Folklore of Stone Circles: Petrified Dancers and Countless Stones
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
- Mention stone circles to many people, and they'll think of people gathering at Stonehenge to watch the sunrise. Or hulking megaliths looming out of the mist on a lonely moor, the sheep being careful to only graze outside the circle.
They're certainly evocative, if nothing else. As with the standing stones that we covered last week, we know very little about them. We don't know why our ancestors built them or how they used them. Naturally, legend rushes in to fill that vacuum. Or does it?
Let's take a look at the folklore of stone circles in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore.
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Thoroughly enjoyed this program. I am retired in the southern Canadian prairies after a career of working closely with native tribes here. I have visited perhaps a hundred stone sites, many of which are stone circles reminiscent of those you showed. (These are stones sunk low in the earth, or piled in cairns, but not dressed or standing upright.) They are always arranged to solstice angles and sometimes stars or constellations, so there is usually a link between stone and sky. Because this is Canada and not Britain, I have actually interviewed people who used these places for dancing, music, and/or sacred ceremony (and still do), and one man who only stopped making stone tools in the mid-1950s (because his neighbours complained of the mess.) Although the knowledge is fading quickly, it has been possible to get some freshets from it. The Dakota (who mainly use these) use a word for nation which means "sky", and the stone circles to them are not on the land, but using horizon against the sky line. The stones show the way to the circle rather than being the circle itself. The circle can be the entire horizon (up to about 40 miles where we are.) The associations with people work in reverse: the Dakota say that they were all stones at one time and the some asked the Creator to give them more interesting lives - so they were changed into humans. The Dakota refer to these stones therefore as their "relatives". One Cree elder (a more northern tribe) went so far as to venture his opinion that Fairies had fled Ireland when humans came and had settled in our land where they found agreeable people and it was they who taught stone circle making to natives here. The Dakota view is the reverse, that they are the original "stone people" and maybe some of them went to Britain anciently (as we certainly know they have within the recent last millenia. (But they also have fairies.) An astronomer told me anyone living outside with big skies is going to notice solstice and star allignments and showed me that it takes only three stones to calculate the solstices and four cardinal directions. (The rest he said is artistic embellishment.) I think the stones begin as glacial erratics and unwanted stones that bunk up the pattern are removed or altered by the humans who used them. Geologically here we are looking at stone detritus that dates to about 12,000 to 15,000 BC. Humans could have arranged these stones anytime from then on, and it's also likely that several cultures in succession, perhaps even unrelated, may have used, reshaped and reused these over time.
Wow, that's absolutely fascinating to hear a contemporary Indigenous take on them! Thank you for commenting, that's definitely added depth to the whole idea!
Really appreciate your posts. Thanks so much.
My pleasure!
Interesting subject and some fascinating details. Just wish the narration wasnt quite so hurried. Though do understand reasons as to why that might be so.
It isn't hurried, that's just the speed I talk.