Chapter One Origins And Antiquity: Myths, Legends And Epics

Chapter One Origins and Antiquity: Myths, Legends, and Epics The geographical origins of Western literature lie in areas as diverse as the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the central European forests, and the northwestern coasts, each of which produced a body of oral histories, myths, and legends, many of which were subsequently written down. They have been drawn on by writers since the emergence of a Western literature culture in ancient Greece. Stories have been used as entertainment, as origin myths (of the physical world, culture, or society), and as a way of preserving ideas and traditions. Attesting to the power of such stories as an important component of human societies, for good or ill, many of these retain a grip on the modern world,
whether as religious texts or as a corpus of ideas that give peoples and nations a series of myths through which they can define and identify themselves as a distinct group. Though these should be taken as myths – and even the idea of a Western literary tradition is “mythological” and hard to delineate – many of the stories that have shaped Western history stem from other cultures (such as the Bible), or were a consequence of trade or colonialism (for example, the constructions of the “other” through crusader narratives or collections such as Arabian Nights), or were exported or were brought by migrating peoples (as in the work of North American writers, some like Henry James who moved east across the Atlantic, or writers from a South Asian background, such as Salman Rushdie, who have spent their working lives in Europe). The boundaries of European, and even Western, literature have been porous, allowing for the exchange of ideas and narratives. Indeed, it is partly this ability

to absorb and integrate literary influences that has defined the Western world as a cultural region. Mesopotamia and Egypt Perhaps the earliest recorded narrative is the Epic of Gilgamesh, known to modern-day scholars through inscriptions on 11 cuneiform tablets from the reign of the Assyrian Ashurbanipal (r.c. 668-627 BC). However, elements of this Mesopotamian epic are thought to have been composed during the Sumerian kingdom in around 2000 BC. The central hero, Gilgamesh, may in fact have been based on a historical figure, a king of the city of Uruk, currently believed to have been situated on the banks of the Euphrates. The story itself is complicated and episodic, but all the sections are concerned with the exploits of Gilgamesh and can be summarized as follows: Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight, after which, as neither emerges victorious, they become friends. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then defeat Humbaba while raiding wood from his lands. Gilgamesh rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar (referred to as Inanna in the Assyrian text). Angered, she sends the Bull of Heaven to kill him, which is subsequently killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. As Gilgamesh is protected by the sun god Utu, Ishtar demands that Enkidu dies in his place. After Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh searches for the secret of immortality and meets Utnapishtim, the only man to have achieved endless life, granted by the gods following his rescue of humankind during the devastating flood sent by god Marduk. Gilgamesh realizes that he will never achieve true immortality and returns to Uruk. A number of themes seen here run through many epics, including that of a heroic figure at the center of the narrative

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whom overcomes many trials sent by the gods. Of particular interest in the Gilgamesh epic is the episode that deals with the flood, which is the earliest source for the same story (that of Noah) in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. The same myth also corresponds with the ancient Greek story of Zeus unleashing a flood to destroy humankind; Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha survive by building a huge boat, and repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind them, which turn into men and women. Some scholars believe that the passage where Gilgamesh searches for immortality shows parallels to Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus travels to the edge of the world and enters the underworld. While it is the best-known Sumerian/Assyrian text, Gilgamesh is not the only Mesopotamian epic that has survived. Other stories include Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Enmerkar and Ensukheshdanna, and the Epic of Shulgi. The flood also occurs as a significant theme in the mythology of ancient Egypt, this time related to the Nile annually bursting its banks and providing the Egyptians with fertile soils. The twin concepts of “dry” and “wet” run through many of the Egyptian creation myths, the dry associated with the male principle and the wet – in essence, fertility and creation – with the female. In addition, the falcon-headed sun god Ra, also considered the god of creation is said in some accounts to have emerged from primordial flood waters. The most famous of the Egyptian myths, however, concerns the god Osiris, and is in many ways similarly linked to the Egyptian landscape, alluding to the unification of the kingdom. Osiris was the ruler of the world, but his brother Seth murdered him and took his place. Osiris’s body was dismembered and scattered all over Egypt, only to be collected in secret by his wife and sister Isis. She assembles his body, and before Osiris descends to become god of the underworld they have a son,

