MYTHOLOGY: TOP 10 BOOKS (HONORABLE MENTION)

 

I live in a mythic world – and I don’t just have a top ten mythology books or my usual twenty special mentions, I also have honorable mentions.

Indeed, I have honorable mentions for books in selected subjects of mythology, where there are enough entries for that subject (potentially racking them up for a top ten in that subject) – hence my honorable mentions for the Bible and Biblical mythology, classical mythology, and zen or tao.

These are the rest of my honorable mentions for mythology books, in general or other subjects of mythology, in chronological or date order, usually date of publication for books.

 

 

 

BEOWULF:

SEAMUS HEANEY – A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION

 

The most enduring mythic character – along with antagonists Grendel and his mother (with the subsequent dragon tending to be overlooked for that more intriguing mother and son duo) – from “the oldest surviving work of fiction in the English language, written sometime between 700 and 1000 AD”.

Indeed it’s so old – how old is it? Older than yo momma (but not Grendel’s momma) – “that the language it’s written in is barely recognizable as English” and it is more correctly described as Old English.

Like the Iliad and Odyssey earlier in these special mentions, it is an epic poem, but in Beowulf’s case it is “in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend”. The story, set in pagan Scandinavia, is reasonably well known, at least in outline, and is in an effective three-part structure that perhaps has added to its enduring appeal.

Beowulf, a “hero of the Geats” (in southern Sweden), “comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes” (once again gloomy Denmark pops up in classic literature), “whose mead hall Heorot has been under attack by the monster Grendel for twelve years”. In the first part, Beowulf faces off with Grendel, tearing off his arm and slaying him. In the second, Beowulf faces off against Grendel’s monstrous mother out for vengeance and slays her too. Yass hero, slay! Although he slays her in a very different sense in the 2007 film adaptation – not surprisingly given she appears as a golden form of her voice actress Angelina Jolie, complete with high heels! In the third, Beowulf, now a king in his elderly years, faces off and defeats a dragon, but “is mortally wounded in the battle”.

And now, in a posthumous fourth act, Beowulf wins honorable mention for my books of mythology – reflecting its status as one of the most translated works of Old English literature (in poetry and prose) as well as one of the most adapted and interpreted works of English literature in general. Not bad for a poem over a millennium in age, even going on a millennium and a half.

One such translation is the “new verse translation” by Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was widely acclaimed by critics, albeit not universally – perhaps not surprisingly as no less than J.R.R. Tolkien wrote on the difficulty of translating Beowulf in an essay (“On translating Beowulf”).

On the subject of J.R.R. Tolkien, here’s a shoutout to him as an enduring influence on adapting or interpreting Beowulf through his study, in lecture or essay, as well as Beowulf as an enduring influence on Tolkien (“Beowulf is among my most valued sources”) – and through him on modern literary fantasy.

You might know Beowulf’s influence on Tolkien and modern literary fantasy through a little book Tolkien wrote called The Lord of the Rings. Although personally I tend to see more of the direct overlap through The Hobbit – with Bilbo as Beowulf, Gollum as Grendel, and Smaug as, well, the dragon. Sadly, no Grendel’s mother though.

 

 

 

 

THOMAS MALORY – LE MORTE D’ARTHUR:

PETER ACKROYD – THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR

 

For mine is the grail quest –

round table & siege perilous

fisher king & waste land

bleeding lance & dolorous stroke

adventurous bed & questing beast

 

In my Top 10 Mythologies, I nominate one strand of Celtic mythology as foremost in familiarity and fascination for me – the legend of King Arthur, as part of the so-called Matter of Britain or legendary history of the Kings of Britain.

And one source of that legend stands foremost among them all – Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (or Mallory) in the fifteenth century, as “the definitive version of Arthurian legend in popular culture, at least for the English-speaking world”, or dare I say it, the once and future king…of Arthurian legend.

That’s pretty impressive for a version written about a millennium or so after the legendary historical setting of its subject in sub-Roman Britain. In large part that was because it was effectively a codification – what TV Tropes calls an adaptation distillation – of the works of its “many, many literary predecessors, including multiple layers of retcons and crossovers”.

