Moon eyes

The oral tradition presents anthropologists and historians with a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, problem; given that by definition its antecedents were not written down, there is no way to tell whether a particular legend is true, is entirely made up, or is in that gray area in between.

Sometimes corroboration of the true tales can come from odd sources -- such as the story amongst the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and tsunami, that was later shown to be true not only by geological evidence -- but by written records from Japan.  But hard evidence of this type for legends in the oral tradition is rare, and in any case, an earthquake in the Northwest isn't exactly a far-fetched claim to begin with.

It's when the stories are more out there that it becomes harder to discern whether they're entirely mythological in nature, or whether there might be some bit of real history mixed in there somewhere.  Which brings us to the strange tale of the Moon-eyed People of the Appalachians.

Botanist, naturalist, and physician Benjamin Smith Barton, in his 1797 book New Views of the Origins of  the Tribes and Nations of America, talks about a conversation he'd had with Colonel Leonard Marbury, who had worked as an intermediary between the Cherokee and the American government.  Barton writes, "... the Cheerake [sic] tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'Moon-eyed-People,' who could not see in the day-time.  These wretches they expelled."  The Cherokee chief Oconostota supposedly told Tennessee governor John Sevier about them, saying they were light-skinned, had "come from across the great water," and were the ones who'd built some of the monumental earthworks in Tennessee and neighboring states. 

Soapstone carving in the Cherokee County (North Carolina) Historical Museum, believed to be a representation of the Moon-eyed People

Those two references seem to be the earliest known sources of the story with at least moderate reliability (although note that both are second-hand).  Through the nineteenth century, the legend of the Moon-eyed People -- who were light-skinned (some said albinos), small in stature, and saw better at night than during the day -- was repeated over and over, then embellished and twisted together with other legends.

One of those is the odd Welsh tale of Madoc (or Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd, who after a family conflict in around 1170 C.E. sailed away from Wales with some friends, who ultimately settled somewhere in eastern North America and intermarried with the locals.  Of course, "somewhere in eastern North America" is a pretty broad target, so this opened up the gates for a variety of claims, including that there's Welsh blood (and/or Welsh linguistic influence) in the Monacans and the Doegs of Virginia, the Tuscarora of New York, and even the Zunis of New Mexico and the Mandans of North Dakota.  This runs up against the problem that there's no good genetic or linguistic evidence supporting any of this -- despite claims of "Welsh-speaking Indians," there's pretty certainly no such tribe.  So braiding together the Moon-eyed People (for which there's no hard evidence) with the legend of Madoc ab Owain (ditto) doesn't make the case for either one any stronger.

Side note: aficionados of science fiction and fantasy will probably recognize the Madoc ab Owain legend as the basis of Madeleine L'Engle's alternately brilliant and cringy YA novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has the main character, Charles Wallace Murry, time-traveling back through Madoc's line of descent in North America.  Brilliant because it weaves together all sorts of contingent histories and what-ifs with a legend that's kind of cool; the cringy part is that a major plot point revolves around a "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" thing, mixed in with a heaping helping of the Noble Savage myth.  I loved the story as a kid, but now it's hard to read it without wincing.

Be that as it may, as far as the Moon-eyed People goes, what we're left with is... not much.  Even the Wikipedia article on the legend admits, "Sources disagree as to the accuracy of the stories, whether or not the stories are an authentic part of Cherokee oral tradition; whether the people existed or were mythical; whether they were indigenous peoples or early European explorers; and whether or not they built certain prehistoric structures found in the region."

So it's a curious story, but the dearth of evidence -- combined with the fact that what we have is filtered through the eyes of white Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were inclined to view Native legends as quaint at best and outright demonic at worst -- means we have to put this in the "most likely mythological" column.

On the other hand, maybe we should wait for the people over at the This Hasn't Been History For Quite Some Time Channel to get their hands on it.  I'm sure they'll have an answer at the ready.

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The writing on the stone

It can often be difficult to sort fact from fiction, especially when multiple people become involved, each with his or her own agenda -- and varying determination to adhere to the truth.