Horus, who, like Ra, is also depicted with a falcon’s head. A battle between Horus and Seth ensues during which, in most versions of the story, Seth is defeated and Horus subsequently takes his father’s place as the god of the earth. A possible link with later Christian iconography might be made between Isis nursing the infant Horus and the similar figure of Mary with the infant Christ. Aside from this, there is little else that filters through into general Western culture until the 18th and 19th centuries, when excavations began to bring to light the monuments and, after the decipherment of hieroglyphics in the 1820s, the written records of early Egypt. The region, like many other areas, was eventually to fall under the spell of the Hellenic world, first through the conquests of Alexander the Great (r. 336-323 BC) and subsequently under the Ptolemaic dynasty. Ancient Greece While myths and legends from the Middle East (in the form of the Bible) were to have a decisive effect on the direction of Western literature after Christianity was established during the Middle Ages, before then – and, later, from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards – a wholly different set of ideas and writings were to hold sway: that of the ancient Greeks. The scale of the influence of Greek thought, transmitted via the Romans and Arabs, on Western art and literature can scarcely be exaggerated, for from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment it vied with Christian scripture as the dominant cultural influence and laid the foundations for much of the philosophy and thought of the modern world.

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The peculiar quality of Greek thought and writing that enabled it to cast such a clear and critical eye on the world may lie, in part, in the religious beliefs of the ancient Greeks. While other early societies, such as those in Egypt, Palestine, and the Middle East, were bound by rigid social structures, sanctioned by a religion in which there were strict and definable rules and modes of behavior, in Greece it was believed that there was a pantheon of deities – many of questionable moral virtue – who, while they occasionally meddled in human affairs and were keen on seducing mortals, generally remained detached from the everyday workings of the world and were not shown any strict allegiance by humans. This left thinkers and writers relatively free to conduct their own investigations into nature and human behavior, and privileged the aim of a dispassionate observance of the world, in all its beauty and ugliness, above that of an imposed discourse that sought to limit narratives to devotion and obedience. While there was undoubtedly some influence on the core of Greek literature from earlier and neighboring cultures (especially the Phoenicians, whose alphabet partly inspired the Greek and modern Roman scripts), no surviving sources remain to give us a clear idea of the literatures of peoples such as the Phoenicians, and until perhaps the decipherment of the Linear A script, the Minoans of Crete. The earliest sources of Greek literature occur, therefore, later than the period in which Greece was starting to develop a distinctive identity. Two of the most important of these sources, however, do set their narratives in Mycenaean Greece (c. 1700-1250 BC) and introduce us to a world of figures who were to remain constant characters throughout Greek literature; these are the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Traditionally these two great epics – in many ways the founding texts of Western literature – have been ascribed to the writer Homer. Most scholars currently doubt whether he or she is the original author of the poems. It, however remains likely that a single figure around the 8th century BC collated existing oral epics on the same themes and produced the two texts known today. Both works are set during and after the Greek siege and victory over the city of Troy. A city-state, known as Troy Vlla, on the coast of present-day Turkey, was destroyed between 1300 and 1200 BC, around the time of the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece, although there is considerable conjecture as to whether this was due to the war described by Homer. One way or another, the Iliad, in particular, was seen by the Greeks as the most important founding document of their civilization, narrating the unification of the Greek peoples for the first time against a common enemy and articulating concepts such as honor, bravery, and right action – important ideals in ancient Greece. The story of Iliad takes place against the siege of Troy by the Greeks under the legendary house of Atreus. The two sons of Atreus – Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and Menelaus, king of Sparta – married the two sisters Clytemnestra and Helen. Helen was very beautiful and was awarded by Aphrodite to Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, after he had chosen her as the most beautiful of three goddesses. Paris abducted Helen and took her back to Troy, prompting Agamemnon and Menelaus to form an all-Greek army to retrieve her and punish the Trojans. It is at this point that the poem begins. With the Greek army camped outside the walls of Troy, their leader Agamemnon argues with the hero Achilles, who refuses to continue fighting. Following this, the poem describes the battles and the changing fortunes of the two

