Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons

Louis A. Knafla is a history professor at the University of Calgary.

The Arthurian and Teutonic legends have become emotive forces in British history since the rise of the Tudors in the sixteenth century. Geoffrey of Monmouth created the Arthurian legend in the twelfth century by popularizing the tales and myths of folk culture. He believed that the origins of the inhabitants of Britain were in Troy, and that the culture of Troy was preserved in the offshore islands by the Welsh through the Celtic civilizations of the pre-Christian era. Dr. MacDougall, however, is more concerned with the Teutonic legend, which had its origins in the Tudor century, and the book is essentially a study of the evolution of this legend through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The Teutonic legend was that the British were primarily of Germanic origin, that Germanic peoples were superior to all others in their individual character and in their institutions, and that the British had become the heirs of the Germanic peoples: more truly German than the Germans themselves. He emphasizes the scientific bases which were established for such beliefs, and explains how the myths that emerged were used by cultural nationalists for establishing the myth of the Aryan race, especially in Britain, France, and Germany. The book closes with a discussion of the rapid disintegration of the myth in the twentieth century, and with some general cliches about its role in modern political history: “It is not accidental that the fullest expression of the national myth coincided with the highest realization of national aspirations, nor that its disintegration was simultaneous with England’s decline as a great power” (p. 130).

The study is marked by some interesting ideas on the interaction of literary, social, and intellectual history, and the relationship between these histories and the political will. But the book is also marked with a feeling of superficiality — a feeling that somehow it has all been said before. There is no critical discussion of the sources, great emphasis is placed on the views of older writers, and much of the current scholarship is not found in the notes. Unfortunately, the index is woefully incomplete and inaccurate.