TC Lethbridge | The Sons of TC-Lethbridge | Tekh's Anthological Review

Herdsmen and Hermits

Celtic Seafarers in the Northern Seas

Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge 1950

Lethbridge came from a family of great adventurers, but it was his own travels that provided him with a wealth of first-hand experiences on which he drew for his literary work. He states in his introduction, “(I am) not like Strabo, who criticised Pytheas from the security of his library. I have crossed all of the seas mentioned...” As T.D. Kendrick suggests in his foreword to Herdsmen and Hermits, Lethbridge offers us a personal interpretation that he knows will bring us closer to the people he is studying.

Herdsmen and Hermits presented Lethbridge with an opportunity to delve further into the possibility that ancient seamen had embarked on voyages of discovery in the northern ocean. This subject was close to Lethbridge’s heart and was obviously a theory that he had been mulling over for several years, as this notion was first touched upon in Umiak back in 1937.

In his introduction, Lethbridge describes a sea-voyage that he had embarked upon in the northern ocean in 1937. Travelling from Cape Wrath to Cape Farewell, he had witnessed the first Sunderland flying-boat on her way to America. With the arrival of the aeroplane, he concluded that he had just experienced the truly last great voyage of discovery. The time-gap between Lethbridge and the ancient mariners, upon which he had based his study, was enormous, but the cultural gulf between Lethbridge’s world in 1937 and that of the present day, is even greater. It is difficult to imagine living in an un-mapped and un-chartered world. To Lethbridge, the little-explored northern lands provided a challenge and an opportunity to adventure, but to the ancients, each journey beyond the sight of land would have been a perilous voyage into the unknown.

There are many passages in Herdsmen and Hermits that indicate Lethbridge’s growing interest in witchcraft and it’s link to ancient fertility cults, a focus that would later materialise in his 1962 publication Witches, Investigating an Ancient Religion. He observes that the existence and persecution of witches in eastern Scotland in the Middle Ages may have stemmed back to the matrilineal Pictish tribes and that the witches were perpetuating an ancient religion that had endured since pre-Belgic times.

But to me, the essence of this work is encapsulated in the closing paragraph, a paragraph revealing the humility and endeavour of a lone mariner adrift on an uncompromising ocean. The full-force of man versus nature is encapsulated in these last few beautiful words, words that expose Lethbridge as a true poet and literary genius.

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