Inspired by this thread, my question remains:
Why does greek and roman mythology thrive today, as far as literary reference, symbolism, names, ideas, adaptations, and yet nordic/germanic/icelandic/tuetonic mythology is barely visible on the radar? I’m trying to do research on Hoenir and I find one, maybe two paragraphs on all of the web. But do a search on Prometheus and you’re flooded.
jarbaby
Do you have “Bullfinch’s Mythology?” I have a lovely illustrated edition from 1895 that has a large section on the “Nordic/Germanic/Icelandic/Teutonic” stories. Highly recommend it!
Just a WAG here, but I think it has some common sense in it:
FWIW, I’ve read both Bullfinch and a lot of Nordic mythology, and find elements to be similar. Nordic/Icelandic , especially in the sagas reminds me of the epic poems of Greco-Roman. Nordic also tends to be gloomier, but look at where it’s coming from. Ice and herring for nine months out of the year and I’d want to hasten my trip to Valhalla as well.
The Greek wrote great literature, came up with brilliant ideas, provided much of the terminology for our arts and sciences, and inspired a cultural revolution that echoes until this very day.
The Germans, OTOH, invented bratwurst. 'Nuff said.
Roman mythology (as distinct from Greek mythology (re)written in Latin) barely exists, and seemingly barely existed at the time. The Romans were extremely pragmatic about religion, as their phrase do ut des suggests. Part of that pragmatism was to dump their own religion and glom onto the more sophisicated Greek gods (who were, after all, worshipped by the more sophisticated civilization from which they borrowed so much[sup]1[/sup]) at very nearly the earliest possible opportunity.
[sup]1[/sup][sub]Like everything portable in Corinth.[/sub]
Also, until recently, (and still today) Greece and Rome were seen as the centers of civilization. The educated person would have studied Latin and Classical Greek, would have read Cicero, Caesar, and the Greek plays, and, in general, would have been exposed to Greek and Roman history. There was no common experience with the Norse world, although German Romatics tried, (Wagner’s “Ring Cycle”, etc.) but outside of a small group in Germany, the Norse myths never really were popular. I think that’s the main reason.
It’s simple enough - western culture is based on the Greco-Roman tradition. Educated people in Europe learned Latin and Greek, not Gaelic or Norwiegan (or whatever the Vikings spoke). Hence the Greco-Roman mythology was promulgated and popularized.
Also, there is simply a larger amount of written source material for the Greco-Roman tradition.
Please tell me you meant this as a pithy joke. Don’t make me go get 50,000 sites of composers, philosophers, scientists, doctors, authors, artists and poets. I don’t have the time.
jarbaby
Yes, O mighty jarbabyj, there are many fine contributions to western civ from the north of Europe. You’re right on that.
But let’s not forget that most of them are relatively recent in comparison to greco-roman influences. The greeks laid down a large chunk of still influential philosophy more than 2000 years ago. That’s had a LONG time to soak into society (even in ways one isn’t normally aware). By the time the Germanic influences popped up they’re like children trying to compete with a wise and powerful father. It’s not a fair match.
Ask again in 2000 years and things may be different. But, for now, the greeks have EVERYONE beat for total influence over the west. I just don’t see any way around it.
However, the entire basis of our modern world aside, I’m still not understanding why stories of the creation persist in Greek/Roman, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and a million other assorted religions and yet just today for the first time ever did I hear the story of creation in terms of the Nordic belief.
True or not, influential or not, it’s still a good story. I mean, Babar wasn’t really part of elephant royalty, but his stories are still interesting.
jarbaby
Please tell me you’re not speaking with a lisp. 
Yes, it is rather an exaggeration; as Jonathan Chance points out, people of Germanic extraction did do some rather notable things. OTOH, as he also points out, they weren’t as early, or as widespread, as Greek contributions.
Note that, by the time that those fur-wearing vandals (quite literally) invaded the Empire, Greco-Roman culture was already centuries old. The German warlords and tribal kings wanted to be seen as civilized men. Therefore, there was a conscious adopting of Greco-Roman cultural icons (when this didn’t interfere with gathering up loot) and dropping German ones. A very similar thing was seen when the Romans conquered Greece.
