Introduction Présentation

In the last ten years as Editor-in-Chief I have had the opportunity to read several dozens of articles submitted for review and numerous monographs put forward for the Pierre Savard Award for which the Editorial Board has also served as adjudication committee. Of all that I have read, the text that fascinated me the most is Past Futures by Ged Martin which received the Pierre Savard Award in 2005. In this collection of essays, Martin questions the difficulty that history faces to explain (In my opinion, it applies to the social sciences in general). To illustrate his point he uses three metaphors: the “fallacy” of Coldingham, the Viking syndrome, finally the Lobster of Kirriemuir. The “fallacy” of Coldingham, according to Ged Martin, is a process that transforms a simple and mundane event suddenly into a complicated one by the “depth” of the explanation given to it. In 680, Coldingham, Scotland a fire destroyed a monastery inhabited by monks and nuns- presumably, the fire was the result of the negligence of its inhabitants. However, in 731, the historian Bede the Venerable, without much evidence, interpreted it as a tragic event caused by the hallucinations of a monk of Irish origin, Adamnan, plagued by visions. This interpretation triumphed over time and became the origin of what came to be known as the “fallacy” of Coldingham defining the process wherein the apparent cause of an event is never the “real” cause. The “profound” reason (although without much evidence) is revealed by the “explanation” and the “fallacy” of Coldingham thus becomes the “fact” of Coldingham. A close cousin, according to Ged Martin, of the “fallacy” of Coldingham, is the Viking syndrome. The Viking syndrome is when an assumption and not any “profound” explanation becomes a fact. In the Middle Ages, over three hundred years the Vikings spread across Europe and as far away as Newfoundland and even in the Crimea. To explain this migration, a hypothesis was supposed to have been first introduced by Sir William Temple in 1699, to the effect that known as the Vikings were rough invaders because in Norway they were going through a population explosion. The event became a “fact”, at least until research in the 20th century proved otherwise. But for centuries it remained a “fact”. Finally, the second cousin of the “fallacy” of Coldingham is the Lobster of Kirriemuir. In this village in Scotland, around 1800, before railroads, stagecoaches of the postal service sometimes left their parcels at specific locations along a road, so that villagers could take them. One day, the villagers of Kirriemuir found a package in which there was a lobster. In Kirriemuir, nobody had ever seen a lobster. So they brought the package to the schoolmaster. The teacher, in a very learned tone, said, “as we have never seen, neither an elephant nor a turtle, the animal can therefore only be an elephant or a turtle.” Thus, the lobster became an elephant or a turtle because the “learned” authority had decided so. Although this is not fair to the subtle thinking of Ged Martin, for me, in a way, for about two centuries, but especially so in the 20th century in the Western world, history as a discipline along with the “social sciences” and literary studies have been, not exclusively, but greatly marked by the “fallacy” of Coldingham, the Viking syndrome or the Lobster of Kirriemuir. And the conceptual source par excellence of the three cousins has been the couple tradition-modernity, transposed in studies of nationalism as the distinction between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism. In the late 1970s, Edward Said termed this …