I was looking through some of my old blogs... I make a lot of little mistakes, especially in spelling or other typos... I guess I get in a hurry with the blogs and don't go back to revise.
Oh well... Sorry!
Friday, May 8, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
It's always cool when classes actually cross over and relate to one another. Here are two papers from diferent classes that were directly influenced by our class in Orality. One is short and interesting, the other is long and boring. I don't expect either to be read in their entirity, I just get excited when one class relates strongly to another, so I thought I share how this class has suplimented some other fields.
One could herald the medieval bestiaries as the first legitimate attempt at a zoological catalogue, but upon close inspection it is clear that zoology is a minor concern for the bestiaries. It is indeed a catalogue, but it serves another purpose beyond merely recording. It serves the purpose of remembering in the sense that only a medieval thinker would fully understand. The art of memory is largely extinct today but in the world that bread the bestiaries it would have been well known among philosophers and men of religion.
One man, Giordano Bruno, believed that remembering was the path to the divine. He believed that the act of learning was in actuality the act of remembering things that humans inherently already knew.( Yates, 202) Through remembering we could achieve knowledge of the divine, and become God-like ourselves. (224) I don’t think I need mention that a man like Bruno was quickly labeled a heretic in Catholic Europe, and was promptly burned at the stake in Venice.(201)
I bring up Bruno simply to demonstrate the divine stigma that memory held in medieval world even if he was much more a renaissance thinker than a medieval philosopher, and he postdates the bestiary by nearly 700 years. Still, he is a perfect example of a time when memory contained divine attributes, and Bruno viewed himself as a continuation of the medieval memory treasies of the past.(Yates, 230) He then is still relevant to a medieval world where writing had come into common existence but was widely inaccessible to the average person, and in a world where the memory truly is the only way for one to remember (no flash drives or electronic planners) it is easy to understand the divine stigma of the memory.
How does this banter on memory apply to the medieval bestiary? It’s very clear that the bestiary was functional as a sort of catalogue of information, and catalogues or lists of information were very popular to medieval thinkers who categorized nearly everything and sorted it out into what is referred to as a memory palace or a memory theater. For an example of such a theater refer to figure one toward the back of the book. This theater is the creation of Giulio Camillo and is properly referred to as the seven pillars of Solomon. (Yates, 144) However, this is not necessarily the form a memory theater might take. I have built a memory theater out of downtown Bozeman, and even out of the classroom where our Nature and Culture class is held, and I would not be surprised if our Bestiary was created just as much as a memory theater as it was created to be a zoological catalogue or divine commentary.
Mind you, in the middle ages and medieval Europe memory theaters, predating Bruno, were not necessarily a path to the divine, but rather a reminder of the divine. Like Dante’s layers of Hell, and later the layers of Paradise, the medieval memory system was a reminder of the divine, a system for cataloguing the good and the evil. (Yates, 122) Similarly the Bestiary catalogues not what the layers of hell can teach us about the human relationship to the divine, but instead what we can learn about our place in the world, and about divine nature, through the observation of the animals.
Take for consideration this passage from our bestiary referring to the bear: “The bear signifies the Devil, ravager of the flocks of our Lord…” (60) or the pelican who tears open her breast and spills her blood to feed the children whom she loves. (146) Clearly, the pelican’s sacrifice is allegorical, but nearly all the animals of the bestiary are, and as such they are reminders not of the types of animals that exist, but of the human relation to the divine. Even the Phoenix is included in the bestiary, and while it is possible that the authors of the bestiary truly did believe in such an animal, it would not be farfetched to assume that they were more concerned with the allegorical qualities of the animal (i.e. it’s cycle of death and rebirth).
Why is there this deep seeded connection between nature and the divine? Pagan religions, by and large, did not bother to separate the natural from the divine, but that view ended with the introduction of western religions. Nature became wild and carnal and fearful and so far removed from the order and civility of organized religion. Of course it can be argued that religion in medieval time breed nothing like order or civility between humans, but whether or not we are willing to recognize that now has little to do with whether or not they believed it in the past.
Today we continue to draw a line not only between the divine and natural, but also between the human and the natural and the human and the divine. We believe that there is this separation, that there is anything which can be unnatural. I would like to argue that these distinctions do not exist. I would argue that there is nothing unnatural about the divine under the simple premise that everything is part of the nature of the universe. This of course means that the human aspect of our world is also part of the nature of the universe, but we cannot make this connection. It is alien to us.
I would like to digress for a short while. Don’t worry; this will be relevant again shortly. I want to mention a friend. Her name is Misty and she is a dog. In a previous paper is asked why it was so wrong to refer to Misty as a person, but now I would like to go the opposite direction, because Misty is also natural in a way we do not consider people natural any more. Even though she is domesticated we know that misty is not human, and is therefore closer to the natural, or carnal world that we believe we as humans are separate from. We believe her to be wild, or last that a part of her is wild or natural and yet we keep Misty and her kind close to us as a companion species, and we lose ourselves in their silent friendship. Perhaps Misty is a conduit. Perhaps we people love dogs and cats and hamsters and parrots and iguanas because they are still connected to that natural world and we believe that we are not. Perhaps we still find something in nature that is divine. Perhaps we think that what is natural simply is divine like the pagans did. Perhaps our memories theaters and bestiaries and pets are our connections to the natural and to the divine.
The Song the Earth Sings
Sean Kane, a professor of cultural studies at Trent University says that “Myth… seems to be the song of a place to itself, which humans overhear.” (51) This may seem a bit mystical for a twenty first century audience, but the truth is that a culture’s mythology speaks multitudes of how that culture views human relationship both to the Earth and to the divine.
Myths serve a practical purpose in addition to religious purposes in that while they taught people their places in the world they conveyed practical information about what humans can and cannot do. An example would be from the Algonkian tribe native to what is now southern Quebec. They have a story about a trickster god by the name of Nanabozo who ate white berries and was forced to climb a tree in order to escape from his mounting diarrhea. (Kane, 39) Perhaps this isn’t a pleasant tale, but Algonkian children know what berries not to eat. Another story is more somber. It is from the Haida culture on the west coast of North America. It tells of a group of boys being slaughtered by Qaasghajiina, a creek goddess, for their disrespect of the land. Besides being a sad tragedy, this story is a lesson to the Haida people to remember their place in the unforgiving powers of nature. (47)
The above examples, however, come from hunter-gatherer societies, and translate poorly to the mythic cultures of Europe, which for ages have been agricultural. We cannot expect myth’s to take the same form in these two opposite societies. For instance, you are not likely to find a god connected to agriculture in a hunter gather society, nor would you consider water or a rock to have a spirit in most agricultural societies. In fact Kane uses the Norse tradition as an example of how a mythical tradition forms in an agricultural society. If a society plants grain or raises cattle, they need land. If societies must compete for land, there will be wars. At this point a polytheistic religion would surely have a god of agriculture and a god of war, and if there are going to be gods there are going to be priests. Now there is a godhead specific to the priesthood. True to this theory, Norse mythology has a god for each war, agriculture, and the priesthood, which are Thor, Frey, and Odin respectively. (Kane, 22)
In a modern society we don’t approach traditional European mythology (i.e. Greco-Roman myth or Norse myth) as a legitimate religion, and we would be hard pressed to find any modern followers of these belief systems. We view the stories as parables and a source of moral teaching, but we tend to forget that for the peoples in these places and times it was very much an acting and functioning religion. This is especially true for the Norse religion. As the Greco-Roman religion began to die out with the philosophers, and when Caesars were feeding Christians to the lions, Norse priests were still sacrificing to Odin, and Kings (who in early times may have been more like chieftains) were building mead halls in honor of Thor.
The fact that the Norse religion survived so much longer than any of the other pagan religions in Europe is exactly why it is so enticing. The fact that it was a primarily oral society (primarily oral because there was a runic alphabet, though it was not accessible to the public) also makes it interesting. The society, an agricultural warrior culture, took form around these concepts. Religion shaped the culture the way any anthropologist would expect it to, but we cannot underestimate the affect that oral traditions would have on a pre literate society and religion.
Orality: How the thoughts of a pre-literate society take form.
The English language has a record high of over 1.5 million words. Many of these words have multiple meanings, and most have meanings that have changed over time. (Ong, 8) I think that when we view the course of our normal dialect, our day to day conversation, we will be able to think of only a couple thousand words that we actually use. The rest are for literary flair and pedantic discourse. This over abundance of vocabulary is a flaw, or be it an obstacle, that is not dealt with by pre-literate societies. The most abundant of primarily oral languages have only a few thousand words to deal with (8) which, in the light of an oral culture’s inability to record hundreds of thousands of discrete items, makes perfect sense. There are no dictionaries, there are no thesauruses, and an oral society is not going to concern itself with the adoption of Latin and French into its vocabulary. It is a tradition that is going to value function over form, where the word “forest” is perfectly functional and there is no need to refer to it as an “arboreal landscape.”
This is only one distinction of an oral culture; a distinction which holds true for Norse oral traditions as it would for any other. There are, however, nine distinctions or psychodynamics of oral tradition that are introduced by the Jesuit scholar Walter Ong, at least five of which can be applied quite nicely to the ballads of the Edda. (Exactly what the Edda is I will elaborate on in another section) Specifically, for the sake of my own familiarity, we will use the first ballad of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer about Regin the smith. Though I use this example specifically, these rules can be applied widely.
The first psychodynamic that Ong introduces is that Oral traditions are additive rather than subordanative. (Ong, 37) This is to say that in a narrative, no action or occurrence is more significant than another. This can be seen in our example as the simple content of the ballad. It is no more important that King Sigmund was slain than it is that Sigurd slays the dragon Favnir. In fact we may think that the story is about the slaying of the dragon, but it is no more about that than it is about the treachery of Regin the smith. So it can be seen that the story is not about one simple plot, but it is about many, layered plots, none of which is subordanative to another.
The second feature of oral traditions is that it is aggregative.(Ong, 38) Oral “literature” (if we can call it literature) does not exist in single words as modern language does. We write our thoughts word by word, but in an oral culture this is not the case. They group together word clusters in the form of epithets and clichés. This is a pneumonic device for storytellers more than anything else. Take for consideration the cliché “it’s raining cats and dogs” which would be viewed as an incomplete thought if any of the words were missing. This is how the entirety of the storytelling exists in the Norse culture, references are repetitive and almost no nouns exist without adjectives. Specific examples from Siggurd would be the re-occurrence of references to Regin as a “clever smith” or that “his words cannot be trusted” and epithets for the “Brave King” or a “fair lady.” The ballad is chock full (another cliché) of these epithets and clichéd references, but to continue citing more examples would not further my point.
