Gilgamesh: the roots civillization?

~ 700 words

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crofter - n - British, a person who rents and works a very small farm

prolepsis - n - 1. the anticipation of possible objections in order to answer them in advance. 2. the assigning of a person, event, etc. to a period earlier than the actual one: prochronism.

vesper - n - 1. the evening star (Venus) 2. evening bells, songs, or religious services. 3. (Archaic) evening.

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As most of you have probably not noticed, I have not posted for a while. I was online recently and noticed that despite this fact the site had still drawn a considerable amount of traffic, and in fact continues to on an ongoing basis. I found this at once curious and heartening, so much so that I've decided not to play as many video games and take back the mantle of blogging. I have read a few books in my absence, so I have plenty to write about, including another by Dostoevki. It seems that my articles on Dostoevski have been the main draw for people, so I will without a doubt mention the book I've read at some point.

But today I would like to talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I must do by first introducing Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is one of the most ancient cultures ever to have existed on this planet, though in this case I'm speaking mostly about Sumeria, a particular subset of Mesopotamia generally. The geography of the region (where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf) provided the ancient sumerians extremely fertile land for agriculture, which may have led to the first real accumulation of population, which would have led to culture blossoming in the heart of the ancient world. We're talking before Greece, before Egypt, before Israel, Even before Babylon (same spot, different civilization). please see map.


The epic of Gilgamesh, like so many of the world's oldest stories, started off in an oral culture, and was subsequently transcribed, in this case onto clay tablets in cuniform language, a written language made by pressing a triangular stylus into wet clay to form characters.

The first half of the epic details Gilgamesh's friendship and adventures with Enkidu, a man born from the wilderness and a metaphor for "wild man." This book is so old that one of the great acts of the hero is capturing the wild man and civillizing him. It is interesting to think about this, because the implication is that the creators of the epic had some difficultly trying to transition people from being cave-people to a civillized, agricultural society. Granted this is probably a distant memory for the city of Uruk (Gilgamesh's city), but a temptingly rational outlook, even if the story is mythical. This interesting theme has a number of uncomfortable parrallels in recent history as well, and I'm thinking about Rudyard Kipling when I say that.

At any rate, Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh sets out on a fantastical journey to find the herb of life that grants immortality. He encounters many gods and beasts, such as the scorpion-man pictured above, two such beasts guard a tunnel into the mountain where the sun rises. In order to gain the knowledge of where the plant grows he has to cross a very large body of water (which is most likely the Indian ocean) to the island belonging to Utnapishtim, the only king ever to be made a god. He tells the story of the flood, which is fascinating in it's parallel to the story of Noah's Ark. That, my friends, is for another post, because I could go on about that for several hundred words at least.

At any rate, he manages to obtain the herb, but it is then eaten by a serpent, which gains the ability of self-renewal, which is why snakes shed their skins. Gilgamesh bemoans this loss, because he was bringing it back to Uruk to share with his people, rather than immediately scarfing it down. He subsequently dies, and we get something that looks like his funeral rights as the last tablet in the epic. Speaking of which, and in case any of you were wondering how easy this story was to translate, the clay tablets look like this:



This is the tablet containing the story of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. You may notice that bits are missing. Fortunately there remain more than one copy of most of these tablets (in various languages) so archeologists can cross reference the tablets and produce a more or less complete story.


Today's image credit goes to MythAdvocate of DeviantArt. Not terribly many people concern themselves with ancient mesopotamian myth and their visual interpretations, so thanks!

The Valkyrie Tragedies

~ 800 words

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indigent - adj - lacking the neccessities of life because of poverty; needy; poor; impoverished

interlocutor - noun - a person who takes part in conversation or dialog

duplicity - noun - decietfulness in speech or conduct; double dealing.

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So I finished the Poetic Edda over the weekend. I must say, it is an excellent book in all respects. I'm on to Pride and Prejudice now. Never thought I'd see the day when Austen made it to the top of my list, but a friend of mine was rather insistent. I'd like to take a few moments and mention a couple of the really interesting characters that dwell in the Poetic Edda.

