Mountains before Mountaineering (eBook)

The Call of the Peaks before the Modern Age

Dawn L. Hollis (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-1-80399-319-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Today, mountains are spaces for adventure: treasured places for people to connect with nature, encounter the sublime and challenge themselves, whether it be skiing in the Italian Alps or scaling the heights of the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Some regard our love of mountains as relatively new, claiming that before modern mountaineers planted flags upon the peaks, the average European was more likely to revile and avoid a mountainous landscape than to admire it. Mountains Before Mountaineering tells a different narrative. It reveals the way mountains inspired curiosity and fascination and how they were enjoyed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It gives voice to the early modern travellers who climbed peaks and passes with fear and delight; to the 'real mountaineers' who lived and died upon the mountain slopes; and to the scientists who used mountains to try to understand the origins of the world. This book invites you on a journey through the mountains, long before Everest was 'discovered' as the highest mountain in the world or before the first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc. It is the story of how our love of the mountains has been a part of us from the very beginning.

Dawn L. Hollis is a historian and hill-lover, despite being born in low-lying East Anglia. Over the course of her studies and research at Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews she became fascinated with the question of how people experienced mountains before the birth of mountaineering. She has spoken and written widely on the topic in academic contexts but has always felt that the stories of her early modern 'friends' deserved to be shared with a wider audience. She lives in Scotland, by the sea, with her family and a nineteenth-century iron printing press.

Textauszug

Introduction

In 1786, a doctor and a peasant burst into a spontaneous race for the final few metres of their shared journey to the summit of Mont Blanc, which had never before been conquered. Over the following century, the rest of the Alps became the ‘playground of Europe’, as triumphant first ascents were made across the range. In 1953, a New Zealand beekeeper and a Nepali-Indian Sherpa claimed Mount Everest for Britain; headlines celebrated, on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, ‘the crowning glory’ of Hillary and Tenzing reaching the summit of the world. Today, the mountains of the world attract innumerable visitors, ascending them in hiking boots and crampons, or descending them with adrenaline-filled rapidity upon skis, snowboards, or rugged bicycles. They are photographed, painted, and admired. This era of modernity – the era we still inhabit – is one in which mountains are places of heroism, of joyous sporting endeavours, of beauty and sublimity. But what came before?

Before this time, or so it is said, travellers shuddered at the very sight of the Alps. Peasants who lived in the shadows of the mountains whispered that the summits were the abode of dragons, best avoided. Mountains were ugly, seen as warts upon the face of the Earth. The very thought of climbing to the top of a mountain was an absurdity. It was only in the modern era, with the start of mountaineering and the new appreciation for nature, as expressed in the writings of poets such as William Wordsworth, that mountains came to be objects of love and admiration. One might say that today we are the inheritors of a uniquely modern appreciation for the natural landscape.

This is a compelling vision. It is fascinatingly strange to imagine a time when the overall view of mountains was so at odds with that of today, and deliciously tempting to cast ourselves as having a special relationship with mountains, unknown by our ancestors. It’s a vision you might be familiar with, since it is embedded in accounts of the origins of mountaineering, in articles about aesthetics and art, and in many ways in the very fabric of what it means to ‘be modern’. It is also, as I have discovered, wrong.

I am at my dad’s retirement party, on a visit back to the parental nest long after flying it for marriage and PhD research up in Scotland. For thirty-five years he worked for the local district council, in building control and planning permission. I am surrounded by Suffolk accents and builder-y types, who are about as far removed from my daily work of poring over centuries-old books as I am from inspecting walls for safety or architectural sketches for planning violations. One of my dad’s colleagues, who I am pretty sure dandled me on his knee when I was a toddler, pauses to ask me about my doctorate. What do I work on? The conversation goes a bit like this:

‘Oh, er, mountains. In history.’

‘Mountains, really? What about them?’

‘Well, I’m looking at mountains in the seventeenth century, what people thought about them …’

‘Oh, yes! People didn’t like mountains back then, did they?’

‘Well, actually …’

The same conversation plays out in any number of settings: making small talk at the doctor’s; at academic conferences; sitting next to random people on the bus. I am always amazed at the fact that this idea, that people didn’t like mountains then, seems to have burrowed into the collective unconscious. Early on in my PhD, I read a book by the historian Daniel Lord Smail which talks about ‘ghost theories’.1 I like this term, because it seems to capture exactly what I keep coming up against: an idea so old and so oft-repeated that it has taken on the status of fact, its real origins long forgotten.

