Prehistoric POVs

Sometimes modern authors imaginatively present prehistoric perceptions and thoughts. This can only be an imaginative exercise but night be intellectually interesting. Our three examples in this post are:

Alan Moore, Voice Of The Fire (London, 1996), Hob's Hog, 4000 BC, pp. 9-56.

Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster";

Poul Anderson, "The Forest" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1996), pp. 161-188.

A Pithecanthropus:

"First light. Wind cold over skin, ruffle hair, whistle from gray-before-sun till stars go. Dew shiny on thorn wall, tree leaf; wet smell. Nest rustle soggy. Warm bodies, flesh smell, dry grass smell, mold-underneath smell." ("The Little Monster," p. 146)

In "The Forest," a man sometime between 16,000 and 9500 BC sees the Horned One. Anderson explains in an after-note that this is not necessarily fantasy because people do have panic attacks and this one is described from the point of view of a primitive man who would have made less distinction than we do between inner and outer.

Moore's narrator lived a mere six thousand years ago but also was of limited intelligence:

"There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he's head."

-Voice Of The Fire, p. 9.

 

His equivalent of thinking that he sees a man, then realizing that it is a tree, is that a man changed into a tree. He does not understand the concept of telling a lie. He is not glean that one can say of thing when thing is not.