The heroic tragedies are divided into two discrete units. First you have Helgi Hundingsbani, who is likely the older archetype on which other variants were based. The second is the Volsung saga, which follows several characters, all related to each other somehow.

Helgi Hundingsbani is a hero, whose auspicious birth was overseen by the Norns (female spirits connected with fate) and who was ready for battle at the age of one day (similar to the god Hod, born to avenge the death of his brother Baldr). It depends on which version you adhere to, as a couple versions of each story are contained in the book, but Helgi falls in love with a valkyrie named Sigrun. Valkyries are interesting, and there is a great deal of modern adaptation of the term to things that have little to do with the actual function of a valkyrie. Valkyries were semi-divine women who determine who falls in battle and serve mead in Valhall, Odin's hall where the spirits of great warriors gather for the final fight of Ragnarok. These are often human women who forgo mundane life for the life of a valkyrie. Helgi falls for Sigrun, but he must first thwart her suitors. Being hand forged from pure awesome, he wins handily, but is subsequently surprise-attacked by Sigrun's brother to avenge their father whom Helgi apparently killed at some point.

More interesting to me are the Volsungs. These more or less start with Sigurd, purportedly the most heroic hero ever to rescue damsels. He is the only hero in the entire book to slay a dragon. The dragon's name is Fafnir, he slays him to reclaim the rightful inheritance of the dragon's brother (who is a dwarf by the way). He finds the dragon's drinking pond, digs a hole over the dragon's tracks, and scores a direct hit when the dragon comes to have a drink.

The sword he uses, which the dwarf brother forged for him, is so sharp, if you dip the tip into a stream and allow unspun wool to float across it, it will part the wool as if it were water.

At any rate, he subsequently saves the valkyrie Brynhild from Odin's wrath (she allowed the incorrect combatant to win in battle), and promises himself to her (for keeps). He subsequently (and conveniently) drinks the ale of forgetfulness, forgetting that he promised to marry Brinhild, and marries another swingin' gal (and valkyrie) Gudrun. Brynhild persuades Gudrun's siblings to kill Sigurd, which they do, and Gudrun is out a husband. She is then fed the ale of forgetfulness and married to Brynhild's brother, none other than Attila the Hun. Brynhild sort of says "Oh, he's dead now isn't he..." and kills herself and a dozen servants.

Attila is beset by Gudrun's brothers, whom he summoned to his court. He intends to steal Fafnir's treasure, which passed to Gudrun's brothers after the death of Sigurd. He murders them mercilessly, cutting the heart out of one and throwing the other in a snake pit. Gudrun is at this point rather peeved with Attila, so she murders their children and feeds them to Attila and his men. She then kills him and burns down his hall and everyone in it.

Gudrun then throws herself into the sea, trying to drown herself, but ends up with still another king. She has two sons who own magic armour, and who set out across the land to avenge the death Svanhild, Gudrun's daughter by Sigurd. They go, knowing it's their doom. They meet their half brother on the road, who is full of wisdom, but also rather annoying. They kill him a few stanzas after meeting him and proceed to the enemy's hall. Though hopelessly outnumbered, their magic armour serves them well. They cut off the king's arms and legs, but the king tells his warriors to use stones to kill the two of them. Apparently the magic only deflected iron, so they say to themselves, "Oops, I guess we shouldn't have killed whats-his-face thirty stanzas ago.

You heard it here first. A brief summary of Old Norse tragedy complete with dragon fighting and child cannibalism.

Reflections on Crime and Punishment

~ 1300 words !!!Major Spoilers!!!

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bravura - n - a display of daring, a brilliant performance

sacrosanct - adj - sacred or inviolable

conspectus - n - a general or comprehensive view, survey

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I finished Crime and Punishment this week, and I have to say it is definitely one of (if not the) best book(s) I have read.

