Meta Monday: Myth and narrative

[dhampyresa]

Hi! Welcome to Meta Monday, in which I go tl;dr about stuff.

Today, I coined the term "ficframed", which is to fic ideas what earwormed is to songs. They dig into your brain and won't leave.

Well, that was an easy meta post to write.

More seriously, I'm going to answer taiyou_to_tsuki: "Since you've read a fair bit of stories based on mythology-- how do you feel about translating characters from a mythic to a literary narrative? Are there any cases where you have felt a deity/other mythical being to be misinterpreted by the author?"

I've read a lot of mythology books and books based on mythology. Most recently, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Heroes of Olympus series(es?) and Joanne Harris' Runemarks series. I'm not counting things that are only distantly related to myths like the Asgardian side of the Marvel Universe, but I've read a lot of that, too.

I think the biggest mistake people can make when trying to turn myths into stories is to forget that gods aren't just humans writ large. They are that, yes, but they're not just that.

The Morrígan isn't just some woman with powers and a grudge against Cúchulainn. She is the frenzy of battle made animate.

But you must never forget, either, that it is a rare god who is god of one thing only. People are complex and gods even more so. In particular, the longer a religion has had to evolve the more its gods will have changed with it. Ancient Egyptian mythology in particular has changed a lot in the, oh, three thousand years and more it was the majority religion in Egypt. A particularly striking example is Isis going from a folk hero to a goddess in her own right. (You could also look at the evolution of the afterlife, because there's a lot more evidence of that on account of a lot of what we know about Ancient Egypt being due to being found in graves and pyramids. Also, I wrote a fic about both of those.)

Still, most gods are gods of more than one thing. And even often things that are unrelated or contradictory.

Odin isn't simply the god of the gallows, he's also the god of knowledge. Sekhmet isn't simply divine wrath made flesh, she's also goddess of healing.

Which brings me to my third point. People have believed in the gods, these gods, for hundreds and thousands of years. Some people still do. If you're going to write about them, the least you can do is treat them with respect.

I don't care if you think your religion holds the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, that doesn't give you free reign to mock other people's beliefs. Same goes for if you're an atheist.

Even if things look ridiculous to you, to the people who believe(d) they don't.

Anyway, all this being said, translating myths to a narrative also has the added problem that myths are often not narratives as a whole. The Loki who kills Balder is a sensibly different Loki from the Loki who rescues Idunn from Tjazi or the one who shoves Thor in a dress then tags along to Jotunheim. You can build a narrative that ties all of the myths of Loki together -- I should know, I've done it -- but the point is you have to build that narrative.

The myths never give you any narrative beyond the one myths you're reading. Myths care very little for consistency. Don't believe me? Okay, pop quizz: In Greek mythology, who is older between Athena and Hermes? (Seriously, if you do know, please tell me because I have no fucking idea.)

If you're going to write about myths, you're going to have to make choices and a lot of them. Which myths are true? Even "all of them" doesn't solve any of your problems, because then you have to explain how that's possible (see above about Isis and the snake vs Isis as sister to Seth, for one example).

You're going to have to make choice on symbolism and cut out part os the gods' attributes. Do you really need Odin as god of poetry if Bragi's in the room?

You're going to have to wrangle completely different creation myths, from the same mythology. In the Kelavala, the world/universe was sung into being by Ilmatar, but the sky was also forged by Ilmarinen. (And that's after Elias Lönnrot went through all the trouble of collecting and turning Finnish/Karelian myths into a narrative.)

Sure, you can just decide to not care about any of that, but then you're not really writing a narrative-formed-from-myth. You're writing myth, or you're writing something that doesn't focus on the narrative of the myths, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Heroes of Olympus, for example, is based on myths (Greek/Roman), but is not narrative-formed-from-myth. It's narrative-around-myth. (This is proof you can absolutely write narrative-around-myth while making some choices re:the myths, btw.)

Runemarks (and Runelight) are also narrative-around-myth. The Gospel of Loki, by contrast, even though it's by the same author and explicitly written in the same universe as a prequel, is narrative-formed-from-myth.

As for the second question, it is very easily answered.

MORGANE. The entire English-speaking world seems to be under the collective delusion that Morgane is the villain of the Arturian mythos, even though Merlin is right there.

I am utterly baffled by this. (No lie, I pretend all English-speaking Arturian mythos-related stuff either doesn't exist or hails from the mirror universe. Merlin as an unambiguous good guy. What.)

Aside from this tragic misunderstanding, there are several cases I can think of of gods being misinterpreted by the authors. Instead of naming those authors, I'm going to name the gods, which will be a lot faster and a lot easier to show similarities, because I have a theory for why this happens.

Loki, Hades, Seth walk into a bar.

These three often get cast as unrepetantly evil to oppose our unrepetantly good ~heroes~. This erases any and all nuance that could be found in their story.

Loki has excellent reasons to turn against Odin and Asgard. They banish three of his children, enslave another and, oh, turn two of them into wolves so they can tear each other apart, then tie him up with the entrails of the one who died. I don't know about you, but I'd be bitter too.

Hades is, by all mythological accounts, a complete stick in the mud, who has better things to deal with than taking over the world. (What for?)

Seth, on the other hand... Well, I'm going to point out that Plutarch is the oldest source we have that gices a complete picture of Osiris' murder and I cannot possibly the only one who thinks it's odd that a Greek is considered teh authority on something that's often held up as central to Egyptian mythology. I'll also point out that Seth is also Pharaoh's protector. Seth is a desert god, a destructive force, but destructive doesn't mean evil. It depends what you do with it. One of the things Seth does with it is fight Apophis, the serpent who would kill the sun (god).

Why are these gods cast as capital-E evil, when they're not? Because Christianity. Christianity, especially certain branches of it (Abligensians, anyone?), is very fond of imagining the world as being split in two with good on one side and evil on the other. As such, Loki/Hades/Seth often takes on the role of Satan in what is more find-and(replace Bible fanfic than myth-based narrative.

Compare, for example, the way Loki and Hermes are treated. They're both tricksters, aren't they? (So's Seth, by the way.) And yet, when's the last time you saw Hermes cast as the bad guy? Why Hades and not him? After all, Hades just rules the dead, Hermes actually carries souls to the afterlife.

My point is that you can play "pin the evil" on pretty much any god you like. Either that or the reason Hermes is never the bad guy is that he dresses far too fabulously for it.

(Only somewhat related to the above: of the three tricksters I've named -- Loki, Seth, Hermes -- all of them are arguably* some variant of LGBTQ, inasmuch as that's a label that has any sense in this context.)

(Also, I have above referred to the King of Egypt as Pharaoh, which is a misnomer. The first Pharaoh is Tutmosis III, all rulers of Ancient Egyt before him are Kings of Egypt, up to and including Hatchepsut, making her, in fact, the last king of Egypt.)

*See the comments to the dreamwidth version of this post.


Sweet Tanith, this got long!

Next week, I'll looking at AUs.

(I need some sort of meta icon.)