Reviewed by Ephraim Nissan (London, England)

Nunn, P. 2019. The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World. Bloomsbury/Sigma, London/Sydney/New York. 288 pp. ($39.99 cloth, $33.29 paper, $27.99 e-book.)

Some scholars (e.g., the late historical linguist Mario Alinei) have argued that some particular folktales or fairytales originated as early as the Palaeolithic. Moreover, take the concept of the celestial dragon, or of snakes in the sky, or in particular of the ouroboros, i.e., the snake whose tail is in its mouth. Apart from Adrienne Mayor’s (2000) idea that dinosaur finds by ancient people may explain why dragon myths are found all over the world, and Alinei’s (1989) associating dragons with meteorological phenomena, there also is a cogent theory linking celestial snakes from myth to auroral phenomena, which in periods that saw major solar storms, were not only boreal, but could be seen at low latitudes as well.[i]

That hypothesis was put forth by Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs and Anthony Peratt in their 2009 article “The Ourobóros as an Auroral Phenomenon,” which is cogent because there have been times in history—e.g., the early September 1859 was the largest solar storm ever recorded in history (the Carrington event)[ii]—when the aurora was visible not only in the polar regions, but also at much more southerly latitudes. Also see another 2009 paper by van der Sluijs, “The Dragon of the Eclipses”.[iii] An even bigger solar storm is only known because of the rings of 140 Alpine trees buried in a bank of the Durance River in Provence. It is dated to 14,300 years ago.[iv] Such events may have engaged the imagination of prehistoric people, just as the memory of post-glacial submerged lands surface in tales, something that Patrick Nunn researched for Australia in this book.

This view would have us expect that ideas about dragons in the sky had emerged in hunter-gatherer societies in the Stone Age, and therefore, it contrasts with Vladimir Propp’s opinion (which Mario Alinei accepted up to a point) that the concept of dragons emerged relatively late in human cultures, even in an urban context, at a time when part of humankind was no longer in close contact with animals in nature.

Patrick Nunn, a London-formed professor of Oceanic Geoscience in Fiji, later moved to Australia. In his recent book The Edge of Memory, he skillfully offers irrefutable evidence that some folk narratives date back as far as post-glacial sea-level rise in Australia, and similar tales also occur in the British Isles (but for the latter, his conclusions are more cautious). About the latter, refer to Patrick Nunn and Barry Cunliffe’s (2019) article “Go Tell It on the Mountain: Mythical Tales of Giants Are Rooted in Geological Realities”. Cunliffe is also the author of Britain Begins (2012).

As mentioned above, the historical linguist Mario Alinei (1926–2018)[v] has also argued for a Palaeolithic origin of some European folktales, such as the one that found literary expression in Carlo Gozzi’s “fiaba teatrale” of 1761, L’amore delle tre melarance, the idea being that the maidens inside the three oranges correspond to an archaic belief system by which animals (even worms inside fruits)[vi] have a magical side to them, and are to be addressed deferentially,[vii] including as kin of humans (something of which he found traces of in dialectal animal names).[viii] Nunn’s thesis, however, would have pleased Alinei (and I considered informing him, before learning about his demise), as it provides a tentative dating interval for some folk narratives to times of quite considerable sea-level rise—that is to say, to the transition from the glacial to the post-glacial era. Nunn does so by resorting to coastline geology, anthropology and folktale studies, archaeology, linguistics, history, and geography.

Nunn’s book comprises seven chapters: 1, “Recalling the Past”; 2, “Words that Matter in a Harsh Land” (it “explains the societal context of Australian Aboriginal storytelling—how a people’s beliefs and history shaped their reality” (31)); 3: “Australian Aboriginal Memories of Coastal Drowning” (it “describes the 21 known groups of stories about coastal drowning along the Australian fringe, and the details of the process they describe and its often memorable life-changing consequences” (31)); 4, “The Changing Ocean Surface” (“a rise of more than 120m […] since the coldest time of the last Ice age”: “The use of this knowledge to determine minimum ages for Aboriginal Australian drowning stories is explained towards the end of the chapter” (32)); 5, “Other Oral Archives of Ancient Coastal Drowning” (which examines the nature of comparable drowning stories from other parts of the world, particularly in north-west Europe and along the fringes of the Indian subcontinent” (32)); 6, “What Else Might We Not Realise We Remember?” (stories told worldwide about meteorite falls, “volcanic eruptions, abrupt land movements and even the nature of animals” (32); and 7, “Have We Underestimated Ourselves?”, which “suggests where the new frontiers of knowledge in this field might lie” (32). Sixty pages of readable endnotes close the book—unfortunately, Nunn felt he had to restrict references to the literature[ix]—before ten pages of “Further Reading,” listing bibliographical entries per chapter. The index on pp. 281–288 is sketchy, yet adequate.[x]

Chapter 1 begins: “It was the year 1853, a balmy June afternoon in western Oregon […] It was a good thing the mule was not blind, Hillman reflected 50 years later, because otherwise he might have been the first New Yorker to drown in the lake that appeared almost 600m (1.968ft) below him when he reached the mountaintop” (9). This is about the discovery of Crater Lake, a sacred place to the Klamath people. 

