The topic of ‘Myth and History’ sets up an opposition between the two partners, but perhaps they are not so very different after all and their juxtaposition offers interesting points of contact to explore. Both are concerned with information networks conceived in human minds and both have points of attachment within conceptions of time.

The main difference is in relation to the truth claim, which is essential in History but is optional or non-existent in Myth. In the Religions of the Book there is a claim to truth which calls upon adherents to subscribe to it, but Myth, like Fiction, belongs to the conceptual world of the ‘As If’ rather than that of the ‘As Is’. When a truth claim is made in an ‘As If’ conceptual world, it is about the accuracy of a statement within the confines of the container of the work of fiction (e.g. ‘Prospero raised a tempest’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest) or of the myth of a community (e.g. ‘Tane separated heaven from earth’, in a Polynesian conceptual system).

This is not to say that the people who knew a particular myth did not accept it and live in a community that included specific culturally posited invisible beings. However, although their mythic system applied to the whole of their world, encounters with neighbouring peoples with different mythic systems were easily accommodated and it was understood that they had different gods and presented no challenge to the indigenous system which could remain intact or could modify to incorporate new elements. The situation was different when an ‘As If’ mythic community came into contact with a religion which was in a position to enforce its claim to universal truth both in history and in worldview, and this is the situation in the Celtic and the Scandinavian communities that were involved in the engagement with Christianity.

The works that were written down in manuscripts were the creations of scribes working within networks of tradition. These networks were the work of skilled practitioners in the creation of compositions in prose and verse in both cultures.