Among those predecessors were the various French texts, from which surprisingly many elements we now associate with Arthurian legend originated – and which I’m sure is the Arthurian in-joke behind the obnoxious French soldiers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

That might account for the gratuitous French title – or more precisely medieval Anglo-Norman French title – translating to The Death of Arthur. Despite that title, the books otherwise “in a form of Late Middle English virtually indistinguishable from Early Modern English (if you modernize the spelling, what you get is virtually indistinguishable from the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare’s day)” – although pronounced very differently due to the great vowel shifts between medieval and modern English.

In turn, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has been almost endlessly adapted since, although my favorite adaption remains cinematic rather than literary – the 1981 film Excalibur, just narrowly ahead of the aforementioned Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which funnily enough still remains one of the most faithful adaptations to Arthurian legend).

And yes – I don’t claim to have read Malory in his Late Middle English but instead prefer the adaptations to Modern English, of which there is a long list. Just to name my personal favorites – Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.

Hence this honorable men also the keynote entry for this special mention – Peter Ackroyd’s The Death of King Arthur.

 

 

 

(1909) H.A. GUERBER –

MYTHS OF THE NORSEMEN

 

“Northern mythology is grand and tragical. Its principal theme is the perpetual struggle of the beneficent forces of Nature against the injurious, and hence it is not graceful and idyllic in character, like the religion of the sunny South, where the people could bask in perpetual sunshine, and the fruits of the earth grew ready to their hand.”

Myths of the Norsemen by American teacher and writer Hélène Adeline Guerber remains one of my favorite books for Norse mythology – and a vintage one at that. It owes its status as my favorite to being one of two books I first read to learn about the Norse myths as a child – the other being Bulfinch’s Mythology, but to be honest this did it better, not least because of its exclusive focus and the art plates throughout the book. It still boggles my mind that they had this vintage book in my school library – although one advantage of its vintage publication is that it is freely available online.

 

 

 

 

(1955) HUSTON SMITH –

THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS

 

The classic work on the subject of its title, by leading scholar of religious studies Huston Smith – himself almost the literal embodiment of that title, raised in China as a child of a Christian missionary family and student of philosophy in the United States.

By necessity, it uses a broad-brush approach to the eight world religions it examines in their respective chapters – Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and what it calls primal or tribal religions. It prompts to mind German philosopher Karl Jasper’s characterization of an Axial Age as the crucible of modern world religions, Jasper ended his Axial Age prior to Christianity or Islam – but it is striking that no major world religion has yet emerged since either.

As per its subtitle “Our Wisdom Traditions”, it seeks to put each religion’s best foot forward and look past caricatures or stereotypes – perhaps most memorably expressed by Smith when it comes to Islam as a common perception of a religion of sword and harem.

My personal favorite chapter, and unfortunately also its shortest, was that on the primal or tribal religions, which despite its brevity, impressed upon me the most the merits of the primal or tribal worldview – including the lost strengths and versatility of an oral culture as opposed to a literate one, despite the obvious advantages of literacy to our society.

 

 

 

 

(1964) MIRCEA ELIADE –

SHAMANISM

 

“The nostalgia for Paradise…the desire to find oneself always and without effort in the center of the world, at the heart of reality”.

Behold the monomyth!

Campbell’s term of monomyth may be somewhat unfair for Eliade, since he established multiple paradigms in mythology or religion “that persist to this day” – hierophany, sacred space and time, the nostalgia for Paradise, the axis mundi or Center of the World, all myths as creation or origin myths, the eternal return, the terror of history, the coincidence of opposites, deus otiosus, and homo religiosus.

On the other hand, all of his paradigms might be considered permutations of his core concept of hierophany, the manifestation – or intrusion – of the sacred in the world, including but not limited to the earlier concept of theophany or manifestation of a god. In turn, it is hierophany that creates sacred space and time, or rather, divides the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time.

And the rest of his paradigms really flow from that. The mythic or religious connotes the nostalgia for Paradise or desire to return to sacred space or time, which is also the axis mundi or center of the world.

“Myth, then, is always an account of creation” – the primordial time “when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world’s structure”. By enacting myths and rituals, one doesn’t simply commemorate them but participates in them – one “detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time”, or the eternal return.

On the other hand, “yearning to remain in the mythical age causes a terror of history” – the desire “to escape the linear succession of events” – “Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its terror, is one of the reasons for modern man’s anxieties”.

