Presentation
'First a wudd, and syne a sea': Scottish stories of memorable landscape change in their global context
University of the Highlands and Islands, Institute for Northern Studies (20-Oct-2022)
2022
Abstract
In pre-literate (oral) societies, observations of memorable events were encoded into oral traditions and passed down across sometimes hundreds of generations, often as stories. Most such stories to have reached us today are regarded as ‘myth’ or ‘legend’, a default judgement characteristic of many literate people. Recent research, especially in Australia and northwest Europe, concludes that many such stories have a clear grounding in observations of the changes to which they describe, albeit in often exaggerated terms.
This presentation focuses on Scottish stories of coastal landscape change since the last great ice age, some 20,000 years ago. It examines stories of coastal submergence, attributable to sea-level rise, that caused land loss and in particular severed land connections between what are today separate land masses. It also examines stories of (net) coastal emergence, attributable to a net rise in the land resulting from the melting of its ice cover. It is argued that all these stories are likely to be authentic cultural memories of coastal change because all submergence stories come from places known to have been submerged within the past 10-15,000 years while all emergence stories come from places that have indeed experienced net land emergence.
Using various geoscientific data, it is possible to estimate plausible ages for most such stories. Submergence stories from Scotland appear to be based on observations made more than 5000 years ago, some more than 7000 years ago, requiring them to have been passed across 200-300 generations in intelligible form. Emergence stories are of similar age although some appear younger. The antiquity of Scottish stories is comparable to that of Australian and other Celtic stories. This research is important because it demonstrates an unsuspected empirical basis for many ancient stories, suggesting that scientists might fruitfully spend more time interrogating these to see whether they contain information that can broaden and deepen our understanding of human pasts.
Details
- Title
- 'First a wudd, and syne a sea': Scottish stories of memorable landscape change in their global context
- Authors
- Patrick Nunn - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Event details
- University of the Highlands and Islands, Institute for Northern Studies (20-Oct-2022)
- Date published
- 2022
- Organisation Unit
- Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research; School of Law and Society; Sustainability Research Cluster
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991155139202621
- Output Type
- Presentation
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