A Re-Post of Characters and Elements Found in Myth and Folklore



THIS POST IS PART OF THE POST-RESURRECTION BLOG HOP!

 

The following piece was first posted on 5/31/12 and I think it deserves more than the 10 page views it's garnered.  Odd, because the subsequent two posts, The Legends of Troy and How to Convert Greek Names into the Shshi Language, received 37 and 41 views.

 

       I got the idea of sending my termites out on an epic journey, complete with all the bells and whistles, out of the blue as I was finishing up "The Termite Queen." I wish I could say that the idea came from a learned source like Joseph Campbell's theories of the Hero's Journey and such, but instead I think the source was much more of a pop culture phenomenon. I was a big fan of "Xena: Warrior Princess" at the time! In that series (and its predecessor "Hercules," which is much inferior, I think, although I did enjoy Michael Hurst as Iolaus), Greek myth and occasionally myths from other cultures are reworked, processed through a compressed time frame (Caesar is contemporary with Troy, for goodness' sakes!), and given their own fresh interpretations. So that was in my mind at the time.

        But another source has to be Watership Down, which is an epic about rabbits and one of my favorite books of all time. It has all the elements of the heroic journey, told in the context of a rabbit culture here on Earth. My books also have the elements of the heroic journey, told in the context of an isopteroid culture on another planet. As Amb. Tarrant Hergard said upon the occasion of the admission of Earth into the Confederation of Planets: “An ancient Earth adage says, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ Perhaps the phrase should now become, ‘There is nothing new among

the stars.’”

        In the article "Epic Poetry" Wikipedia lists the following characteristics of an epic:  

1. Begins in medias res. [Actually, I don't do that one, unless you consider beginning right after the conclusion of "The Termite Queen" to be in medias res.]
2. The setting is vast, covering many nations, the world or the universe. [check!]
3. Begins with an invocation to a muse (epic invocation). [No, not here]
4. Begins with a statement of the theme. [Umm, not exactly]
5. Includes the use of epithets. [No, I don't think so.]
6. Contains long lists (epic catalogue). [Ah, yes -- I subject the reader to epic lists three times throughout the series. One in each of the original volumes. Maybe I can construct lists for the other three! Or maybe not.]
7. Features long and formal speeches. [At times, when appropriate]
8. Shows divine intervention on human affairs. [On only two occasions does the Nameless Mother personally poke her antennae into the mix, but the foretellings of Seers prevade the books.]
9. Features heroes that embody the values of the civilization. [Definitely]
10. Then there are the stock characters who are encountered in epics. First, of course, you've got the epic hero and ours is ready-made: Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head, the extra-large Da'no'no Shshi Warrior from To'wak. Often this hero is a demigod; whether that's true of Ki'shto'ba you'll have to find out later. The hero has to go on a quest and be tested in some way. So far, so good.

 

        The hero may fall in love, rescue and marry a Princess. (???) Impossible! There are some things sexless termites just can't do! Although there IS one place where Ki'shto'ba rescues a fertile female nymph ...

        The hero must have Companions, be it just a sidekick or a dozen of them. I opted for a dozen.

There is the wandering Bard, who roams the world recounting the deeds of the hero. Here we have Di'fa'kro'mi the Remembrancer, who is also Ki'shto'ba's First Companion.

        Its Second and Third Companions are little Workers -- sidekicks par excellence. Every termite Warrior must have groomers and feeders -- squires, in effect.

        The Fourth Companion is the twin -- a pervasive theme in mythology and one stressed by Robert Graves in his Greek Myths. Hercules had a twin named Iphicles; Ki'shto'ba has one named A'zhu'lo.

        Then there is the trickster. Aren't tricksters fun, though? Reynard the Fox, Coyote, Raven, Loki, Puck, Ariel, Q in StarTrek, Odysseus -- and last but hardly least, El-ahrairah in Watership Down. And right up there with those: Za'dut, the Fifth Companion of Ki'shto'ba -- a Worker but so much more. Its name means two things in the Shshi language: Little Lizard and Little Thief.

        Finally, there are the Seers. Fiver in Watership Down comes to mind. And Greek myth is loaded with Seers, which fits right in with Shshi culture, since every fortress has an Alate who is gifted with Seeing (even if part of it does come from ingesting a hallucinogen). Teiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, becomes in my tales Thru'tei'ga'ma, the half-blind Seer of To'wak, who sets up the premises of the tale early on. Ki'shto'ba won't acquire a Seer as a Companion until the fifth volume, but different Seers in different places have tremendous influence all the way through the story. How much of their pronouncements are true foretellings and how many are merely self-fulfilling prophecies? Again, you'll have to find out for yourself.

