European literature begins with Homer's Iliad and Odyysey.
Virgil followed and imitated Homer's epics with his Aeneid.
Somewhere I read a comparison of the Time Traveler's itinerary in 802,701 A.D. with the Odyysey. (This is the weak link because I can't remember where I read it.)
James Joyce wrote Ulysses.
Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote "A Martian Odyssey."
Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry refers to "...blooded horses stamp[ing] on the ringing plains of Ilion..."
Sometimes it feel as if literature and fiction are one long series or at least sequence.
5 comments:
As to beginnings of European literature: many of the "kennings" in Homer -- the repeated phrases -- are extremely similar to those in the Vedas.
Those two bodies of poetry were compiled (set down in final form) a few centuries apart, but the peoples involved had been separated for a very long time -- about two thousand years.
The similarities are due to common inheritance.
Eg., in Homer the phrase for "undying fame" is "kléos áphthiton". In the Vedas it's "srávo ákṣitam".
These look similar because the words are common descendants of proto-Indo-European equivalents, each having undergone characteristic sound-shifts. *k to s and *l to r in Indo-Iranian, for example.
But it's more than that: the way they're used and other factors make it plain that the use as a -poetic phrase- also dates to Proto-Indo-European.
In other words, they're both reflexes of an oral poetic use that was 2000 years old when Homer and the Vedas were put into their final form. Heroic poetry had been using this phrase, this standardized epithet, two thousand years before on the steppes.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
JRR Tolkien would have loved these philological notes from you. And I think he would have mostly agreed with you, despite specializing largely in the Germanic languages, not Greek, Sanskrit, and their proto-Indo-European antecedents.
And we see similar kennings in Scandinavian sagas and poetry.
Ad astra! Sean
From SM Stirling:
Sean: yup. This was a common tradition, preserved in many of the cultures using Indo-European languages. Other language families have similar things. A lot of the stuff in the Old Testament, particularly the older bits, has strong -stylistic- similarities with Babylonian writing.
In many respects the Scandinavians preserved very ancient traditions down into the medieval period. There's a reason a lot of the saga literature "feels" old. I think one of Poul's historical novels has a Viking-era Norseman talking poetry with a Greek scholar around 1000 CE, and the Greek exclaiming at how Homeric the sagas are.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You had me looking up a booklet I have called INTRODUCTION TO THE WISDOM LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Fr. Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm. (The Liturgical Press: 1965), because of how it discusses OT Hebrew poetry. It's not surprising if OT literature has strong similarities to Mesopotamian writing. The ancient Jews were greatly influenced by Akkadian/Babylonian culture.
This bit from page 4 of Fr. Murphy's booklet caught my eye:
"...Hebrew poetry is characterized by the number of accens (or beats) in a line and by parallelism. A line is the verse unit, called a stich, which is divided by a caesura (or pause) into a distich, or if there are two caesuras, a tristich. The length of the line depends upon the number of accented syllables and their distribution among unstressed syllables. This finds mathematical expression thus: 3 plus 3 (three accented syllables, parallel to three accented syllables):
Is-not-man's-life on-earth a-drudgery (3)
Are-not-his-days those of-a-hireling (3) (Job 7.1)
English is too verbose to catch the succinct beats of the Hebrew, but if one joins words together, as above, the Hebrew can be approximated. [End quote]
The thought I had was that Hebrew parallelism reminded me of the kennings found in the poetry of the Indo-European languages.
If I remember correctly, it was Harald Hardrede who discussed Scandinavian poetry with a scholarly Byzantine aristocrat in Anderson's THE GOLDEN HORN.
Ad astra! Sean
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