The story telling tradition is repetitive, which is Ong’s third psychodynamic. (39) This is a fact that has been recognized by many scholars, but what it means is basically that if something is said once, it will probably be said twice, if not three times or more. Consider these two consecutive verses from our example:
Form: The Eddic verse
In the previous section I mentioned that the ballads all have a set form that simply was not tampered with. This is true for the ballads, but not all stories in the Norse tradition. There are sets of stories known as the Sagas that are mostly related to Icelandic and Norwegian tradition that are written in prose, but while they are spackled with bits of mythology, they are primarily historical accounts rather than religious poems. Probably the most famous examples are the Vinland Sagas about the discovery of North America (although I don’t think I need to point out that the Vikings did not call it “America”). However, I hope that I don’t have to explain the form of prose, because it doesn’t have one, so I will not delve into the form of the Sagas.
What I do want to discuss is the form of eddic lay. This form is originally Germanic, and traditionally dealt with Germanic hero legends (Hallberg, 11) but was adopted by the Norse poets (who were also of Germanic descent) almost exclusively to convey mythology. In the next section I will discuss the Edda (an actual compilation of eddic poetry) but for now I would like to focus on the meter of the poems. There are two types of eddic meter, but I will focus on what is believed to be the older form known as fornyrðislag or “epic meter.”(12). It consists of stanzas of eight line, each with two stressed syllables and a varying but comparable number of unstressed syllables. The line are joined together in couplet form using alliteration in the form that fallows:
Ár var alda
Þats ekki var,
vara sandr né sær
né svalar unnir;
iörð fannsk æva
né upphiminn,
gap var Ginnunga
en gras hvergi.
Of old was the age
Ere anything was,
Sea nor cool waves
Nor sand there were,
Earth had not been
Nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap,
And grass nowhere.
(Hallberg, 12)
I have highlighted the alliterative words by bolding them, and you can see that the alliteration occurs twice on the first line of each couplet, and only once on the second line. The stressed syllables are always the first syllables of the alliterative words in the first lines, but in the second lines of the couplets it is more subjective. (12) This is the oldest poetic form in the Norse tradition, and probably the best known form thanks to the Edda.
Christianity, the Death of Paganism, and Snorri
It’s no secret that the introduction of Christianity meant the death of pagan religions in Europe. In Iceland Christianity was introduce around 1000 C.E., and with it came the Roman alphabet that extended literacy beyond the priesthood.(Ross, 116) It was shortly after that Chritianity was made the official religion by the Althing, which was essentially the Icelandic parliament. (Ross, 116) This was at a fairly young age for the island, which had only been settled roughly 100 years before and was almost entirely pagan, though there were some hermits whose homeland of Ireland had already converted to Christianity. (116) However, even with the official decision to adopt Christianity, many Icelanders were slow to convert to this foreign religion and a full conversion of the populace wasn’t to occurred for nearly 300 years. This slow conversion, and the popular desire to stay connected with their pagan heritage, may be the only reason the Norse religion survived with any detailed record. (118)
Though the oral tradition had largely faded away with the introduction of a democratic writing system, it was precisely this writing system and the actions of one man that allowed the myths to survive. This man was Snorri Sturluson, who in the early 13th century took up the task of recording in eddic lay the myths and ballads of the pagan religion. His compilation is known as the Edda, which is broken into three main sections: the Codex Regius, which deals primarily with the world and actions of the gods; the Codex Wormianus, which is primarily concerned with the hero ballads such as Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer; and the Codex Upsaliensis, which is a montage of all kinds of fun stuff. (Ross, 128-129) The myths and songs of the Edda are believed to be archaic and the basis for the original Norse religion, but Snorri’s manuscripts are relatively new and are believed to be the first full written record of the Eddic myths, which of course speaks multitudes for the functionality of the earlier oral tradition as a means of preservation.
If there was a possible downside to Snorri’s contribution, however, it is that he was Christian. Because of this most scholars believe that the Edda cannot be viewed with an unwary eye. Snorri was most certainly concerned with preserving the myths, but to believe that an outsider to the religion could accurately portray the ideologies of a belief system he doesn’t belong to is a lack of healthy skepticism. However, all skepticism aside, most scholars will agree that they owe a great deal to Snorri because without his manuscripts studying a coherent record of the Norse Religion would be an impossible task.
Remnants of the Past
The Norse religion did not escape the fate that the introduction of Christianity had doomed it to. No European pagan beliefs did, however there are still shards of its mysticism buried in the day to day life of the Scandinavian culture. It’s important to recognize that compared to the rest of Europe, Christianity came very late to the Norsemen, and for a society that has so much history and folk tradition, it’s to be expected that any mysticism and superstition will be based out of their pagan roots.
One example is in the Vinland Sagas, which as I mentioned before were written to function as history books, however they are rampant with Viking superstition, attention to omens, and even conversations with the dead, which is interesting considering that they are not pre-Christian. In fact there are many Christian references in the sagas. Leif the Lucky himself was charge by the King of Norway to bring Christianity to Iceland. In addition it is likely that the authors of the original Vinland manuscripts were Christians rather than pagans, which means we must also have a healthy skepticism about the role of both the Christian and pagan religion in the tales.
Another example of mythical influence on Christian Scandinavia comes from the folklore of Norway. The stories are of simple, God-fearing people in a peasant culture, but they too cling to the superstitions of the pagan religion. The protagonists in these folk tales are always faced with obstacles in the form of magic and trolls, where trolls were originally the ugly, often stupid enemies of the Norse gods.
Whatever the case is, there are still tracks of the mythical Norse religion making their mark in the modern world of what once was home to a rich story telling culture. It could take its form in the folklore of Norway, or in the Faroe Islands where they still sing the ballads in traditional verse, but this oral, mythical religion played the key role in creating rich cultures that have not lost their roots in their pagan past.
Bestiaries: Memory, the Carnal, and the Divine
One could herald the medieval bestiaries as the first legitimate attempt at a zoological catalogue, but upon close inspection it is clear that zoology is a minor concern for the bestiaries. It is indeed a catalogue, but it serves another purpose beyond merely recording. It serves the purpose of remembering in the sense that only a medieval thinker would fully understand. The art of memory is largely extinct today but in the world that bread the bestiaries it would have been well known among philosophers and men of religion.
One man, Giordano Bruno, believed that remembering was the path to the divine. He believed that the act of learning was in actuality the act of remembering things that humans inherently already knew.( Yates, 202) Through remembering we could achieve knowledge of the divine, and become God-like ourselves. (224) I don’t think I need mention that a man like Bruno was quickly labeled a heretic in Catholic Europe, and was promptly burned at the stake in Venice.(201)
I bring up Bruno simply to demonstrate the divine stigma that memory held in medieval world even if he was much more a renaissance thinker than a medieval philosopher, and he postdates the bestiary by nearly 700 years. Still, he is a perfect example of a time when memory contained divine attributes, and Bruno viewed himself as a continuation of the medieval memory treasies of the past.(Yates, 230) He then is still relevant to a medieval world where writing had come into common existence but was widely inaccessible to the average person, and in a world where the memory truly is the only way for one to remember (no flash drives or electronic planners) it is easy to understand the divine stigma of the memory.
How does this banter on memory apply to the medieval bestiary? It’s very clear that the bestiary was functional as a sort of catalogue of information, and catalogues or lists of information were very popular to medieval thinkers who categorized nearly everything and sorted it out into what is referred to as a memory palace or a memory theater. For an example of such a theater refer to figure one toward the back of the book. This theater is the creation of Giulio Camillo and is properly referred to as the seven pillars of Solomon. (Yates, 144) However, this is not necessarily the form a memory theater might take. I have built a memory theater out of downtown Bozeman, and even out of the classroom where our Nature and Culture class is held, and I would not be surprised if our Bestiary was created just as much as a memory theater as it was created to be a zoological catalogue or divine commentary.
Mind you, in the middle ages and medieval Europe memory theaters, predating Bruno, were not necessarily a path to the divine, but rather a reminder of the divine. Like Dante’s layers of Hell, and later the layers of Paradise, the medieval memory system was a reminder of the divine, a system for cataloguing the good and the evil. (Yates, 122) Similarly the Bestiary catalogues not what the layers of hell can teach us about the human relationship to the divine, but instead what we can learn about our place in the world, and about divine nature, through the observation of the animals.
Take for consideration this passage from our bestiary referring to the bear: “The bear signifies the Devil, ravager of the flocks of our Lord…” (60) or the pelican who tears open her breast and spills her blood to feed the children whom she loves. (146) Clearly, the pelican’s sacrifice is allegorical, but nearly all the animals of the bestiary are, and as such they are reminders not of the types of animals that exist, but of the human relation to the divine. Even the Phoenix is included in the bestiary, and while it is possible that the authors of the bestiary truly did believe in such an animal, it would not be farfetched to assume that they were more concerned with the allegorical qualities of the animal (i.e. it’s cycle of death and rebirth).
Why is there this deep seeded connection between nature and the divine? Pagan religions, by and large, did not bother to separate the natural from the divine, but that view ended with the introduction of western religions. Nature became wild and carnal and fearful and so far removed from the order and civility of organized religion. Of course it can be argued that religion in medieval time breed nothing like order or civility between humans, but whether or not we are willing to recognize that now has little to do with whether or not they believed it in the past.
Today we continue to draw a line not only between the divine and natural, but also between the human and the natural and the human and the divine. We believe that there is this separation, that there is anything which can be unnatural. I would like to argue that these distinctions do not exist. I would argue that there is nothing unnatural about the divine under the simple premise that everything is part of the nature of the universe. This of course means that the human aspect of our world is also part of the nature of the universe, but we cannot make this connection. It is alien to us.
I would like to digress for a short while. Don’t worry; this will be relevant again shortly. I want to mention a friend. Her name is Misty and she is a dog. In a previous paper is asked why it was so wrong to refer to Misty as a person, but now I would like to go the opposite direction, because Misty is also natural in a way we do not consider people natural any more. Even though she is domesticated we know that misty is not human, and is therefore closer to the natural, or carnal world that we believe we as humans are separate from. We believe her to be wild, or last that a part of her is wild or natural and yet we keep Misty and her kind close to us as a companion species, and we lose ourselves in their silent friendship. Perhaps Misty is a conduit. Perhaps we people love dogs and cats and hamsters and parrots and iguanas because they are still connected to that natural world and we believe that we are not. Perhaps we still find something in nature that is divine. Perhaps we think that what is natural simply is divine like the pagans did. Perhaps our memories theaters and bestiaries and pets are our connections to the natural and to the divine.