And, besides, pasta has bratwurst knocked. 
Well, the Christian, Jewish and Muslim creation stories have the advantage of modern adherents promulgating them. The Greco-Roman stories have one additional advantage over the Norse - Odin and the lot were still being worshipped when Christian missionaries wandered up to the frozen tundra. Thus, my educated guess is that the Norse stories were actively suppressed as idolatry.
Sua
Like tomndebb quoted in another thread, complex questions always have simple answers. And they are always wrong. Hence facile explanations of the greater antiquity of the Greco-Roman tradition and their accompanying corollaries are wholly insufficient.
Wrong. The Norseman traded vigorously from Novgorod to Constantinople. Nor does this have any bearing whatosever on cultural currency today.
Also wrong. More people can read and write German today than can translate Ancient Greek. The same is true of people 1000 years ago.
As was Greek literature. I would refer you to the fifteen-plus Sagas in Icelandic, the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, and the surfeit of medieval German epic and lyric poetry.
I can read Latin, Greek, German, and am working on learning Icelandic and Old Norse. The northern languages, while difficult, are easier than the classical languages.
This proves nothing but your own cultural bias and ignorance, Akatsukami.
More merda. Roman and Greek institutional and political models were on the verge of extinction for several hundred years. If anything, the Greco-Roman affectations that we gild ourselves with are but dressing on a Germanic window.
To be dealt with below.
Norse stories were incorporated into the Christian canon in a myriad of ways. Arthuriana. Christmas trees. Halloween. Every major medieval German epic. St. Boniface, responsible for converting the Germans. Early Christianity was a master of appropriation and assimilation, not suppression. Serious suppression does not begin until the late Middle Ages, or more particularly, the Renaissance. For an excellent analysis of the cultural phenomenon of late medieval repression, see R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society.
I apologize for being so perfunctory, but I did want to leave room for my analysis. I will give it in outline. Any citations or supplementary information is gladly available on request.
The drastic and overemphasized influence of the Greco-Roman literary tradition is relatively recent, and did not come without serious literary and poetic opposition. To summarize briefly, medieval intellectual institutions maintained a vigorous tradition of Latin learning which informed nearly all of the secular literature of the day, from the lyric poetry of Occitania to the Tristan und Isolde of Gottfried von Strasbourg. However, Latin learning was always deeply rooted within a body of traditional, local myth. Ornamentation and learning, as it were.
This tradition persisted and some of the greatest literary works in the western tradition were produced. The Nibelungenlied. Chaucer. Dante. Beowulf. All somehow incorporating classical learning, all formed from a vernacular bedrock.
However, the discovery of more classical thought in the Middle Ages and the wholesale rape and assimilation of the classical world in the so-called Renaissance altered the picture considerably. Though the printing press hastened the development of the vernacular languagues, it also exacerbated an existing dichotomy: those who knew Latin (and later Greek) and those who didn’t.
The rise of the bourgeoisie in the later Middle Ages provided the resources for more widespread secular education. By the Renaissance many people were learning the classical languages outside of a purely ecclesiastical setting. Thus they began to see and to reconstruct their world in terms of the high culture they were exposed to in school. Classical scholarship, to a certain degree, was de rigeur for a gentleman of any means in the 16th and 17th centuries. Castiglione says that Latin and Greek are essential components in every courtier’s education.
By the end of the 17th century the incorporation of Attic rationalism was complete. Medieval logic and linguistic theory had been replaced by a revival of unadulterated Aristotle and Plato. The aesthetics of Ovid and Vergil, while always present in the Middle Ages, were able to supplant native traditions completely due to the changes in Renaissance and Baroque education.