In a nutshell, to say it with a companion article by Nunn and Cutliffe (2019):

When European explorers first encountered the Klamath Indians of Oregon in what is now the western United States, they were told a story about Crater Lake, where once a huge volcano towered over the landscape until the day it erupted, its remains collapsing into the newly emptied lava chamber beneath and forming the modern ‘crater.’ Geologists date the terminal collapse of this volcano to 7,600 years ago, leaving us no option but to believe that the Klamath passed on their observations of this event orally for more than 300 generations, without its essence being lost. (50)

Nunn’s follow-up book under review here tells the story on pages 9–13. “[T]his book argues that stories of this kind do exist in many of the world’s cultures, but that their apparent longevity has led to their dismissal by generations of scientific commentators” (13) owing to their inability “to overcome their knee-jerk scepticism about the implied time depth of oral tradition” (13). “We have become dependent on writing and reading, and in the process have invariably convinced ourselves that the written word is superior—must be superior—to the spoken word. But it was not always so” (16). The sustained colonization of Australia by humans “perhaps 65,000 years ago” (19) led them into an environment with unfamiliar animals and plants, and “much of Australia was uncommonly dry” (19), resulting in life there being “more challenging than it may have been along the tropical coasts of Asia” (19). “Knowledge about water sources, and about where to find food, and how to capture and consume it, probably all became part of a lore that was intentionally passed on from one generation to the next to ensure a tribe’s survival” (19).

In March 1847, Mt. St. Helens erupted spectacularly. A contemporaneous painting of the event is shown in the color plate section and not much imagination is needed to see the eruption cloud as a giant, long-winged bald eagle, a creature with which local people were familiar. The head and beak of the eagle appear orange-red, the cloud of steam rising from the volcano’s crater (perhaps fortuitously backlit by the moon); the body and feathers of the giant bird are darker yet clearly discernible. The eagle’s beak appears fastened to the mountain, as though tearing at living flesh, rivulets of blood running from a creature tethered there, its roars of pain heard by all. For non-literate observers accustomed to animistic interpretations of such phenomena, an aggressive eagle analogy was obvious.

In other parts of the world where active volcanoes are found, there are also myths about giant eagles attacking people confined on mountaintops. A well-known example is that of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods in Greek mythology. It is understandable that the story of Prometheus has been interpreted as that of an eruption. There are similar mythical interpretations of eruptions from active volcanoes in many other parts of the world.[xi]

“Postglacial sea-level rise gradually drowned the Ireland–Wales land bridge, leading to its submergence about 9,600 years ago, or perhaps a few millennia earlier” (149). The timing “has the potential to lend credence to or to dismiss the idea that the traditions of unassisted human crossing of the Irish Sea may be based on actual events” (149), There is the story of the Welsh hero Brân the Blessed, “who went with his warriors to Ireland to rescue his sister from a bad marriage” (149), by one account by wading as the Irish Sea was not yet so wide. (A combination of walking and wading also appears in Aboriginal Australian stories, concerning places where “that has not been possible for several thousand years” (149), as shown in Ch. 3). “[O]ne can see how, to rationalise the crossing of what is now a deep sea, it is necessary for Brân to be a giant in most extant versions of this story” (149). 

Nunn and Cunliffe (2019) previously related:

Then, as land and ice continued to melt, the ocean surface rose, drowning coastal lands in most parts of the world, progressively reducing the width and continuity of land bridges, such as those that connected Ireland with Cornwall and Wales. The last journeys would have been memorable, becoming enshrined in popular stories as the ocean overwhelmed the land bridge, which later generations would never see—just a great sea separating two lands. The story of Brân may well have its roots in such a scenario (49). 

Continuing:

On evenings around the hearths, older folk would insist that people had once walked across places now covered by the sea, to sceptical younger listeners, increasingly intolerant of such apparently obvious fictions. Sensing this, the storytellers made their tales believable by claiming that those who had walked across the ocean were giants—so large that the water barely rose above their knees, even in the deepest places (50).