Orality and Norse Mythology: The Past and the Preserved
The Song the Earth Sings
Sean Kane, a professor of cultural studies at Trent University says that “Myth… seems to be the song of a place to itself, which humans overhear.” (51) This may seem a bit mystical for a twenty first century audience, but the truth is that a culture’s mythology speaks multitudes of how that culture views human relationship both to the Earth and to the divine.
Myths serve a practical purpose in addition to religious purposes in that while they taught people their places in the world they conveyed practical information about what humans can and cannot do. An example would be from the Algonkian tribe native to what is now southern Quebec. They have a story about a trickster god by the name of Nanabozo who ate white berries and was forced to climb a tree in order to escape from his mounting diarrhea. (Kane, 39) Perhaps this isn’t a pleasant tale, but Algonkian children know what berries not to eat. Another story is more somber. It is from the Haida culture on the west coast of North America. It tells of a group of boys being slaughtered by Qaasghajiina, a creek goddess, for their disrespect of the land. Besides being a sad tragedy, this story is a lesson to the Haida people to remember their place in the unforgiving powers of nature. (47)
The above examples, however, come from hunter-gatherer societies, and translate poorly to the mythic cultures of Europe, which for ages have been agricultural. We cannot expect myth’s to take the same form in these two opposite societies. For instance, you are not likely to find a god connected to agriculture in a hunter gather society, nor would you consider water or a rock to have a spirit in most agricultural societies. In fact Kane uses the Norse tradition as an example of how a mythical tradition forms in an agricultural society. If a society plants grain or raises cattle, they need land. If societies must compete for land, there will be wars. At this point a polytheistic religion would surely have a god of agriculture and a god of war, and if there are going to be gods there are going to be priests. Now there is a godhead specific to the priesthood. True to this theory, Norse mythology has a god for each war, agriculture, and the priesthood, which are Thor, Frey, and Odin respectively. (Kane, 22)
In a modern society we don’t approach traditional European mythology (i.e. Greco-Roman myth or Norse myth) as a legitimate religion, and we would be hard pressed to find any modern followers of these belief systems. We view the stories as parables and a source of moral teaching, but we tend to forget that for the peoples in these places and times it was very much an acting and functioning religion. This is especially true for the Norse religion. As the Greco-Roman religion began to die out with the philosophers, and when Caesars were feeding Christians to the lions, Norse priests were still sacrificing to Odin, and Kings (who in early times may have been more like chieftains) were building mead halls in honor of Thor.
The fact that the Norse religion survived so much longer than any of the other pagan religions in Europe is exactly why it is so enticing. The fact that it was a primarily oral society (primarily oral because there was a runic alphabet, though it was not accessible to the public) also makes it interesting. The society, an agricultural warrior culture, took form around these concepts. Religion shaped the culture the way any anthropologist would expect it to, but we cannot underestimate the affect that oral traditions would have on a pre literate society and religion.
Orality: How the thoughts of a pre-literate society take form.
The English language has a record high of over 1.5 million words. Many of these words have multiple meanings, and most have meanings that have changed over time. (Ong, 8) I think that when we view the course of our normal dialect, our day to day conversation, we will be able to think of only a couple thousand words that we actually use. The rest are for literary flair and pedantic discourse. This over abundance of vocabulary is a flaw, or be it an obstacle, that is not dealt with by pre-literate societies. The most abundant of primarily oral languages have only a few thousand words to deal with (8) which, in the light of an oral culture’s inability to record hundreds of thousands of discrete items, makes perfect sense. There are no dictionaries, there are no thesauruses, and an oral society is not going to concern itself with the adoption of Latin and French into its vocabulary. It is a tradition that is going to value function over form, where the word “forest” is perfectly functional and there is no need to refer to it as an “arboreal landscape.”
This is only one distinction of an oral culture; a distinction which holds true for Norse oral traditions as it would for any other. There are, however, nine distinctions or psychodynamics of oral tradition that are introduced by the Jesuit scholar Walter Ong, at least five of which can be applied quite nicely to the ballads of the Edda. (Exactly what the Edda is I will elaborate on in another section) Specifically, for the sake of my own familiarity, we will use the first ballad of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer about Regin the smith. Though I use this example specifically, these rules can be applied widely.
The first psychodynamic that Ong introduces is that Oral traditions are additive rather than subordanative. (Ong, 37) This is to say that in a narrative, no action or occurrence is more significant than another. This can be seen in our example as the simple content of the ballad. It is no more important that King Sigmund was slain than it is that Sigurd slays the dragon Favnir. In fact we may think that the story is about the slaying of the dragon, but it is no more about that than it is about the treachery of Regin the smith. So it can be seen that the story is not about one simple plot, but it is about many, layered plots, none of which is subordanative to another.
The second feature of oral traditions is that it is aggregative.(Ong, 38) Oral “literature” (if we can call it literature) does not exist in single words as modern language does. We write our thoughts word by word, but in an oral culture this is not the case. They group together word clusters in the form of epithets and clichés. This is a pneumonic device for storytellers more than anything else. Take for consideration the cliché “it’s raining cats and dogs” which would be viewed as an incomplete thought if any of the words were missing. This is how the entirety of the storytelling exists in the Norse culture, references are repetitive and almost no nouns exist without adjectives. Specific examples from Siggurd would be the re-occurrence of references to Regin as a “clever smith” or that “his words cannot be trusted” and epithets for the “Brave King” or a “fair lady.” The ballad is chock full (another cliché) of these epithets and clichéd references, but to continue citing more examples would not further my point.
The story telling tradition is repetitive, which is Ong’s third psychodynamic. (39) This is a fact that has been recognized by many scholars, but what it means is basically that if something is said once, it will probably be said twice, if not three times or more. Consider these two consecutive verses from our example:
The brave men of the hall
Were forced to take a stand;
War soon stalked about,
In King Giur’s Land.
War soon stalked about
In King Giur’s Land;
All joined themselves in battle,
First on the south sea-strand.
Verbatim repetition exists here as a very concrete example of the repetition. Again, like so many of these features, it serves as a pneumonic device. It is closely linked to the previous psychodynamic in that it allows the story to continue driving without creating an over abundance of verse that needs to be memorized.
Fourth, Ong states that the form of the poetry is conservative or traditional.(41) In the case of Siggurd, this form exists as eddic verse, but Scandinavian ballads also exist in skaldic verse. I will elaborate on the eddic verse in the next section, but suffice it to say that to change the verse form of these ballads simply isn’t done. To break this traditional verse is to ruin a perfectly functional pneumonic system.
The final psychodynamic that Ong gives us is that oral traditions are participatory rather than distant.(45) This says as much of the literate culture as it does of an oral one. Something understood about the composition of a book, a novel, or an essay is that it is composed by a distant writer who records his or her thoughts in solitude, which in turn is read by an audience in solitude. Indeed even the word “audience” can be misleading when referring to the individual readers of a manuscript. This is not the case with an oral culture where both the composition and performance of these oral ballads is done in a social setting. For obvious reasons it is difficult to relay a direct example of how this is manifested in Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer by throwing text at you or alluding to the theme of the ballad, but there are still cultures alive today, like the Faroese, that chant these ballads in a ritualistic and social manner. It is as social and performance oriented as live music or a dance, in fact on the Faroe Islands both music and dance are incorporated into the singing of the ballads.
These five psychodynamics, a healthy chunk of the nine presented by Ong, apply very readily to the Norse storytelling or mythological tradition. The remaining four apply, but are simply too abstract to apply directly to a single text. They say that the story telling tradition is close to the human life world, agonistically toned, homeostatic, and situational rather than abstract. (42, 42, 46, 48) I don’t want to go into too much detail on these four psychodynamics for the sake of risking clarity, but in a roundabout way they all point to the idea that the myths are morally and practically relevant to the society they belong to.
Were forced to take a stand;
War soon stalked about,
In King Giur’s Land.
War soon stalked about
In King Giur’s Land;
All joined themselves in battle,
First on the south sea-strand.
Verbatim repetition exists here as a very concrete example of the repetition. Again, like so many of these features, it serves as a pneumonic device. It is closely linked to the previous psychodynamic in that it allows the story to continue driving without creating an over abundance of verse that needs to be memorized.
Fourth, Ong states that the form of the poetry is conservative or traditional.(41) In the case of Siggurd, this form exists as eddic verse, but Scandinavian ballads also exist in skaldic verse. I will elaborate on the eddic verse in the next section, but suffice it to say that to change the verse form of these ballads simply isn’t done. To break this traditional verse is to ruin a perfectly functional pneumonic system.
The final psychodynamic that Ong gives us is that oral traditions are participatory rather than distant.(45) This says as much of the literate culture as it does of an oral one. Something understood about the composition of a book, a novel, or an essay is that it is composed by a distant writer who records his or her thoughts in solitude, which in turn is read by an audience in solitude. Indeed even the word “audience” can be misleading when referring to the individual readers of a manuscript. This is not the case with an oral culture where both the composition and performance of these oral ballads is done in a social setting. For obvious reasons it is difficult to relay a direct example of how this is manifested in Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer by throwing text at you or alluding to the theme of the ballad, but there are still cultures alive today, like the Faroese, that chant these ballads in a ritualistic and social manner. It is as social and performance oriented as live music or a dance, in fact on the Faroe Islands both music and dance are incorporated into the singing of the ballads.
These five psychodynamics, a healthy chunk of the nine presented by Ong, apply very readily to the Norse storytelling or mythological tradition. The remaining four apply, but are simply too abstract to apply directly to a single text. They say that the story telling tradition is close to the human life world, agonistically toned, homeostatic, and situational rather than abstract. (42, 42, 46, 48) I don’t want to go into too much detail on these four psychodynamics for the sake of risking clarity, but in a roundabout way they all point to the idea that the myths are morally and practically relevant to the society they belong to.
Form: The Eddic verse
In the previous section I mentioned that the ballads all have a set form that simply was not tampered with. This is true for the ballads, but not all stories in the Norse tradition. There are sets of stories known as the Sagas that are mostly related to Icelandic and Norwegian tradition that are written in prose, but while they are spackled with bits of mythology, they are primarily historical accounts rather than religious poems. Probably the most famous examples are the Vinland Sagas about the discovery of North America (although I don’t think I need to point out that the Vikings did not call it “America”). However, I hope that I don’t have to explain the form of prose, because it doesn’t have one, so I will not delve into the form of the Sagas.
What I do want to discuss is the form of eddic lay. This form is originally Germanic, and traditionally dealt with Germanic hero legends (Hallberg, 11) but was adopted by the Norse poets (who were also of Germanic descent) almost exclusively to convey mythology. In the next section I will discuss the Edda (an actual compilation of eddic poetry) but for now I would like to focus on the meter of the poems. There are two types of eddic meter, but I will focus on what is believed to be the older form known as fornyrðislag or “epic meter.”(12). It consists of stanzas of eight line, each with two stressed syllables and a varying but comparable number of unstressed syllables. The line are joined together in couplet form using alliteration in the form that fallows:
Ár var alda
Þats ekki var,
vara sandr né sær
né svalar unnir;
iörð fannsk æva
né upphiminn,
gap var Ginnunga
en gras hvergi.
