The Myth of Britain makes our identity, we must make sure the story is passed on

It isn’t enough to celebrate the Britain of today, we need to celebrate 400 years of the United Kingdom and over a thousand years of England. And that means teaching the myths, telling the stories

He sees no stars who does not see them first

of living silver made that sudden burst

to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song

We are, in this rational age, trained to have disdain for myth and the making of myths. Tolkien wrote those words above in a poem addressed to his friend C.S. Lewis, then an atheist: “(t)o one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver'”. Lewis’s argument, so familiar in our supposedly rational and sceptical age, was that regardless of the joy they bring, stories were worthless, myth is something deceitful, and that we should quest instead for truth, objective truth.

The problem is that the closer we get to true understanding the more that understanding remains tantalisingly beyond our reach. Unless, of course, you join Tolkien in believing that there is truth in story, fairy tale and myth. And that the making of myth is as important to our identity than objective history and precise science. This is central to human identity, to ideas of society, culture and nation, yet modern liberal ideology rejects story, preferring dry objectivity and the elaborate describing of sex, emotion and sadness. Yet story still cuts through and we should try to appreciate that people place more trust in the tales they are told than they do in the dusty certainties of liberal scepticism.

In Annie Hawes telling of her life in Liguria, ‘Extra Virgin’, she describes her boyfriend’s father as insisting on drinking ‘wine from grapes’, the drink made from the fruit he grew himself, rather than the expensive wine from the shop that he insisted was probably not made from grapes at all and, anyway, was poisoned with chemicals and sugar. Our relationship to story is very similar to that Italian farmer. Annie’s story is, for all its autobiography, a personal myth, a relating of her remembering of life. We don’t really care whether the book is an accurate telling of Annie’s life in Liguria, because we can immerse ourselves in the sentiment, character, touch and smell of that place she chose to make home.

One of the oddities of today’s world is the eagerness with which we’ve embraced ideas of ‘fact-checking’, ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information’ in a quest for truth, a quest objectively free from dragons, distressed damsels and other mythic ideas. Yet, at the same time, we also encourage the idea of personal truth, of lived experience and individual identity. In this postmodern framework there isn’t any objective truth, we have returned to faerie:

“In this world, something’s name matters beyond mere identification. And while there is a true name to everything, those mundane names we choose for ourselves, or have thrust on us, still have power. If I call you a pig, and I have power, then you become more hog-like. And if you adopt the name Wolf, you must be ready when the pack leader arrives. Faerie is not a place where magic exists, Faerie is a place that is magic. It is not shaped by physics and geology (or even economics and sociology) but by the intersection of our magics, of the things we call ourselves, the names we give to others, our beliefs, loves and rages. There is truth but it is your truth, my truth, the tree’s truth. And power lies in understanding these truths.”

Simon Evans, writing in Spiked, sees the fading of myth as something gnawing at the things that hold our society - our nation - together. In this case the commemoration of VE Day and the end of war in Europe:

“So we should give it everything, one last time, on 8 May and let those last few survivors know that we remember and that our gratitude still burns. But once this is done, Britain is really going to need a new foundational myth if we are to right the boat we’re all in together now.”

In one respect Simon is wrong, we haven’t forgotten past heroes both the great men - Nelson, Wellington, Churchill - and Kipling’s ‘mere uncounted’. Most people can recount the myths of the first world war, the terrible conditions, so many dead, trenches and ‘lions led by donkeys’. The skeleton of our national myth remains solid and it is blessed by the efforts of people like Amy Jeffs who make sure the oldest bones remain in view. But it is a skeleton and that is why Simon Evans is right, the passage of time is picking away at the flesh of our most recent myth of greatness, the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Soon like Alfred, the Lionheart, Henry V, Drake and Nelson, the stories of that last great war will just be bones in the myth of Britain.

There was a time, less cynical and sceptical maybe but none the worse for that, when the story of Britain was told to us without apology and with the knowledge that teaching this great myth sits at the heart of our national identity. But now, fuelled by obsessions about race, power and war, we are more likely to be told, usually with a faith-like certainty, that teaching people the myth of Britain is somehow wrong, sinful and a lie. There was no greatness, just exploitation. There were no heroes, just bad men and women grasping power. There is no real identity, just a set of banal values crafted almost as an apologia for our history.

Evans starts his article with a report of a local council in Hertfordshire deciding they wouldn’t have a parade on the 8th of May because that would be ‘elitist’. Evans suggests the motivation was a distaste for pomp but sitting there too is a disdain for the long thread of England that winds back to Alfred sitting in a Somerset marsh and letting the cakes he was supposed to watch, burn.

Myth is important. And, as Tolkien told his friend Lewis in ‘Mythopoeia’, “Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time”. The places we love are, like Anne Hawes’ Liguria, built from stories and are sustained by the passing on of those stories to those who come after. When you stop telling these tales, the myths of our nation, and some in Britain actively apply the brakes, you pull at the old sinews that hold together the skeleton of Britain, we become a set of people who by happenstance live in the same place without knowing why.

It isn’t enough to celebrate the Britain of today, we need also to celebrate 400 years of the United Kingdom and over a thousand years of England. And that means teaching the myths, telling the stories, explaining why we are so fortunate to live in the finest place on earth.