In the first place the ending was fantastic. This man, crippled by ambition, intelligence and circumstance, finds redemption. If you've read the book this comes as no surprise, and you might even have thought it a bit corny. Love saves him in the end. Well, I'd just like to point out that love is not what saves him. At the end of the book (after going to prison), Raskolnikov falls ill, a sort of lack of will or purpose in life. Psychosomatic illness occurs frequently throughout the book. He misses his visit from Sonya (who followed him all the way to Siberia) because she is ill (notable because it is one of only two occurrences of illness caused externally in the book. The other is Katerina Ivanova's tuberculosis). She has a cold. At this point he realizes how much he relies on her for emotional support, he had been snubbing her up to that point, more or less. Of course, realizing his love for her is only the first step. On her next visit, when none of the guards are looking, he throws himself on her feet. In the end, he overcomes his pride, which up to that point had prevented him from making public (or any) displays of emotion. I thought that was a very good ending. Raskolnikov learns that just because you have an idea, that doesn't make it a good idea, even if you can rationalize it. It takes him the murder of two innocents, incarceration in Siberia, and him causing the death of his mother for him to realize this. Lots of people, young people in particular, could benefit from this wisdom I think.

I would also like to share with you a paragraph that appeared near the end. It really stuck in my mind for some reason.

He lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week. As he began to recover, he remembered his dreams from when he was still lying in feverish delirium. In his illness, he had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish except for a certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgements, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, and could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into whole armies against each other but, already on the march, the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another. In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious. The most ordinary trades ceased, because everyone offered his own ideas, his own corrections, and no one could agree. Agriculture ceased. Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part--but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and spread further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; they were the pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and new life, to renew and purify the earth; but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words or voices.

The first time I read this I thought, this is Dostoevsky's vision of a world consumed by the philosophical forces he sought to counter. As I read this again, however, I'm not so sure. Certain elements certainly have an anti-rational lean (such as the epidemic having the ability to reason), but in general it's almost like the tower of babel all over again. For those in my listening audience unfamiliar with the story of the tower of babel, it occurs in the Bible after Noah's flood. Essentially, a bunch of people band together after Noah's flood to design and build a gigantic tower that would protect them from another great flood. In punishment for their insolence, God makes it so that no person can be understood by any other. To a person "love" may mean "hate", and "war" may mean "peace". Stymied by their inability to communicate with each other, they all sort of meander off and went back where they came from, and that explains why all sorts of different languages exist in the world.

Among Biblical stories, this one (in my humble estimation) is extremely influential. Off the top of my head, "babble", our word for incoherent nonsense, bears striking resemblance to "Babel". The organism that slips into your ear and translates for you in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the Babel Fish. In Final Fantasy II, one of the core environments is the tower of Babel, which supposedly reaches all the way to the moon. It's an interesting game, what with the whole walking on the moon thing, but final fantasy almost doesn't count in this regard. It seems to me as if the people who make those games actively pursue world mythology to integrate into their content, no matter how obscure the source. Granted the old testament isn't exactly obscure, but I've seen references to Homer's Odyssey (in the form of Scylla).

Here is a picture:

Not exactly congruous with the description in the Odyssey (something about seven heads), but undeniably final fantasy material.

Oh, and while I have you here, I'd just like to mention that my good friend Jeff Chapman (his blog) has a short story in an anthology up for preorder! The anthology is The Midnight Diner Volume 3 and the story is "The Princess and the Vampire", which I believe I mentioned actually. Jeff has a sample of his story up on his blog, so check it out if you have a taste for astounding tales!

Also, he has had another short story accepted, "The Master and the Miller's Daughter". I haven't read it myself, yet, but Jeff given the quality of Jeff's fiction (and the fact that it was accepted after all), I have reason to believe that it is very good. Check it out if you get the chance!

The image today came from a pop art blog if you can believe it. It's unfortunately been derelict for more than a year, but still has an interesting archive of pop art. I don't know if it's really art, I'm not exactly an expert, but here's the link anyways.

Necrology 2

~ 700 words

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New Interesting Words!

salutary - adj - favourable to or promoting health.

solecism - n - a breach, error, impropriety or inconsistency, esp. in grammar or etiquette.

inimical - adj - unfriendly, hostile, adverse in tendency, harmful.