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sides, as well as the machinations of the gods in trying to gain advantage for their favored side. One of the most famous narratives lies toward the end of the Iliad, in which Patroclus, Achilles’ close friend, borrows the hero’s armor but is killed by Hector, King Priam’s son. This prompts Achilles to rejoin the fighting, subsequently beating back the Trojans, and eventually killing Hector, whose body he drags around the walls of Troy behind his chariot. The poem ends with Priam pleading for his son’s body. Ultimately, Achilles relents and relinquishes Hector’s body to the king. In the continuation of the Trojan war narrative, Achilles is killed by Paris, who wounds him in his heel, his only vulnerable spot (hence the expression “Achilles heel”). The Trojans are subsequently defeated through a subterfuge by the Greeks; they leave a supposed offering of a large wooden horse that contains hidden Greek soldiers, who emerge at night and lay waste to the city. This incident is described in Homer’s second great poem, the Odyssey, which primarily focuses on the wandering of the Greek hero Odysseus, who becomes lost on his way back to his home island of Ithaca from the war against Troy. During his travels Odysseus is shipwrecked, fights the Polyphemus Cyclops, escapes from the witch Circe, evades the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis, and is imprisoned by the nymph Calypso. When he finally reaches Ithaca, he finds that his wife Penelope is about to choose a husband from a number of suitors who have been importuning her (as he has by this time been away for 10 years, Odysseus is thought to be dead). With the help of his son Telemachus and the old faithful servant Eumeus, Odysseus kills the suitors and regains his wife and lands. Although the Iliad and Odyssey are the earliest surviving Western literary texts, known not only through the

original Greek but also in celebrated translations by notable literary figures, including Alexander Pope and Samuel Butler, other poems exist from the same period, such as those by the poet Hesiod. He is known as a figure with more certainty than Homer from slight references to events in Hesiod’s own life within his two surviving poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Valuable in their own right and because of the influence they had on later writers such as Virgil and Milton, the two poems also contain valuable evidence concerning the beliefs and lives of the early Archaic Greeks. The first work, the Theogony, outlines the origins of, and relationships between, the Olympian deities of ancient Greece – a vital source in understanding its religion – while Works and Days describes rural life and agriculture. Lying chronologically between Hesiod and the later writers of Classical Greece (from the 5th century BC onward) is the female poet Sappho (mid-7th century BC), who was born on the island of Lesbos. Her surviving works are a series of 12 love poems, mostly known from fragments, this possibly makes her the first lyric poet. The desired object in the poems is a woman, leading many to conjecture that she was a lesbian (indeed the word itself, derived from the island of her birth, refers to Sappho). While these works of ancient Greek poets, especially Homer and Hesiod, provided many clues to classicists and archeologists piecing together the history of ancient Greece, two writers in particular consciously set out to record the events of their own time and immediate past: Herodotus (c. 484 – 425 BC) and Thucydides (c. 460 – 395 BC). Herodotus is known as the “father of history,” the first writer to record and evaluate the evidence and sources for events that actually happened, having as his aim a true record of events. His work,

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Histories, describes the events leading up to and the attempted Persian invasion of Greece by Xerxes in 480BC.
In this masterful and wide-ranging account, Herodotus, outlines the earlier histories of both Athens (the dominant city-state within the Greek army) and Persia, deals with the earlier invasion of Greece by Xerxes’ father Darius, and includes valuable information from his own travels to distant lands such as Egypt. Earlier texts that survive from ancient Greece are either poems (as with Homer and Sappho) or, with Aeschylus, drama. The Histories is the earliest surviving work of prose of Western literature – although fragments remain of earlier prose writers of histories (or, more likely, hagiographies) of city-states, such as Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. c. 500 BC). For all his reliance on verified sources and his highly readable prose, Herodotus is not, however, a truly dispassionate observer – his sympathies lie clearly with the Greek side. The slightly later figure of Thucydides might hold a better claim to being the “father of history” in a modern sense. In his great work The History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta that wracked ancient Greece between 431 and 404 BC, he brings a scientific approach to the presentation of his evidence and sources. Where Herodotus introduced legends, travelogs, and intimations of divine intent into his text, Thucydides is more direct and factual, declining to make moral judgments or
unsupported speculations, even if as a result The History of the Peloponnesian War is less readable and engaging than Herodotus’s Histories. The period of history following that of Thucydides was recorded by Xenophon (c. 430 – 352 BC) in his Hellenica. More importantly, however, he is noted for his biography of Cyrus of Persia (the Cyropedia). This fictionalized account was the first in what would become a

