It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything new and intersting about the Holy Gail. This might not be exactly new but it’s off the beaten path of modern romanticism. The legends about the Holy Grail are associated with the Knight Templar, almost from the beginning. And the Templars were in Poland. So… On the trail of the Knights Templar and Holy Grail in western Poland, at...
“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.”― Galadriel in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
One more piece on oral history. I think this is probably the first place I encountered the basic idea that oral tradition tends to “improve the story”. Sometimes, though very rarely, an investigator chances to come upon the actual transformation of an event into myth. Just before the last war, the Romanian folklorist Constantin Brailoiu had occasion to record an admirable ballad in a...
Here’s another story to illustrate the malleability of oral history. We should not trust our family stories, but always look behind them for ways they might have been elaborated over time. This story comes from Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian. “Sometimes, though very rarely, an investigator chances to come upon the actual transformation of an event into myth. Just before the last...
One of the canards of genealogy is that professional genealogists always prefer the earliest recorded name. The idea is that name is the most authentic. More or less true, but not quite, not always. William Shakespeare, for example. You think you know his name? His baptismal record, the earliest in a scant collection, calls him Gulielmus — Latin for William. Wait! Do I have to change...