Forget the names, forget the time. For a moment imagine two pictures without dates.
The Indian warrior sits his pony on a hilltop, watching the white man's wagon train/railroad bite deep into his older truth with a blade of iron. He wonders how the spirits can allow this. He has done the ghost dance to bring back the buffalo and the Green Time That Was, but the buffalo will not return.
Dorelei sits her pony on a hilltop, looking at a tallfolk village with its timber walls and planted fields. Their queer, straight lines are an alien geometry to her. She prays in the ring of stones and wonders why these tall-folk thrive where her own decline.
Where is the essential difference? Both were a people, both wanted to survive on their own terms but failed to keep up with the quickening dance of the world. Both had a concept of existence and man's place in nature
before Christianity placed the human soul apart from it. Both were called devils by the people who pushed them out of the good lands. The Indians were overrun in a time of cameras and the written word. The Faerie/proto-Celts/Iberians were engulfed in a time of illiteracy and superstition. For this reason alone, Indians are a recorded fact while Faerie retreat into distorted legend.
Take them both without tears. Remember them watching from a very real hill, and that both had a truth quite different from our own, but one that worked for them for thousands of years before their time ran out. The same has happened to more than one people who considered themselves chosen of their gods, and perhaps it will again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Last Rainbow is a work of fiction and fantasy, but for the framework of fact to reconstruct the Britain of the years 429-432,1 found the following works of the most help to me:
In the Steps of St. Patrick by Brian De Breffny © 1982, Thames and Hudson Ltd., New York.
The Battle for Gaul, Julius Caesar, tr. by Anne and Peter Wiseman, David R. Godine, Boston, 1980.
The Problem of the Picts, ed. by F. T. Wainwright, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, repr. 1970.
The Bible As History, Werner Keller. Newly revised English translation © 1980, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, G.B. Printed in the U.S. by William Morrow, New York, 1984.
The Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert L. Wilken, Yale University Press, 1984.
A History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, Atheneum Press, New York, 1970.
The Age of Arthur, John Morris, Scribners, New York, 1973.
* * *
There were also the standard works; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records burial of treasure by Roman Britons under the entry for the year 418, with the caveat that datings for that period may not be absolutely accurate. There was as well The Gospel of St. Luke and Psalms, re-read with total delight in their pure poetry; and, for as much fun as enlightenment, The Encyclopedia of Faeries by Katherine Briggs, Pantheon Books, New York, 1976.
Finally, to Professor Aubrey Burl, John Rowley and Roger Martlew of the 1979 Earthwatch expedition to Machrie Moor, Arran, Scotland, who taught me, through three weeks in the field, more of the common-sense nuts and bolts of Scottish prehistory than I could ever have learned from the best reference books. My heartfelt thanks.
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