History and myth

Elizabeth Tonkin writes in her article 'History and the myth of realism' that the belief historians have in what they write is real is not necessarily right. Her point is that it is the form in which the history is presented that tell us if we should interpret it as myth or historiography, and we assume that historiography have more correspondence with reality than myths have. She uses examples from Liberia in which the same historical episode is not only told in the form of traditional myth, but also in the western form of history. The episode is as true, no matter how it is retold.

Tonkin explains that the division between myth and history in Britain, make British historians write history in a form that will be accepted. In everyday life, people judge whether a story is true on criteria of how reasonable it is. A story told in the right format will thus get more credability.

When discussing A Knight's Tale I argued that film is art and therefore has a different purpose than historiography. If Tonkin's argument should be taken into account one can also say that the form it is presented in does not give it credability as representing the past. Because the film makes fun of both present and past society, we do not take its story for true. The story is also told as a knightly romance, and we do not give those kind of stories to be true. Thus we do not take the context around the plot to be true either.

Comments

[ksbrorson]

Tonkin's article can be found in The Myths We Live By ed. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London and New York: Routledge 1990)

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