It's nice to see a journalist who has a sense of humour. In one of the local papers here in Pembrokeshire, the coverage of my latest article in QSJ was straightforward enough, but when the editor hunted through the archive for a suitable photo of me, he chose this one, taken many years ago by Martin Cavaney. It was first published in connection with my "Pembrokeshire Folk Tales" trilogy, which resulted in four hardcover books containing, in all, around 500 stories.
Anyway, one of the tales told in Volume 2 of the four-volume trilogy was the heroic tale of the "bluestone expeditions"as narrated by HH Thomas and many others since then..........
I included the story because it is an archetypal myth, invented by somebody with a fertile mind to explain something strange and spectacular (like Stonehenge) which science, at the time, could not cope with. That is what myths are -- stories used to express respect or admiration for wondrous things -- night and day, the sun, the moon, the seasons, storms, tides, epidemics or plagues, birth and death. And so forth. This is one definition:
Myth, a story of the gods, a religious account of the beginning of the world, the creation, fundamental events, the exemplary deeds of the gods as a result of which the world, nature and culture were created together with all parts thereof and given their order, which still obtains. A myth expresses and confirms society's religious values and norms, it provides a pattern of behavior to be imitated, testifies to the efficacy of ritual with its practical ends and establishes the sanctity of cult.
You don't have to have gods in myths, but it helps. And mythology does not have to be associated with religious beliefs or rituals. But heroes and heroic deeds commonly feature, and indeed the heroic deeds of our Neolithic ancestors are central to the bluestone myth. HH Thomas was fully aware of that, and artists like Alan Sorrell quite deliberately flagged up the "heroic" element just to hammer home how extraordinary and wonderful the transport of the bluestones really was. Really? In other words, truthfully, as a matter of fact? Yes -- and this is where the danger lies, because the bluestone myth is now quite cynically sold to the nation and the world as if it is a matter of fact -- regardless of the fact that mythology is ALWAYS overtaken by events, as the most enquiring of minds in any society make observations, make deductions and assemble hard evidence to show that the sun was not created by a giant and that nighttime does not occur because a great god is covering the sun with a blanket.
But certain archaeologists and geologists -- and the top brass of English Heritage -- persist in trying to convince the world that the myth is TRUE. There is certainly a cult that insists on it, and there is a never-ending flood of pseudo-science devoted to demonstrating that there were bluestone quarries, that stones were parked up in a "giant lost circle", and that Neolithic tribesmen had the technical and geographical knowledge required to move 80 bluestones from West Wales to Stonehenge. They also of course believe in the parallel myth of sarsen transport, over somewhat shorted distances. And they all get furious when people like me gently point out that there is a vast data deficit -- and that science has moved on very considerably from the time when HH Thomas started the myth off in 1923, demonstrating in the process a very inadequate understanding of the British Quaternary.
There is something rather pathetic about people like MPP, Ixer and Bevins trying at every turn to demonstrate the truth of the bluestone transport myth, and dreaming up brand new mythological components every time the facts get in the way of one or another of the elements of their narrative. They might just as well try to prove that the universe really is held up in the branches of a giant ash tree called Yggdrasil, or that there is an "otherworld" called Annwn, or that somewhere underground in Wales a red dragon fights against a white one, or that the sun is really a great god called Ra, riding across the sky..........