Myth as infrastructure

Walk across Paris from the Panthéon to Notre-Dame and you pass through a story most residents could not tell you in full. The hill under the Panthéon is named for Geneviève, a young woman who, according to her early biographers, persuaded the people of Paris not to flee when Attila's army approached in 451. The Huns turned toward Orléans instead. Whether she had anything to do with it is unknowable. She became the city's patron saint, the hill took her name, and fifteen centuries later students still climb the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève to reach their lectures.

Nobody needs to believe the story for it to keep working. That is the odd thing about civic myth. It goes on organising streets, festivals, names and loyalties long after it has stopped being taken literally, rather like a water main laid under a road by engineers whose names no one remembers.

Stories that hold weight

Infrastructure is a useful word here because it describes things we only notice when they fail. A bridge is invisible until it closes. A founding story is similar. It sits under the everyday life of a place, carrying weight quietly, and comes into view only when it is contested, when a statue is pulled down or a street is renamed and people discover how much they cared.

Gothenburg has a plainer origin than Paris. Gustav II Adolf founded it in 1621 as a fortified trading town at the mouth of the Göta älv, and Dutch engineers laid out its canals because they knew how to build on wet ground. There is no saint and no miracle. The city still carries its founding story, though. It is a merchant's story, practical and outward-facing, and you can read it in the grid of the old town, in the warehouses along the river, and in a certain local suspicion of anything too grand.

A city's founding story goes on carrying weight long after it has stopped being believed.

Older myths run underneath even that. The Norse world-tree, Yggdrasil, with its roots in three realms and a serpent gnawing at one of them, is not a belief anyone in Gothenburg holds. Its imagery still turns up in public art, in the names of companies and boats, in the half-joking way people refer to the old gods when the weather turns. These references do not require faith. They require only a shared memory that the story exists, which is a much lower bar and a much more durable one.

Why the old shapes last

Part of the answer is economy. A myth compresses a great deal of meaning into a form that is easy to repeat. Geneviève on the walls of Paris says something about courage, about staying when others leave, about a city that sees itself as besieged and survives. You could write that as a civic charter. Nobody would remember it.

Part of the answer is that myths are flexible in a way that laws are not. Each generation can reread them. Geneviève has been claimed by royalists and republicans, by Catholics and by secular historians interested in the late Roman world. The story survives because it can be bent toward new purposes without breaking.

There is a darker side, of course. The same flexibility lets a founding myth be used to decide who belongs and who does not. A city that tells itself it was built by one people will find ways to make others feel like guests. Paying attention to a city's myths is partly a way of noticing where those lines have been drawn.

Reading a city

For anyone who writes about places, this suggests a method. Before you describe a city's present, find out what stories it tells about its beginning, and then look for where those stories are still at work. They will be in the street names, certainly, and in the statues. They will also be in what people are proud of, what they apologise for, and what visitors are always told within the first hour.

In Paris you will hear about the revolution, the siege, the barricades. In Gothenburg you will hear about the harbour, the ships, the trading companies that sailed to Canton. Neither account is complete. Both are working parts of how the city understands itself, and you cannot read the place well without them.

The old stories have not gone anywhere. They have gone underground, where infrastructure usually lives.