The Truth of the Thing: Critical Thinking about Secondary Sources

There is a lot of nonsense on the internet that is sometimes politely referred to as literary exaggeration. (Nonsense is the word I use for bullshit because people inform me that I should not resort to polemics.) 

A favorite professor of mine often quoted Melville when discussing literary exaggeration: “It will be a strange sort of a book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; . . . to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy. . . Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”

The fancy is, of course, quite appealing to the public.  Modernly we call it clickbait.

Literary exaggeration is hyperbole or presenting a characteristic in the most extreme form. Nationalists often made something more representative of a particular culture than it was. Artistic exaggeration is what I call it when an editor asks me to make something “witchier” or “sexier.” 

Hopefully, a good professor or editor will tell you when you are citing literary or artistic exaggeration, but you can’t always count on that. My thesis cited some hot garbage, even though I tried to use sources I thought were credible. I hadn’t done enough research at the time to know better, and I didn’t have great guidance, so I used some problematic sources.

One example would be Carmichael’s work which compiles the charms of the Highlands. It is undoubtedly an example of artistic exaggeration because he acknowledges changing some to make them more pagan. To make matters worse some authors will muck around “paganizing” them further and soon they are being spread all over the internet as the original and no one knows the difference. It’s what I call Llewellynized history.

Another would be The Golden Bough written by anthropologist James Frazer which some people would have you think is the quintessential depiction of Scottish Gaelic folk belief. Frazer shared such odd explanations of his observations, that Edmund Leach another noted anthropologist of the 20th century criticized his assumptions saying that Frazier and his team seemed to think they “possess some kind of golden key whereby they can blandly assert that a particular piece of stereotyped human behaviour ‘stands for’ or ‘is a symbol of’ this, that, or the other thing.”¹ 

At least Frazer tried to be objective.  Robert Graves wrote completely fictional poetic myths and convinced people it was history including his ridiculous Celtic Tree Calendar. Thankfully, I knew enough not to cite that one.

My grandfather’s beloved authors of Celtic Twilight were prone to “throwing in a little fancy” to sell books, as well.   A good deal of green plastic hat fun is an invention of romantic nationalism in the late 19th century, including any genetic ties to the actual Iron Age Celts. Unfortunately, a lot of modern scholars who are invested in this idea of a Celtic Irish identity, cite hsitorians who made up stories about invading Celts and their kilts.

As an example, Lady Wilde wrote that a common saying in Ireland was “The blessing of Bel and the blessing of Samhain be with you,’ that is, of the sun and of the moon.”  Native Irish speakers of the day quickly scoffed at the idea, Douglas Hyde retorting, “It would be interesting to know the locality where so curious a Pagan custom is still practised, for I confess that though I have spoken Irish in every county where it is still spoken, I have never been, nor do I expect to be, so saluted.”² Hyde offers up this poem as likely being the source of her bit of fancy.

It’s fun to read Hyde’s books of stories because the discussions in his footnotes remind me of the discussions held on my Irish language forum today.  I regret not finding much of Hyde’s work until after I finished my thesis.

The poet modern author Irish linguists like to pick on most for “murdering the Irish language” is John O’Donahue. Take the word tenalach which O’Donahue defined as “a relationship one has with the land, air and water, a deep connection that allows one to literally hear the Earth sing.” At best this is artisitic exaggeration, but borders on being made up.

A linguist acquaintance of mine had a lot to say about that, “Tenalach {sic} which would be properly spelled tenlach was a variant spelling for the word tellach³ the Old Irish word for a fireplace or “those who shared a fireplace” so a family.”  There are variations of the word in Old and Middle Irish which have a variety of meanings related to fire such as tendálach ] which translates to fiery.”⁴

I suppose a bit of creative license is to be expected from a poet. Think for a moment though about what is lost by supplanting the true meaning of the word in this case? While not as flowery, I love that there is a word for people who share a hearth because I tend to attract stray people to mine. 