On that same page, they also remark: “Just as their size was massively inflated, so were many of their achievements, their legacy, even their humanity” [and] “[t]here is no need for giants, except to make memories more credible”.

Nunn and Cunliffe further claim: “It is no coincidence that both Australian Aboriginal cultures and the Brythonic (Celtic and Breton) cultures of north-west Europe were at the fringes of global human interactions for the last ten millennia or so, largely isolated from outside influences and therefore optimally positioned to preserve ancient stories in intelligible form” (54).

Nunn’s interdisciplinary book deserves the attention not only of folklorists, but also of scholars in a number of disciplines, paleontologists among them, as well as, of course, those investigating paleo-landscapes, whose research has sometimes appeared (e.g. Westley, et al., 2011) in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. (Interested readers can download for free the 2020 book The Archaeology of Europe’s Drowned Landscapes, edited by Geoff Bailey, Nena Galanidou, Hans Peeters, Hauke Jöns, and Mortiz Mennenga).[xii]

References

Alinei, M. 1983a. L’evoluzione dal totemismo al cristianesimo popolare studiata negli sviluppi semantici dei dialetti italiani. Quaderni di Semantica 4(1): 3–29 and 4(2): 253–270.

Alinei, M. 1983b. Altri zoonimi parentelari. Quaderni di Semantica 4(2): 241–251.

Alinei, M. 1989. Geografia semantica: continuatori di draco in Italia e in Francia. In Espaces Romans: études de dialectologie et de géolinguistiques offertes à Gaston Tuaillon. Grenoble: Ellug, on behalf of the Université Stendhal, vol. 2: 459–487. The etymographical part of Alinei’s article is posted here.

Alinei, M. 1996–2000. Origini delle lingue d’Europa. I: La Teoria della Continuità (1996), and II: Continuità dal Mesolitico all’età del Ferro nelle principali aree etnolinguistiche (2000), in the series Collezione di testi e studi: Linguistica e critica letteraria, Bologna: Il Mulino.

Alinei, M. 1997. Magico-religious motivations in European dialects: A contribution to archaeolinguistics. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 5: 3–30. A pre-publication draft can be downloaded from a website about Alinei’s paradigm of continuity from the Palaeolithic, http://www.continuitas.com/texts.html

Azarpay, G. and A.D. Kilmer. 1978. The eclipse dragon on an Arabic frontispiece miniature. Journal of American Oriental Society88(4): 363–374. http://www.jstor.org/stable/599748

Bard, E. C. Miramont, M. Capano, F. Guibal, C. Marschal, F. Rostek, T. Tuna, Y. Fagault, and T.J. Heaton. 2023. A radiocarbon spike at 14,300 cal yr BP in subfossil trees provides the impulse response function of the global carbon cycle during the Late Glacial. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 381(2261): 20220206. 

Beggan, C.D., E. Clarke, E. Lawrence, E. Eaton, J. Williamson, K. Matsumoto, and H. Hayakawa. 2024. Digitized continuous magnetic recordings for the August/September 1859 storms from London, UK. Space Weather 22(3): e2023SW003807.

Carrington, R. C. 1859. Description of a singular appearance seen in the Sun on September 1, 1859. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 20(1): 13–15. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/20.1.13

Cunliffe, B. 2012. Britain Begins. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Eigen, E. 2010. The perils of historical geography: On a pretended lost map to a legendary sunken forest. Architectural Design 80(3): 82–87.

Mayor, A. 2000. The First Fossil Hunters. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Mayor, A. 2022. Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Nissan, E. 2010. Revisiting Olender’s The Languages of Paradise, placed in a broader context. Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei3: 330–360.

Nunn, P. and B. Cunliffe. 2019. Go tell it on the mountain: mythical tales of giants are rooted in geological realities. History Today69(4): 46–55.

Ramaswamy, S. 2004. The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Vitaliano, D. 1973. Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Westley, K., R. Quinn, W. Forsythe, R. Plets, T. Bell, S. Benetti, F. McGrath, and R. Robinson. 2011. Mapping submerged landscapes using multibeam bathymetric data: A case study from the north coast of Ireland. The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology40(1): 99–112.

Wilkins, A. 2023. Largest known solar storm struck Earth 14,300 years ago. New Scientist, 9 October.

Wilkins, A. 2024. Largest recorded solar storm was even bigger than we thought. New Scientist, 22 March.