Of old was the age
Ere anything was,
Sea nor cool waves
Nor sand there were,
Earth had not been
Nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap,
And grass nowhere.
(Hallberg, 12)
I have highlighted the alliterative words by bolding them, and you can see that the alliteration occurs twice on the first line of each couplet, and only once on the second line. The stressed syllables are always the first syllables of the alliterative words in the first lines, but in the second lines of the couplets it is more subjective. (12) This is the oldest poetic form in the Norse tradition, and probably the best known form thanks to the Edda.
Christianity, the Death of Paganism, and Snorri
It’s no secret that the introduction of Christianity meant the death of pagan religions in Europe. In Iceland Christianity was introduce around 1000 C.E., and with it came the Roman alphabet that extended literacy beyond the priesthood.(Ross, 116) It was shortly after that Chritianity was made the official religion by the Althing, which was essentially the Icelandic parliament. (Ross, 116) This was at a fairly young age for the island, which had only been settled roughly 100 years before and was almost entirely pagan, though there were some hermits whose homeland of Ireland had already converted to Christianity. (116) However, even with the official decision to adopt Christianity, many Icelanders were slow to convert to this foreign religion and a full conversion of the populace wasn’t to occurred for nearly 300 years. This slow conversion, and the popular desire to stay connected with their pagan heritage, may be the only reason the Norse religion survived with any detailed record. (118)
Though the oral tradition had largely faded away with the introduction of a democratic writing system, it was precisely this writing system and the actions of one man that allowed the myths to survive. This man was Snorri Sturluson, who in the early 13th century took up the task of recording in eddic lay the myths and ballads of the pagan religion. His compilation is known as the Edda, which is broken into three main sections: the Codex Regius, which deals primarily with the world and actions of the gods; the Codex Wormianus, which is primarily concerned with the hero ballads such as Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer; and the Codex Upsaliensis, which is a montage of all kinds of fun stuff. (Ross, 128-129) The myths and songs of the Edda are believed to be archaic and the basis for the original Norse religion, but Snorri’s manuscripts are relatively new and are believed to be the first full written record of the Eddic myths, which of course speaks multitudes for the functionality of the earlier oral tradition as a means of preservation.
If there was a possible downside to Snorri’s contribution, however, it is that he was Christian. Because of this most scholars believe that the Edda cannot be viewed with an unwary eye. Snorri was most certainly concerned with preserving the myths, but to believe that an outsider to the religion could accurately portray the ideologies of a belief system he doesn’t belong to is a lack of healthy skepticism. However, all skepticism aside, most scholars will agree that they owe a great deal to Snorri because without his manuscripts studying a coherent record of the Norse Religion would be an impossible task.
Remnants of the Past
The Norse religion did not escape the fate that the introduction of Christianity had doomed it to. No European pagan beliefs did, however there are still shards of its mysticism buried in the day to day life of the Scandinavian culture. It’s important to recognize that compared to the rest of Europe, Christianity came very late to the Norsemen, and for a society that has so much history and folk tradition, it’s to be expected that any mysticism and superstition will be based out of their pagan roots.
One example is in the Vinland Sagas, which as I mentioned before were written to function as history books, however they are rampant with Viking superstition, attention to omens, and even conversations with the dead, which is interesting considering that they are not pre-Christian. In fact there are many Christian references in the sagas. Leif the Lucky himself was charge by the King of Norway to bring Christianity to Iceland. In addition it is likely that the authors of the original Vinland manuscripts were Christians rather than pagans, which means we must also have a healthy skepticism about the role of both the Christian and pagan religion in the tales.
Another example of mythical influence on Christian Scandinavia comes from the folklore of Norway. The stories are of simple, God-fearing people in a peasant culture, but they too cling to the superstitions of the pagan religion. The protagonists in these folk tales are always faced with obstacles in the form of magic and trolls, where trolls were originally the ugly, often stupid enemies of the Norse gods.
Whatever the case is, there are still tracks of the mythical Norse religion making their mark in the modern world of what once was home to a rich story telling culture. It could take its form in the folklore of Norway, or in the Faroe Islands where they still sing the ballads in traditional verse, but this oral, mythical religion played the key role in creating rich cultures that have not lost their roots in their pagan past.
Emoticons: More on the orality of instand messaging
Happy : )
Wink wink ; )
Angry Eyes: >: (
Sad : ( Big Nose : > ) (I made it up. Yay!)
OMG!! : O
Silly : P
I don't know : $
For anyone unfamiliar with emoticons, what you have to do is tilt your head 90 degrees to the left and these seemingly random puntuations become little faces conveying simple emotions.
In a techno age rampant with text messages and Email a truly interesting phenomenon has occured. Instead of taking the time to eloquently convey the emothions behind the writing we hav reverted back to practices that are distinctly part of the oral culture: that of facial expresions. When we talk to eachother we convey more emotion through facial expressions and body language than we do through words... Not the case in writing and typography... untill NOW!
Now we end a sentance like "my dog died" which is a sad statement, but the emotion isn't necesarily conveyed acurately, so at the end we tak on a little sad face : ( or if we, fo whatever reason, are angry about the death of our dog we tak on angry eyes >: (
It's like Mr. Potato head on a keyboard, but what I'm getting at is that we are reverting back to the symbolice representation of emotions. We no longer say "Pizza makes me happy" we say "Pizza! : )"
I don't like it much either, but I think it's either because people are lazy (mostly true) or they are inherently tied to expressing their emotions through something other than words. It makes sense since we are the only animals that do convey meaning through words.... that is unless we train a monkey to use sign language...
Wink wink ; )
Angry Eyes: >: (
Sad : ( Big Nose : > ) (I made it up. Yay!)
OMG!! : O
Silly : P
I don't know : $
For anyone unfamiliar with emoticons, what you have to do is tilt your head 90 degrees to the left and these seemingly random puntuations become little faces conveying simple emotions.
In a techno age rampant with text messages and Email a truly interesting phenomenon has occured. Instead of taking the time to eloquently convey the emothions behind the writing we hav reverted back to practices that are distinctly part of the oral culture: that of facial expresions. When we talk to eachother we convey more emotion through facial expressions and body language than we do through words... Not the case in writing and typography... untill NOW!
Now we end a sentance like "my dog died" which is a sad statement, but the emotion isn't necesarily conveyed acurately, so at the end we tak on a little sad face : ( or if we, fo whatever reason, are angry about the death of our dog we tak on angry eyes >: (
It's like Mr. Potato head on a keyboard, but what I'm getting at is that we are reverting back to the symbolice representation of emotions. We no longer say "Pizza makes me happy" we say "Pizza! : )"
I don't like it much either, but I think it's either because people are lazy (mostly true) or they are inherently tied to expressing their emotions through something other than words. It makes sense since we are the only animals that do convey meaning through words.... that is unless we train a monkey to use sign language...
Full Term Paper
Raven and the Light
Once Earth was bare and sunken into the abyss. And the light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this. The light was guarded by Mole and Mole kept it and would not share it. The other animals asked Mole to share the light but the greedy digger did not want it to shine for his eyes were sensitive. “I will keep the light buried and hidden,” said Mole, “because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.” Even though the other animals asked and pleaded mole would not let the light out so that he might share it and the Earth remained dark. Such was the nature of the world before the first Father of men.
In these times there was Mother Pelican and there was Father Osprey and they met in the darkness. And Mother Pelican did not know that Father Osprey was not a pelican because it was dark, but she loved him and Father Osprey loved her and they had a child who was black as night because he was conceived in darkness. Thus came about their child who was Raven and Raven was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good. Since Father Osprey was of the land and the plains and the mountains, and Mother Pelican was of the seas and oceans, Raven was able to travel between them and be all places. This the other birds could not do, for while they were people of the sky they were still tied to the ocean or tied to the land.
Then one day noble Bear came to Mother Pelican and Father Osprey. Bear was the most noble of the animals for he was strong and brave, and he too wanted Mole to share the light so he came to Pelican and Osprey so that he might meet Raven. He said “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is good. You can trick Mole, I think, and free the light for all the animals to enjoy.” Raven pondered these things in his head. He was not an adventurer like the wolf, or a traveler like the goose, but his heart was good and he wanted to help so he said to bear “I am not strong but I am smart, and Mole is made stupid by his selfishness. I am not fearless, but my heart is strong, and Mole is fearful because he cannot love. I think that I can defeat Mole and free the light, but I will need help.”
Bear was glad about this acceptance. “Paint faced Salmon has left the stream, and gone to the sea, but she knows well how to find Mole,” Bear told Raven. “You must go to the sea and speak to her.” Then Bear began to sing:
“Over the waters
The secrets will lie
And to paint-faced Salmon
You Raven must fly!
Learn you the secrets
And the light you will find
And free from selfish Mole
To share with all kind.
So fly you now Raven,
Your heart it is strong
And teach the greedy digger
His selfishness is wrong”
At the end of the song Raven took off toward the sea to find paint-faced Salmon. Raven flew over the flat lands and over the mountains and over the forests and over the valleys until he came to the land of the cliffs where the ocean met the land. There he met Turtle who was wise. Raven asked of turtle “Turtle, you are old and you are wise, and you know the ways of both the land and the sea. Can you help me?”
Turtle who was wise spoke slowly, for his mind was ancient and knew many things. “I know that you seek paint faced salmon so that you may seek the greedy mole who is hoarding the light. I lay still all day and the winds have told me such things. Fly along the coast, over the water. Paint faced Salmon will be on the current, so fallow the current to where she is.” With thanks Raven took off from Turtle’s place on the cliffs in search of the current where he would find paint faced salmon. He flew and fallowed the shoreline passing both cliff and beach until he came across the current of which Turtle had spoken. He then continued to fallow the current until finally he came across a place where there were many fish and they feared him because he appeared as though he were fishing.
“Fear not!” said Raven, “I am Raven and I seek paint faced Salmon for she knows where I may find the light. I am not a fisher, but I am trying to free the light and seek the help of paint faced Salmon!”
Then paint faced Salmon came forward and spoke. “Indeed I can show you where Mole is, but only Mole knows where it is that he has hidden the light. To find Mole you must go to a mountain that no longer has a top. Near the mountain there is a tree that has no leaves and it has had no leaves since the mountain lost its top, and there is a pond by the tree that has been black with the soot of the Mountain. It is a land of darkness and of fire and it is where you will find the greedy Mole.”
