In the Neolithic Age

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. In its encomium the Committee gave its reasons as:

…in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1907.

The prize brought with it not just fame but the sort of money that penniless scribblers could only dream about: in 1907 each Nobel Prize award was worth 138'796 Swedish krona (kr/SEK). Beerbohm wrote the sterling amount on the bag, £9'620. Today's equivalent would be around £1'009'316 according to the Bank of England.

In the febrile world of scribblers – then as now – there were always people ready to criticise the bright young writer Rudyard Kipling, who had risen to fame and fortune remarkably quickly. Kipling never attacked his fellow scribes. He laid out his feelings on this point in his 1895 poem, In the Neolithic Age. It revealed Kipling at his best: witty, entertaining, manly. The poem is not obscure, but modern readers may need a bit of help getting over the line, so I have added some notes. Here we go.

In the Neolithic Age (1895)

In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt;

I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;

And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.

The Neolithic (in Europe), a.k.a. the New Stone Age is considered to have lasted from c. 7000 BC to c. 2000 BC. It was marked by the emergence of settled farming cultures. We shouldn't overthink Kipling's use of the term Neolithic, the break up of 'Biscayan ice-pack' would seem to be something that happened at the end of the last interglacial, which occurred about 10'000 BC, at the end of the Paleolithic Age. It's called 'poetic licence'. | dwerg: dwarf. | Cliff and Berg: Note how precisely this statement (me/here, cliff/down, berg/up) is reflected in the line which follows it: about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré —
’Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell.

And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart
Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

The archeological findings at Solutré (now the commune of Solutré-Pouilly, in Burgundy) typify the Solutrean culture of the Upper Paleolithic (20'000 BC to 15'000 BC), which came just before the Neolithic. Until quite recently there used to be an interesting museum there, but it seems to have gone the way of the Solutreans. Never mind: you can pick up a few bottles of Pouilly-fuissé while you are exploring – just check that the contents match the labels, you know what I mean. outré: 'Beyond the bounds of what is usual or considered correct and proper; unusual, peculiar; eccentric, unorthodox; extreme.' OED. | tomahawk: Strictly speaking the North American Indian weapon we have all heard about. | diorite: a very hard and tough rock which, though difficult to work, makes good stone tools. | barbed and tanged: 'tanged' implies that the arrowhead has points or barbs on it to allow it to stick in the victim. This could also be the meaning of 'barbed' ['To furnish (an arrow, hook, etc.) with barbs'], but this would simply duplicate the meaning. One not very satisfactory solution would be to read 'barbed' as 'feathered'. | mammothistic: Kipling has taken the suffix 'istic' – atheism-atheist-atheistic, idealism-idealist-idealistic, etc. – and constructed a new word using it that we can take to mean 'mammoth-venerating'. | Grenelle: alluding to the 'Grenelle-Furfooz Men' of the European Upper Palaeolithic whose caves were found in the Belgian village of Furfooz.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,
And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
“For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night:—

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And every single one of them is right!”

Totem: Originally a concept applied to some indigenous North American peoples but also more widely applied to numerous other peoples with similar beliefs. The totem is usually a representation of an animal or some natural object, which in turn represents a spirit that watches over the tribe, clan or even the individual. The spirit manifests itself in the form of the animal or object which represents it. Such a totemic animal is never hunted, killed or eaten.

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;

And I stepped beneath Time’s finger, once again a tribal singer,
And a minor poet certified by Traill.

They: the gods. | a minor poet certified by Traill: Henry Duff Traill (1842-1900) was a British writer and journalist. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) had been Poet Laureate since the death of his predecessor, Wordsworth, in 1850. By 1892 it was clear that Tennyson would not last much longer (he died in October) and Prime Minister Gladstone and the literary establishment began the process of selecting a successor for this prestigious position. Trail published an assessment of the fifty leading poets of the day, finding them all more or less wanting. As an afterthought he added Kipling's name as the fifty-first on the list, with apologies but no enthusiasm, thus 'certifying' Kipling as a 'minor poet'. The satire here is very Kiplingesque, witty yet without rancour, despite Traill's public denigration of a fellow writer. After a few years of wrangling, the title was awarded in 1896 to that dim bulb, Alfred Austin (1835-1913). Kipling wasn't interested: he was a citizen of the world (as would be explicitly recognised in the award of the Nobel Prize in 1907, who in their encomium even quoted his line 'And what should they know of England who only England know?' from his poem The English Flag). Already in 1892 he had made his home in America with his new wife.

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow,
When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;

When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

aurochs is the name of a very large wild ox (not to be confused with the bison) that roamed Europe until the mid-eighteenth-century, when the species became extinct. The phrase 'headed off the aurochs turn for turn' alludes to the hunting technique for such large, fast and dangerous beasts, in which they would be herded ('headed off … turn for turn', aided by the aforementioned 'hunting dogs') into a natural corral where they could be slaughtered more efficiently. | Allobrogenses is Kipling's poetic remodelling of the standard term Allobroges, the name of a Celtic tribe of ancient Gaul (France) which settled around what is now Lake Geneva and the Rhône valley, making them congruent with the builders of the lake dwellings in Berne. We now know that lake dwellings built on piles above ground existed in many suitable places in Switzerland, most significantly around the Lake of Zurich. The dwellings were not built in the lake, as is usually imagined, but on suitable shores at the edge of the lake. The Allobroges certainly didn't need amanuenses to write for them, and their plots were the territory upon which their dwellings rested on wooden piles.
Your author's inner pedant adds: Kipling's creation of the word Allobrogenses (being an analogue of words such as Albigenses) although not used in modern scholarship, is justifiable poetic licence. The '-genses/sis' ending is the classical Latin suffix, 'of/coming from the [aforementioned place]'. For example, the Albigenses heretics were originally from Albi, in France. In the present case, there was no place called Allobro from which the Allobrogenses came. That said, 'allobro' comes from an ancient root 'allo' + 'brog', meaning 'other/foreign + country' – to the previous inhabitants the newcomers were simply 'foreigners' in Gaulish. Strictly speaking therefore, Kipling was not wrong to use this term, just swimming against the philological Zeitgeist. So the next time you are taking to social media and to the streets, tell the cops that you are protesting against all the bloody Allobrogenses.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;

Still we let our business slide — as we dropped the half-dressed hide —
To show a fellow-savage how to work.

scuffle, squeak, and rage … pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk the sort of unmanly argument one might expect from a tribe of apes, Neolithic humans or modern aesthetes. To 'dirk' = stab (with a dirk).

Still the world is wondrous large, — seven seas from marge to marge —
And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;

And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu,
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

a vast, used as a noun, is a dialect word meaning 'a very great number or amount'. | Martaban, now called Mottama, is the name of a town in Burma/Myanmar that in Kipling's time was part of British Lower Burma.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:—

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!”

roared … roars: a wonderful construction, the two halves of which cleverly align the Neolithic Age with the Modern, thus concluding the metaphor which has run through the whole poem. Any poet would be proud of startling the attentive reader with such a bold construction. Unfortunately, the risibly titled Definitive Edition (1940) of Kipling's poetry changed 'roared' into 'roamed', quite destroying Kipling's fine construction. Being kind, I suspect a typo, 'roa*ed-roa*ed' and sloppy proofreading. 'Roared-roars' had survived through all the many editions of Kipling's verse up to his death in 1936, only to be mutilated by incompetents as soon as he was gone. As a result we can expect 'roamed-roars' to creep into circulation, particularly now with the Kipling Society propagating it in their text of the poem.