Epics

[varnish7]

I was wondering if someone could recommend some good epics for me to read. I've already read Beowulf, The Aenied, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Gilgamesh, and The Divine Comedy. Right now, I'm reading The Odyssey.

Also, I've been reading a lot of classical literature, and I'd like to make the move to mythology that isn't Greek or Roman. Could someone recommend some books that will give me a basic overview of some other mythology? And also, could you tell me about some famous works that are based on other mythologies?

Thanks for the help.

[JBI]

The Song of Roland, The Cid, The Nibelungenlied (sp?), Ramayana, The Mahabharata, the Shahnameh, The Lusiads (I hear, though I can't seem to find a good translation), and I'd add one more, the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, though it is in prose, I think it works sort of like an epic.


I missed the Scandinavian and Slavic ones, but that is because, as far as I know, there are no good translations of those texts available - Finnish verse doesn't translate supposedly.

The two Indic epics I gave you should be a good guide into the mythologies of their respective culture, especially if you read the introduction at the beginning of a good edition (albeit, they are quite long works, so you may just want to go with Ramayana).

[JCamilo]

He seems to be missing Hesiod, Ovid and Ariosto in his list.

[JBI]

He seems to be missing Hesiod, Ovid and Ariosto in his list.

Yes well, I don't consider any of them epic writers - I consider Ariosto, and Tasso to be Romance writers, and Hesiod to be more in the form of Didactic writing (unless you are talking about The Shield, which isn't really an epic I would argue), whereas Ovid, in my opinion, is also a romance writer - perhaps the first.

[stlukesguild]

To JBI's list you might add Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Spenser's Fairie Queene, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Orlando innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, Africa by Petrarch (although I can only say I've heard tell of this one from mortalterror).

[JBI]

Is there a good Orlando Innamorato available? The dialect on the original is incomprehensible to me, but does a good translation exist, or should I seek an Italian copy - I don't particularly like Ariosto in translation, so I'm wondering if this one came out better.

As for the texts you mentioned though, they seem again, to be far closer to Romance than epic, with the exception of perhaps Parzival, though even that shows the changing tastes.

Strangely enough, I feel myself echoing the exact words of Milton, which is scary.

[JuniperWoolf]

The one by Ovid about Procne and Philomela was pretty awesome... "But Itys is already inside... INSIDE YOU!" Aaaah! :eek2: Ovid is so fun to read.

[billl]

I recently read a big collection of Icelandic sagas.

http://www.amazon.com/Sagas-Icelanders-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0141000031/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247967323&sr=8-1

The most famous Icelandic saga is probably Njarl's saga, and that one isn't included in the collection. I haven't read it, and I'm not really in a rush to do so, because I just read so many, and I found the older ones were more enjoyable in my opinion. The first one (Egil's Saga) and the next 3 or so are particularly great. Somewhere in the middle of the (chronological) collection linked above, Iceland converts to Christianity, and the followers of the Nordic religions start to fade from the scene, are actually even negatively stereotyped kind of. The last sagas in the collection are the earliest historical accounts of European settlers reaching North America.

Anyhow, these sagas are pretty remarkable. These were the Vikings who were too wild for Norway, and they apparently had enough time on their hands to become internationally famous for their poetic skill. As far as mythology, well, this stuff is sort of non-fiction. However, it appears that exaggeration and legend-ization of the stories has transpired, especially in the earlier ones. And many of the characters are basically priest/shaman-type people (with swords).

One thing that is pure mythology that this collection has pointed me to is Snorri Sturlusson's Prose Edda
http://www.amazon.com/Prose-Edda-Mythology-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140447555/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
The description at Amazon calls it "the source for most of what we know about Norse Mythology." It looked pretty good in the bookstore, and I'll probably be checking it out pretty soon.

[varnish7]

The one by Ovid about Procne and Philomela was pretty awesome... "But Itys is already inside... INSIDE YOU!" Aaaah! :eek2: Ovid is so fun to read.

Metamorphoses really did push the envelope didn't it? That had to be the most graphic version of the classical myths that I've ever read.

Thanks for all of your suggestions. Also, what is Bhagavad Gita supposed to be? The guy who translated my copy of Gilgamesh apparently translated that as well, so I was wondering if I should give that a try.

[Pryderi Agni]

Here's something you should try to track down: The Cradle Tales of Hinduism, by Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble). It's published by the Ramakrishna Mission (maybe the Vedanta Society would bee better known to you), and it contains many small epics of the Indian pantheon.

Also, in addition to JBI's recoms for the Ramayana and Mahabharata, I'd like to recommend the Bhagavad Gita. It's a philosophical epic that forms a part of the Mahabharata.

Happy reading!

[mortalterror]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry#Notable_epic_poems
A good list to start with. Pharsalia and The Thebaid have a lot of really cool stuff in them and are not to be overlooked. Dante thought enough of both writers to put them into his Divine Comedy, and should we have better artistic sense than Dante? Also, gotta love The Book of Job. The couple hundred pages I've read of the Shahnameh are as good as anything I've ever read, Shakespeare, Dante, you name it. I haven't read more than the first couple of verses of Nonnus' Dionysiaca but I really want to read that too.

[kiki1982]

What about the whole range of traditional medieval Athur-romances? Among which La Morte d'Arthur, but there are a whole lot more involving Lancelot and Galahad. I read them in medieval Dutch, but there must be French and Englsh versions of them too.

There are a whole lot of epic tales about Charles the Great.

[JCamilo]

But if we do not consider Ariosto, why considering The Cid or even Dante? Anyways, we seen to be talking about classic poetry rather than being able to find a definition of epic that we all can agree...