Raven bowed and said to paint faced Salmon, “Both the Pelican and the Osprey are fishers and they hunt the fish, but in thanks to you I, Raven, shall never hunt for the salmon or the trout.”
Salmon thanked him saying “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is truly good. I thank you on behalf of my kind.” With that Raven took off in search of a Mountain that no longer had a top. He soon came to such a place. The cap of the mountain was white, but flat for it no longer had a top and the forest had fled many miles from the base of the mountain. Only one tree remained and it no longer had leaves and it was on the edge of a pond that had been made black by the soot of the mountain. Here on this pond it was said that Mole lived and Raven circled the banks of the pond until he came across the opening of Mole’s hole. Raven sang:
“Come forth greedy Mole
And share all your light.
You’ve hidden the brightness
But this darkness is not right!
Tell me greedy Mole
Where you keep the light
And share with all kind
So the days may be bright!”
Mole came forth and looked at Raven and said “Raven, the light is mine and it should not be released into the sky. It hurts my eyes! In huts my eyes and so it must not be in the sky. I have hidden it below the earth and below the earth it will stay because it cannot be in the sky!”
All these things Mole told to Raven, but Raven was full of wit and tricks and he planned to trick the light away from Mole. “Mole, I spoke wrongly! I too want to keep the light hidden, but your hiding spot is not good enough! I found it right away!”
Mole was shocked and he stammered “I know not how you found my hiding spot, but we will go there to see if indeed you know where the light is hidden. Then if we must we may hide it again.” And so Mole led the way to a hidden place at the bottom of the mountain that no longer had a top. “Here is the place where I hid the light Raven, but it does not seem that you have taken it.”
Raven answered “But Mole, how can you know unless you dig to see if it is still under the earth where you put the light?” Mole knew this to be true so he began to dig where he had hidden the light under the earth, but when he scraped away enough soil a radiant light came forth from the earth and shone in his eyes. Mole was blinded by the brightness, and he cried loudly and called Raven evil things at Raven and Raven knew that Mole could not be allowed to get the light back, so he took the light in his beak and carried it into the sky and placed it in the heavens where Mole could not reach because he was tied to the ground.
And so today we still see the light in the sky where only Raven can reach it, and we sing songs of Raven who was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good and he shared the light, and we sing of Mole, who was greedy and selfish and is now blind.
Explanation: Why I’ve Failed
When I started writing this I was not intent on failing. I thought I would create something complete and almost magical in nature, but as I wrote it I realized more and more that this myth is a sham. I created it. I made it up. That alone may cause one to consider it a farce, but the real reason to call it that is because I wrote it. Ong tells us that in the oral tradition words are always going out of existence, but here I have immortalized these words using flash drives and laser printers. I composed it as a typographical piece and saved it as a Word document. It’s true that many myths have been recorded on paper and thus preserved, but that does not degrade them from their original mythical culture. Instead it removes them from the oral tradition. Something like an honorable discharge. This sham, this creation of mine never belonged to such a culture. Indeed, even though the motifs and themes borrow heavily from Native American culture, in the end this myth belongs to no culture at all.
Culture, in the end, may be defined more by a culture than anything else. Kane explains how myth can be defined as the song of a place to itself, (50). This quote may seem a little overused in our class, but it is still one of my favorites. A myth teaches peoples how to treat the land and how to live with the earth. Kane limits this feature to the myths of hunter-gatherer societies, but I think it is true of all cultures. For instance, the Norse societies would not have come to know the Deity Frey, a god of agriculture, if they were not an agricultural society, and the duality, or sense that the human realm and the natural realm are separate, can be traced to the creation stories. What though, can my myth speak to a culture of twenty-first century college students into which it was born? Almost nothing except that if one does a little background research on the traditional story form of Native Americans from the west coast that person can create a fairly realistic sounding myth.
That much I may have succeeded in. I did create something that could potentially fool someone that was unlearned in the traditions of oral cultures, but even one that was familiar would recognize the motifs of talking animals and a trickster hero making an epic journey. There is repetition and clichés and epithets and an overriding additive form, (Ong, 37) but that is not enough to create a successful myth. Here are a few reasons my myth falls short.
Kane tells us that myths are the products of dreams. (131) These dreams are more than the mere activity of the sleeping mind, they are gateways to truth and the metaphysical universe. They could be prophecies of what’s to come or stories of what has been, but the externalization of dreams is the realization of the potential to the actual. (Kane, 132) My story or myth is not the product of the dream world. If it were it would have been about a seagull saving a miniature person from a water dish, or a psychotic doctor chasing me with his robot arm. Instead, this story is not the remembrance of a supernatural or metaphysical dream, but merely the product of research and a meager idea for a term paper. I didn’t create anything real or honest or sacred. I was working and studying away to create a farce that is little more than a children’s story, when I should have been facing a wall with my eyes closed and dreaming. (Kane, 132)
Another failure is tied closely with the fact that this myth was not told but instead it was written. The problem with writing a myth is that myths are meant to be participatory and empathetic, (Ong, 45) but mine was created in solitude. Traditionally, in order for a story to exist there must be both a story tell and a listener. Without a listener the story fades into the walls and dies with the sound and is no more than noise. My story however, can exist without a listener because is composed not of sounds but of symbols, letters on a page. That is not to say that this story will ever be fully realized without a reader, but it certainly exists independently of either reader or listener. Most cultures have some sort of tradition surrounding the act of storytelling. The Finnish story telling culture (Finnish is very young as a literate language) involves one singer of songs and his helper crossing arms and holding hands as they and their listeners chant the stories of the Kalevala. I on the other hand sat alone on my laptop, or at a desk in the library, and composed a mock story that only a small and distant audience will read.
My myth, or be it a story since it has lost its standing as a myth, was created in the literate tradition. As we can see it does not satisfy the credentials to convey the truth and magic that would have made it a true myth, but at the same time I have not failed entirely. It could stand as a mock-up example of how a traditional myth might look. Here are some examples:
For the sake of discussion I would like to show just how my myth relates to a few of the psychodynamics of oralitiy that are presented by Ong, beginning with the notion that it is additive rather than subordanative. (37) I did my best to demonstrate this in the language of the myth by including introductory “ands.” This is a pretty simple concept but center your thought on how the language changes the focus in this example: “And the light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this.” This example is sufficient in showing that because I use the word “and” I can undermine the fact that “the light had not yet come” should be a causal remark in relation to the other remarks. That “the animals wander in the darkness” is caused by the absence of light, but this fact is not bothered with in oral traditions, so it is not recognized in the language.
I also used many clichés and epithets, which is true to Ong’s second psychodynamic that the language of the oral culture is aggregative.(38) I have the “Noble Bear” the “Turtle who is wise” and the raven is always referred to as “full of wit and trick, but with a good heart.” On a related note, (related because clichés are reptative) my myth is Redundant, which is true to yet another of Ong’s psychodynamics (39). Take for instance the passage “‘I will keep the light buried and hidden,’ said Mole, ‘because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.’” This is how the language, especially the dialogue functions in the myth, repeating itself and looping back to reiterate itself in a way that when read seems like it doesn’t function well, but when spoken has an actually pleasing effect on the sound and rhythm of the language.
Ong also says that the oral tradition is just that: traditional.(41) In order to recognize this I first picked a culture, namely the Native American culture of the present day Oregon and Washington coast. In these cultures animals are always personified and given voices. They are also revered in these cultures, especially animals such as the raven, who generally has a trickster personality, or the salmon, so I tried to work in these motifs that are traditional to a specific culture. I also added some verse in quatrain form with a pretty basic meter. I don’t think I need to describe what is conservative or traditional about the quatrain.
My myth is also devoid of the abstract or alien ideas, which keep it close to the human life world. (Ong, 42) The myth, which has not a single truly human element in it is still made entirely relatable to humans as it is a story, devoid of theories or lists or statistics, the types of abstract ideas that exist only in a literate culture. Part of being close to the human life world means that myths will be agonistically toned (Ong, 43) and this sense of struggle and conflict is real in my myth, even if it is a little underplayed. Raven has to struggle both internally and externally to reach his goals, concepts that can be abstracted from in a literate culture.
Ong brings up the ideas that oral societies are homeostatic (46) and situational rather than abstract (49) which quite frankly don’t translate will to my myth because they are more concerned with the culture itself than with the stories of that culture. Being homeostatic basically means that an Oral culture is willing to drop memory baggage if it is no longer relevant, and so the stories remain relevant to the present, while being situational means that things are taken to be concrete and are recognized, say, for what they do rather than where they can be categorized. For instance, Ong gives us the example of an illiterate man given pictures of a saw, a hatchet, a hammer, and a log. Remember how Sesame street always asks children which object doesn’t belong? Well in this case it’s the log because it is not a tool, but the illiterate man answered that it was the hammer, because both the saw and the hatchet could be used to cut the log while a hammer could not. Obviously this say more about the culture that their stories, so I will not attempt to apply it to my story.
That does it for Ong, but I would like to briefly relate to Kane and point out a few features that he introduces as relevant to myth and which I in turn attempted to apply to my own myth. One of these would be that there is practical wisdom hidden in the story.(Kane, 38) In mine I did my best to relay practical wisdom that Salmon leave the rivers at certain times of the year and go to the ocean to fallow the current. That is essentially the reason for the entire existence of paint faced Salmon. Or it could offer a moral. Mole was blinded because he was selfish, so it fallows that we should learn not to be selfish. It also delivers explanation for things which are taken for granted, which is another feature of myth. This could be the explanation for Raven’s blackness, for Mole’s blindness, of even something as mundane as why ravens don’t fish. We in a modern society would simply accept that a raven belongs to a classification of birds that do not eat fish, but that explanation by classification would not be acceptable for a society that might know a myth like the one I have written. They want to know WHY, not simply what.
This is all fine and well, but in the end my story falls short of the supernatural or magical quality of the myth. It is fairly well constructed and contains many of the features that are common in the oral tradition but in the end it lacks the most important quality: it was born out of and created in the fashion of a literary tradition. I am not trying to undermine the values of literature or writing as it has many cultural benefits and has allowed humanity to advance far beyond what it would have been without the invention of writing or even typography, and my story, trivial though it may be, can hold its head up high in this culture. It is a fine yet simple story, created with much thought and high intentions, but it is not a myth.
Once Earth was bare and sunken into the abyss. And the light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this. The light was guarded by Mole and Mole kept it and would not share it. The other animals asked Mole to share the light but the greedy digger did not want it to shine for his eyes were sensitive. “I will keep the light buried and hidden,” said Mole, “because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.” Even though the other animals asked and pleaded mole would not let the light out so that he might share it and the Earth remained dark. Such was the nature of the world before the first Father of men.
