Harnessing the Power of Stories: Using Literature in History

I have always been interested in literature. This was one of the reasons I decided to do a joint undergraduate degree in history and English at university. Aside from the benefit of being able to avoid the worst core modules in each subject (something any student will tell you is not to be undervalued), my joint degree also introduced me to the intricate relationship that exists between history and literature. In every piece of research I have undertaken since I have been drawn towards literature in some form. From my undergraduate dissertation on post-colonial Maori religion in New Zealand to my current PhD research focusing on medieval Scotland there is always at least one literary source that has found its way into my bibliography pages.

You may think this a perfectly natural thing to do, but the relationship between history and literature is by no means straightforward. The question that most obviously arises is: ‘what exactly is the difference between a ‘literary’ text and a written historical source?’ As has been previously noted on this blog, academics love engaging in long drawn out debates about definitions, but in this case the drawing of this distinction is foundational to any historical investigation.

Often in the past historians have been loath to use pieces of literature (poetry, narratives, etc.) for historical study in preference for the chronicles, annals and explicit histories (to speak of my own period) written at the time. The distinction being drawn here between fiction and non-fiction is not unusual or indeed surprising. However neat divisions have a tendency of becoming quickly muddled. The text that my current PhD research is based on is an excellent example of a source which defies an easy label and will hopefully serve to demonstrate the issues that arise from such definitions.

The Bruce is the story of the Scottish Wars of Independence at the turn of the 14^th century, written to record the exploits of Robert Bruce (Robert I of Scotland) and his fellow knights and freedom fighters James Douglas, Edward Bruce and Thomas of Moray. It is the most extensive account of this pivotal point in Scottish history and as such has been drawn on heavily by historians of medieval Scotland. There is a catch however, because John Barbour (author of The Bruce) not only set out to write an historical account but also, in his own words, ‘a romance’ which in addition draws on the style and conventions of the epic tales popular in medieval Europe. The result of this genre blending is that whilst Barbour gives us ‘historical fact’ he gives it to us in an exhilarating story of heroes, villains, and clashes of steel. The embellishments of language and narrative that make the work engaging for its audience are the things that, for many, have relegated it to the category of literature rather than history. I say relegated because there is also a value judgement here: The Bruce is less useful or valid for the historian because it does not straightforwardly outline the events of the Wars in plain language at all times.

To rectify this, some in their work have sought to remove the additional ‘incorrect’ or ‘un-factual’ material to leave only the bare bones of ‘what actually happened’. What is the problem with this? Well apart from making an otherwise quite interesting text more boring to read, it fundamentally misunderstands exactly what a text is and what the aims of someone like Barbour are as an author. To drive a wedge between history and literature as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ attempts to separate two things that are inseparable parts of what we do as human beings. When Barbour wrote the Bruce he was not trying to write either an accurate account of the Wars or a narrative that his audience would enjoy. Rather the medieval understanding of history refuses to see these aims as mutually exclusive. The past was important because of how it informed and shaped the present. This did not mean you could make up what had happened, but it did mean that a writer could use the past to present their own explanation of current events or advocate for their view of the future. And to pass this message on it helped to make your writing interesting.

After all we are always doing this, renegotiating with and re-framing our past to make sense of who we are now and where we might be heading. And neither is this necessarily wrong, because the past continues to be important to us in the present as well as how we view and understand that past. In order to remember, preserve and interpret our inheritance we have always created stories that commit the past to memory and work to distil the lessons that lie within it.

And in fact, as literary scholars have increasingly pointed out, the writers of chronicles, annals and histories engage in this process as much as those that write ‘literature’. It is in fact impossible to separate the present from the past, especially when the people writing and reading history do so from their own presents with all the unique influences that this entails. This is the basis for what is known broadly as the post-modern critique or, in literary studies, ‘the death of the author’. The idea that a text is so intrinsically linked to the individual who both writes and reads it (along with their individuals contexts) that there is no ‘one text’ but rather an endless variety of different interpretations that are different for each person depending on their own myriad of influences (cultural, social, historical etc.).

But before we throw away our history books (and my PhD for that matter) the observation that every individual has their own influences that they bring with them to reading and writing history need not remove all meaning from text altogether. It does however call for a more careful approach to sources; unpeeling the layers of influence to understand as much about the people and events of the past as we can.

Going back to the distinction between history and literature, one of the reasons behind relegating a text like The Bruce to the ‘less useful’ category of literature or even lesser history is a failure to attribute either the author or his audience with any engagement in this process of re-framing, representing and applying history to the present. In the scholarly edited and translated edition of The Bruce there are many footnotes added by the editor to inform the reader when Barbour has ‘got things wrong’. Any deviation from strict historical fact is therefore treated as a result of ignorance, direct outside influence or lack skill on the author’s part. But what if Barbour knew exactly what he was doing but, as we touched on earlier, simply had a different intention for his work than our own purposes as modern historians?

It is also likely that medieval audiences were often aware of the choices that had been made by an author. Popular pieces of literature, history or myth were often updated and recreated in different versions to make contemporary political points. For these points to be understood, an author relied on the fact that an audience was aware of the original version of the text and how the new one differed. (The same idea at play in modern day internet memes).

You may be able to see by now several ways in which studying The Bruce is far from un-useful just because it straddles both literature and history. In fact, Barbour’s text is able to give us not only useful historical information about the events he depicts in the Scottish Wars of Independence (for in many ways his account tarries with other sources we have) but also how these events and their actors were viewed at the end of the 14^th century. How Barbour chooses to depict this history and the morals he chooses to draw out of it shed light on his own time and the process of forming Robert Bruce’s legacy as a famous King of Scotland.

And this is also the case for more ‘straightforward’ pieces of literature too (ones that do not explicitly make a claim to history themselves as The Bruce does). Which is good news for me as I can continue to count diving into great works of storytelling as part of my job.