SOURCE: Ellingson, Ter. “The Noble Savage Myth and Travel-Ethnographic Literature.” In The Myth of the Noble Savage, pp. 45-63. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Ellingson surveys travel writings throughout history, maintaining that the idea of the Noble Savage was not widely held by the writers of these works or by the general population.

In the interval between Lescarbot's invention of the Noble Savage concept at the beginning of the seventeenth century and its reemergence as a full-blown myth in the 1850s, the Noble Savage appears to have receded into a state of virtual nonexistence. Although no one could say with certainty how many instances of discursive linkage of the terms “noble” and “savage” occur in the thousands of travel-ethnographies produced during this period, anyone who takes the trouble to carefully read more than a few of them can verify that such linkages do not...