Why Historic Civilisations Were So Scared Of Wilderness | Myths & Monsters

my name is dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video [Music] the tales have been told since man first gathered around the fires of prehistory tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden in the vast unknown shadows of the world [Music] tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic of gods and kings of myths and monsters from dark forests to the lands of ice from desert wastes to the storm's thrasher scenes every corner of the earth has its legends to tell stories of heroes and the villains they encounter of the wilderness and the dangers within stories of battles of love of order and of chaos but what are the roots of these fantastic tales and why have they endured so long in this series we'll explore the history behind these legends and reveal the hidden influences that shape them war and disease religious and social upheaval the untameable ferocity of the natural world and above all the monsters lurking within ourselves [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] today the significance of the wilderness and a journey into it can be hard for us to appreciate as populations grow and travel and communication become ever faster we can overlook how different the world was in the past how vast it must have seemed and how wild for thousands of years most people lived and died within a short distance of the place they were born their existence was bounded by the wilderness by the unyielding darkness of ancient woods by the ice shed peaks of impenetrable mountains and by the hostile desert's lonely wastes a journey to the next town was a perilous undertaking it meant abandoning the safe and the familiar and entering a realm that was not their own [Music] [Music] the wilderness is usually defined as somewhere that is uncultivated uninhabited by humans and it's often a liminal space wildernesses are the places you don't know the places where you don't go the places where you have no business to be they are the spaces of darkness what counts as wild and what counts as natural is very much a human construct we decide where the wilderness starts and where it ends so that question makes it a very fertile place for stories to happen as human cultures work out where those limits are you confront difference you confront a world that's not your own you confront the unknown it's dangerous and it's disordered but it's natural and it's free as well and this is really in many ways the perfect setting for what's going to happen in a myth or a legend [Music] people will feel the wilderness that surrounds them with what they fear in themselves what they fear in their own society the wilderness is the place where we expel all the stuff we don't like in ourselves in our culture in our society such is the contradiction of the wilderness it is both obvious and not of us surrounding us yet at once strange and far away for wilderness is as much an idea as it is a physical place and a great deal can be learned about it people from the way they saw it and from the stories they told about it as much as people must have feared what lay beyond their walls they also relied upon it seas threatened the fisherman with drowning but they provided his livelihood too the forest hid all manner of danger but that was where the hunter had to roam the trees can hide more than deadly creatures and lawless men however as the ancient story of action tells us magic and madness can lie in weight should we ever stray too far from the past [Music] acting had wandered far from home the young huntsman had long since passed the city gates and the fields where farmers thumbing sweat from their brows had stood to track his progress towards the darkness of the woods action did not fear that wilderness he scorned the superstitions of other men the forest he thought was as much his realm as the city street as action rested in a shady clearing he suddenly heard an unfamiliar sound drawn on by the strange music actin pushed deeper and deeper into the ever thickening forest he parted the last branches and stared into the grove beyond [Music] the story of action is a classical myth to the ancient greeks the young huntsman was courting danger the moment he stepped beyond his city walls the moment he entered the wild for the greeks human life revolved around the city athens with its resplendent temples was the birthplace of democracy in its golden age it became a flourishing center of art and philosophy socrates and plato called the city home as did the great playwrights europa leagues and sophocles their works helped shape western literature and thought and they are still read debated and performed to this day athens was not only a cultural powerhouse it had military muscle too with a navy which dominated the aegean sea this supremacy was not unchallenged however for athens had a rifle another great city of ancient greece renowned for its austere discipline and the skill of its hoplite warriors sparta was more than a match for atoms the long war between the two great cities consumed the ancient greek world and ultimately ended the golden age of athens [Music] cities such as athens and sparta were the human realm what lay beyond belonged to something else however [Music] the ancient greeks just didn't like the wilderness much so they were profoundly unenthusiastic about anything that we would see as wilderness they simply saw it as somewhere that you didn't want to be [Music] the greeks have this view that if you're out in the wilderness there's always this risk of walking over the boundary of crossing into the divine the greeks who guarded the wilderness as so scary that the god they created to inhabit it the god pan is the god from whose name we get the english word panic it's about the crossing in between the wild and the tame the controlled the uncontrolled so there's the possibility of crossing over that line and going beyond where you should go it's interesting that the gods always