omens of/in literature

[cacian]

''beware the ides of march'' is William Shakespeare in Julius Ceasar.


from omen to glory is literature greatest folly because if superstition is its ultimate truncheon and epic its brief then what else to literature?
how did the omen start? from reality to fiction of fiction to reality?

[kev67]

Omens can have an encouraging or discouraging effect. For example, when William the Conqueror was preparing his invasion for England, Halley's Comet appeared in the sky. I don't know whether William and his followers, Harold and his followers were encouraged or discouraged, but it may have been a factor in the battles that followed. Multiply that effect by about 10000 times for every time and army or priesthood has seen something strange in the sky then omens have had a massive effect on human history.

In literature, obviously the Greeks put a lot of store on omens. There were several omens in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (all of them bad). The only other book I can remember in which omens played a part was in a book by Nikolai Tolstoy (grandson of Leo) titled, The Coming of the King. That was a hard read.

[cacian]

Omens can have an encouraging or discouraging effect. For example, when William the Conqueror was preparing his invasion for England, Halley's Comet appeared in the sky. I don't know whether William and his followers, Harold and his followers were encouraged or discouraged, but it may have been a factor in the battles that followed. Multiply that effect by about 10000 times for every time and army or priesthood has seen something strange in the sky then omens have had a massive effect on human history.

HI Kev it is indeed interesting a comet is used as an omen to good or bad fortune. It reminds of the story of the Three Kings and the stars . There is this element of skies the heavens space and planets being the source of omenship. Of course the most popular and obvious one is astrology and the study of the stars. The signs of the zodiac and the tarot. I am not so sure why would a comet that appears every 67 years a sign to good or bad. If anything one would have thought it is a sign that there are some changes coming and for the better. A comet to appear rotationally in time in this way is like a birth rather then death to something. That is how I would look at it. :)


In literature, obviously the Greeks put a lot of store on omens. There were several omens in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (all of them bad).
Interesting that all of them are bad in this book. It can bring a feel to the story after a while as if there is no way out about it no matter how far in the story one is relentless. This reminds of the book ''The Good Omen'' by Pratchett. The opposite of ''Tess ''I would say.

The only other book I can remember in which omens played a part was in a book by Nikolai Tolstoy (grandson of Leo) titled, The Coming of the King. That was a hard read.
For a minute I got it mixed up with ''The Coming of the Kings'' by Ted Hughs I was looking in the wrong place :blush5:
I am betting reading 6th century Europe is quite a task to read. Historical fantasy I find difficult at the best of times because I can no longer tell myth from reality and so it becomes a real puzzle to me.
I have not read it yet but which omen would say stand out more the others in this book?

[Ecurb]

H.L. Mencken always felt that this friend Theodore Dreiser had a weakness for writing about omens. He poked fun at his friend by writing in a letter to him: "The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign."

Dreiser, recalling Mencken's habit paying respect to Edgar Allen Poe's grave by taking his drinking buddies there late at night and urinating on the tomb, wrote back, "A spirit message informs me that the dog who so offended you now houses the migrated soul of Edgar Allen Poe, who thus retaliates."

[kasie]

HI Kev it is indeed interesting a comet is used as an omen to good or bad fortune....... I am not so sure why would a comet that appears every 67 years a sign to good or bad. .....

It wasn't until 1705 when Halley described their nature that it was known that comets describe a path through the solar system and so reappear at intervals: prior to that, they were thought to be different comets.

I'm not entirely sure what the OP means but omens originated from the days when they were a means of divining the future: priests would ask the gods for a sign and look for the answer in, for example, the entrails of animals slaughtered as offerings or in the flight of birds at certain times of the day, or in the patterns made by the random casting of sacred objects. Natural occurrences that could not be explained - storms, comets - were also interpreted as fearsome messages from the gods.

btw - Good Omens is nothing at all like Tess.....

[kiki1982]

Haley's comet even features on the Bayeux tapestry, so the Normans must have attached some importance to it. Maybe in hind sight it must have been a good omen to them or a bad one to Harold. Depends how you look at it.

But if they thought that comets were single things that cropped up once in a while, it is logical that they thought that they also meant something profound. IF they just appear regularly, then you can pinpoint the time that it will happen and then they become less magical, although astrology works remarkably well to be real tosh.

Indeed, the ancients attached a lot of importance to omens of any kind, whether they were birds in the field or things in the sky.

Come to think of that, there is that English thing about magpies:
one for sorrow, two for joy
three for a girl, four for a boy,
five for silver, six for gold,
seven for a story that's never been told.

That must be a remant from the time people thought that it meant something.

Ironically, whenever there is one magpie in my garden, there is another nearby and when they prod about in my grass I nearly always get a trnslation assignment. Weird.

[ennison]

If 'arold had kept his head down instead of looking up for a bleedin' homen 'e wouldn't have got that arrer in the eye

[Zaza]

Before the battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461, during the Wars of the Roses, three suns appeared in the sky. This is a phenomenon known as a parhelion or sundog, and is to do with the refraction of light. The not-yet King Edward IV pointed this out to his troops; according to him, it meant that he and his two brothers would triumph and he would gain the throne. He did win the battle, and later adopted the 'Sunne in Splendour' as his badge. He obviously felt it would have a helpful psychological effect on his army.

Another example is the solar eclipse which took place the day Richard III's wife Anne Neville died in 1485. This was thought to be a sign that he had poisoned her. Of course it's not an omen, since it was supposed to be confirming something rather than predicting it, but it falls into the same general way of thinking.