tradition of imaginative biographical writing and shows the early beginnings of a genre that was eventually to become the novel.
While legend claims that the first actor was the 6th century singer Thespis and the first writer of tragedies his pupil Phrynichus (fl. 511 BC), the earliest Greek dramatist whose work still survives is Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC). The first Greek tragedies, of which none remain, are thought to have consisted of one actor whose words and actions were commented on by a chorus that stood as a group at the back of the stage. This convention was retained by Aeschylus but, aside from his impressive skill as a dramatist, his importance lies in introducing more than one actor to the stage at the same time, thus allowing characters to directly interact with each other. Interestingly, his first surviving play, The Persians (472 BC), drew directly on his own experiences at the battle of Salamis, predating Herodotus’s writings on the same theme. Aeschylus wrote over 70 plays, of which seven still exist. These are The Suppliants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, and the Oresteia trilogy (perhaps his greatest achievement), comprising Agamemnon, The Choephori (also known as The Libation Bearers), and The Eumenides. The narrative follows the events that befall the house of Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War. In his absence, Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra has taken as a lover Aegisthus (Agamemnon’s uncle, who was robbed of the throne by
his brother Atreus), and when Agamemnon returns to Mycenae, Clytemnestra murders him. In The Choephori, Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, returns to Mycenae to avenge his father’s death. He kills both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, but for the terrible crime of killing his mother he is pursued by the Furies as he flees to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. The

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Eumenides tells of Orestes’ appearance before the oracle at Delphi and his plea to the gods to release him from the Furies. Apollo defends Orestes to the goddess Athena, who absolves Orestes from his crime and releases the Furies from their charge of pursuing those guilty of matricide and parricide. Aside from the debate throughout the trilogy about “right action,” the final play can be seen as the conclusion of a passage from darkness to light, as an allegory of the rise of a democratic Classical Athens out of the age of the dictators, or as the triumph of the Olympian gods over the older and crueler Dionysian world represented by the Furies. The 5th century BC was the age of Periclean Classical Athens. Besides Aeschylus, the city saw the emergence of three other exceptional dramatists. These are Sophocles (496 – 406 BC), Euripides (c. 485 – 406 BC), and the younger Aristophanes (c. 448 – 380 BC). Like Aeschylus, Sophocles is said to have also written a large number of plays – thought to be around 120 in number – of which only seven have survived. Sophocles was possibly even more influential than Aeschylus, and very highly regarded during his lifetime, and his writing and insights into the human condition influenced writers as diverse as Milton, Yeats, and Freud. His surviving plays include Ajax, Elektra, Philoctetes, and The Women of Trachis. However, again like Aeschylus, his most famous work is the so-called Theben Trilogy: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Although these do trace the story of Oedipus – who kills his father and unknowingly marries his mother, and who was later to lend his name to one of Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis – there is no evidence that they were originally meant to be grouped together, and it is thought they were written many years apart.