seem much more comfortable in the wilderness than human beings are it therefore follows that human beings who are usually out doing something like hunting something that's very much about conquering the wilderness usually ends badly it's almost a way of saying know your place which is one of the great greek sayings know that you're not a god you're just a human being there's a very real sense for the greeks that that boundary between where humans are and where the divine is is very thin and if you're out in the wilderness if you're out in the wild you can just drop through it without meaning to to the greeks the wilderness was a frightening place where the laws of society held no sway it belonged instead to the divine to the monstrous to the mad it was a place of taboos broken and punishments terrible it was everything a city was not as such it fulfilled an important role for the greeks by exploring what lay beyond the boundaries of society people defined what lay within them as well by telling stories of the monsters outside they better understood those within [Music] actin stared into the grove it was a wooded cave wild and beautiful to behold he was enraptured he could not resist he had to get closer acton crept forwards down to the water's edge drawn on ever on by the sight before him his foot broke the stillness of the crystal waters the ripples spread suddenly dark eyes turned on the intruder for those were no mortal creatures this was the goddess artemis and her nymphs artemis of the wilds of the hills of the moon [Music] the goddess stood cloaked in her wild fury action ran acting's encounter with the goddess artemis would not have surprised the ancient greeks for them the wilderness was no place for man the greeks were not alone in seeing the wilderness as an other worldly realm centuries later the celts of northern europe would also sense in their great forests and rugged landscape the presence of the supernatural the celts were a pre-christian people their origins in central europe date back as far as the 9th century bc at its height celtic culture spread as far south as the iberian peninsula and as far east as modern turkey celtic religion was a polytheistic one the worship of its many gods was led by the druids mysterious figures of great social importance they made prophecies dispensed justice and performed religious rights that may even have included human sacrifice celtic society and the age of the druids was threatened however by the growth of the roman empire most of our sources for the celts are roman sources unfortunately rather than surviving celtic sources the celts didn't write their stuff down and the romans did so we have julius caesar's horrified a count of celtic sacrifices in oak groves and oak groves with bits of sacrificed people hanging off them so that's the first encounter between the romans and the people that they came to call the celts and it's an encounter fought with horror and dismay interestingly the romans never called the celts celts they call them golly gauls or britanni britons basically so they don't actually use the term celts so clearly they were aware of this slightly disparate group which was nevertheless pressuring on their desire to establish a huge empire the roman authorities suppressed the druids who disappeared from the written record in the second century much of the celt's unique cultural heritage was preserved only as an oral tradition and so it was lost along with the druids the druids were a challenge for the romans because they were very very secretive they didn't like even writing down what their beliefs or their rituals were and that was a problem the romans found it very hard to get to understand what it was that they were facing faced with all that secrecy and denial they decided that the easiest thing would be to get rid of it completely the romans attitude to the druids was the same as their attitude to any group that they were going to take over if there was a locus of power in that group it had to be suppressed by 500 a.d the once widespread celtic people are to be found only in northern europe in parts of britain france and in ireland there some ancient traditions survived to be recorded by later christian writers of the medieval period stories of the gods they worshipped of the kings they served and of the wilderness that surrounded them the giants causeway on the coast of northern ireland is today a unesco world heritage site its 40 000 geometric rock columns reach heights of over 10 meters and they stretch from the cliff edge to the sea and beyond we now know them to be the result of ancient volcanic activity but the celts had another explanation to them the causeway was the work of legendary giant finn mccool he was challenged to a fight by scottish rival so built a great bridge of stone over the sea so the two could meet without wetting their feet alongside that wilderness of rocks and trees however there was another more magical realm to be discovered in the lands of the celts the other world [Music] [Music] the celtic other world was a supernatural realm a realm that existed alongside of our own and parallel to our own it's a world that has its own laws inhabitants power structures and nature it's like something that's always there it doesn't go away so it's very much located in the outside the beyond the wild [Music] a glimpse might be seen in the clouds or the fleeting mist in the half light or in the shadows it was at once both here and somewhere else stories of humans entering the elusive realm are found throughout celtic mythology sometimes heroes were enticed in by beautiful fairy maid or they stumbled across an entrance in a cave or under the water or in a dream the other world they found beyond was home to the many pre-christian gods of the celts it was a land of eternal youth and beauty where it was always summer and there was no hunger and no despair the realities of life for most celts were sickness and starvation war and want the other world must have offered