In these times there was Mother Pelican and there was Father Osprey and they met in the darkness. And Mother Pelican did not know that Father Osprey was not a pelican because it was dark, but she loved him and Father Osprey loved her and they had a child who was black as night because he was conceived in darkness. Thus came about their child who was Raven and Raven was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good. Since Father Osprey was of the land and the plains and the mountains, and Mother Pelican was of the seas and oceans, Raven was able to travel between them and be all places. This the other birds could not do, for while they were people of the sky they were still tied to the ocean or tied to the land.
Then one day noble Bear came to Mother Pelican and Father Osprey. Bear was the most noble of the animals for he was strong and brave, and he too wanted Mole to share the light so he came to Pelican and Osprey so that he might meet Raven. He said “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is good. You can trick Mole, I think, and free the light for all the animals to enjoy.” Raven pondered these things in his head. He was not an adventurer like the wolf, or a traveler like the goose, but his heart was good and he wanted to help so he said to bear “I am not strong but I am smart, and Mole is made stupid by his selfishness. I am not fearless, but my heart is strong, and Mole is fearful because he cannot love. I think that I can defeat Mole and free the light, but I will need help.”
Bear was glad about this acceptance. “Paint faced Salmon has left the stream, and gone to the sea, but she knows well how to find Mole,” Bear told Raven. “You must go to the sea and speak to her.” Then Bear began to sing:
“Over the waters
The secrets will lie
And to paint-faced Salmon
You Raven must fly!
Learn you the secrets
And the light you will find
And free from selfish Mole
To share with all kind.
So fly you now Raven,
Your heart it is strong
And teach the greedy digger
His selfishness is wrong”
At the end of the song Raven took off toward the sea to find paint-faced Salmon. Raven flew over the flat lands and over the mountains and over the forests and over the valleys until he came to the land of the cliffs where the ocean met the land. There he met Turtle who was wise. Raven asked of turtle “Turtle, you are old and you are wise, and you know the ways of both the land and the sea. Can you help me?”
Turtle who was wise spoke slowly, for his mind was ancient and knew many things. “I know that you seek paint faced salmon so that you may seek the greedy mole who is hoarding the light. I lay still all day and the winds have told me such things. Fly along the coast, over the water. Paint faced Salmon will be on the current, so fallow the current to where she is.” With thanks Raven took off from Turtle’s place on the cliffs in search of the current where he would find paint faced salmon. He flew and fallowed the shoreline passing both cliff and beach until he came across the current of which Turtle had spoken. He then continued to fallow the current until finally he came across a place where there were many fish and they feared him because he appeared as though he were fishing.
“Fear not!” said Raven, “I am Raven and I seek paint faced Salmon for she knows where I may find the light. I am not a fisher, but I am trying to free the light and seek the help of paint faced Salmon!”
Then paint faced Salmon came forward and spoke. “Indeed I can show you where Mole is, but only Mole knows where it is that he has hidden the light. To find Mole you must go to a mountain that no longer has a top. Near the mountain there is a tree that has no leaves and it has had no leaves since the mountain lost its top, and there is a pond by the tree that has been black with the soot of the Mountain. It is a land of darkness and of fire and it is where you will find the greedy Mole.”
Raven bowed and said to paint faced Salmon, “Both the Pelican and the Osprey are fishers and they hunt the fish, but in thanks to you I, Raven, shall never hunt for the salmon or the trout.”
Salmon thanked him saying “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is truly good. I thank you on behalf of my kind.” With that Raven took off in search of a Mountain that no longer had a top. He soon came to such a place. The cap of the mountain was white, but flat for it no longer had a top and the forest had fled many miles from the base of the mountain. Only one tree remained and it no longer had leaves and it was on the edge of a pond that had been made black by the soot of the mountain. Here on this pond it was said that Mole lived and Raven circled the banks of the pond until he came across the opening of Mole’s hole. Raven sang:
“Come forth greedy Mole
And share all your light.
You’ve hidden the brightness
But this darkness is not right!
Tell me greedy Mole
Where you keep the light
And share with all kind
So the days may be bright!”
Mole came forth and looked at Raven and said “Raven, the light is mine and it should not be released into the sky. It hurts my eyes! In huts my eyes and so it must not be in the sky. I have hidden it below the earth and below the earth it will stay because it cannot be in the sky!”
All these things Mole told to Raven, but Raven was full of wit and tricks and he planned to trick the light away from Mole. “Mole, I spoke wrongly! I too want to keep the light hidden, but your hiding spot is not good enough! I found it right away!”
Mole was shocked and he stammered “I know not how you found my hiding spot, but we will go there to see if indeed you know where the light is hidden. Then if we must we may hide it again.” And so Mole led the way to a hidden place at the bottom of the mountain that no longer had a top. “Here is the place where I hid the light Raven, but it does not seem that you have taken it.”
Raven answered “But Mole, how can you know unless you dig to see if it is still under the earth where you put the light?” Mole knew this to be true so he began to dig where he had hidden the light under the earth, but when he scraped away enough soil a radiant light came forth from the earth and shone in his eyes. Mole was blinded by the brightness, and he cried loudly and called Raven evil things at Raven and Raven knew that Mole could not be allowed to get the light back, so he took the light in his beak and carried it into the sky and placed it in the heavens where Mole could not reach because he was tied to the ground.
And so today we still see the light in the sky where only Raven can reach it, and we sing songs of Raven who was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good and he shared the light, and we sing of Mole, who was greedy and selfish and is now blind.
Explanation: Why I’ve Failed
When I started writing this I was not intent on failing. I thought I would create something complete and almost magical in nature, but as I wrote it I realized more and more that this myth is a sham. I created it. I made it up. That alone may cause one to consider it a farce, but the real reason to call it that is because I wrote it. Ong tells us that in the oral tradition words are always going out of existence, but here I have immortalized these words using flash drives and laser printers. I composed it as a typographical piece and saved it as a Word document. It’s true that many myths have been recorded on paper and thus preserved, but that does not degrade them from their original mythical culture. Instead it removes them from the oral tradition. Something like an honorable discharge. This sham, this creation of mine never belonged to such a culture. Indeed, even though the motifs and themes borrow heavily from Native American culture, in the end this myth belongs to no culture at all.
Culture, in the end, may be defined more by a culture than anything else. Kane explains how myth can be defined as the song of a place to itself, (50). This quote may seem a little overused in our class, but it is still one of my favorites. A myth teaches peoples how to treat the land and how to live with the earth. Kane limits this feature to the myths of hunter-gatherer societies, but I think it is true of all cultures. For instance, the Norse societies would not have come to know the Deity Frey, a god of agriculture, if they were not an agricultural society, and the duality, or sense that the human realm and the natural realm are separate, can be traced to the creation stories. What though, can my myth speak to a culture of twenty-first century college students into which it was born? Almost nothing except that if one does a little background research on the traditional story form of Native Americans from the west coast that person can create a fairly realistic sounding myth.
That much I may have succeeded in. I did create something that could potentially fool someone that was unlearned in the traditions of oral cultures, but even one that was familiar would recognize the motifs of talking animals and a trickster hero making an epic journey. There is repetition and clichés and epithets and an overriding additive form, (Ong, 37) but that is not enough to create a successful myth. Here are a few reasons my myth falls short.
Kane tells us that myths are the products of dreams. (131) These dreams are more than the mere activity of the sleeping mind, they are gateways to truth and the metaphysical universe. They could be prophecies of what’s to come or stories of what has been, but the externalization of dreams is the realization of the potential to the actual. (Kane, 132) My story or myth is not the product of the dream world. If it were it would have been about a seagull saving a miniature person from a water dish, or a psychotic doctor chasing me with his robot arm. Instead, this story is not the remembrance of a supernatural or metaphysical dream, but merely the product of research and a meager idea for a term paper. I didn’t create anything real or honest or sacred. I was working and studying away to create a farce that is little more than a children’s story, when I should have been facing a wall with my eyes closed and dreaming. (Kane, 132)
Another failure is tied closely with the fact that this myth was not told but instead it was written. The problem with writing a myth is that myths are meant to be participatory and empathetic, (Ong, 45) but mine was created in solitude. Traditionally, in order for a story to exist there must be both a story tell and a listener. Without a listener the story fades into the walls and dies with the sound and is no more than noise. My story however, can exist without a listener because is composed not of sounds but of symbols, letters on a page. That is not to say that this story will ever be fully realized without a reader, but it certainly exists independently of either reader or listener. Most cultures have some sort of tradition surrounding the act of storytelling. The Finnish story telling culture (Finnish is very young as a literate language) involves one singer of songs and his helper crossing arms and holding hands as they and their listeners chant the stories of the Kalevala. I on the other hand sat alone on my laptop, or at a desk in the library, and composed a mock story that only a small and distant audience will read.
My myth, or be it a story since it has lost its standing as a myth, was created in the literate tradition. As we can see it does not satisfy the credentials to convey the truth and magic that would have made it a true myth, but at the same time I have not failed entirely. It could stand as a mock-up example of how a traditional myth might look. Here are some examples:
For the sake of discussion I would like to show just how my myth relates to a few of the psychodynamics of oralitiy that are presented by Ong, beginning with the notion that it is additive rather than subordanative. (37) I did my best to demonstrate this in the language of the myth by including introductory “ands.” This is a pretty simple concept but center your thought on how the language changes the focus in this example: “And the light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this.” This example is sufficient in showing that because I use the word “and” I can undermine the fact that “the light had not yet come” should be a causal remark in relation to the other remarks. That “the animals wander in the darkness” is caused by the absence of light, but this fact is not bothered with in oral traditions, so it is not recognized in the language.
I also used many clichés and epithets, which is true to Ong’s second psychodynamic that the language of the oral culture is aggregative.(38) I have the “Noble Bear” the “Turtle who is wise” and the raven is always referred to as “full of wit and trick, but with a good heart.” On a related note, (related because clichés are reptative) my myth is Redundant, which is true to yet another of Ong’s psychodynamics (39). Take for instance the passage “‘I will keep the light buried and hidden,’ said Mole, ‘because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.’” This is how the language, especially the dialogue functions in the myth, repeating itself and looping back to reiterate itself in a way that when read seems like it doesn’t function well, but when spoken has an actually pleasing effect on the sound and rhythm of the language.
Ong also says that the oral tradition is just that: traditional.(41) In order to recognize this I first picked a culture, namely the Native American culture of the present day Oregon and Washington coast. In these cultures animals are always personified and given voices. They are also revered in these cultures, especially animals such as the raven, who generally has a trickster personality, or the salmon, so I tried to work in these motifs that are traditional to a specific culture. I also added some verse in quatrain form with a pretty basic meter. I don’t think I need to describe what is conservative or traditional about the quatrain.
