E. A. ARMSTRONG will be already known to the readers of the New Naturalist Series as the writer of one of the most important monographs on a single species of animal, his famous study, The Wren, published in 1955.
Wide scholarship and talents have fitted him uniquely for the authorship of The Wren’s most unusual sequel. We use the word ‘unusual’ deliberately because his The Folklore of Birds is a most extraordinary book. It could only have been written by a scholar with a deep understanding, not only of ornithology, but of social anthropology, psychology and religion.
Armstrong has selected an assemblage of well-known birds upon which to base what he describes in his sub-title as “An enquiry into the origin and distribution of some magico-religious traditions.” He has set himself the task of revealing the general principles that underlie the evolution and diffusion of beliefs and symbols. With the scientist’s eye and the scientist’s methods of analysis and investigation he has examined the development of myth and ritual with originality and ingenuity. It is hard for us to make a choice from the multitude of those odd and interesting facts which Armstrong cites in this book, to bring to the reader’s attention. Customs such as “breaking the wish-bone” are explained with new and brilliant reasoning. Every kind of naturalist—and archaeologists, folklorists and ornithologists are all naturalists—will follow with interest his compelling studies of the origins of such beliefs as those concerning weather-prophet birds, and of such fables as that of the generation of the barnacle goose from barnacles.
We do not know of any previous attempt of such importance to trace beliefs concerning birds as far back as possible in time, and to identify the cultures in which they must have originated. Armstrong has examined groups of folk-lore beliefs, it seems to us, in just the same way as an archaeologist examines a series of artifacts; and we know of no other scholar who has given folk-lore just this sort of treatment, classifying beliefs and notions in a system based upon the eopchs in which they originated.
Armstrong has, indeed, combined the facts derived from archaeology with oral and literary traditions, to illustrate the origins and significance of much of the current folk-lore of birds. Some of the magico-religious myths and cults, of which these fragmentary traditions are the relics, prevailed in the past throughout most of northern Europe and Asia and in some areas of North America. Such beliefs were carried about the world in the streams of culture, and their travels are often illuminated by graphic motifs and imagery, much of which is reproduced in the pages of this book, and some of which—from the old Stone Age to modern times—can be held to be artistic masterpieces.
Promoting, as it does, our understanding, both of man and nature, this is a book that we are proud to sponsor.
THE EDITORS