History and fiction

‘Why do you study the middle ages?’; ‘What’s so special about the Normans?’; ‘Why are you an historian?’. These are all questions I get asked on a regular basis, alongside enquiries like ‘History is so boring: what on earth got you into it?’. Questions like this are at the heart of an entry in the Guardian’s book blog.

My answer, of course, depends on to whom I am talking. Telling an audience of academics assessing your ability to do the job, I would hesitate before saying that I was introduced to the Normans by a very good school education TV programme called Zig Zag, which had a very irritating signature tune (both the generic one and the special Norman one – you can hear it on YouTube, where else!) which has stuck with me today, though that was my reasoning for a display board ‘Why I love the Middle Ages’ poster. That response dates me more than anything else! More likely, I would say that I was inspired by Norman architecture in my childhood and fired by good old-fashioned curiosity. For enquiries about history more generally, I may well cite one of my all time favourite children’s authors, Rosemary Sutcliffe, particularly Bonnie Dundee (Jacobite rebellions); The Armourer’s House (Tudor) and The Eagle of the Ninth (Roman).

While I find it incredible that Sutcliffe doesn’t merit a mention in the Guardian post, the value of fiction in historical enquiry is one that is discussed far beyond the confines of primary school classrooms. In the chronicles that I read, the medieval author will sometimes drift into the realm of fantasy by including elements drawn from the romances and chansons doing the rounds to embellish their accounts of various episodes. Orderic Vitalis’ account of Mabel of Belleme being murdered in her bed after having a bath is an excellent example. Turning to medieval literature – the Lais and other poetry – how much of their appeal is linked to verisimilitude? Moving on through history, how can, to pick an entirely random example, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables be used to analyse French society and politics in the nineteenth century? How can modern historical fiction about the Tudor court tell us anything about the sixteenth century? For student historians, the problems are nicely condensed into historiographical chestnuts along the lines of ‘To what extent does literature mirror the society in which it was written?’. And as for the question of whether all history is fiction anyway, that can wait for another day.

A good story can inspire a seven-year-old in ways that text books possibly can’t, but there are better ways of using it than kicking off a history or general humanities lesson with an extract from a novel. The commentator who mentioned the Icelandic Sagas (though how you’d teach some of those to primary school children is a moot point!) had it right. Why not start a lesson with an extract from a source, an object or a picture – something actually from the period of the past in question? Many museums now have loan boxes for schools for this very purpose. We need not be reliant on what children’s novelists think children should be interested in. Literature has its place in stimulating interest, but on the sly. If I cast my mind back to my own junior school days, much of the collective interest in history was instilled through the books we read in our reading groups or together as a class, an interest which spilled over into drawing pictures of castles, analysing brick patterns in Wakefield (a whole project believe it or not) and other such worthy pursuits. Children should be encouraged to read anything and everything, but history is so much more than literature.