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This post, as one might gather from its title, is the second in my Necrology series, based on a series of essays contained in "Death and Dying: Challenge and Change", edited by R. Fulton, E. Markusen, G. Owen, and J. L. Scheiber. Today's blog post is based on the essay "Life and Death in the USA" by Melvin Maddocks.

Let me preface by saying that I am not American in the traditional sense. That is to say, I'm Canadian. Thus, some of the more regional themes were not readily apparent to me as I read this essay, but thankfully the majority of the article is not of regional interest.

Maddocks' purpose for this article is mainly taxonomic, as he is almost exclusively interested in segregating people into groups based on their views and beliefs about death. While such systems beg for exceptions, it is interesting to note the author's perception of general trends in society. This article was originally published in 1974, so one might argue that the 70s were an entirely different time and place. I would stipulate that the 70s were the last social revolution I'm personally privy to, and much of what was decided forty years ago is still relevant in today's society (not only because people who lived through the seventies now run things. Scary thought?). We still make references to hippies, though they have long been extinct, or at least, the only surviving specimens are kept in captivity.

He groups people into three categories.

1) The Pragmatist.
These are people who act to thwart death wherever it occurs. Immortality is possible if you try hard enough, or at least, death can be managed out of existence. Hence you get a plethora of how-to books, guides, handbooks, pamphlets etc. all espousing their particular theory on death and the grieving process (which you pay for of course, they are pragmatists after all). Maddocks calls this politicizing. Here's one of those how-to books for free.

manuscript: How to Die for the Incurable Imbecile

-Step 1-

Stop breathing.

end manuscript


2) The Optimist
These are interesting folk who hold that death "could be the best thing that ever happened to you". Death is not a disease, it is the natural course of life. You are going to die anyway, you might as well embrace it. Life's end can be a beautiful experience, as beautiful as life's beginning. These are the sorts of people who tend to pull the plug on people on respirators. Why would you suffer, they might say, when you could simply die and end your sufferings. It is from this mode of thought that power of attorney came into being. You should make your wishes known. You should have the right to choose the manner of your death.

3) The Existentialist
This group, comprised primarily of young 'uns (according to Maddocks) are melancholics. Suffering is to be honoured, case by case, and death gives meaning to life. Death, therefore, is authentic, and kids these days crave validation. Hence, Maddocks neatly explains his theory of teen suicide. I think kids still crave validation, correct me if I'm wrong. I die, therefore I am. To these sorts of people, if they are authentically depressive by nature and not simply lured in by the lethargy of melancholy, the possibility of living forever would be philosophically castrating.

The extrapolation of this, as seen by Maddocks, is that you get one of two futures. You either get a society advanced enough (remember, this was in the seventies, when resources were limitless and science would advance indefinitely) to create the "Anti-Death Machine", or you get a society sensitive enough to extract death's sting, the "Age of Compassion".

Anti-Death Machine? Unlikely. We are no closer to immortality now than we were forty years ago when the article was written. It all seems a bit like science fiction to me.

Age of Compassion? More likely. At the very least there's much less overhead. It could arise as a natural consequence of religious (specifically Christian) beliefs. Compassion is undeniably espoused in the Bible, and Maddocks says that "imitation of Christ [is a habit] that post-Christians have inherited in spite of themselves."

I would like to close with a little verse that closed Maddocks' article.

Xerxes the great did die,
And so must you and I.

Youth forward slips,
Death soonest nips.

Raskolnikov's Napoleon Complex

~ 800 words -- !Minor Spoilers!

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New Interesting Words!

philander -v- to make love without serious intention, to carry on flirtations.

reticent - adj - disposed to be silent, reserved.

samovar - noun - A metal urn, used for heating tea in Russia.

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10th post! Someone bake a cake!

This illustration, which I found on www.deviantart.com, is a rather artistic depiction of the crime in Crime and Punishment. For those of you who have not read the book (or have not read it in some time), Raskolnikov's first victim, that little old lady, was in fact brained by the blunt end of the handle, not the blade itself. So no, he is not holding the axe the wrong way in this illustration.