Euripides, by contrast, while also prolific and no doubt aware of the dramatic developments explored by Aeschylus and Sophocles, has a larger corpus of works (possibly 19 plays, although the authorship for one of these is disputed). A number of them – notably Medea, The Bacchae, and The Trojan Women – are still part of the theatrical repertoire, having been reintroduced through late -19th and 20th century translations. While Aeschylus and Sophocles were greatly concerned with the mythology and legendary history that underpins much of their work, Euripides has a dramatic urgency that still appeals to modern audiences and readers through his greater concentration on the individual characters of his dramatic personae. In the hands of Euripides, these become real, living people whose actions are neither wholly good or bad but tinged with shades of gray, and so awaken our sympathy. While these three great dramatists – Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – are all writers of tragedy, Aristophanes is a very different, though equally important, figure. Although there was a strong tradition of satire and comedic writing in Athens, the 11 plays we know of Aristophanes are the only surviving examples (the others are known from second-hand reports) and include The Wasps, The Frogs, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae. Like modern satire, his plays attack and ridicule prominent individuals in public life and, as such, are a valuable historical source on life in contemporary Athens as well as amusing dramas. Aristophanes’ humor was not always at the expense of politicians and statesmen – Euripides also makes several appearances in his plays. Aristophanes died in 380 BC, by which time the temporal power of Athens was beginning to wane, and with it the city’s cultural dominance. However, the 5th and 4th

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centuries BC saw Athens emerge as the center of philosophical discourse with an extraordinary lineage of thinkers and teachers making the city their home, including Zeno (c. 490 – 430 BC), Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC), Plato (c. 428 – 348 BC), and Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), the latter being the teacher of Alexander the Great. With the rise of the Macedonian Empire under Philip II (r. 359 – 336 BC) and Alexander the Great (r. 336 – 323 BC) the demise of Classical Greece was complete, although the new Hellenic kingdoms produced little to match that of the 5th century Athens. Rome to Byzantium In 168 BC, Macedonian Greece was subsumed into the burgeoning Roman Republic (c. 509 – 27 BC), now the dominant power in southern Europe. As in so many other areas, from music to architecture, Rome aped the achievements of the earlier Greeks in its literature. This does not denigrate the many superb, and often lively, writers, poets, and dramatists of Rome but rather points to the overwhelming legacy bequeathed to the Western literary tradition by the Greeks. Little survives of the earliest Latin writers but works remain by the two most important figures, the comic dramatists Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC) and Terence (c. 190/180 – 159 BC). Both writers looked to the plays of the Greeks and many of their works are reinterpretations of Greek plays for a Roman audience. However, the comic narratives they looked to were not the biting political satires of Aristophanes but the later works of Hellenic writers of “New Comedy,” such as Menander (c. 342 – 292 BC), which were devoid of political and social comment. As Greek literature tended to be more obscure than Latin writing until a wider dissemination of the

texts in the 19th century, dramatists such as Plautus and Terence were important sources for later writers seeking to learn about classical comedy. If the 5th century BC was a “golden age” for the Athenians, then the 1st century BC was similar period for Rome. Up until the fall of the Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire under Augustus in 27 BC, 1st century Rome saw the emergence of some of the most important figures of Western literature. Towering above all of them is Virgil (70 – 19 BC). Not only were his works to help in creating a mythological justification for the Roman state, but they were also to have an immense influence on later writers. Following Hesiod, he made a substantial contribution to the genre of pastoral poetry in his Eclogues and Georgics, while his greatest, and most substantial work, the Aenied, took its cue from Homer. Virgil traces therein the end of the Trojan war from the viewpoint of the Trojans and describes the flight of Aeneas via Carthage – where he conducts a doomed love affair with its queen, Dido – to Italy where, with the grace of the gods, he founds the city of Rome. By merging the foundation of Rome with the revered canon of the Greeks – even if the Romans thus claimed to stem from the losing side – was particularly welcomed with the fall of the Republic and the need of the emperors to justify their dictatorial position. Both Shakespeare and Milton were influenced by Virgil, but his most celebrated appearance in later literature is as the guide in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Virgil was not, of course, the only poet of the period to make his mark on future generations. The works of Catullus (c. 84 – 54 BC), Horace (65 – 8 BC), and Ovid (43 – 18 BC) all display a typically Roman breadth of style and genre, often accompanied by a satirical attitude and keen eye for