an attractive mirror image of those struggles however the price the other world extracted could be hefty too just as in the tales of the ancient greeks these human encounters with the supernatural did not always have a happy ending the celts manage the wilderness by peopling it with entities that are somewhat like themselves on the other hand those entities are more often than not at least potentially very dangerous the realm of the fairies is superficially attractive it seems quite glamorous but often when the hero's in there they discover that there's another side to it initially the character he stumbles into the other world finds it as a glorious and happy place but generally the longer the character stays in that other world they realize that it's more sinister that it's got darker dimensions let's take the beautiful fairy lady who's perhaps the most typical issuer of an invitation to the celtic other world in irish mythology she's usually well intentioned and usually won't do any harm in and of herself but there's still a problem because if you spend three days with her it'll be three years where you came from if you spend three years with her it'll be 300 years so when you go back home everybody you know will be dead [Music] the principle of life is change and we often regard that as a frightening thing because we don't want to grow old we don't want to die but yet the idea of the fairy realm suggests that the opposite is also quite horrific that if we didn't grow old if we stayed static then there would be no growth there'd be no life for the heroes of celtic myth entering this fairyland meant abandoning home and family by their return though the world had changed and there was no place left for them in human society the stories seem to recognize that shared suffering and ultimately shared mortality are necessary for society to function but where there is suffering there is also kindness and where there is death there is a need for new life action heated not the rocks underfoot nor the branches clawing at his tunic slashing at his face but he could not escape the goddess's rage action had intruded as no mortal should upon the realm of the divine he would have to be punished as he ran the bones of his face began to split and reforms [Music] actions stumbled his whole body taught with pain antlers burst through his skull he tried to scream but a stag's harsh cry had displaced his human tongue the dogs he'd left behind stared from their rest that familiar scent [Music] it quickened in the mouth of every hand excitement quivered through the pack a stag the hunt had begun actin is transformed from man into stag his dogs change from loyal companions into fanged predators the transformation of these dogs strikes at the very human anxiety our communities are ordered laws govern our behavior crimes are punished but in the natural world it can seem that chaos reigns like acting and his hands our grip over the wild is only ever a tenuous one some things are beyond our control we are all times exposed to the random ferocity of nature [Music] oceans cover over 70 percent of the earth's surface almost every civilization in history has exploited them for food trade or transport but if the waters brought opportunities they also represented danger you were at the mercy of wind and the storms leaving view of shore was a very dangerous undertaking that only very experienced sailors took it's quite normal for sailors to be scared of the sea it's not the case that people who cross the sea are comfortable with it or at home with it it's actually normal the more time you spend with it to distrust it even experienced sailors even experienced mariners will be caught by surprise by the behavior of waves by currents by weather it was not just the wind and waves that sailors feared throughout history there have been tales of strange creatures living in the cold blackness of the deep the serpents of the mid-atlantic which stalked ships of the royal navy the vast devil whales seen by early irish explorers and of course the famous monster of loch ness in scotland none however is more terrifying than the creature said to dwell off the frozen coasts of norway and greenland the king's mirror an old norwegian manuscript from the 13th century spoke of a creature that had never been caught a beast so large sailors mistook it for land an enormous being which devoured fish men and even ships whole they called it the goofer the half goofer is a sea monster that appears in the saga of arrow odds this sea monster is enormous and spends most of its time below the surface level of the sea so all you ever see of it is its nostrils and its fangs and when it comes to the surface it looks like two big craggy rocks sticking up out of the sea its name is made up of two elements the old norse words for sea half and goofer which is steam or vapour so perhaps it's something about this monster's breath as it comes to the surface looking like sea mist it's a sort of see-going nightmare that illustrates the way that the ocean's depths are the ultimate wilderness the ultimate unknown space [Music] the stories circulated among fishermen and traders of the north for decades some likened the creature to a giant crab others said it was more like a squid with enormous tentacles that ensnared boats and sailors alike all agreed though that not even the greatest ships of war could resist its attack over time a new name emerged and stuck the beast was dubbed the kraken in the 18th century new scientific disciplines emerged many natural philosophers dismissed the kraken as a fisherman's tale but others were not so sure swedish zoologist carl linnaeus described it as a singular monster of the norwegian seas danish bishop eric pontopodin believed the stories too proclaimed the true danger lay not in the creature but in the deadly whirlpools left in its wake modern science gives more credence to the stories than you might think the legend of the kraken may be a result of sailors encountering a giant squid