I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss some of the philosophical underpinnings of Crime and Punishment, while at the same time presenting some context to these ideas, as I'm sure was Dostoevski's intent when he wrote the novel.

Raskolnikov (our central character) is the quintessential melancholic. That is, melancholy as defined by humourism, an ancient mode of medicine that (on the grand scale of things) has only recently fallen into disrepute. Humourism divides a person's physical and mental health (concepts more closely correlated a hundred and fifty years ago) into four humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. The theory is very old (think ancient Greece), but later evidence arose to support it. Apparently, if you let blood sit for a while, it separates itself into four distinct layers, which resemble the four humours. Each humour is associated with specific personality traits, and many diseases were at one point diagnosed and treated as imbalances in the humours. Hence, you get practices like bloodletting. I digress. A person with too much black bile, under humourism, is irritable, depressive, independent, and takes his philosophy personally. This describes Raskolnikov's personality quite thoroughly. He often has half-mad depressions which cause him to lay on his couch fretting. He is frequently rude to nearly every important character. His most ardent desire is just to be left alone.

And he takes philosophy very seriously. In order to really understand any book written in the 19th century, you have to know who the author was arguing against. While I'm not educated enough to know who specifically he was fighting (though I'm sure the translators of my edition are), I'm familiar with the concept he makes his case against. The name of the game is rationalism, and if you don't believe me, check some of the quotes I've posted on my "Interesting Quotations" page penned by our friend Fyodor.

The murder, as an act, is perfectly rational and completely justified by some of the larger principles that were (and still are) natural consequences of rationalism. Alyona Ivanovna, the unfortunate axe-ee, is an old crone, a moneylender and pawnbroker, who jealously hordes several thousand roubles (currency, ten roubles will by you a thrifty but serviceable wardrobe including boots, one hundred kopecks to the rouble). Raskolnikov is troubled by the human suffering that he encounters in his daily life. At one point he comes into thirty five roubles (an advance on his mother's pension) and twenty five of it goes to the widow of a man run over in the streets by a carriage.

So he asks himself this question. If several thousand roubles could do so much good in the world, why is it allowed to stagnate in some old crone's stash where it does no good to anyone? If these funds were distributed among the poor, and their lives improved, would that not be worth the life of some bitter old hag? Can we equate the life of a human being, even one so stale and abusive of the poor, with the well being of dozens of families?

Combine this with Raskolnikov's Napoleon complex and you have murder and robbery. Silly guy doesn't even rob her properly though, stealing only pawned trinkets that he subsequently hides under a rock.

Raskolnikov writes an article, before the book's timeline begins, theorizing that the world is divided into two groups of people. First, you have ordinary people, for whom crime can not be justified. Second, you have extraordinary people, for whom crime can be justified. If one of these extraordinary people, by the performance of a crime, can remove a barrier to the betterment of mankind, then he has the right to do so. That is, not a legal right, but the right to a clean conscience. If by killing ten people an extraordinary person could improve the lives of one hundred thousand, Raskolnikov believes this would be justified.

Raskolnikov views himself as one of these extraordinary people, commits murder for the benefit of mankind, and spends 5/6s of the book being punished (and punishing himself) for it. Dostoevski is illustrating that there are more considerations than simply the faculty of reason, and that there are forces internal to the human mind that can rip a person apart if offended.

I haven't quite finished the book, so you can expect one more post from me on the subject.


Image credit to ~PoohateQ of www.deviantart.com, who posted this rather dramatic scene. It is apparently an image from the movie "Crime and Punishment" by Peter Dumala.

SF&F -- Distinction Through Modes of Plausibility

~800 words

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New Interesting Words!

mien - noun - air, bearing or aspect indicative of character.

bedizen - verb - to dress or adorn in a showy, gaudy or vulgar manner.

catechism - noun - A statement of beliefs or principals, or a particular book, a summary of Christian beliefs and values in the form of questions and answers.

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Let me start by saying that I originally conceived this article as bridging the great gap between these genres, but that quickly stepped in far out of my depth (literary criticism is a really deep well). Instead of doing something crazy (and dare I say academic), I will talk about things I have read and things I would like to read.