The Legends of Troy

       First, I want to make an addendum to the previous post ("Characters and Elements Found in Myth and Folklore").  I thought of four more elements of epics that I've worked into "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head" series. 

       No. 1: funeral games.  That custon isn't practiced in Lo'ro'ra among the Little-Head Shshi, but there are certain other fortresses that have invented it.  In the Iliad a whole section is devoted to the funeral games for Hector.

       No. 2:  battle frenzy and, as an adjunct, the battle taunt, where two Warriors trash each other verbally before a combat. 

       No. 3:  the significance of returning the bodies of dead warriors to the enemy for proper disposition.  I've already made the point in "Termite Queen" that the Shshi practice necrophagia and therefore it is traditional and even obligatory that one side in a battle to return the opponent's dead bodies.  This fits right in with the Greek emphasis on retrieving their dead. 

       No. 4 (and not least):  the powerful, storied, perhaps enchanted weapon, like Excalibur.  You can't have a heroic tale without such a weapon of lore!  You'll find out how I managed that, since Shshi Warriors grow their own weapons upon their bodies.

 

       Now to the Troy legends.  Everybody (at least in the Western world) knows the story; it's engrained in our culture.  Even if you've never read the Iliad or the Odyssey, you know the tales from children's books or from movies like the latest one "Troy," or from reading other retellings or studying myths in school.  Everybody knows that Paris the Prince of Troy fell in love with Helen the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta  and carried her off during a visit to that place, upon which the Greeks set out with a huge fleet of ships to attack Troy and bring her back.  Everybody knows about Achilles and his one weak spot (which gave its name to the Achilles tendon), and about the nobility of Hector the Prince of Troy, and about the Trojan horse.  However, the fact is that Homer's Iliad ends with the death of Hector.  It contains nothing about the death of Achilles at Paris' hand, or the death of Paris, or the stealing of the Palladium (the statue of Pallas Athene that would keep Troy safe as long as it remained within the walls), or even the episode of the Trojan horse.  The valuable thing about Robert Graves' Greek Myths is that he gives the whole story in segments that draw on all kinds of original sources, not just the Iliad.  And he gives all the alternative versions.  This made it really valuable in helping me pick and choose which incidents or versions would be most adaptable to termite culture.   And you might be surprised how adaptable the story is. 

       Of course, it was impossible to include every one of the myriad characters or all the tortuous complexities of the plot twists, and there were times when I had to make serious adjustments to meet termite requirements.  An example is the episode of Briseis, the Trojan female who is abducted by the Greeks and over whom Achilles and Agamemnon are quarreling at the commencement of the Iliad.  Termite Warriors do not abduct female Alates for sexual purposes -- they have no sex drive or functioning organs.  So I had to find a different reason for a high-ranking Alate to be abducted and I think I did that successfully.  The important thing was to provoke the Achilles character so that it would be sulking in its "tent" at a crucial moment, causing the Patroclus character to respond to "Hector's" challenge in its place. 

       In Graves' interpretation of history, the Trojan War wasn't about the abduction of Helen at all but was really a trade war (see p. 302 or Graves' The Greek Myths, v.2 [Penguin Books, c1955])  Troy happened to be in a good location to control the entry to the Black Sea.   Obviously, in the landlocked home of the Northern Shshi, I couldn't create a contest for naval supremacy, so I made the conflict begin as a quarrel over a river ford.  Hence, my Troy gets the name "Thel'or'ei," meaning "Good Broad Ford."

       The mythical Hercules didn't take part in the Trojan War, but somewhere in his Greek Myths (and for the life of me I can't find the reference again, but I remember it), Graves mentions that Hercules is associated with fighting at Troy, probably in earlier conflicts over the city, so I felt justified in allowing my Hercules stand-in Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head to play a part in the War of the Stolen Mother.  Ki'shto'ba is not equivalent to any particular character in the Troy stories but is a kind of catalyst, voice of reason, and savior.  Di'fa'kro'mi obviously fills the role of Homer (albeit our Remembrancer is not blind).  And our little Worker/trickster is in this book -- who else? -- Odysseus, a trickster character in his own right -- responsible for both the stealing of the "Palladium" and for the building of the "Trojan Horse."
       And one word about Cassandra:  I was annoyed to say the least that she was omitted completely from the movie "Troy."  In that movie there was no Seer whom nobody would believe, and nobody ever said anything like "Beware Greeks bearing gifts" (unless I fell asleep at the wrong time -- it wasn't the greatest movie in the world).  "Cassandra" plays a big part in my interpretation.  And let's not forget Aeneas, who fled the burning city of Troy carrying his father on his back.  How does that work?  At some time in the near future, you'll be able to read "War of the Stolen Mother" and find out!