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observation. Catullus was perhaps the most diverse of this trio, producing love poetry, satirical epigrams (a form that achieved great popularity in Rome), and elegiac verse. Horace is best known for his odes, a form based on earlier Greek lyric poetry and to a sub-genre of which, in the Horatian ode, he gave his name. The youngest of the three, Ovid, was almost as versatile as Catullus, although he is best known for his elegiac love poetry, some of it erotic, and the mythological narratives of his Metamorphoses. Stories from this collection achieved a certain popularity during the late 19th century and prompted revised versions by a number of authors. Indeed, it inspired the title of Kafka’s nightmarish short novel The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung). Shortly after Ovid, one writer was to produce both essays and dramas: Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65). A philosopher and politician like Cicero, Seneca wrote philosophical essays outlining the main ideas of Stoicism, and in one he mounted a justification for his espousal of Stoic ideas in the face of his immense personal wealth and comfort. Unlike the works of many of the earlier Roman dramatists and poets, Seneca’s nine surviving plays are tragedies, dealing with themes from Greek mythology. It is thought that these highly colorful and gory texts were not meant to be actually performed but instead read aloud at intimate gatherings. As a republic, the workings of Rome’s political system gave rise to much public debate and oratory, particularly in the prosecution of criminal cases or in debates over the on-going wars and power struggles within the political class. The greatest exponent of rhetoric and the discussion of ethics of the time was Cicero (106 – 43 BC), and many of his own speeches have been recorded. A brilliant orator, he spent his life immersed in the volatile politics of Rome, occasionally

condemned to exile. His writings and ideas were to be influential throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and from them it is possible to reconstruct much of the Roman political history of the 1st century BC. Cicero opposed Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC) in the general’s efforts to take over the Senate and his opponent was to become a rival in literature as well as politics. Caesar’s accounts of his military campaigns are not only brilliantly written but are also valuable as firsthand accounts of the peoples and the lands of Gaul and Germania. If Caesar’s Commentaries provide a contemporary version of events, the foremost historian of the age, Livy (59 – 17 BC), sought to record the entire history of Rome up until the first decade Ad. Of the 142 books that were said to have encompassed this huge work only 35 remain, but from these, many passages have been taken up by later writers, providing the inspiration for a number of works. The later historian Tacitus (c. AD 55 – 115) was, through his Annals and Histories, to provide even more magisterial accounts of the empire’s history and in his Germania was to give a more balanced description of the peoples of Germany. This latter work counts as one of the first attempts at ethnography and is a seminal source on the early history of northern Europe. The fall of the Republic seems to have dampened the ardor of Rome’s poets and engendered a greater contempt for its society and rulers. The 1st century AD saw two masters of satire turn their jaundiced eyes on Rome, Martial (c. AD 40 – 104) and Juvenal (c. AD 60 – 136). Their biting and frequently scatological writings pour scorn on the decadence of the society they saw around them. Martial wrote over 1,500 epigrams which were to achieve considerable popularity after their translation during the 17th century, while Juvenal was

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similarly popular with writers of the 17th and 18th centuries for his 16 satires on the various foibles of Imperial Rome. In prose, the 1st century AD was perhaps better served. One of the first natural histories was written by Pliny the Elder (AD 23 – 79), an immense work that – like the later Encyclopédistes in France, where Pliny’s influence was particularly strong – sought to assemble knowledge. The Natural History covers subjects as diverse as agriculture, architecture, mining, and textiles. Pliny’s nephew (known as Pliny the Younger, AD 62 – 112) is remembered for his account of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was not only in Rome that there were notable literary endeavors: in Greece, under Roman rule since 168 BC, Plutarch (c. AD 50 – 125) became the most prominent biographer and essayist of his day. In one of his most famous works, Parallel Lives, figures from Greek and Roman history are opposed in pairs to draw attention to their relative faults and virtues. Among his biographies are the Life of Alexander and the Life of Pyrrhus. As an essayist he is best known for his Moral Essays, which cover a great deal of antiquity’s philosophical debates and codes of behavior. The so-called Silver Age of Rome (that of the pagan empire) was brought to an end with the emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan of 313, granting freedom of worship to Christians, and in 395 the division of the empire and the rise of Constantinople and Byzantium in the east. With the adoption of Christianity as the official state religion, the literary world that had hitherto existed waned and disappeared, replaced by the writings of the Church Fathers and the Bible as the most prominent literary influences at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Scandinavian and Germanic Mythology The Germanic-speaking peoples of northern Europe – those of Germany, Scandinavia, and, to a certain extent, England – can point to a rich body of literature and mythology that pre-dates the imposition of Christianity on their lands. The pantheon of Germanic and Norse deities (often known by slightly different names in Scandinavia and Germany) is largely known to us from the Snorra Edda by the great Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (1178 – 1241). In this he retells a number of Norse myths through a masterly demonstration of the different types of Norse verse meters. Another 12th century collection, known as the Elder Edda, also describes the history of the Norse deities as well as the epics of a number of Germanic and Norse heroes. Notable among the deities is Odin/Wotan (the Norse and Germanic forms of his name), the most powerful of the gods, who resides in the mythical hall of Valhalla among the heroes of the dead, brought there by the Valkyries from the field of battle. He is especially associated with the protection of the Volsungs, the heroes of the Germanic epic the Nibelungenlied. This 13th century poem derives much of its material from the Eddur, via the Völsunga Saga, and tells in part the story of Sigmund and his son Sigurd (Siegfried), Sigurd’s love for Brynhild, his tricked marriage with Gudrun of the Niblungs, and Sigurd’s death at the hands of Hagen. This, perhaps the greatest of the German epics, formed the basis for Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Other gods and goddess included Thor/Donnar, the god of thunder. While Wotan was to reign supreme in Germany, Thor was thought of as the most powerful deity in parts of Scandinavia. He is identified by his miraculous hammer – by

