Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93807 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Ink Magazine, October 2003
Wavering between the factual and the fanciful, it's an interesting book.

Synopsis
Tolkien readily admitted that the concept of Middle-earth was not his own invention. An Old English term for the Dark Age world, it was always assumed that the importance of magic in this world existed only in Tolkien's works; now Brian Bates reveals the truth about this historical culture. Behind the stories we know of Dark Age kings and queens, warriors and battles, lies the hidden history of Middle-earth, a world of magic, mystery and destiny. Fiery dragons were seen to fly across the sky, monsters haunted the marshes and elves fired poisoned arrows. Wizards cast healing spells, wise trees gave blessings and omens foretold the deaths of kings. The very landscape itself was enchanted and the world imbued with a life force. Repressed by a millennium of Christianity, this belief system all but disappeared, leaving only faint traces in folk memory and fairy tales. This text draws on archaeological findings to reconstruct the imaginative world of our past, revealing a culture with insights that may help us understand our own place in the world.

About the Author
Brian Bates is a Professor at the University of Brighton, and past Chairman of Psychology at the University of Sussex. Specializing in the use of deep imagination in tribal cultures, the performing arts, and also in business, he directs a research programme and teaches an award-winning course in Shamanic.

He is an author of five books, many scientific papers and articles, writes occasional features for the Sunday Times, Observer and Express, and is frequently a guest lecturer internationally. His most recent book was The Human Face, co-written with John Cleese. He lives near Brighton.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and very well written, BUT...
This is a fascinating book which is a compelling delight to read, but, like others, I have some serious reservations about the author's accuracy. For a start, I'd love to know what route he took to the Ankerwycke yew at Wraysbury. I just got off at the railway station, walked straight through the village and beyond it - along the well worn tarmac road - until I saw a road sign to my right bearing the legend "Runnymede." Curious about the name, I turned right and, once among the nearby fields, it only took ten minutes by foot to find the tree (to which people are still tying their offerings, by the way). So much for walking: "for an hour across ancient fields, along trackways and over wooden bridges linking ancient islands once separated by the estuary of the River Thames" (page 42). In any case, you'd have to go back a darned sight further than the Iron Age - when this grand old dear is supposed to have first seen the light of day - to find any part of Berkshire any where near the sea. Estuary? Berkshire and Surrey are nowhere near any river mouths or ocean tides. And it isn't a "small sign from English Heritage," (page 50) it's a small sign from the National Trust. And he doesn't do the Romans much justice either. The idea of "connection," which is such a buzz idea in some circles these days, was by no means exclusive to the Germanic tribes beyond the Danube. Bates obviously hasn't bothered to read Marcus Aurelius: "All things are linked with another, and this oneness is sacred; there is nothing that is not interconnected with everything else" (ed. Mark Forstater, Chapter 4). And then there's: "the thread of causes was from the beginning of time spinning the fabric of your existence...." (chapter 7). The concept of "connection," and being in harmony with Nature, were integral parts of Stoic philosophy and the Romans were just as familiar with these ideas as their Teutonic contemporaries. So, being wonderfully readable is all very well, but books like these have to rest on a solid bedrock of meticulous research, otherwise they just spread more inaccuracies and misconceptions.

Moments of insight, but read with care
The book is fairly well written and evocative, but full of historical mistakes and misrepresentations (Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol is early modernist and authority on paganism, but clearly no expert on Bates's early medieval sources). Bates founds his entire concept of `Middle-earth,' supposedly a common cosmology shared by all Celtic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon peoples, on very flimsy circular reasoning that allows him to gather uncritically a great many scraps of evidence from divergent times, places and contexts and lump them all together. There are common features of cosmology and myth which appear across Indo-European cultures - we have known this for years - but to presume that they were manifested in the same way in such varied places and times, and to present an über-culture of `Middle-earth' (which, incidentally, is a specifically Norse concept) as a product of the Jungian subconscious, is dangerous and fanciful.

Bates acknowledges that almost all of his sources date from the Christian period and were written by Christian clerics, but appears not to realise the significance of this for our understanding of pre-Christian paganism. He subtly demonises Christianity and denies the cultures of early medieval north-west Europe their uniqueness in order to bolster a rose-tinted, Romantic notion of pre-Christian paganism.

We know little enough about these particular forms of paganism (the plural is important here), but why does he not so much as mention the prevalence of human sacrifice? There is no doubt at all that the eighth-century continental Saxons, and almost certainly the pre-Roman inhabitants of Gaul and Britain (who were never even referred to as `Celts' until the sixteenth century), committed ritualised murder in order to `live well with the spirits,' as Bates would put it (p. 77). This was one of the most profound and central of pagan rituals, but Bates ignores it entirely. Should we also slay sacrificial victims to become `reconnected with ourselves' (p. 255)? Or could it be that Bates's New Age meanderings, fortuitously cashing in on Tolkien's recent surge in popularity, are based more on a rootless sense of spirituality than a true understanding of the vibrant, savage religiosity of the pre-Christian past?

Myth and History mixed for pleasure.
Bates presents a fascinating read that stretches through the myth and history of the Anglo Saxon Kingdoms and those of North Western Europe.
If anyone has any interest in how things have come about, or has ever raised such questions as 'Well, why is that giant on a hill?' this provides interesting insights.
A very worthwhile read.