My myth is also devoid of the abstract or alien ideas, which keep it close to the human life world. (Ong, 42) The myth, which has not a single truly human element in it is still made entirely relatable to humans as it is a story, devoid of theories or lists or statistics, the types of abstract ideas that exist only in a literate culture. Part of being close to the human life world means that myths will be agonistically toned (Ong, 43) and this sense of struggle and conflict is real in my myth, even if it is a little underplayed. Raven has to struggle both internally and externally to reach his goals, concepts that can be abstracted from in a literate culture.
Ong brings up the ideas that oral societies are homeostatic (46) and situational rather than abstract (49) which quite frankly don’t translate will to my myth because they are more concerned with the culture itself than with the stories of that culture. Being homeostatic basically means that an Oral culture is willing to drop memory baggage if it is no longer relevant, and so the stories remain relevant to the present, while being situational means that things are taken to be concrete and are recognized, say, for what they do rather than where they can be categorized. For instance, Ong gives us the example of an illiterate man given pictures of a saw, a hatchet, a hammer, and a log. Remember how Sesame street always asks children which object doesn’t belong? Well in this case it’s the log because it is not a tool, but the illiterate man answered that it was the hammer, because both the saw and the hatchet could be used to cut the log while a hammer could not. Obviously this say more about the culture that their stories, so I will not attempt to apply it to my story.
That does it for Ong, but I would like to briefly relate to Kane and point out a few features that he introduces as relevant to myth and which I in turn attempted to apply to my own myth. One of these would be that there is practical wisdom hidden in the story.(Kane, 38) In mine I did my best to relay practical wisdom that Salmon leave the rivers at certain times of the year and go to the ocean to fallow the current. That is essentially the reason for the entire existence of paint faced Salmon. Or it could offer a moral. Mole was blinded because he was selfish, so it fallows that we should learn not to be selfish. It also delivers explanation for things which are taken for granted, which is another feature of myth. This could be the explanation for Raven’s blackness, for Mole’s blindness, of even something as mundane as why ravens don’t fish. We in a modern society would simply accept that a raven belongs to a classification of birds that do not eat fish, but that explanation by classification would not be acceptable for a society that might know a myth like the one I have written. They want to know WHY, not simply what.
This is all fine and well, but in the end my story falls short of the supernatural or magical quality of the myth. It is fairly well constructed and contains many of the features that are common in the oral tradition but in the end it lacks the most important quality: it was born out of and created in the fashion of a literary tradition. I am not trying to undermine the values of literature or writing as it has many cultural benefits and has allowed humanity to advance far beyond what it would have been without the invention of writing or even typography, and my story, trivial though it may be, can hold its head up high in this culture. It is a fine yet simple story, created with much thought and high intentions, but it is not a myth.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Random thoughts concerning IM and Text Messages
Until about five minutes ago I was under the impression that Texting and Instant Messaging were of the same nature.
Now I realise very clearly why they are not and it is inherent not in WHAT a text or an IM is but WHY we use them and which direction they point on a spectrum between the print and oral cultures.
Instant messaging is a step away from the literate tradition. It is instant, it is conversational, and even though there is a physical distance between two parties, they are much closer mentally than someone sending a letter, writing a book, or even an Email. Yes, the fact is that these conversations can be save and made permanent and that may cause one to consider it ultimately part of the print culture, but I maintain that it is indeed closer to that of an oral culture.
Text Messaging as done via cell phone is however part of the print culture. I don't really like texting much. I avoided it as long as I could because I find it inconvenient, I find it impersonal, and most importantly because I don't want Carpal Tunnel. It is the second reason, however, that causes me to think it is part of the print culture. It is impersonal, it is distant, and unlike the instant message which was created to close the gap between literate people, text messages do exactly the opposite. Their selling point is that one no longer has to engage in verbal contact to convey simple messages that they would otherwise not bother writing down. They also create a time lag. The texts will be just as relevant in five minutes as they were when they were sent, and so long as we don't need to vocalize our thoughts we are content to wait on the reply.
I have a friend that doesn't use her phone. You can call her, but she will not pick up. Right after you will recieve a text message asking what it is you want. I love this friend of mine, but I hate that she does this.
Now I realise very clearly why they are not and it is inherent not in WHAT a text or an IM is but WHY we use them and which direction they point on a spectrum between the print and oral cultures.
Instant messaging is a step away from the literate tradition. It is instant, it is conversational, and even though there is a physical distance between two parties, they are much closer mentally than someone sending a letter, writing a book, or even an Email. Yes, the fact is that these conversations can be save and made permanent and that may cause one to consider it ultimately part of the print culture, but I maintain that it is indeed closer to that of an oral culture.
Text Messaging as done via cell phone is however part of the print culture. I don't really like texting much. I avoided it as long as I could because I find it inconvenient, I find it impersonal, and most importantly because I don't want Carpal Tunnel. It is the second reason, however, that causes me to think it is part of the print culture. It is impersonal, it is distant, and unlike the instant message which was created to close the gap between literate people, text messages do exactly the opposite. Their selling point is that one no longer has to engage in verbal contact to convey simple messages that they would otherwise not bother writing down. They also create a time lag. The texts will be just as relevant in five minutes as they were when they were sent, and so long as we don't need to vocalize our thoughts we are content to wait on the reply.
I have a friend that doesn't use her phone. You can call her, but she will not pick up. Right after you will recieve a text message asking what it is you want. I love this friend of mine, but I hate that she does this.
Listening to presentations.
I'm glad I go so close to the end of these presentations. Every time I hear someone speak about their project--I used to call them papers, but thanks to Tai I now feel like that term is inadequate--every time someone shares their project I feel like I need to tweak this or adjust that in my own project. I think I will like the final form it will take.
As I mentioned in my last post... or more than mentioned, rather explained and shared, part of my project is a myth, which is written in it's entirety on the same blog. Right now I have a few pages of commentary written on why it is a decent myth, but now I feel like that is a terrible rout to take. Now I feel like the final form will be explaining exactly WHY I FAILED to create a good myth in the truly oral tradition.
Mind you, this is not to say that I think I've failed my project, only that I was doomed to fail in the creation of a myth. I will explain why on Wednesday.
As I mentioned in my last post... or more than mentioned, rather explained and shared, part of my project is a myth, which is written in it's entirety on the same blog. Right now I have a few pages of commentary written on why it is a decent myth, but now I feel like that is a terrible rout to take. Now I feel like the final form will be explaining exactly WHY I FAILED to create a good myth in the truly oral tradition.
Mind you, this is not to say that I think I've failed my project, only that I was doomed to fail in the creation of a myth. I will explain why on Wednesday.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
MMMMMmmmmm... blog.... term paper too.
I think we should have more opportunities to sing in class. Thanks for that John.
I've really been a lazy blogger. I could make up excuses for why my blog is lacking but that doesn't help anyone, it just causes me to look a little more like an ass.
So I have to backtrack and think about the group presentations. I thought they were good, and ours was OK... I'm just sorry ours wasn't more theatrical like so many of the others.
The truth of the matter is that Kane is not an easy read. He has very dense academic writing that forces the us to re-read ever single sentence before we can get anything out of it, and then the next time we read it we get something entirely different out of it. My section on "Things and States" quite frankly told me something different every time I read it, but I think that's one of the beauties of Kane: I think certain aspects of the oral tradition have been absorbed into his work. I think that one of the reasons he's so hard for me to understand sometimes is that since Wisdom of the Mythtellers is a book I end up trying to read it when I should be listening.
That sounds weird and I'm still trying to figure out how to listen to a book, but I'm confident that Sean Kane is writing to someone that will think like a listener rather than a reader.
As for my term paper... I'm working on final touches this evening, but I'm nervous about it. I had a very difficult time thinking of a topic I truly wanted to write on, but as I read Kane and Ong and noticed the features they pointed out that belonged to an Oral tradition I realised what I really wanted to do: I wanted to write my own myth!
So that is what I've done is my best to write a myth in a form that might even fool Ong or Kane, and here is what I've got:
Raven and the Light
Once Earth was bare and sunken into the abyss. The light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this. The light was guarded by Mole and Mole kept it and would not share it. The other animals asked Mole to share the light but the greedy digger did not want it to shine for his eyes were sensitive. “I will keep the light buried and hidden,” said Mole, “because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.” Even though the other animals asked and pleaded mole would not let the light out so that he might share it and the Earth remained dark. Such was the nature of the world before the first Father of men.
In these times there was Mother Pelican and there was Father Osprey and they met in the darkness. And Mother Pelican did not know that Father Osprey was not a pelican because it was dark, but she loved him and Father Osprey loved her and they had a child who was black as night because he was conceived in darkness. Thus came about their child who was Raven and Raven was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good. Since Father Osprey was of the land and the plains and the mountains, and Mother Pelican was of the seas and oceans, Raven was able to travel between them and be all places. This the other birds could not do, for while they were people of the sky they were still tied to the ocean or tied to the land.
Then one day noble Bear came to Mother Pelican and Father Osprey. Bear was the most noble of the animals for he was strong and brave, and he too wanted Mole to share the light so he came to Pelican and Osprey so that he might meet Raven. He said “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is good. You can trick Mole, I think, and free the light for all the animals to enjoy.” Raven pondered these things in his head. He was not an adventurer like the wolf, or a traveler like the goose, but his heart was good and he wanted to help so he said to bear “I am not strong but I am smart, and Mole is made stupid by his selfishness. I am not fearless, but my heart is strong, and Mole is fearful because he cannot love. I think that I can defeat Mole and free the light, but I will need help.”
Bear was glad about this acceptance. “Paint faced Salmon has left the stream, and gone to the sea, but she knows well how to find Mole,” Bear told Raven. “You must go to the sea and speak to her.” Then Bear began to sing:
“Over the waters
The secrets will lie
And to paint-faced Salmon
You Raven must fly!
Learn you the secrets
And the light you will find
And free from selfish Mole
To share with all kind.
So fly you now Raven,
Your heart it is strong
And teach the greedy digger
His selfishness is wrong”
At the end of the song Raven took off toward the sea to find paint-faced Salmon. Raven flew over the flat lands and over the mountains and over the forests and over the valleys until he came to the land of the cliffs where the ocean met the land. There he met Turtle who was wise. Raven asked of turtle “Turtle, you are old and you are wise, and you know the ways of both the land and the sea. Can you help me?”
Turtle who was wise spoke slowly, for his mind was ancient and knew many things. “I know that you seek paint faced salmon so that you may seek the greedy mole who is hoarding the light. I lay still all day and the winds have told me such things. Fly along the coast, over the water. Paint faced Salmon will be on the current, so fallow the current to where she is.” With thanks Raven took off from Turtle’s place on the cliffs in search of the current where he would find paint faced salmon. He flew and fallowed the shoreline passing both cliff and beach until he came across the current of which Turtle had spoken. He then continued to fallow the current until finally he came across a place where there were many fish and they feared him because he appeared as though he were fishing.