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which he produces the thunder and lightning – and represents the ideal hero. The goddess Frigg/Frija/Freya is sometimes distinguished as two separate goddesses, but each is seen as the wife of Odin/Wotan. Loki, a god of fire and trickery, seems to have lent some of his attributes to Christian conceptions of Satan and is one of the most important Norse/Germanic deities, not least as it is due to his actions that the end of the world comes about, the Ragnarök or Götterdӓmmerung, as it is devoured by the wolf Fenrir and the fire giants. Besides these major deities, there are numerous lesser gods and goddesses, trolls and sprites, and heroes and spirits, many associated with aspects of the landscape, that permeated the Norse and German world. Completely culturally and linguistically separate from the Germanic world, Finland too has its myths and legends that informed its pre-Christian world view. These are contained in the Kalevala, a body of oral lore and narratives that was first written down in the 19th century. It is believed that many of the stories it contains are of considerable antiquity. The Sagas Perhaps the most well-known and best-loved of the Norse epics are the sagas (“story” in Old Norse). These Icelandic and Norwegian narratives fall into three main types: heroic sagas, royal sagas, and family sagas. The first includes the Völsunga Saga, source for the Nibelungenlied, as well as the Sturlunga Saga that includes heroic figures from the nearhistorical past. Of the royal – or historic – sagas one of the greatest is the compilation by Snorri Sturluson of the stories of the kings of Norway up to 1177, the Heimskringla. The royal sagas are generally written in skaldic verse, a complex set of

rules of rhyme, alliteration, and meter that was practiced by Norse poets during the 10th and 11th centuries. The majority of the sagas, however, are those of the “family” type. These are the stories of the settlement and subsequent history of Iceland, and the families that descended from the first settlers. They show the development of Icelandic society from one of disparate settlers into a whole with centralized laws, customs, and government. Forming, in part, a genealogy it is from these that we know much of early Icelandic history, and even today many Icelandic families can use elements contained within the sagas to trace back their past. Of these sagas the two most famous ones are the Laxdaela Saga, about the loves and fortunes of one of the most powerful of Icelandic families, and the Njáls Saga. This tells the story of Gunnarr, a brave hero who eventually dies in a fight caused by a feud set off by his wife Hallgerr. Njáll, of the title, is the loyal friend of Gunnarr. The Eyrbyggja and Grettis sagas are also family tales, but also contain stories of trolls, the dead, and other supernatural happenings. Some of the family sagas contain lausavísur (occasional) and love poems written in skaldic verse. Celtic Myth and Legend To talk of the Celtic world as a generalized idea that encapsulates all the peoples rather loosely – settlers in the Central Alps, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Basque, and early-Britons – is problematic. Little now links all these groups and many scholars are now circumspect about ascribing them all a similar cultural past. In addition, the archeological evidence, much of it dating from Roman incursions into the Celtic world, is hard to link to the surviving records we have of