these unearthly looking creatures rarely come to the surface but can grow to enormous lengths of 13 meters and more and it is thought even larger squid as yet unknown to science lurk in the inky depths if you see a giant squid and you're in a very small boat that's a terrifying experience they are unnatural looking they have the largest eyes in proportion to any other animal so they look incredibly powerful also they can do magical things like squirting ink out of their bodies so there's a lot of discomfort associated with that kind of creature and they therefore figure very often in horror stories suddenly there's one in 20 000 leagues under the sea there's one in victor hugo's book workers in the sea they often figure as man's opponents a kind of personification of the ocean itself in its unpredictability its enormity and its power terror and confusion that seeing such a creature may have been intensified by the collision of the sailors themselves hunger and malnutrition were commonplace on ocean-going ships of the past the sailor's work was hard and they were confined to the same small space with the same people for week after week the combined effect all this could have on their physical and mental health was devastating i think if you spend hours on a ship looking out at sea as a lookout for land or for any other vessels approaching you're going to start seeing things in the light and the water and their interaction it's natural to give a reason for the odd behavior of the ocean it's in a way easier to deal with it with a bunch of superstitious and mythological interpretations than it is just to throw up your hands and say we don't really know why it works the way it does but i'm going out sailing again next weekend it's much better to think in terms of sea monsters that will make a good story whatever the roots of the kraken the tales proved enduring and we've not lost the taste for such stories the ocean retains its power to frighten and to enthrall in 1975 director stephen spielberg scored box office success with his killer shark movie jaws and the formula remains a popular one for taking to the seas to sail or to swim is still to enter the unknown for who can say what might be sharing the waters with us what might be lurking beyond the boat's hull or beneath our kicking feet though today ships cross our oceans with satellite precision the fears provoked by open waters and the unseen depths below have not entirely disappeared the wilderness of the sea remains a dangerous place and in modern tales of killer sharks and the mysteries of the bermuda triangle we can still hear the echo of the kraken's war [Music] for thousands of years europe was cloaked in forests even the largest of its settlements and cities were mere pinpricks of light among a vast wooded darkness [Music] it should be little surprise then that the forest is a common setting in the continent's myths and legends it was both mysterious and familiar dangerous but within touching distance of home it was a place of magic and adventure a wilderness that lurked all too accessible at the bottom of the field or beyond the city gates the wood is one of those wilderness spaces in which scary things that you've never met before and can only imagine might look forests do tend to have a particular value in the profile of that particular culture forests are the places where the people who haven't succeeded in the arable lands end up they end up there because they can afford to live there because nobody owns the forest you can't stop them from living there they're therefore associated with the fear of not making it with the fear of failing your family your children failing to provide [Music] among the most famous stories of the forest are the fairy tales collected by two german academics in the 19th century the brothers grimm jacob and wilhelm grimm were born in hanau in central germany in the late 18th century their childhood was one of comfortable affluence until the death of their father in 1796 plunged the family into poverty this traumatic upheaval affected the young brothers deeply relying on each other for support the two became inseparable both excelled at school and went on to attend the university of marble it was here that their interest in folklore began it was an interest that would become an obsession one that would dominate both their lives building on the work of french academics such as charles perrault and baroness del noire the brothers began a patriotic project to collect the folktales of their own land they spoke to german peasants and aristocrats farmers and city dwellers and documented the stories they heard [Music] the grim tales were collected from people who lived in hesse which though it was quite industrialized by the grimm's time had a lot of woods in it about 10 or 11 of the united kingdom is covered by what we would call woodland in germany even today it's something like 35 so forests are everywhere now there's a particular reason for that which is that the germans place a high esteem on unspoilt nature that's simply a cultural given and that means that in some ways germans value a radical encounter with otherness represented by the forest in their renditions of fairy tales their stories handed down by families who lived among those woods and who often live very difficult and impoverished lives the grimm's collected stories from a whole range of sources in the main from middle class boy to our friends and neighbours and people in their own social circle they'd often take several different versions of the same story take the bits they liked cannibalize them in effect and combine them into a news story [Music] they were adapting the tales of course for an educated literate public a middle-class and aristocratic public and they were adapting the content of those towns of course to the expectations of that public in 1812 the grimms published the first volume of their children's and household tales three years later the brothers added a second volume forming what we