Anamchara, is another word that he has taken some liberties with.  O’Donahue claims that this term resulted due to the “Druidic” tradition of high priests advising Irish kings. This explanaiton kind of falls apart when you learn that at one point everyone in the clergy had an anamchara, and that Irish druids were characters invented by monks to be the bad guys in their stories.

It was common practice in the church to have a colleague who was your confessor. A priest’s anamchara was their confessor, offered spiritual advice and read their last rites. Eventually all people wanted one, because an anamchara could reduce the penance demanded of people for personal sin, by church doctrine⁵.

“In Ireland, everybody [this was written in the early 1960’s, he means every man] had an anamchara, a pater confessarius. It was a proverb: colann cen ceann, duine cen anamcharaid, a man without an anamchara is like a headless body’ and so not only kings and princes but nobles and commoners, prelates and monks, all had their soul-friends”.⁶

Power distribution in these relationships was not equal, and we should not assume they were friendly. The anamchara was looking out for the well-being of the eternal souls in his charge and had little concern for their embodied selves’ physical or emotional comfort. The anamchara often demanded harsh sacrifice or toil from those they agreed to serve in this role.  One king had to fast for forty days and forty nights on nothing but bread and water. 

So, when you are talking about your lovely “druidic” friendship rite, anamchara, I am reminded of Bishop Powertrip getting his jollies by exerting power over others and and inflicting a lot of harm.  I will never be comfortable using the term because my family has a longstanding disagreement with the Catholic church.

As Irish is a living, evolving language Donahue’s definition has been adopted, by enough people that in most modern minds it is a good thing. I have plenty of respect for O’Donahue as a poet and a visionary who wanted to make the world a better place, just don’t call him a linguist or any sort of historian, and you and I will get along fine.

Sometimes I feel like the headache of trying to sort through secondary sources is just not worth it. If I want to know what Julias Caesar said in “The Gallic Wars” I will just find it myself. Of course Caesar himself is a questionable secondary source and might have been using some nationalistic exaggeration to puff himself up.

So, what are some red flags you can look for when reading secondary sources?

• If something said it is “adapted from” any source, proceed with caution. It often means the author of the paper has changed the words to suit their own beliefs or worse yet support an erroneous thesis—thus, creative nonfiction.   This does not pertain to modernized receipts, although I would always look at the original to see if I agree with the modernization.
• When someone interprets something in only one way, chances are there are other alternative explanations.
• If someone is using a word that you can’t find in a dictionary or defining a word you can find in some odd way, there is a strong chance that you are reading some creative nonfiction. As an aside to avoid acidentally doing this, I use contemporary dictionaries when doing transcriptions. The meaning of words have changed.

I am going to end this by sharing with you what I find to be “the truth of the thing” from my spiritual viewpoint. I love the idea of invention and I think the work that people involved in creating new and evolving forms of spirituality is important.

If you go to the bother of creating something new, you want to revel in the newness and make everything about it uniquely yours.  You can’t just change the words to other peoples’ songs or define your practices using someone else’s ancestral language. Eventually, you are going to run across someone like me who is fed up with that sort of thing. 

I have a problem with making people shit up while invoking the ancestors because it is disrespectful.  The ancestors’ words have meaning. I don’t approve of primary sources being “re-paganized” incorrectly by modern neopagans because it doesn’t ring true in that part of me where I store the memory of the ancestors. 

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1. Leach, Edmund, E. R. “Magical Hair.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 88, no. 2 (1958): 147. ↩︎
2. Hyde, Douglas. Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. London: D. Nutt. ↩︎
3. Royal Irish Academy. “eDIL – Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language.” Royal Irish Academy, 2017. http://edil.qub.ac.uk/40466 ↩︎
4. Ibid http://edil.qub.ac.uk/40495 ↩︎
5. Bradshaw, Brendan. “The Wild and Woolly West: Early Irish Christianity and Latin Orthodoxy.” Studies in Church History 25 (1989): 1–23. ↩︎
6. Ryan, John. “The Sacraments in the Early Irish Church.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 51, no. 204 (1962): 508–520. ↩︎