Take, for example, the Brandenburg Stone.  It's a 74 by 39 centimeter slab of oolite (a sedimentary rock) that appears to have writing-like marks scratched into the surface.  Without further ado, here's a photograph of the alleged artifact:

It was found in 1912 near Brandenburg, Kentucky by a farmer named Craig Crecelius.  Crecelius clearly thought the marks were writing -- and you can see for yourself that they look like it -- and he made a good effort to contact linguists who might be able to identify the script, but without success.  He exhibited the stone several times in nearby towns, but wasn't able to drum up much in the way of interest.

In 1965, the stone passed into the hands of one Jon Whitfield, and that's where things start to get interesting.

Whitfield thought he knew what the script was.  The letters, he said, were Coelbren y Beirdd (Welsh for "Bard's Lot"), a script for writing the Welsh language that in the early nineteenth century was the center of a linguistic controversy regarding its origins.  The man who promoted it, one Edward Williams (more often known by his "bardic name" of Iolo Morganwg), was absolutely obsessed with ancient Welsh history and traditions, and achieved fame as a collector of rare medieval Welsh manuscripts.

But why would there be Welsh script on a stone in Kentucky?

Whitfield thought he knew the answer.  There was a story circulating that the medieval Welsh prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd had crossed the Atlantic in around the year 1170 C. E. with a handful of friends, and the lot of them had stayed in North America and intermarried with Native Americans.  (Fans of Madeleine L'Engle will recognize this legend from her book A Swiftly Tilting Planet.)  This, said Whitfield, was proof that the legend was true -- and that Welsh-speaking Natives who descended from Madoc and his comrades had gotten as far inland as Kentucky.

There's only one problem with this.  Coelbren y Beirdd almost certainly wasn't an ancient script at all, but had been invented by Iolo Morganwg in 1791 -- who then passed it off as authentic.

It's pretty clear that despite his legitimate work in preserving ancient Welsh manuscripts, Williams/Morganwg also was a champion forger.  He was exposed as such long after his death by Welsh linguist and poet John Morris-Jones, who decried Williams's dishonesty, saying "it will be an age before our literature and history are clean of the traces of his dirty fingers."  Several of the works he "transcribed" were apparently written by him -- weaving his own fiction and philosophy into allegedly ancient legends and poetry, thus confusing the hell out of scholars who simply wanted to know what historical cultures actually believed.

So even if the marks on the Brandenburg Stone are actually Coelbren y Beirdd, it can't be any older than 1791, and probably much more recent than that.  Skeptic Jason Colavito points out that Morganwg's writing became really popular in the mid to late nineteenth century, when his son Taliesin began publishing and promoting his father's works.  Colavito writes:

The alphabet was widely published in the 1830s and 1840s, and whoever forged the Brandenburg Stone (it was not actually either Williams, who were never in Kentucky) almost certainly used such publications, possibly Taliesin Williams’s widely-read book about the alphabet, in forging the stone.  The younger Williams’s popular book was published to scholarly acclaim in 1840 (having won a prestigious prize two years before) and the alphabet was exposed as a hoax in 1893 (though suspicions had been raised earlier, until Taliesin successfully combated them), which makes it much more likely that the stone was actually carved between 1840 and 1912, though a date as early as 1792 cannot be excluded.  In the United States, libraries had dozens of different volumes on Coelbren y Beirdd, including the Iolo Manuscripts (1848), Bardaas (1862 and 1874), etc., but I am not able to find evidence that the alphabet itself would have been widely available in rural America prior to Taliesin’s book, though it is possible that some of Edward’s specialist publications imported from Britain were available in some places.  After 1862, the largest collection of the Williams forgeries was in print and the alphabet was at the height of its popularity.  Thus, the latter nineteenth or early twentieth century seems the best candidate for the time of forgery.

So we have Craig Crecelius, the farmer who found the stone, and who appears to have been genuinely unaware that it was a forgery; Jon Whitfield, who was the one who identified the writing as Coelbren y Beirdd, but was too young to have been responsible for the creation of the stone, and seems to have thought it was authentic as well; and Edward Williams, who created the fake script but never went to Kentucky and so can't have been the stone's creator, either.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  An unknown person scratched some mysterious letters on a stone, probably in the last half of the nineteenth century, and left it for someone to find.  And someone did... starting a domino effect of speculation that still shows up on television shows specializing in archaeological weirdness.  The fact remains, though, that everything about it is certainly a forgery -- not only the artifact itself, but the script in which the inscription is written.

But as far as who perpetrated the hoax, we'll probably never know.

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