Adventure! Google! Danger!
Apr. 16th, 2009 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
polutropeYouTube comments are kind of nutty, eh? someone said "I feel shipwrecked upon the green water of his glance" in the comments to this Jarrousky song (which is nice, though the commenters are right about the quality.
Since that's a. an odd thing to come up with on your own and b. kind of creepy even if it is a quote, I googled it, and there's no matches (which makes it really creepy); but the first hit for something approximate was this, which is just hilarious. To quote my dad, "he could have tried to make the dialogue a little more labored." E. G. optimus: "'Your tunic and hose match ill with that jewel, young man,' said Bratti, deliberately." And "'A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die by the sword!'" ¹ And definitely "'I've got a wife and raven to stay at home and mind the stock'"
And then I clicked the link at the end. There is more. Lots more. I have not yet been brave enough to venture farther.
Upon googling the title I found that it's by George Eliot.
***
I really need to stop reading "scholarly" books that weren't recommended to me. Folktale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics isn't quite as ridiculous as Finding Merlin, "Homer was really talking about Finland," or "Tatiana Larina is an earth goddess." In fact, the first half of the book makes very interesting and salient points about time in epic: in the Nibelungenlied, Attila appears as a contemporary of Alaric, who was born in the year Attila died. The point being, critics tend to assume that if the Homeric characters were in fact historical, Homer was factual about timing and length of life.
Then he (Rhys Carpenter, the author of this thing) spends a lot of time trying to establish the location of the city of Troy, which I personally don't think is particularly important, but other people do, so that's fine I guess. It's here that he starts using Egyptian sources talking about the Sea Peoples, which is very interesting actually. He also points out, again using the Nibelungenlied, that epic sometimes has little relation to truth: the Goths lost the battle they win in the poem.
And then in the second half it gets crazy and badly supported. You see, Odysseus takes part in the "Bearson" myth, along with Beowulf. Also, most things in the ancient world were connected somehow with the cult of the Sleeping Bear, Salmoxis.² Perhaps because the book was originally a series of lectures, there's no transition from "The Setting of the Odyssey" to "The Cult of the Sleeping Bear." I was very confused for a very long time. Eventually, however, Carpenter connects Odysseus with the myth of the bear.
He claims that Odysseus' disappearance to the Trojan War counts as the hibernation common to the many forms of the myth and says that when he tells Polyphemus that his name is "Outis" he is really referring to his hairy ears (οὔτις vs. ὠτις, and the cyclopes hear and understand it wrong).
Finally, he runs down similarities between Odysseus' story and the general "bearson" archetype. The problem here is that the story is much too general. It fits any Märchen hero: has extraordinary strength/skill etc, finds an empty house, is discovered by the owner of the house, goes to the underworld. That's a story type, certes, but it's not just the bearson. And I am not at all convinced by his identification of Odysseus with this hero; he stretches the facts quite a bit to make it work.
"When I pause to consider how preposterous the Bearson and other ursine connections of Odysseus will appear to the classicist who has spent a satisfactory life time without them..." he says; and indeed they do appear pretty preposterous, but not because, as he continues, "the bimillennial superiority of the Hellenist [leaves me] loath to admit that...his more barbarous colleagues...can bring [me] illumination." I am, or rather hope to be, an Indo-Europeanist; I sort of have to accept connections. And I certainly do accept connections to an older archetype in the Odyssey; but the one he's putting forward just does not fit the facts.
ETA: OH GOD Y'ALL CARPENTER WROTE TERRIBLE POETRY "Stout hearts for war the smiting Spartans had..."
---
¹ ok fine I kind of love that second one.
² "Romanian rock band Sfinx worked from around 1975 through 1978 on what became one of the most appreciated Romanian progressive rock LPs, Zalmoxe. It was based on lyrics by poet Alexandru Basarab (actually a pen name for Adrian Hoajă), which retold the story of Zalmoxis's existence." From Wikipedia ³
³ Am listening to it. It's pretty good
Since that's a. an odd thing to come up with on your own and b. kind of creepy even if it is a quote, I googled it, and there's no matches (which makes it really creepy); but the first hit for something approximate was this, which is just hilarious. To quote my dad, "he could have tried to make the dialogue a little more labored." E. G. optimus: "'Your tunic and hose match ill with that jewel, young man,' said Bratti, deliberately." And "'A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die by the sword!'" ¹ And definitely "'I've got a wife and raven to stay at home and mind the stock'"
And then I clicked the link at the end. There is more. Lots more. I have not yet been brave enough to venture farther.
Upon googling the title I found that it's by George Eliot.
***
I really need to stop reading "scholarly" books that weren't recommended to me. Folktale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics isn't quite as ridiculous as Finding Merlin, "Homer was really talking about Finland," or "Tatiana Larina is an earth goddess." In fact, the first half of the book makes very interesting and salient points about time in epic: in the Nibelungenlied, Attila appears as a contemporary of Alaric, who was born in the year Attila died. The point being, critics tend to assume that if the Homeric characters were in fact historical, Homer was factual about timing and length of life.
Then he (Rhys Carpenter, the author of this thing) spends a lot of time trying to establish the location of the city of Troy, which I personally don't think is particularly important, but other people do, so that's fine I guess. It's here that he starts using Egyptian sources talking about the Sea Peoples, which is very interesting actually. He also points out, again using the Nibelungenlied, that epic sometimes has little relation to truth: the Goths lost the battle they win in the poem.
And then in the second half it gets crazy and badly supported. You see, Odysseus takes part in the "Bearson" myth, along with Beowulf. Also, most things in the ancient world were connected somehow with the cult of the Sleeping Bear, Salmoxis.² Perhaps because the book was originally a series of lectures, there's no transition from "The Setting of the Odyssey" to "The Cult of the Sleeping Bear." I was very confused for a very long time. Eventually, however, Carpenter connects Odysseus with the myth of the bear.
He claims that Odysseus' disappearance to the Trojan War counts as the hibernation common to the many forms of the myth and says that when he tells Polyphemus that his name is "Outis" he is really referring to his hairy ears (οὔτις vs. ὠτις, and the cyclopes hear and understand it wrong).
Finally, he runs down similarities between Odysseus' story and the general "bearson" archetype. The problem here is that the story is much too general. It fits any Märchen hero: has extraordinary strength/skill etc, finds an empty house, is discovered by the owner of the house, goes to the underworld. That's a story type, certes, but it's not just the bearson. And I am not at all convinced by his identification of Odysseus with this hero; he stretches the facts quite a bit to make it work.
"When I pause to consider how preposterous the Bearson and other ursine connections of Odysseus will appear to the classicist who has spent a satisfactory life time without them..." he says; and indeed they do appear pretty preposterous, but not because, as he continues, "the bimillennial superiority of the Hellenist [leaves me] loath to admit that...his more barbarous colleagues...can bring [me] illumination." I am, or rather hope to be, an Indo-Europeanist; I sort of have to accept connections. And I certainly do accept connections to an older archetype in the Odyssey; but the one he's putting forward just does not fit the facts.
ETA: OH GOD Y'ALL CARPENTER WROTE TERRIBLE POETRY "Stout hearts for war the smiting Spartans had..."
---
¹ ok fine I kind of love that second one.
² "Romanian rock band Sfinx worked from around 1975 through 1978 on what became one of the most appreciated Romanian progressive rock LPs, Zalmoxe. It was based on lyrics by poet Alexandru Basarab (actually a pen name for Adrian Hoajă), which retold the story of Zalmoxis's existence." From Wikipedia ³
³ Am listening to it. It's pretty good
