myths and notes

I am finally making some progress on my mythology research. introductory as it is. I learned a lot from the Egyptian mythology reference book I just finished and the Poetic Edda is fascinating, both in content and just by how fragmentary and debated it all is due to lack of contextual information. My impression is that a lot of cultural information did not survive the transition from oral histories to written ones.

I see Neil Gaiman rewrote the Norse Mythologies, which is something I thought of doing 15 years ago but never did (as I'm sure 1000 others have considered as well). It makes sense that he would do it, he being an actual writer who writes, but I wish I had done my own version. I am considering doing an interpretation of some Egyptian fables though.

I think I have it in my head that Gaiman has staked some territory on modernizing myths, but that doesn't really hold up to examination I think. I mean, there are plenty of other authors doing their own take on these common myths for one.

More importantly though, I don't think there is "canon" as such when it comes to ancient mythologies. The fragments we have through the Edda and various archeological finds in egypt and Greece are by no means complete, and more importantly represent only a partial understanding of those myths by those particular people at that particular time. The Edda is not how it was, it is just the earliest version we have of those stories, as related by these particular story tellers. They were telling these tales through the lens of their own experience and culture and time period and, truthfully, each of us can do the same, whether we choose to commit them to paper or not. There are ways to do that that are truer to the original sources than not, but like all art, myths get to be what we see them as. The object may be less to describe the world through myth, but to describe the storyteller in how they relate to myth. So I guess I have given myself permission to write what I need to.

The other things I want to write is something about archetypal ideas that exist as beings on higher planes who are in conflict, and life on earth affected by the fallout of the victors and losers over time. I probably need to read more Jung to flesh this idea out. I'm not sure explicitly what my influences are here, and maybe I don't need to to write a flight of fancy, but I would like to not be recreating the wheel when I talk about it. If there's a history of thought here, I want to tap into it I guess.

That last is a weird idea, and it is probably just confirmation bias, but I I am interested because I am often struck at how ideas sweep a populace. Either as a natural progression of ideas as they bump into each other or, more fantastically, as a kind of psychic weather that the solar system drifts through on it's journey through the galaxy.  The first I want to read academic schools of thought about and the second fantastic stories about. I may have to write the second myself.