-English to Greek-Jewish-Egyptian crosstime culture-clasp is expressed beautifully by lyricist Alfred Bryan and Chris Smith in their rollicking song "The Irish Were Egyptians Long Ago", recorded in 1920 and again in 1940 (choruses only) by the great comic singer Billy Murray:
Intellectual history: fluid, misleading, inspiring
In terms of intellectual history, A. L. Owen describes an intricate process, and we may see why his excellent book is not focused on Druid evidence of which we possess so little. Rather he shows the fluid impression of the Druids as it was created and evolved in Britain during the Sixteenth through early Nineteenth Centuries.
It's a wild ride in which William Stukeley's translation of Horace shows "the Bacchus of the Heathen to be the Jehovah of the Jews" (1736). But there are great figures along the way: John Aubrey, antiquarian of Stonehenge and Avebury; John Milton and William Blake. Many took Druids and Druidism (however defined at the time) more or less for granted, and chunks or tidbits of imagined lore and pseudo-history found their way into the general culture.
Owen provides considerable leavenings of humor amidst the scholarship in The Famous Druids, generally only a few sentences and sometimes just a reversed word, a negative where we expect a positive in the sentence. So it pays to read him rather measuredly, enjoying tone as well as outrageous fact:
Toland [author of History of the Druids, 1726] had an exuberant fancy. On seeing some Irishmen jumping over bonfires, he took it to mean that they were still performing ancient rites of purification. With a rather pert facility, he found much to improve upon in his sources ...
It is characteristic of Owen's high but empathetic perspective that he sees both good and bad inextricably melded in these Druidist enthusiasms:
Helping to draw the bow
To employ a Nietzschean concept, this tension of the spirit — between the glories with which thoughtful men wished to imbue ancient Druid philosopher-priests, versus the few facts and those mostly unsupportive or downright contrary — that this tension of projected Platonic ideal versus oak-sturdy facts with the bark on, this Druidist effort helped draw the great bow of the modern spirit, its science and its history.
John Milton strongly favored the Druids, then repudiated them. William Blake adopted them during the course of his poetic systematization, and fitted and retrofitted them into his poetry. Archaeologists, comparative linguists, and historians of ideas were not the only ones who eventually felt the stress of reevaluating. Owen describes Milton's change of mind about Druids:
© 2009 Robert Wilfred Franson