now know as grimm's fairy tales [Music] after its initial publication the brothers spent the next four decades revising and expanding their collection the seventh and final edition of 1857 contained more than 200 stories many of those tales are now familiar to us all little red riding hood sleeping beauty hansel and gretel and many more the grimm's enterprise was not simply an act of scholarly record however over the years the brothers rewrote many of the stories themselves they minimized sexual elements and softened other darker themes in earlier versions little red riding hood was eaten by the big bad wolf sleeping beauty was raped not kissed and hansen and gretel were neglected not by their evil stepmother but by their own parents [Music] i suspect that that violent and abusive culture directed towards children may unfortunately have reflected not a social reality but a social fear we tend to credit other people with abusive and violent tendencies towards children rather than regarding ourselves as having those tendencies we're getting with the parents in hansel and gretel who are hungry and therefore abandon their children in the woods because they can't work hard enough to provide for them properly the reason we need to tell ourselves these stories is because we need to be sure that we're not those people we need to differentiate ourselves from those people and make out that we are much more loving and careful as parents [Music] some have interpreted these stories as cautionary tales little red riding hood tells us to obey our elders beware the woods and be cautious of strangers from beyond our homes others have taken a more psychoanalytic approach employing the concepts of sigmund freud these interpretations recast the story as one of sexual awakening the dark woods are a symbol of the unconscious mind obedient and innocent she is the archetypal female the wolf on the other hand hungry and aggressive is the male when they meet later at the grandmother's house little red riding hood recognizes the wolf in his disguise but does not flee instead she climbs into bed with him the scene is a seduction and little red riding hood is a willing participant fairy tales like all stories have an element of content which is not explicit on the surface psychoanalysts have also argued fairy tales communicate to us at the level of the unconscious in particular they communicate to children at the unconscious level in real life wolves very rarely attack human beings they're actually quite sensible animals so it follows therefore that wolves must be symbolic rather than representing an actual threat what they seem to represent it's the fear that human beings who live in woods might become wild and wood-like they represent this sort of savage interior that has to be carefully contained controlled and muzzled by civilization if the wolf is a symbol of the wildness lurking within us all then its frequent presence in these stories is a reminder that however grandly we build our monuments however elegantly we draft our laws civilization is ultimately a fiction a veneer far thinner than we would like to admit the smallest of slips can see it crack and set loose that savage interior that wolf in terrifying fashion hurtling through bush and trees acting's hounds streamed after him as never before the transformed huntsman urged his unfamiliar limbs on close behind was blackfoot milampa swift as the wind beside him snatcher fiercest of all and shepherd his favorite who knew not his master's call crashed on through the woods but the trees closed tight around him there was nowhere left to run on every side the ravenous dog surrounded their dear master [Music] teeth sank into flesh tearing and slicing ripping and biting so they ended the life of action and slated the goddesses rage action's grisly death comes a long way from home deep in the wilderness that was the untamed forest his story is one of the most famous and enduring in all greek mythology it has inspired writers sculptors and artists in generation after generation but though the age of the ancient greeks is long past our fascination with the wild unknown remains undimmed throughout history societies have used the wilderness to explore what frightens us about the world and about ourselves to help us understand what it means to be part of a family part of a community and what it means to lose those things the wilderness is in some respects the opposite of civilization but also there's a sense in which we carry a bit of wildness in ourselves as well the wilderness also becomes a place for exploring what happens when humans get too civilized what does it mean when we go too far where we start sort of becoming too artificial and too false it might be the mountains it might be the heath it's the place where because you haven't got a big rational take on it you can fill it with the irrational the parts of yourself that you normally repress or crush it continually calls to us as being untamed and we are drawn by the lure obtaining it but it will never actually give in to our control [Music] today perhaps we like to think we've pushed the wilderness back but though our cities may now stretch to the horizon we can never banish the wilderness entirely we can sense it in the silence of a deserted wood or in the roar of a storm breaking over a distant mountainside but it is with us always our maps may grow ever more detailed but the wild unknown will always lurk at the edges [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 515,720

Keywords: Grimm brothers, Timeline - World History Documentaries, ancient cultures, ancient stories, ancient tales, ancient traditions, dark fairy tales, fairy tales, folklore traditions, forest mysticism, historical context, historical events, history, history buffs, history documentary, legends and folklore, legends and tales, magical world, mystical woods, mythological tales, storytelling

Id: iuKVQHyWxqA

Length: 43min 29sec (2609 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021