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Celtic myth and legend. The surviving written sources from the world of Celts overwhelming come from Wales and, especially, Ireland. These survive as both poetry and prose, and the earliest manuscripts date back to the 8th century, although they record stories that have their origins much earlier. The two sets of surviving tales, the Irish and Welsh, have much in common and tend to support each other, giving at least some evidence of a broadly common culture between these two areas and peoples. Both sets of mythologies were often recorded by Christian monks and so there is undoubtedly some re-working of the myths to bring them more into line with Christian thought, and no doubt to be self-justifying on the part of early missionaries. The Irish sources tend to record more details of the religious beliefs of these early peoples, contained in the Books of Leinster, the Dun Cow, Ballymote, and the Yellow Book of Lecan. However, one of the most important sources of all is the Lebor Gabála, or Book of Conquests. This tells the history of Ireland through a series of myths, and how successive waves of invaders and peoples brought new technologies (such as forging gold) and changed the pattern of the landscape before the arrival of the mythological ancestors of the present Irish, the Sons of Mil. Of these invasions one of the most significant, the one that predated the arrival of the Sons of Mil, were the Tuatha Dé Danann, who may be equated with the deities of the Celtic, at least Irish, pantheon. Foremost among these deities were Dagda and Lugh, to whom the Irish did not seem to ascribe a fixed, and unique, set of attributes but rather a series of powers, and most especially stories. Dagda is associated with life, death, and fertility. He is said to have dragged a huge club that carried the power of life and death, as well as at a certain festival having to eat a ferocious amount of porridge before

having sex with a daughter of the ruling family, thus pointing to his role in human fertility. Lugh, by contrast, was known for his great learning, legend recounting that he was a warrior, poet, smith, genealogist, and magician. Irish goddesses were a major trinity of Danu, Anu, and Brigit, all associated with the fertility of the ground besides having more complex identities of their own. A further goddess, Macha, was both a warrior and associated with childbirth. The most terrifying of the Irish goddesses of battle, however, was the Morrigan, who could appear in different guises. The mythological history of the Welsh seems to be more overlain with Christian additions but often a direct correspondence can be made between figures mentioned in the main text to have survived, the Mabinogion, and those deities and heroes mentioned in the Irish sources. The Mabinogion consists of four stories, brought together from two manuscripts, the White Book of Rhydderch (1300 – 1325) and the Red Book of Hergest (1375 – 1425). The stories deal with: Pwyll, father of Pryderi; Branwen, daughter of Llyr; Manawyddan, son of Llyr; and the death of Pryderi. Manawyddan and Llyr correspond to the Irish hero-gods Manannán and Lir, but the children of Llyr as a group seem to be more particularly British. Notable among these was Bran, the brother of Manawyddan. If Manawyddan had the terrifying fortress made of bones, Bran was the keeper of a magic cauldron that could bring the dead back to life. Another family that, while they bear some resemblance to the Irish deities, are only encountered in the Welsh texts are the Children of Don. Among these are Gwydion, having something in common with Dagda and Lugh, and the smith and brewer Govannnan, who seems to be equivalent of the Irish Gobniu. Two deities, however, that seem to have no parallel

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within the Irish myths are the goddess Arianrod and her son Llew, both of whom were occasionally associated with stellar constellations. As well as these pantheons of deities there was also a tradition of the hero, of which the Arthur legend may be part. If Arthur was the main hero figure of the Britons, then in Irish mythology by far the most important hero Cúchulainn. One version of his story has him descended from the god Lugh, and, having killed the fierce guard dog of Culann the smith at the age of seven, he is made to guard the kingdom of Ulster against the other four provinces of Ireland during the great Cattle Raid of Cooley, during which he died a hero’s death.

Lilian Leong SY Page 12 Anderson, D., Lord, M., Macaroon, M., Peel, C., & Stubbs, T. (2010). The story of Literature: From antiquity to the present. Potsdam, Germany: Tandem Verlag GmbH.