Ancient Literature Discussion (History, Myth, Philosophy &c.)

[Nanashi(kari)]

Even if such a thing existed I doubt it could be deciphered considering there are already proto-cuneiform tablets which use pictographs whose meaning is unclear.

[Castellan]

In this case Europe is still left in the cold, since many parts of Europe are among the last where evidence of written language has been discovered.

Most (if not all) of the Viking Age is technically proto-historical by the Eurocentric definition of history, which is my go-to example for how this standard is profoundly arbitrary.

Also, I've covered some miscellaneous Ireland Stuff but are there other Ireland-related things people have questions about? I can have a go at answering them/picking the brains of a PhD student to see if they have an answer.

[Ideofago]

How come this specific set of islands has such a varied and rich mithological culture in a territory that doesn't seem that vast? Is it the case for other, most, and maybe all mithologies, or is it just an outlier?

[Petrikow]

How come this specific set of islands has such a varied and rich mithological culture in a territory that doesn't seem that vast? Is it the case for other, most, and maybe all mithologies, or is it just an outlier?

It's probably a kind of survivor's bias. A lot of pre-Christian cultures had very extensive mythologies, but Irish and Norse are two examples that have survived fairly well in comparison (ironically, almost always through the efforts of Christian monks).

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Were the Fomorians based on real pre-Christian Irish traditions, or were they made up by the Christians for the sagas?

[SpoonyViking]

Most (if not all) of the Viking Age is technically proto-historical by the Eurocentric definition of history, which is my go-to example for how this standard is profoundly arbitrary.

Also, I've covered some miscellaneous Ireland Stuff but are there other Ireland-related things people have questions about? I can have a go at answering them/picking the brains of a PhD student to see if they have an answer.

I'm interested in any Irish-specific legends about werewolves. I've found the legend of St. Patrick supposedly cursing people for not listening to his preachings - "If you're going to behave like wolves, then be wolves" -, but I was curious if there were any others.

[Five_X]

Most (if not all) of the Viking Age is technically proto-historical by the Eurocentric definition of history, which is my go-to example for how this standard is profoundly arbitrary.

I don't think it quite works that way, since regardless of Norse peoples' own literacy, other peoples who did write a lot, wrote a lot about the Vikings - not to mention oral tradition later being written down. A better example is the Trypillian culture of Eastern Europe ca. 5500 BC, who had an immensely complex society and some kind of pictograms we can't decipher, but no written records. Methodologically, the emergence of writing is immensely important.

[Ideofago]

I guess my problem with it is mostly semantic. This is a bit of over-sensitivity, but at the same time calling things that can be studied through written documents history and excluding everything else previous feels off. I understand that the methods of study have been changing, but I believe such blazing displays of the white racial frame have not yet been dealt with at the foundations of many sciences.

[Nanashi(kari)]

I don't really care about peoples who didn't left behind written records but that's because I'm more interested in the words ancient people left behind rather than actual history.

[Five_X]

I guess my problem with it is mostly semantic. This is a bit of over-sensitivity, but at the same time calling things that can be studied through written documents history and excluding everything else previous feels off. I understand that the methods of study have been changing, but I believe such blazing displays of the white racial frame have not yet been dealt with at the foundations of many sciences.

The problem really lies in attaching a qualitative positivity to "history" in opposition to "pre-history." It's obviously dumb to pretend that studying a society that left written records is comparable to studying a society that didn't.

The very word history through its Greek roots carries the meaning of research, inquiry, and recording of what one knows and has learned. If I'm to be particularly pedantic, referring to the past as "history" is a misnomer: history is study of the past, much as geology is not "the Earth" but specifically study of the Earth (made more easily evident by its discrete roots in geo-logos). It's understandable that we've come to use these words as shorthand to refer to the thing that is being studied, but when it comes to history it's particularly problematic. If you're not studying something through documents, then it's not history, by definition. This isn't a qualitative difference - though it once was used to create one - but a methodological difference. By and large prehistoric societies are studies by archaeologists and anthropologists, who specialise in examining and interpreting material remains and cultural artifacts, while historians focus mostly on where written records can be used for interpretation and inquiry. There's a lot of overlap and cooperation (at least ideally) between the three since they all together study the past, but in crucially different ways.

[Ideofago]

And what about new methods of study that arose? I remember a part of history class specifically focused in the different types of texts and cultural patrimonies(is that a word in english?) that were now being utilized, and their dichotomy with the older, written text restricted sort. Are those still history? Though I guess this falls to what you define as a document.

[Herod]

This is the coolest thread in this forum.

[Castellan]

How come this specific set of islands has such a varied and rich mithological culture in a territory that doesn't seem that vast? Is it the case for other, most, and maybe all mithologies, or is it just an outlier?

Because the Irish wrote a lot of shit down and a lot of it survived. While Ireland had been embroiled in internecine conflict for ages it had largely avoided the large-scale devastation of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, and its conflicts were largely between warrior-aristocrats, which left the clergy and other learned men with a lot of time to write things down, especially since said aristocracy were very generous with patronage because it made them popular. We have more law codes from Ireland than the entirety of medieval Europe put together, and a lot of Classical texts survived because the Irish happened to have preserved a copy here or there. It's just that we have a lot of written sources, a lot of which haven't been translated.

I don't think it quite works that way, since regardless of Norse peoples' own literacy, other peoples who did write a lot, wrote a lot about the Vikings - not to mention oral tradition later being written down.

That's the definition of proto-historical.

Historical: We have written sources from the period written by the people themselves.
Proto-historical: We have written sources from the period written about the people.

