Name John Stuart-Glennie | Died 1910 | |
Books The Women Of Turkey And Their Folk-Lore, Arthurian localities | ||
John Stuart Stuart-Glennie (1841–1910) was a Scottish barrister, socialist and folklorist.
Contents
Life
John S. Stuart-Glennie was the son of the daughter of John Stuart of Inchbreck, Professor of Greek in the University of Aberdeen; his father was Alexander Glennie of Maybank Aberdeen. He was educated in law at the University of Aberdeen and became a barrister, called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1853. He later undertook a series of journeys of historical exploration across Europe and Asia to collect folklore.
Views and associations
In 1885 Stuart-Glennie met and befriended George Bernard Shaw in London at the house of Jane Wilde, known as "Speranza". He took part in a socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square, in 1887. He clashed with Annie Besant in wanting to include family matters in the charter of the Social Democratic Federation during the 1880s; and was later a Fabian for a time, before coming up against the same issue of women's rights as foundational. Socialist views led him in 1906 to predict a Russian revolution and transformation of Europe.
Stuart-Glennie was involved in the attempt to set up a Celtic League in 1886, and in Scottish activism of the 1890s. Patrick Geddes was influenced by his pan-Celticism.
In his time Stuart-Glennie was seen, by Bernard Shaw, as a successor to Henry Buckle, with a theory of religious origins going back some eight thousand years, and based on racial foundations. Lewis Mumford in a 1956 work credited him with anticipating the Axial Age concept. As a disciple of Buckle, with whom he travelled, Stuart-Glennie was heavily criticised by John Mackinnon Robertson in Buckle and His Critics; Robertson took up challenges to his account of Buckle in Pilgrim Travels, made in the biography by Alfred Huth, was dismissive as callow of the theories about the era of 600 BC, and discounted John Fiske as a supporter of Stuart-Glennie.
As Eugene Halton has shown, Stuart-Glennie formulated the first systematic theory of what he termed “the moral revolution” in 1873 to characterize the historical shift around roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, most notably ancient China, India, Judaism, and Greece, later termed “the axial age” (“die Achsenseit”) by Karl Jaspers in 1949. His theory of the moral revolution was part of a broader critical philosophy of history, which included gradations unexplored by Jaspers, such as a view of prehistory as “panzoonist” in outlook, a worldview of revering “all life” as a religious basis for conceiving nature. Stuart-Glennie’s theory of the moral revolution is set in the context of a comparative theory of history that gave great attention to material conditions, as well as to pre-axial folk cultures and civilizations, both of which Jaspers undervalued or ignored.
Folklore
Stuart-Glennie is remembered for his extreme ethnological stance regarding the origin of folklore, for which he introduced a neologism "koenononosography" in 1889. He presented a racial theory of folklore origins at the International Folk-lore Congress of 1891.
Anthropologists in the 19th century, such as Edward Burnett Tylor, argued that mythical beings could have been modeled on historic "savage" or "primitive" races. This theory was developed by Edwin Sidney Hartland, Andrew Lang, and Laurence Gomme; and as an offshoot emerged the racialist concept that myths and folklore contain a basis of conflicting lower and higher races.
Laurence Waddell and Alfred Cort Haddon were two authors who were proponents of the racialist interpretation of folklore. Stuart-Glennie went further, and gained attention with his theory that swan maidens were superior women of an archaic white race, wedded to a dark skinned race beneath them in level of civilization.