The “Enlightenment” was the death knell for traditional vernacular culture. 18th century thinkers and philosophers achieved intellectual legitimacy by creating a continuity between their peculiar brand of rationalism and that of ancient Greece. They viewed their pioneering, scientific spirit as the direct outgrowth of a more ancient and venerable western tradition. Reason was universal, monolithic, and flowed constantly and steadily throughout history. Their scientific progress was just one part of a tradition of western curiosity, which they found in the works of the Greek natural philosophers.
Their classical education trained them to see the world in terms of Latin and Greek. While their systems of government and a large part of their literature remained deeply Gallic and Germanic, they imposed the artifices of Greco-Roman culture upon themselves, for Enlightenment thinkers believed that they were the heirs to the Greek intellectual tradition. And the classical education they inflicted upon their children testifies to this peculiar bias.
This trend met serious opposition. The Romantic movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries sought to reconnect with Europe’s older and potentially richer cultural heritage. The Gothic tradition rejected Attic rationalism in favor of the picturesque, the emotional, and the mysteriously old. The fact that the movement misrepresented vernacular culture is not relevant; its goals, however fragmented and misguided, were the resurrection of everything not Latin and Greek.
This tradition spilled over into the great modernist literary figures of the 20th century.
Joyce. Pound. Eliot. All of them were medievalists. Pound’s translations of the troubadours are perhaps the most brilliant translations from Occitan in the history of the world.
The later 20th century, in the wake of two world wars, sought to reconnect itself with a more rational, peaceful, and essentially redeeming world. College curricula began to emphasize classical studies again. Great Books courses were chosen with an eye to the continuity of the great western tradition, a clear contrast to the bankruptcy of western political and diplomatic systems.
Despite the assault on classical culture perpetrated by postmodern vultures, it survives today. Not in an accurately represented and unbiased form, to be sure.
But it is not the be-all and end-all of the west. Its ascent was random and haphazard. It proceeded from the whim of powerful and influential individuals spread over a relatively short period of time. The success of their will to knowledge, as it were, is the immense cultural bias displayed in the above posts.
I apologize in advance for my oversimplification and polemical tone. I do this to grind my own axe as well as to stimulate discussion. But before you accuse me of my own sets of cultural biases…I have plenty of them. I just don’t know what they are.
Regards,
MR
[Fixed your code. Did you hire Loki to proofread? – Alpha]
[Edited by Alphagene on 08-02-2001 at 10:43 AM]
Would a mod please take pity on me and fix my code?
I’m kinda surprised at the dearth of Norse (Teutonic, etc.) mythology expressed in the OP.
My education was fairly good if fairly basic. I certainly got more exposure to Greek mythology than Norse mythology but that said my education in any mythology was fairly thin. Sadly, except for a literature class or two, I hardly remember coming across it at all in my formal education.
That said I have nearly as good of a sense of Nordic mythology (and to a lesser extent the others) as I do of Greek mythology. I know who Thor, Odin and Loki are (to name a few). I know what Vallhalla is and Ragnarok. I know some of the stories in Norse mythology. In fact, about the only thing I find problematical with Norse mythology vs. Greek is dealing with some of the names (Ginnungagapet, Jämnhög, Hvergelmer and Grottekvarnen [to name a few]). To my untutored tongue these names are a little tough.
Where did I get all this stuff? I couldn’t really point to one source…just picked it up here and there. Still, I bet most people you ask would be about as familiar with Thor as they are with Zeus (I know the two don’t directly compare across mythologies but I expect they are the most readily identifiable of the two).
As if all that weren’t enough:
My dog is named Freyja and one of my brothers has an e-mail handle of Mjollnir (the name of Thor’s hammer and I think there is a Mjollnir on this board as well).
BTW: I did a search on Hoenir and got a bunch of relevant hits. I also got a bunch of hits for porno sites with the same search…not sure how that worked out.
Sua’s right.
Check out The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlasson. He wrote the thing in the 1300s because he was afraid that all the christian kids wouldn’t be able to understand the old poetry, since the old Icelandic mythology wasn’t taught anymore. But he had to take pains to establish that the myths were just silly stories and of course not real.