I was researching this article (surprised?) looking up science fantasy authors I seemed to recall, when I happened upon a pair of articles on the Internet that lend some insight on this topic. The author was Ursula K. LeGuin, whom you might know from the Earthsea novels, or The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards. She has written quite a lot of prize winning science fiction and fantasy since the mid sixties, and has a very good website.

I had been researching her because I remembered her name appearing on a list of science fantasy authors. A couple of sources cite her as being mildly unconcerned with genre boundaries, but neither did I find a billboard declaring this or that novel to be science fantasy.

I probably should mention, stories that deliberately contain science fiction and fantasy elements have their own sub-genre called science fantasy. My excellent friend Jeff Chapman recently wrote an article clarifying the somewhat misty boundaries between sci fi and fantasy, which inspired this article, and I am here to expand somewhat on his classification. I tend to think of science fantasy as having two approaches, over-explaining fantasy or under-explaining science fiction.

There is one book that I will tentatively place in this category. It is a book I have been meaning to read for some time now, and have read a fair bit about. The book is The Iron Dragon's Daughter, by Michael Swanwick, and it says right in the first line of the wikipedia article that it "combines fantasy and science fiction."

So there you go.

Michael Swanwick was an author I first read in Best SF 14, an anthology of science fiction short fiction (with occasional novellas). The story was called "The Scarecrow's Boy", and it was about a world in which robots have more common decency than humans do.

The Iron Dragon's Daughter focuses on the misadventures of Jane, a young female changeling who is a slave in a dragon factory. She meets an rusty old dragon and they escape, and I believe she goes to school afterwards. The book is more or less a criticism of the rash of recent fantasy authors who prey on the success of J.R.R. Tolkien. That is to say, he takes all the tropes and archetypes of the elf-man-dwarf-dragon stories and turns them on their head. I believe there's also some social satire mixed in there as well, but as I've said I haven't read it. Yet.

So yes, when we find a book (or set of books) that doesn't quite fit in our set of pigeon holes, we create a brand new hole for it. The interesting thing to me is whether science fantasy gets listed as a sub-genre of fantasy or science fiction. Wikipedia's index of genres has a special category for "cross-genre".

One other note: more than once, when reviewing story markets on Duotropes, I have noticed that publishers will say something to the effect of "Cross-genre is more than fine" or similar. I could be mistaken, but it looks to me as if publishers want that sort of thing.

BUT I DIGRESS

In her articles on plausibility in Fantasy and Science Fiction, LeGuin draws a clear line between the two by demonstrating the different methods by which they become plausible to the reader.

Fantasy, according to LeGuin, is made plausible through detail. Vivid, realistic description, reference to events in the past or the future, and above all coherence and stability in whatever rules govern the world are the staples of a plausible fantasy novel. She also says that ulterior motives completely spoil the mood. If the writer is a victim of wishful thinking, political intent or didactic purpose, fantasy stories are hobbled by their intent. In order to be a free expression of imagination, it has to truly be free from these harmful psychological influences.

Of science fiction, she says that it is very similar to realism. Science fiction relies on "accurate, honest observation and intuition of reality". Science fiction often avoids comparison with the present time, because contradicting the reader's experience of modern life seriously compromises the plausibility of the story. The most important question, when testing the plausibility of a science fiction story, is whether this might have happened, might be happening, or might yet happen, so the science fiction story must subjugate reality, but also keep its distance from it.

They are very good articles, I would encourage all my readers to take a look at her website, as well as her books.


Image credit to ~Rawbot of www.deviantart.com, who likes to draw ROBOTS (and is also pretty good at it).

Odin's Quest

~800 words

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New Interesting Words!

signet - noun - a small official seal, as on a ring, sometimes used to mark wax seals.

spermaceti - noun - a waxy solid drived from the cranial cavity of sperm whales. Used as an emolient in 19th century cosmetics.

didactic - adj - intended to instruct or tutor.