      

Characters and Elements Found in Myth and Folklore

       I got the idea of sending my termites out on an epic journey, complete with all the bells and whistles, out of the blue as I was finishing up "The Termite Queen."  I wish I could say that the idea came from a learned source like Joseph Campbell's theories of the Hero's Journey and such, but instead I think the source was much more of a pop culture phenomenon.  I was a big fan of "Xena: Warrior Princess" at the time!  In that series (and its predecessor "Hercules," which is much inferior, I think, although I did enjoy Michael Hurst as Iolaus), Greek myth and occasionally myths from other cultures are reworked, processed through a compressed time frame (Caesar is contemporary with Troy, for goodness' sakes!), and given their own fresh interpretations.  So that was in my mind at the time.

       But another source has to be Watership Down, which is an epic about rabbits and one of my favorite books of all time.  It has all the elements of the heroic journey, told in the context of a rabbit culture here on Earth.  My books also have the elements of the heroic journey, told in the context of an isopteroid culture on another planet.  As Amb. Tarrant Hergard said upon the occasion of the admission of  Earth into the Confederation of Planets:  “An ancient Earth adage says, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’  Perhaps the phrase should now become, ‘There is nothing new among

the stars.’”

       In the article "Epic Poetry" Wikipedia lists the following characteristics of an epic:

1. Begins in medias res.  [Actually, I don't do that one, unless you consider beginning right after the conclusion of "The Termite Queen" to be in medias res.]
2. The setting is vast, covering many nations, the world or the universe.  [check!]
3. Begins with an invocation to a muse (epic invocation).  [No, not here]
4. Begins with a statement of the theme.  [Umm, not exactly]
5. Includes the use of epithets.  [No, I don't think so.]
6. Contains long lists (epic catalogue). [Ah, yes -- I subject the reader to epic lists three times throughout the series.  One in each of the original volumes.  Maybe I can construct lists for the other three! Or maybe not.]
7. Features long and formal speeches.  [At times, when appropriate]
8. Shows divine intervention on human affairs.  [On only two occasions does the Nameless Mother personally poke her antennae into the mix, but the foretellings of Seers prevade the books.]
9. Features heroes that embody the values of the civilization.  [Definitely]

       Then there are the stock characters who are encountered in epics.  First, of course, you've got the epic hero and ours is ready-made:  Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head, the extra-large Da'no'no Shshi Warrior from To'wak.  Often this hero is a demigod; whether that's true of Ki'shto'ba you'll have to find out later.  The hero has to go on a quest and be tested in some way.  So far, so good.

       The hero may fall in love, rescue and marry a Princess.  (???)  Impossible!  There are some things sexless termites just can't do!  Although there IS one place where Ki'shto'ba rescues a fertile female nymph ...

       The hero must have Companions, be it just a sidekick or a dozen of them.  I opted for a dozen.

       There is the wandering Bard, who roams the world recounting the deeds of the hero.  Here we have Di'fa'kro'mi the Remembrancer, who is also Ki'shto'ba's First Companion.

       Its Second and Third Companions are little Workers -- sidekicks par excellence.  Every termite Warrior must have groomers and feeders - squires, in effect.

       The Fourth Companion is the twin -- a pervasive theme in mythology and one stressed by Robert Graves in his Greek Myths.  Hercules had a twin named Iphicles; Ki'shto'ba has one named A'zhu'lo.

       Then there is the trickster.  Aren't tricksters fun, though?  Reynard the Fox, Coyote, Raven, Loki, Puck, Ariel, Q in StarTrek, Odysseus -- and last but hardly least, El-ahrairah in Watership Down.  And right up there with those: Za'dut, the Fifth Companion of Ki'shto'ba -- a Worker but so much more.  Its name means two things in the Shshi language:  Little Lizard and Little Thief.

       Finally, there are the Seers.  Fiver in Watership Down comes to mind.  And Greek myth is loaded with Seers, which fits right in with Shshi culture, since every fortress has an Alate who is gifted with Seeing (even if part of it does come from ingesting a hallucinogen).  Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, becomes in my tales Thru'tei'ga'ma, the half-blind Seer of To'wak, who sets up the premises of the tale early on.  Ki'shto'ba won't acquire a Seer as a Companion until the fifth volume, but different Seers in different places have tremendous influence all the way through the story.  How much of their pronouncements are true foretellings and how many are merely self-fulfilling prophecies?  Again, you'll have to find out for yourself.