Why Legends Matter: Chesterton’s ‘Ballad of the White Horse’

A landscape view of the remodeled Westbury White Horse to commemorate King Alfred's victory over the Danes at the Battle of Ethandun on the edge of Bratton Downs, Wiltshire, England. Alan Jeffery/Shutterstock

Why read legends about world events when you could read accurate historical accounts instead? Why choose fables when you can get facts? In the preface to his narrative poem “The Ballad of the White Horse,” G.K. Chesterton gave a cryptic and thought-provoking answer to that question: “It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.” Chesterton’s comment at the beginning of his ballad requires some unpacking to fully understand.

In this ballad, Chesterton tells of a real king, King Alfred the Great, a Christian Anglo-Saxon leader in Britain who stood against the tide of invading pagan Danes in the 9th century. But Chesterton built his narrative not on historical documents, but on “popular traditions.” He argued that without legends, we wouldn’t remember much about King Alfred. He'd be just another king from the dark, tumultuous times after the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s the legends about him that have kept his memory alive.

While acknowledging that Alfred was a real king, Chesterton asserted, “the legends are the most important things about him.”

Now, how could legends of Alfred be more important than the historical facts? Why embrace legend knowing that it gets some of the facts wrong?

G. K. Chesterton at work. Public Domain

Poetry Versus History

Poems and legends tend to penetrate to the essence of the subject or topic, while history sometimes concerns external details only. While it may not be true that Alfred went disguised into the camp of the Danes and sang upon the harp, as he does in Chesterton’s poem, the story is metaphorically true.

The legend distills the reality of Alfred’s historical situation: Alfred was surrounded by his enemies, alone, unaided, yet he kept alive the song of Christian and chivalric hope. He defied the pagans to their faces even when it seemed victory was impossible. The legend embodies this fundamental truth about Alfred, and it expresses the truth in a higher and more complete sense even than all the historical details of Alfred’s life could do.

As Chesterton said, the legend “foreshortens,” or “condenses” the essence of what it meant to be King Alfred and to wage his lonely war in the windy hills around the Vale of White Horse. In a very real sense, the legends express not just what he did—as archeological digs or dusty manuscripts might—but who he was and what role he played in the grand story of the world.

Engraving depicting Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, disguised as a harp player to enter the camp of the Danes, where he entertained them with songs while listening to their conversations. Kean Collection/Getty Images

In his “Poetics,” Aristotle puts it this way: “The real difference [between poetry and history] is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”

Legend is a distillation of history that emphasizes the universal truths contained within the particulars of a given time and place. The poets’ eyes, as they look at the raw material of the human past, leap to the essential and discard the unimportant. To do so, a poem based on a historical event—such as “The Song of Roland” or “The Ballad of the White Horse”—will discard or rearrange the bare facts in the service of the larger truth the poet wants to tell. One such use is to explain the ongoing, cosmic battle between good and evil that continues through age after age.

Many historians, on the other hand, merely catalogue information without seeing the larger picture that these puzzle pieces form. They have only scattered pottery shards, torn pages, and skeletons, painfully pieced together. The teller of legends, on the other hand, brings the dead back to life.

Of course, in the final analysis, these two ways of looking at the human past—history and legend—need not be mutually exclusive. They can be reconciled. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote  in “The Two Towers":” “Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight? A man may do both. ... For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!”

In other words, everyday realities and historical and scientific facts are, at the same time, the stuff of legend. Our task is to see them as such, to grasp the larger narrative—the mythic quality—of the events unfolding around us, and the “facts” of science. To be healthy, human nature demands that we find the larger meaning in our lives and the world around us. Paradoxically, then, maybe the trouble isn’t that we attach too much importance to historical or scientific facts, but that we don’t attach enough.

Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been privileged over mythic forms of understanding reality. An engraving from the 1772 edition of the “Encyclopédie”; Truth, in the top center, is surrounded by light and unveiled by the figures to the right, Philosophy and Reason. Public Domain

Towards a More Complete View

The historian isn’t wrong to aim for accuracy, of course. However, a shortsighted approach to history that concerns itself only with exact statistics, perfectly preserved antique relics, and well-documented economic trends with no thought to their meaning might be worse than no history at all. A shortsighted approaches miss the essential ingredient in human history: the human soul and its spiritual battles. It is this central conflict in the human story that the legend-seeker—with X-ray vision—discovers underneath all the facts and figures.

Perhaps the balance between the two in this case is a dedication to historical accuracy that nevertheless maintains a grand, mythic vision, which is the only way the facts can be properly interpreted. And, of course, no good historian should be too quick to dismiss certain tales as “only” legend. Some myths turn out to be both  metaphorically and literally true—at which point history and legend fuse into one, like twin rivers flowing into the same sea. King Alfred’s against-all-odds victory over his enemies at the seems like the stuff of legends--yet it is also historical fact.

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]