So Scandinavia in the 8th-10th century is largely proto-historical and then we see the first non-runic writings actually come out of Scandinavia. I didn't make the rules, I just call them very dumb, because they are :v

Were the Fomorians based on real pre-Christian Irish traditions, or were they made up by the Christians for the sagas?

They're probably quite old. They appear in the earliest sagas, although their character changes immensely. In the early sagas they simply seem to be another group of Otherworldly beings like the Túatha Dé, possibly representing agrarian labor (one way to interpret their name is 'Those Who Farm Beneath the Earth'). With the advent of the Norse invasions the Irish go "no actually fuck these people, we're making them into raiders from across the sea and fucking up our perfectly good god-genealogy for this."

I'm interested in any Irish-specific legends about werewolves. I've found the legend of St. Patrick supposedly cursing people for not listening to his preachings - "If you're going to behave like wolves, then be wolves" -, but I was curious if there were any others.

I can't OTOH think of any werewolf stories, but it's worth noting that 'wolves' as a motif in Ireland tends to refer to outlaws of some kind rather than actual wolves because the name itself is metaphorical, so it might literally be Patrick going "if you're going to behave like outlaws, go be outlaws". Ireland didn't really have a word for 'wolf' for the longest time, it just had a word for 'house canine' versus 'canine that will rip your face off at the first provocation.' I'll let you guess which of the two "Cú" is.

[SpoonyViking]

I guess my problem with it is mostly semantic. This is a bit of over-sensitivity, but at the same time calling things that can be studied through written documents history and excluding everything else previous feels off. I understand that the methods of study have been changing, but I believe such blazing displays of the white racial frame have not yet been dealt with at the foundations of many sciences.

For what it's worth, oral literature has been steadily given more importance in certain circles of literary and historical studies since at least the early 20th century, and material culture has always had great prominence in the latter.
I think few contemporary historians worth their salt would state history only begins with the written word.

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I can't OTOH think of any werewolf stories, but it's worth noting that 'wolves' as a motif in Ireland tends to refer to outlaws of some kind rather than actual wolves because the name itself is metaphorical, so it might literally be Patrick going "if you're going to behave like outlaws, go be outlaws". Ireland didn't really have a word for 'wolf' for the longest time, it just had a word for 'house canine' versus 'canine that will rip your face off at the first provocation.' I'll let you guess which of the two "Cú" is.

Oh, that's very interesting! There's also an interesting parallel with how the Norse also associated outlaws with wolves (one word for both was "vargr"), even if they also had more positive associations for wolves (although depending on whether berserkers were respected or stigmatised at the specific time). I've read that the English also used to call the Irish "wolves", with all the negative connotations of the word, usually as a call for "civilising" them.

Hm. How about stories with legendary wolves of some kind, even if not shapeshifting ones? Did the "wild canines" have any particular importance in Irish mythology?

[Skull]

I can't OTOH think of any werewolf stories, but it's worth noting that 'wolves' as a motif in Ireland tends to refer to outlaws of some kind rather than actual wolves because the name itself is metaphorical, so it might literally be Patrick going "if you're going to behave like outlaws, go be outlaws".

Also worth noting is this sort of terminology correlates to the rest of the British Isles where the Anglo-Saxons called outlaws Wolf-Heads (“Wulfes heafod”) whilst the Welsh called them Dog-Heads (“Cinbin”)

[Castellan]

Hm. How about stories with legendary wolves of some kind, even if not shapeshifting ones? Did the "wild canines" have any particular importance in Irish mythology?

There's Lug's dog Fáil-Inis that he may or may not have had three dudes swipe from Odin.

And the word "Cú" or its possessive form "Con" shows up in a lot of hero names. Cú Chulainn, Cú Roi, Conchobar, Conall. They're all from that word.

[Five_X]

"History" begins with translatable human thought - in other words, historical records. This includes oral tradition as well as written documents; after all, Greek ἱστορία involved talking to people and writing it down, even if the original methodologies weren't perfect. I don't really recognise "protohistory" as sufficiently distinct from history, because both primarily involve interpretation of written or received texts in conversation with archaeological research. To me it's a pretty meaningless distinction these days.

If you've got purely non-written evidence of a society, then you can still study it from an archaeological and anthropological perspective. The Dufuna canoe of northern Nigeria tells us a lot about the environmental conditions and society of the region around 6,500 BC through the work of archaeologists, scientists, and anthropologists, but historical inquiry hasn't much of a role to play there.

[Castellan]

"History" begins with translatable human thought - in other words, historical records. This includes oral tradition as well as written documents; after all, Greek ἱστορία involved talking to people and writing it down, even if the original methodologies weren't perfect. I don't really recognise "protohistory" as sufficiently distinct from history, because both primarily involve interpretation of written or received texts in conversation with archaeological research. To me it's a pretty meaningless distinction these days.

For the record, I wholeheartedly agree with this - I think the distinction's pretty meaningless and that not paying as much attention to oral or material culture just diminishes the field overall.

[SpoonyViking]

There's Lug's dog Fáil-Inis that he may or may not have had three dudes swipe from Odin.

And the word "Cú" or its possessive form "Con" shows up in a lot of hero names. Cú Chulainn, Cú Roi, Conchobar, Conall. They're all from that word.

(laughs) The latter, I gathered. :-) Thanks, though! Is Fáil-Inis's story available in English anywhere?

[Bugs]

Not sure when I wanted to interject and ask, but I was curious about Castellan's or anyone else's opinion on the Lebor Gabála Érenn. Specifically its inclusion of a deluge myth, which I can't seem to find anywhere else in Irish myth in my few minutes of research.