An Epic Undertaking

My acquisition of The Poem of the Cid yesterday got me thinking about national epics and how they had become something of an obsession of mine. The thing about a national Epic poem is that they were, if not immediately, at least in time, the embodiment of the ideals of a certain people at a certain period point of their development. They became touchstones of national identity and the entryway for cultures separated in time or culture to enter into an understanding of each other.

I would also qualify my categorization of the national epic to be anonymous, though perhaps translated or collected by a single author. Thus, I would qualify The Iliad and The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, to be true national epics, while The Aeneid is historically known to be by Virgil and so ‘disqualified’ in this reckoning. Other disqualifications are The Shah Nameh of Firdausi or Don Quixote of Cervantes or The Divine Comedy of Dante or the Heimskringla of Sturlason; influential as they are, they are too ‘modern’. I would not include any of the curated collections of Arthurian tales, say by Geoffrey of Monmouth or Thomas Malory. I count the Kalevala, because although it was put together and edited and written down by Lonnrot, it seems to have an authentic anonymous folk tradition.

Some ‘national’ epics had to wait a long time to become representative of a culture. Gilgamesh was only discovered relatively recently, and the sagas like The Nibilungenleid or The Saga of the Volsungs were only thrust into prominence when the newly united German state was seeking to establish a separate historical identity, and Beowulf lay ignored for centuries before being proclaimed the beginning of English Literature (despite its foreign ‘roots’).

I find them all historically, legendarily, and literarily fascinating. So often they are jumping-off places for other works, talking points sprouting out from The Great Conversation.