I could share a dozen examples of this theory as expressed on television, in books, or in magazine articles. My favourite is an old one, from Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilisation, a then-groundbreaking documentary on the history of art, which was intended partly to take advantage of the full potential of the new technology of colour television. Seated on a large rock on a mountainside, incongruously dressed in a suit and tie, he declared in clipped, definite accents that:

For over two thousand years mountains have been considered simply a nuisance: unproductive; obstacles to communication; the refuge of bandits and heretics. It’s true that in about 1340 the poet Petrarch had climbed one, and enjoyed the view at the top … and at the beginning of the sixteenth century Leonardo da Vinci had wandered about in the Alps … No other mountain climbs are recorded.

He went on to observe that to most people ‘the thought of climbing a mountain for pleasure would have seemed ridiculous’, and when ‘an ordinary traveller of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries crossed the Alps, it never occurred to him to admire the scenery’.2

This book tells a different story. Long before Everest was ‘discovered’ as the highest mountain in the world, long before the first (recorded) ascent of Mont Blanc, mountains in fact inspired curiosity and fascination. A wonderful summation of this can be found in an oration on travel written by Hermann Kirchner (1562–1620), a professor of history and poetry at the University of Marburg. His goal was to urge young men to journey into foreign and distant lands for their edification and personal improvement. Mountains offered a special attraction:

What I pray you, is more pleasant, more delectable, and more acceptable unto a man than to behold the height of the hills … to view the hill Olympus, the seat of Jupiter? to pass over the Alps that were broken by Hannibal’s vinegar? … to behold the rising of the Sun before the Sun appears? to visit Parnassus and Helicon, the most celebrated seats of the Muses?3

Professor Kirchner invited his readers on a journey through the mountains. This book does the same, inviting you on a journey through mountains as they were viewed, experienced and loved before the modern age.

MY JOURNEY TO THE MOUNTAINS

I have now been studying the history of mountains for most of my adult life, long enough that I have replaced the verb of studying with that of being: I am a historian of mountains, specifically of early modernity. I am going to talk more later about that term, but for the time being let’s just say that by ‘early modern’ I mean the period between roughly 1450 and 1750. Before drilling down into questions of terminology, though, I want to explain how I got here. What journey did I take to becoming a historian of mountains, and to doubting the ghost theory that people didn’t like mountains back then?

There are many places this story could begin, because it starts not with history but with my own personal relationship with mountains. Maybe it starts with childhood holidays and hiking up hills in the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Northumbria. I particularly loved, and still love, the Lake District, the names of the peaks rolling off my tongue and around my head like incantations: Blencathra, Scafell, Skiddaw, Helvellyn. These names evoke visceral teenage memories: getting soaked and cold slipping up the shaley summit of Skiddaw, the foot-bruising monotony of the upper moonscape of Scafell Pike, the heady thrill of tracing the narrow stony top of Striding Edge up to the summit of Helvellyn.

Or maybe it starts with that peculiarly masochistic form of British youth improvement (I wonder what Hermann Kirchner would have thought of that), the Duke of Edinburgh award, and the two ‘Gold’ expeditions trekking through wild country with a tent and what felt like the kitchen sink on my back. At one memorable point on the second of the two expeditions, the team member, whose turn it was to route-find, stopped us at the top of a hill, glancing with dawning horror between the map and the peak across from us, before uttering the sentence: ‘I think we climbed the wrong mountain.’ Somehow, this still did not put me off.

I was certainly well down the path to my mountains of today – or maybe I should say my mountains of yesteryear – when the teacher who ran the Duke of Edinburgh scheme at my school lent me a pile of books on the Everest expeditions of the 1920s, and the ‘mystery of Mallory and Irvine’.4 George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, members of the 1924 team hoping to claim Everest for Britain, departed their tent for their summit bid on the morning of 8 June 1924. Later that afternoon, cloud enveloped the top of the mountain, and they were never seen alive again. The ‘mystery’ lay in the tantalising suggestion that they might have successfully reached the ‘top of the world’ almost thirty years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The same teacher also led an annual winter mountaineering weekend to Scotland, during which I wore crampons for the first time and learned to self-arrest with an ice axe. Two years later, she took a sabbatical from work in order to make her own attempt upon Mount Everest. My peers and I at school waited for updates coming down the mountain from her expedition team with bated breath. Some of us had figured out, with the obsessiveness of teenagers towards a beloved role model, that if she succeeded she would break the record for being the oldest British woman to summit Everest. This was apparently news to her; when she returned, she described with some indignation the experience of returning to Base Camp from...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.5.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
• Schlagworte: 16th century • 17th century • 1924 everest expedition • Alps • climbers • dawn l. hollis • European mountains • first mountaineerers • George Mallory • Hill Climbing • hill scrambling • historic mountaineering • mountain climbing • Mountains • outdoor pursuits • Sandy Irvine
• ISBN-10: 1-80399-319-7 / 1803993197
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80399-319-5 / 9781803993195