The Gathering Night: author’s afterword
The following is a section from the afterword to Margaret Elphinstone’s The Gathering Night: Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when her brother goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son.
The Mesolithic era in Scotland tends to be passed over in deafening Silence. Six thousand years of human occupation – from the last Ice Age until the agricultural revolution of around 4000 BC – are usually represented in histories and prehistories by a maximum of a page or two on Scotland’s hunter-gatherers, with comments on how little we know about them. I was drawn to the early inhabitants of my country partly because, unlike ourselves, they left so little trace of their long presence. They lived long before agricultural peoples built stone circles like Callanish or villages like Skara Brae. My initial ignorance was great, but I soon discovered popular misconceptions were even greater. I’ve often been asked ‘Could these people speak?’ ‘Did they have fire?’ or ‘Did they have any art?’ I wanted to show that in evolutionary terms seven or eight thousand years is almost nothing. In other parts of the world people were already farming. These people were genetically the same as us; only
the world they inhabited was different. Sometimes it seems so far away and long ago it’s like looking down the wrong end of a telescope.
My search for these early peoples led me along various paths. I began looking at familiar Hebridean and West Coast landscapes in a different way. I considered what I’d seen and read of Inuit, Native American and Sami traditions. I read about peoples in places I’ve never been to, like Mongolia, Australia and South Africa. These parallels helped me to see my own country through the eyes of people who were hefted to their land in a way that I can never experience myself. Mesolithic people wouldn’t have needed a separate word for ‘nature’: everyone – people, animals, birds, fish, mountains, rivers, seas – would have co-existed in the same holistic world.
Nor were Mesolithic lives necessarily as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as Hobbesian theory would have us believe. The stereotype of grunting cavemen wielding clubs lingers on, although recent hunter-gatherers have lived rich lives in marginal areas where no one could possibly practise agriculture. Resources must have seemed infinite before agriculture took over all the prime land. Mesolithic Scotland seems to have provided a living as plentiful as that enjoyed by, for example, the Native Americans of the north-west coast before their way of life was disrupted for ever. Mesolithic people in Scotland shared their land with red and roe deer, pig, wild cattle, wolf, bear, beaver, otter, fox and perhaps squirrels. Rivers were full of salmon and trout. All kinds of birds inhabited sea, cliffs, marshes and forests. Shores were rich in shellfish. The sea teemed with fish. Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman, in their TV programme on survival, have indicated the tasty variety of plants available for gathering, even through the long winters. I am not suggesting that Mesolithic Scotland was a Rousseau-esque paradise full of noble savages, but all the evidence suggests that human life was about far more than mere subsistence. People could make decisions about their lives, just as we do, based on social and spiritual considerations, and not just the material imperatives of where and how to find the next meal.
There’s little material evidence of the hunter-gatherers of Mesolithic Scotland. The shell middens of Oronsay, caves near Oban and on Ulva, locations on Islay, Jura, Mull, Coll, Rum and Risga are the main west-coast sites. Microliths – tiny stone blades and points – are indicative of a Mesolithic presence. Food remains and tools of bone, shell and antler, and a few postholes where tents were once pitched, are really all that is left. The only human remains are odd finger-bones from shell middens. There is nothing in Scotland like the fishing traps, villages or cemeteries of southern Scandinavia. In a Danish Mesolithic grave a newborn child was found resting on a swan’s wing. At Starr Carr in Yorkshire archaeologists unearthed stag antlers attached to a mask. Their purpose remains a mystery; I’ve incorporated them into my fictional narrative. There are no such indications of spiritual or symbolic life in Scotland. That could either be because soil conditions are too acid, or because burial practices were different. My premise, as a storywriter, is that wherever there are people there will be emotions, rituals, metaphors, stories, art… in other words, a constant search for meanings.
Hunter-gatherer cultures all over the world share remarkably similar spiritual practices that express deep affinity with the land to which they belong. Shamanistic religions are closely allied to hunting economies. My Go-Betweens’ spiritual practice is based on my readings in shamanistic spiritualities from many different parts of the world. To be Go-Between is to enact a role rather than to belong to a class. Go-Betweens have their own sort of power, but it operates through the natural world, within an egalitarian society. Forms of social control in hunter-gatherer societies sometimes strike me as being remarkably civilised and effective. However, if I’d been born eight thousand years ago, I would almost certainly have had fewer years in which to enjoy the cultural benefits on offer.
In all the long years of Mesolithic Scotland we know of only one definite historic event. This was the tsunami that struck the east coast following an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway in c.6150 BC. I took this tsunami as the catalyst for my plot, and used first-hand accounts of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami as the basis for Kemen’s story.
I use Basque names for my characters because, although no one has any idea what languages were spoken in Mesolithic Scotland, Basque is thought to be the only extant language of pre-Indo-European – which is to say, pre-agricultural – origin on the western seaboard of Europe.
Most of my novels have maps. There’s no map in this book, partly because sea levels have changed in complicated ways: land around the Scottish ice cap lifted up after the huge weight of ice melted, while sea levels everywhere were also rising. But, more importantly, there shouldn’t be a map because my characters imagined their land in other ways.
September 1st, 2010 at 9:02 am
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September 3rd, 2010 at 9:03 am
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