As for the coincidence of opposites, “Eliade claims that many myths, rituals, and mystical experiences involve a “coincidence of opposites” or “twofold revelation” – “they express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled…the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on”.

Deus otiosus – the inactive (or leisurely) god – is perhaps my favorite paradigm by Eliade. Contrary to those who proposed that religions evolve from polytheism to monotheism, Eliade argued that supreme heavenly beings were less common in advanced cultures.

“Eliade speculates that the discovery of agriculture brought a host of fertility gods and goddesses into the forefront, causing the celestial Supreme Being to fade away and eventually vanish from many ancient religions. Even in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, the High God is a vague, distant figure, dwelling high above the world. Often he has no cult and receives prayer only as a last resort, when all else has failed. Eliade calls the distant High God a deus otiosus (idle god)”.

His book on shamanism, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, applied his ongoing ideas to shamanism, whicn in turn he saw as the ongoing death and resurrection of shamanic figures.

 

 

 

 

(1977) WIL HUYGEN & RIEN POORTVLIET –

GNOMES

 

“Yeah, Rien Poortvliet just called. He wants you to pose for him…Oh come on, beloved illustrator of Gnomes? Jesus, read a coffee table book!”

Archer, “Sea Tunt: Part I”

 

It always surprises me that gnomes are of such recent vintage, compared to other legendary creatures – “A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century”.

He introduced them as earth elementals – to match sylphs as air elementals, undines as water elementals, and salamanders as fire elementals. Note to self – air and water are the s€xy ones.

Anyway, they were “widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature” and “typically depicted as small humanoids who live underground”.

So what’s the difference from dwarves? The short answer is not much, at least in depiction (as opposed to origins in folklore), and any difference is really a matter of stylistic choice. Apparently kobolds or Germanic mine spirits also overlap with gnomes.

Although probably the most famous gnomes are garden gnomes – garden or lawn ornaments crafted as statues of gnomes, typically with beards and pointed conical caps (in the style of those old school dunce caps), that originated in the nineteenth century.

Essentially, Poortvliet’s illustrations of gnomes in this book, written by Wil Huygen, follows the visual depiction of gnomes in the style of diminutive garden gnomes. Ironically, it distinguishes gnomes as always bearded from dwarves as always beardless, which is the opposite of their most popular contemporary depiction as character races in Dungeons and Dragons – arguably following the books of Tolkien, except with gnomes as similar to hobbits or halflings (without the hairy feet).

As for the book itself, it “explains the life and habitat of gnomes in an in-universe fashion, much as a biology book would do, complete with illustrations and textbook notes” – often with astonishingly intricate fictional detail. The titular gnomes are also depicted as living harmoniously with animals and nature, evoking contemporary environmental themes.

 

 

 

 

(2023) FRANCIS YOUNG –
TWILIGHT OF THE GODLINGS

 

Small god-shaped holes – or everything you know about fairies is wrong.

Well, perhaps not quite everything, but at least the belief that Britain’s fairies and supernatural beings are the direct preservations or survivals of pagan gods.

But they are small god-shaped holes – filling the niche through many cultures, particularly European folklore or mythology, for ‘godlings’ or what Francis Young dubs small gods (borrowing from Terry Pratchett), although I’d have been tempted to go with hemi-demi-gods.

Essentially those supernatural beings ranking beneath the top-tier gods or major cult figures, somewhere between the human and divine – such as fauns and nymphs in Roman culture, not coincidentally one of the influences Young traces for fairies.

Young argues that earlier folkloric beings (albeit probably only as far back as those Roman godlings) were reinvented within Christianity to fill the niche – or the small god-shaped holes of culture.

 

 

 

(X) THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EROTIC WISDOM

 

The subtitle of the original version of this alphabetical reference book by Rufus Camphausen says it all – “A Reference Guide to the Symbolism, Techniques, Rituals, Sacred Texts, Psychology, Anatomy, and History of Sexual Sexuality”. As indeed does the subtitle of the later version – “From Aphrodisiacs and Ecstasy to Yoni Worship and Zap-Lam Yoga”.

 

You can return to or find more top tens in my indexed page for top tens of mythology.