Before Twitter, YouTube, Hulu, Farmville [2] and W.o.W [3], before cable television's five-hundred channels of nothing-much-on-
tonight-Honey, before Howdy Doody [4] and Uncle Miltie [5], before Marconi, Edison, Bell, and Morse [6], before Tristram Shandy [7] and Robinson Crusoe [8], before Shakespeare [9] and all those titled mouth-breathers (one of whom must have been the "real" Shakespeare [10] because the single greatest writer in the English language just cannot possibly be a lower-middle-class bumpkin-slash-actor), before Copernicus and Gutenberg, before Punch and before Judy, before Gothic cathedrals rose as Christian parables in stone and light [11], before half-frozen monastics [12]copied and recopied by hand the surviving works of antiquity, there was the verse epic—part origin myth, part history, part cinematic blockbuster, part propaganda and ego-stroke for the powers that be, and part owners’ manual for the collective soul.
Many of them are lost, having never been preserved in the pseudo-permanent medium of ink, now no more than the faintest swirls of dust within some forgotten bard’s hollow and time-burnished skull within some forgotten ossuary. Some have mutated and humbled to the outlines of folktales [13]. But once upon a time the verse epic was the psychic lifeblood of cultures--vast narratives memorized and passed down. Verse was the first flash drive or memory card--a technology designed to retain and transmit knowledge.
Below are some of the great epics that have come down to us. I'm sure I left something out, so drop me a line if you see any glaring (or non-glaring) omissions. Next week we will dig further into these long-format poems both ancient and modern.
Aeneid [14] / Virgil
Beowulf [15]
Bhagavad-Gita [16] /
Gilgamesh [17] /
Odyssey [19] / Homer
Ramayana [20] /
Big thanks to Richard D, Reference Librarian at our Atascocita Branch and intrepid reader of this blog, for suggesting this week's topic.
Photo Credit: Achilles Statue by MuntyPix [21]
- Aeneid [22]
- Beowulf [23]
- Bhagavad Gita [24]
- FarmVille [25]
- Gilgamesh [26]
- Homer [27]
- Howdy Doody [28]
- Iliad [29]
- Odyssey [30]
- Poetry [31]
- Ramayana [32]
- Robinson Crusoe [33]
- Tristram Shandy [34]
- Uncle Miltie [35]
- Virgil [36]
- World of Warcraft [37]