In fact, he claimed that the legends of the Aesir were derived from stories of survivors of the Trojan war migrating north and impressing the barbarians with their culture and sophistication. He claimed that the word Aesir was derived from Aeneas, the hero who founded Rome. So you see, the prejudice against the Norse goes all the way back to the Norse.
Rubbish. Modern Icelanders can still read their medieval epics with only relatively minor syntactic and lexical changes. Icelandic is an extremely conservative language.
Such topoi are extremely common in works of medieval poetry and should not be taken at face value. You still address a letter “Dear So-and-So” even if you in fact despise the recipient of the letter. Such are the incipits of medieval poetry.
<yawn>
Just as Snorri, accounted by all to be an opportunist, was trying to impress his audience with his literary sophistication. He studied at Oddi, a city renowned for its academic merits after Saedmundr, the grandfather of Jon Loftsson, Snorri’s own foster father, returned from the Sorbonne. Everyone knew his story was crapola, but by appropriating the same story that Vergil does in his Aeneid, he demonstrates what a smart, learned fellow he is.
You are going to have to do a little better than that.
MR
Deep breath, Maeglin.
Fair enough.
Queries. Were the Norse myths written in German, particularly the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas? Were they written in old/medieval German or modern German? Were they written at all until rather late in the Medieval period?Third, were texts published in whatever form of German being used, or in Latin? I seem to recall that the Bible wasn’t published in the vulgar languages until rather late in the game.
And the oral mythology of the Greeks was written down at least one thousand years before the Eddas, indeed closer to two thousand years.
But you aren’t the sample, Maeglin. I think it is a fair statement that more people understand Latin than Old Norse or Icelandic.
So, the Greeks didn’t write great literature, come up with brilliant ideas, inspire a cultural revolution, etc.?
Tell that to my old philosophy professors - they still seem to believe that most philosophical systems are derivations of Aristotelian or Platonic ideas.
See Lemur’s post. Absolutely, the early Christians assimilated local traditions, but the key word is “assimilate”. They Christianized the traditions.
And certain things could not be Christianized, e.g., a Norse creation myth that contradicted the Christian creation mythos, or hell, the local gods themselves. Some aspects of local gods were incorporated into J.C. and/or saints, but the idea, for example, the Odin was king of the gods was certainly suppressed.
Sua
Do not mistake my strong language for my emotional state. Biographical fallacy. 
Norse myths were, of course, in Icelandic and Old Norse. Much of the northern mythological and cultural traditions were transmitted through Old High German sources as well.
The official translations of the Bible were late. John Wyclif in England and Martin Luther in Germany.
But beyond the seventh or eighth centuries in the West, no one could read Greek, with the exception of such luminaries as Isidore of Seville and Gerbert of Aurillac. Greek folklore, transmitted by Greek sources, was dead for hundreds of years.
But the number of people who know Latin is disproportionally small compared to the importance of Greco-Roman culture. Hence I do not think the number of people who can read the language is terribly relevant.
Don’t patronize me, please. So did the Chinese. So did the Aztecs. So did the Norse. None of which explains why Greco-Roman culture was chosen. I believe that anyone with linguistic knowledge and an open mind will arrive at the conclusion that although the Greeks were culturally brilliant, their legacy does not necessarily commend them as the core of Western culture.
What do you expect? Surely they are classically educated. They probably wrote their dissertations on Aristotle and Plato.
Dealt with.
Christianization is not, to be sure, the same thing as suppression. The church lacked the institutional machinery to suppress much of anything: the institutional creativity of the 12th century, Wyclif, Savanarola, etc are all testamants to the church’s incredible vulnerability.
What the church had was patience. Lots of patience. It waited for the native tradition to die out. And it worked.
MR
Whack-a-Mole:
Marvel Comics, perhaps?
It just occurred to me that perhaps the correct answer to the OP is that the Renaissance began in Italy. Since Italy was the first European nation to emerge from the Dark Ages, the studies into history involved their glory days, e.g., classical Rome (and Greece necessarily gets dragged in there). Since this is arguably the beginning point of the modern wave of scientific progress, it is this view of Western history that has become standard.