Literacy is tyrannical, for it encourages us to undervalue our pasts –- the knowledge amassed by those countless ancestors of ours who could neither read nor write.
Subtitled 'Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World', Nunn's thesis is that preliterate societies encoded and passed down observations of natural disasters in folk tales. He opens with a discussion of Klamath stories about Crater Lake in Oregon. According to the stories, there was a demon who dwelt in a mountain and terrorised the local people with earthquakes and falls of hot rock. The demon was defeated by a spirit who pulled the mountain down and made a lake instead. This is, according to Nunn, a fair fictionalisation of what actually happened when the caldera was formed ... 7,700 years ago. If the story is an account of actual events, it's been passed down for 300 generations.
The bulk of the book deals with Aboriginal myths that include information about sea level rise and coastal drowning. Nunn recounts more than twenty of these, which began to feel a bit repetitive: but he believes each story explains a local phenomenon, such as the disappearance of an island or the flooding of a bay. He also discusses similar stories from India, and from north-west Europe: Doggerland, and especially the Scillies, which were once rather higher above water (and thus had fewer distinct islands). There's also an intriguing mention of a folktale from Italy which seems to record a meteorite impact in the 4th or 5th century, which disrupted a pagan ritual and convinced the locals to convert to Christianity. (I am unable to access the article on which this is based, but there's more about the theory on wikipedia.)
I wasn't wholly convinced by some of the interpretations, but I do accept the core tenet that folk tales can be fictionalised accounts of actual events, and can be passed on for many generations. And it's certainly true that 'our ancestors', as in 'prehistoric humans', lived through some drastic geological, astronomical and meteorological events. I'd like to read more on this topic.
Excellent narration by Peter Silverleaf, who sounded engaged and enthusiastic throughout.
Read because: I'm fascinated by the notion of stories being passed down, specifically from prehistoric/preliterate times, as a way of remembering important events.
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