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Just one small administrative note. Some of the more observant of my loyal listeners may have noticed that a quote from the poetic edda has adorned my header for some weeks now. Well, I've decided to change it, so I've filed the old one away in a brand new page you are welcome to visit whenever you like. Clicking "interesting quotes" at the top of the page will bring this up. Similar to the interesting words, these will occur on an "as they appear" basis, and if it hasn't changed in a couple of weeks I'll pull some wisdom from the poetic edda.

Speaking of me being back from vacation...

It wasn't bad. Not bad at all. I had a little more time to sit around and read than I thought I would (plus!) so I actually managed to digest a sizable chunk of the poetic edda (now @ 119/263). You know, that book I've been raving about for weeks now. I've moved from myths to legends (the hero stories) which mostly involve evil kings, righteous warriors and valkyrie brides.

The Poetic Edda (or the Elder Edda) is translated from a very ancient manuscript called the Codex Regius. The codex was written in 1270 by an unknown icelandic author on fifty three pages of vellum, and the majority of poems contained therein appear no where else in the world. The book was written, and subsequently disappeared into history, re-emerging nearly four hundred years later as a gift to the king of Denmark in 1643, having lost eight pages. It was preserved exceedingly well until the nineteen seventies, when it was transported back to iceland to take it's place in the Árni Magnússon Institute.

It is interesting to note that the Prose Edda (or Younger Edda), another mythological text written by Snorri Sturlston in the 1220s, is likely to have predated the Elder Edda's actual transcription by about fifty years. So despite one being called "Elder" and the other "Younger", they were actually transcribed in the reverse of that order.

So, Norse mythology. The poems themselves are surprisingly coherant, and having recently dealt with terrible translations, I attribute this to Carolyne Larrington, who translated my Oxford World Classics edition.

The first four poems are wisdom poems, essentially listing out large swathes of information. The Seeress's Prophecy, for example, is a timeline of the major events in the history of the world, from creation to post-Ragnarok. In Norse myth, the world was created from the body of Ymir, the primordial being, the first humans were created of driftwood, and the varying realms of the world are connected by a gigantic ash tree named Yggdrasil. Ragnarok is concerned mainly with the slaying of various gods by various beasts/demons. Surt, a flame monster of the underworld, ravages the realms with fire in the final days. Fenrir, an inteligent and deadly wolf, does battle with Odin and defeats him, though Odin's son Vidar avenges his father. Thor is fated to fight the Midgard Serpent (or Iormungand), and they will kill each other. Midgard being the realm of men, Iormungand was a serpent that completely encircled Midgard, swimming in endless circles around the surrounding oceans. Another important beast/demon is Nidhogg, one of only two dragons I've encountered thus far (the other is Fafnir, who is slain by the hero Sigurd I believe), whose primary function is to gnaw on the roots of Yggdrasil and to suck on the souls of the dead. He is the only beast in the Seeress's Prophesy that survives Ragnarok, and that depends somewhat on your interpretation.

Odin is the primary figure in all four of thesee wisdom poems. He is roughly equivalent to Zeus in his role as leader of the gods, though in this case he indeed fathered most of the gods (except the Vanir). He is a source of great wisdom, and he is characterized by his endless quest for knowledge, particularily concerning Ragnarok. In Vafthrudnir's Sayings, he challenges a giant (Vafthrudnir) to a contest of wisdom in the giant's own hall. He wins of course.

I should mention two things. First, the giants are the rival race of the gods, they are comparable in both strength and wisdom, and it is from the giants that the gods are descended. Second, there are two main families of gods. The Aesir live in Asgard and include Odin, Thor, their wives, children etc. The Vanir are the rival house, living elsewhere, and include Freyr and Freyia who appear to be male and female fertility deities. Prior to reading this book I was under the impression that there were three important gods: Odin, Thor and Frey. As it turns out, "Frey" is actually two separate deities of opposite gender.

It is an interesting read, definitely worth the time. I can already begin to see ways in which this stuff influenced Tolkien, but I'll save that for another post.


Image credit to Luis S. Ramos of www.deviantart.com, your Odin pleases me!