Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Are you not liking Greek Mythology?

I know, I know, it's not what I usually do, though it sort of is except at the moment it's rewriting good works instead of bad, specifically the Theogony, fleshed out where possible with, you know, everything else.

Though not fleshed out (at least not much) in the case of The Line of Pontos because I really wanted to get something posted and I needed sleep (three hours passed my preferred bed time) so I basically just stuck to the Theogony by Hesiod as my guide and that can be boring so I can understand not giving a damn about that.

The line of Nyx seemed relatively popular as these things go.  And was more or less what I'm aiming for with these genealogies (Theogony as frame, filled out by other stories that give understanding of family lines, synthesis with stories that have nothing to do with that but are related (see how Pandora entered it.))  And my plan is to at some point to a revised Line of Pontos that does the same.

Some more scenes from the line of Nyx, was two things that were, basically, all me.  Homer doesn't describe the confrontation between Zeus and Nyx, Vergil doesn't have Eris and Hermea looking on and commenting as Venus(Aphrodite) talks with Juno(Hera).  That's wholly original work on my part not nearly as popular as The line of Nyx, no comments whatsoever.

The line of Pontos less popular still, and it had monsters and a beheading and Hercules going around killing people, and Pegasus, and Pegasus' original rider (who wasn't Perseus, that idea came later) and stuff.  Boring stuff, but stuff.  Plus footnotes.

Next up is Okeanos and Tethys, which would be done already if I stuck to just the Theogony, but it would also be boring as hell.  (This is them in the Theogony: They had sons [list of names] and daughters [list of names] there are actually 3000 of each but it's difficult for a mortal to recite them all, those who live near the rest know their names.)  This one simply has to be fleshed out.

But I'm trying to get through these things because it is bearing useful fruit for me, specifically it's getting preliminary drafts for when I try to combine the genealogies into a history, second it's getting me a list of references that cross stories so I can try to work out some kind of timeline.

Some are exactly what you'd expect X married/had unmarried sex with Y and produced Z, which definitively places Z after both X and Y and means X and Y must be contemporaneous.  The second part isn't as useful as it would be in other situations because a lot of the Xes and Ys are immortal, but it does count for something.

Others aren't.  For example, in a story about the gods you wouldn't expect to be able to develop a chronology of mortals, but since Bellerophon was the Pegasus rider his deeds had to come after Perseus the Pegasus creator (done via the decapitation of Medusa).  Or, for the driving example in The line of Nyx, some of the things that came out of Pandora's Jar were clearly children of Eris so:
1) The opening of the jar post-dates Eris
2) Someone had to put those things in the jar
3) Given the mother wants to save her child motif running through Greek myth (See: Gaia, Rhea, Demeter, Nyx, Aphrodite, probably others), and the fact that it's pretty well established in real life, it can give a motivation to some of the characters in the story.
But also:
4) Pandora was in response to Prometheus stealing fire, and given exactly who he stole it for, that allows us to place the story within one of the ages of man listed in Works and Days (also by Hesiod.)
5) Everyone involved in the story had to exist at the time of the story, that tells us when certain people must have been born before.

-

So I'm going to be doing this anyway, and I don't want the blog to be left blank while I am, thus I'm posting the genealogies and such, but if no one is interested in them I don't need to.

-

And I do promise I'll try to get back to normal stuff when it's done.  Actually, I'm going to see if I can maybe do a .hack post and a Deus Ex post later today.

6 comments:

  1. Interested but nothing to say. I count myself moderately knowledgeable about this stuff but I haven't read in the detail you have.

    ReplyDelete
  2. About the same as Firedrake - I love mythology, but I don't have a lot of commentary to offer.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What they said. Go ahead and keep posting them.

    (Also, I don't suppose you have any idea why the Recent Comments hasn't loaded in days?)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. (Also, I don't suppose you have any idea why the Recent Comments hasn't loaded in days?)

      Knowing that would require me to have some understanding of how it worked, or rather worked, in the first place. Which I don't. Didn't realize it was broken, I'll see if there's anything I can do.

      Delete
  4. I find them tremendously interesting, but have not had the time to tackle them. =<

    That is, in fact, what I came here to do, so I'll just toddle on over to those posts.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Add my voice to the general susurrus of interest.

    ReplyDelete