“Fear not!” said Raven, “I am Raven and I seek paint faced Salmon for she knows where I may find the light. I am not a fisher, but I am trying to free the light and seek the help of paint faced Salmon!”
Then paint faced Salmon came forward and spoke. “Indeed I can show you where Mole is, but only Mole knows where it is that he has hidden the light. To find Mole you must go to a mountain that no longer has a top. Near the mountain there is a tree that has no leaves and it has had no leaves since the mountain lost its top, and there is a pond by the tree that has been black with the soot of the Mountain. It is a land of darkness and of fire and it is where you will find the greedy Mole.”
Raven bowed and said to paint faced Salmon, “Both the Pelican and the Osprey are fishers and they hunt the fish, but in thanks to you I, Raven, shall never hunt for the salmon or the trout.”
Salmon thanked him saying “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is truly good. I thank you on behalf of my kind.” With that Raven took off in search of a Mountain that no longer had a top. He soon came to such a place. The cap of the mountain was white, but flat for it no longer had a top and the forest had fled many miles from the base of the mountain. Only one tree remained and it no longer had leaves and it was on the edge of a pond that had been made black by the soot of the mountain. Here on this pond it was said that Mole lived and Raven circled the banks of the pond until he came across the opening of Mole’s hole. Raven sang:
“Come forth greedy Mole
And share all your light.
You’ve hidden the brightness
But this darkness is not right!
Tell me greedy Mole
Where you keep the light
And share with all kind
So the days may be bright!”
Mole came forth and looked at Raven and said “Raven, the light is mine and it should not be released into the sky. It hurts my eyes! In huts my eyes and so it must not be in the sky. I have hidden it below the earth and below the earth it will stay every day!”
All these things Mole told to Raven, but Raven was full of wit and tricks and he planned to trick the light away from Mole. “Mole, I spoke wrongly! I too want to keep the light hidden, but your hiding spot is not good enough! I found it right away!”
Mole was shocked and he stammered “I know not how you found my hiding spot, but we will go there to see if indeed you know where the light is hidden. Then if we must we may hide it again.” And so Mole led the way to a hidden place at the bottom of the mountain that no longer had a top. “Here is the place where I hid the light Raven, but it does not seem that you have taken it.”
Raven answered “But Mole, how can you know unless you dig to see if it is still under the earth where you put the light?” Mole knew this to be true so he began to dig where he had hidden the light under the earth, but when he scraped away enough soil a radiant light came forth from the earth and shone in his eyes. Mole was blinded by the brightness, and he cried loudly and called Raven a trickster. Raven knew that Mole could not be allowed to get the light back, so he took the light in his beak and carried it into the sky and placed it in the heavens where Mole could not reach because he was tied to the ground.
And so today we still see the light in the sky where only Raven can reach it, and we sing songs of Raven who was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good and he shared the light, and we sing of Mole, who was greedy and selfish and is now blind.
My paper doesn't actually end there. There is explanation for why it has been written in this fashion as well as some academic reflection in the light of Ong and Kane, but this part of the paper needs work.
Anyway....
I've really been a lazy blogger. I could make up excuses for why my blog is lacking but that doesn't help anyone, it just causes me to look a little more like an ass.
So I have to backtrack and think about the group presentations. I thought they were good, and ours was OK... I'm just sorry ours wasn't more theatrical like so many of the others.
The truth of the matter is that Kane is not an easy read. He has very dense academic writing that forces the us to re-read ever single sentence before we can get anything out of it, and then the next time we read it we get something entirely different out of it. My section on "Things and States" quite frankly told me something different every time I read it, but I think that's one of the beauties of Kane: I think certain aspects of the oral tradition have been absorbed into his work. I think that one of the reasons he's so hard for me to understand sometimes is that since Wisdom of the Mythtellers is a book I end up trying to read it when I should be listening.
That sounds weird and I'm still trying to figure out how to listen to a book, but I'm confident that Sean Kane is writing to someone that will think like a listener rather than a reader.
As for my term paper... I'm working on final touches this evening, but I'm nervous about it. I had a very difficult time thinking of a topic I truly wanted to write on, but as I read Kane and Ong and noticed the features they pointed out that belonged to an Oral tradition I realised what I really wanted to do: I wanted to write my own myth!
So that is what I've done is my best to write a myth in a form that might even fool Ong or Kane, and here is what I've got:
Raven and the Light
Once Earth was bare and sunken into the abyss. The light had not yet come to warm Earth and the animals wandered in darkness and the ice was never to melt and the animals were sad because of this. The light was guarded by Mole and Mole kept it and would not share it. The other animals asked Mole to share the light but the greedy digger did not want it to shine for his eyes were sensitive. “I will keep the light buried and hidden,” said Mole, “because it hurts my eyes I will keep it hidden.” Even though the other animals asked and pleaded mole would not let the light out so that he might share it and the Earth remained dark. Such was the nature of the world before the first Father of men.
In these times there was Mother Pelican and there was Father Osprey and they met in the darkness. And Mother Pelican did not know that Father Osprey was not a pelican because it was dark, but she loved him and Father Osprey loved her and they had a child who was black as night because he was conceived in darkness. Thus came about their child who was Raven and Raven was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good. Since Father Osprey was of the land and the plains and the mountains, and Mother Pelican was of the seas and oceans, Raven was able to travel between them and be all places. This the other birds could not do, for while they were people of the sky they were still tied to the ocean or tied to the land.
Then one day noble Bear came to Mother Pelican and Father Osprey. Bear was the most noble of the animals for he was strong and brave, and he too wanted Mole to share the light so he came to Pelican and Osprey so that he might meet Raven. He said “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is good. You can trick Mole, I think, and free the light for all the animals to enjoy.” Raven pondered these things in his head. He was not an adventurer like the wolf, or a traveler like the goose, but his heart was good and he wanted to help so he said to bear “I am not strong but I am smart, and Mole is made stupid by his selfishness. I am not fearless, but my heart is strong, and Mole is fearful because he cannot love. I think that I can defeat Mole and free the light, but I will need help.”
Bear was glad about this acceptance. “Paint faced Salmon has left the stream, and gone to the sea, but she knows well how to find Mole,” Bear told Raven. “You must go to the sea and speak to her.” Then Bear began to sing:
“Over the waters
The secrets will lie
And to paint-faced Salmon
You Raven must fly!
Learn you the secrets
And the light you will find
And free from selfish Mole
To share with all kind.
So fly you now Raven,
Your heart it is strong
And teach the greedy digger
His selfishness is wrong”
At the end of the song Raven took off toward the sea to find paint-faced Salmon. Raven flew over the flat lands and over the mountains and over the forests and over the valleys until he came to the land of the cliffs where the ocean met the land. There he met Turtle who was wise. Raven asked of turtle “Turtle, you are old and you are wise, and you know the ways of both the land and the sea. Can you help me?”
Turtle who was wise spoke slowly, for his mind was ancient and knew many things. “I know that you seek paint faced salmon so that you may seek the greedy mole who is hoarding the light. I lay still all day and the winds have told me such things. Fly along the coast, over the water. Paint faced Salmon will be on the current, so fallow the current to where she is.” With thanks Raven took off from Turtle’s place on the cliffs in search of the current where he would find paint faced salmon. He flew and fallowed the shoreline passing both cliff and beach until he came across the current of which Turtle had spoken. He then continued to fallow the current until finally he came across a place where there were many fish and they feared him because he appeared as though he were fishing.
“Fear not!” said Raven, “I am Raven and I seek paint faced Salmon for she knows where I may find the light. I am not a fisher, but I am trying to free the light and seek the help of paint faced Salmon!”
Then paint faced Salmon came forward and spoke. “Indeed I can show you where Mole is, but only Mole knows where it is that he has hidden the light. To find Mole you must go to a mountain that no longer has a top. Near the mountain there is a tree that has no leaves and it has had no leaves since the mountain lost its top, and there is a pond by the tree that has been black with the soot of the Mountain. It is a land of darkness and of fire and it is where you will find the greedy Mole.”
Raven bowed and said to paint faced Salmon, “Both the Pelican and the Osprey are fishers and they hunt the fish, but in thanks to you I, Raven, shall never hunt for the salmon or the trout.”
Salmon thanked him saying “Raven, you are full of wit and tricks, but your heart is truly good. I thank you on behalf of my kind.” With that Raven took off in search of a Mountain that no longer had a top. He soon came to such a place. The cap of the mountain was white, but flat for it no longer had a top and the forest had fled many miles from the base of the mountain. Only one tree remained and it no longer had leaves and it was on the edge of a pond that had been made black by the soot of the mountain. Here on this pond it was said that Mole lived and Raven circled the banks of the pond until he came across the opening of Mole’s hole. Raven sang:
“Come forth greedy Mole
And share all your light.
You’ve hidden the brightness
But this darkness is not right!
Tell me greedy Mole
Where you keep the light
And share with all kind
So the days may be bright!”
Mole came forth and looked at Raven and said “Raven, the light is mine and it should not be released into the sky. It hurts my eyes! In huts my eyes and so it must not be in the sky. I have hidden it below the earth and below the earth it will stay every day!”
All these things Mole told to Raven, but Raven was full of wit and tricks and he planned to trick the light away from Mole. “Mole, I spoke wrongly! I too want to keep the light hidden, but your hiding spot is not good enough! I found it right away!”
Mole was shocked and he stammered “I know not how you found my hiding spot, but we will go there to see if indeed you know where the light is hidden. Then if we must we may hide it again.” And so Mole led the way to a hidden place at the bottom of the mountain that no longer had a top. “Here is the place where I hid the light Raven, but it does not seem that you have taken it.”
Raven answered “But Mole, how can you know unless you dig to see if it is still under the earth where you put the light?” Mole knew this to be true so he began to dig where he had hidden the light under the earth, but when he scraped away enough soil a radiant light came forth from the earth and shone in his eyes. Mole was blinded by the brightness, and he cried loudly and called Raven a trickster. Raven knew that Mole could not be allowed to get the light back, so he took the light in his beak and carried it into the sky and placed it in the heavens where Mole could not reach because he was tied to the ground.
And so today we still see the light in the sky where only Raven can reach it, and we sing songs of Raven who was full of wit and tricks, but his heart was good and he shared the light, and we sing of Mole, who was greedy and selfish and is now blind.
My paper doesn't actually end there. There is explanation for why it has been written in this fashion as well as some academic reflection in the light of Ong and Kane, but this part of the paper needs work.
Anyway....
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