Alia said:
Wouldn't The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer be considered fantasy written in 800 B. C. E?
I’m going to place my answer to this at the end.
Brys said:
However, much of those elements were believed to have been real, so it could easily be historical fiction, for example, Homer's Iliad and Oddessy introduced the Gods regularly, but they were believed to have been real, and so it is hard to describe as fantasy.
Point here: Homer did not introduce the God’s regularly, that role was attributed to Hesiod, especially his
Theogany. Actually, how the Greeks came to have such a universal network of gods and goddesses is something I’m incredibly curious about. Archaeology shows it existed before the first written myths and before the first Pan-hellenic sanctuaries. I’m actually hoping to research this topic for my thesis.
Alia said:
Religion, gods, myths and legends I believe, all play an important part on what people wrote about. Just because Homer (or any other myth writer or story teller) used the gods of this times doesn't mean that his stories aren't fantasy. Mythology is one of the earliest forms of fantasy stories we might know of.
Mythology is very different to fantasy, to us it contains fantastic elements, and a lot of it is created. But it is above all a social construct and a product of society as a whole. We can’t talk about the intention of the authors as society is its author.
Caladanbrood said:
With Homer, it is difficult to define, because, as far as I know, its really the only widespread account of the battle of Troy... (please correct me if I'm wrong), and so it is really asort of historical fiction, rather than fantasy. While he cannot possibly have known all the movements to the detail put down in the Illiad, he can have known the general outline, and who was where when, and he can have made very well educated guesses at the facts behind the story. He would, however, have had to make big guesses at times aswell. I will admit now that I haven't read the Illiad all the way through, and I'm far from being an expert, but while it blends in mythology to the story, its hard to say that it is fantasy, as Brys said, the greeks firmly believed that the gods walked among them and took part in battles and all such things... Nonetheless, the Illiad was made up, at least in part... does creating your own myths as you go count as using established mythology in writing?
The Greeks believed, and did not believe, their myths. (Paul Veyne.
Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths). Henrich Schliemann was obsessed with finding Homeric Troy through archaeology. He completely decimated the site of Troy, but to this day, Homeric Troy has still not been found and doesn’t appear to exist. But. The Iliad, though it does appear to be a construct, was not “made up” by one man.
Fantasy
Mythology
Legend
Fable
These aren’t antonyms, each has a different nuance.
What about China? I take it we’re talking about the invention of fantasy in the west mainly, though Gilgamesh is also being discussed? If so I’ll leave China out of it.
Kelpie said:
But all this refers back to what I said, Alia, about needing first to define Fantasy -- and whether the intent of the writer has any bearing on the matter. Because if you say Homer was writing Fantasy merely because he included gods and goddesses and mythical heroes, then what of other religious writings?
And just because so many Fantasy writers past and present have drawn so much inspiration from mythology, that doesn't make them interchangable. Fantasy has a whole array of ancestors, but I think we make a mistake if we make too close an identification between the genre and its sources, just as it would be a mistake to identify a child and his or her parents and grandparents as the same person.
Very good point.
knivesout said:
As Kelpie, I think, has attempted to point out,
intention is crucial here, more so than the inclusion of elements that to us today may seem fantastic. I think the writer of Gilgamesh was probably acting in good faith - he was attempting to narrate something that he thought had really happened, and if he stretched things a bit, it was to make his story and point stronger. Also, ascribing great powers and magical encounters to figures from the past is pretty common to the legendry of all civilizations
. It's a way of aggrandizing yourself by building up your roots, and of contributing to the function of social-cementing that such myths and legends perform. And, seeing how people from the modern era are willing to allow race or national pride to lead them into believing that their ancient ancestors might well have pioneered things like air travel and the atom bomb several milennia before the fact, I'm willing to bet that a lot of the ancient legend tellers and their audiences may well have been convinced of the literal truth of even their wildest tales.
While the imaginative creations of early myths and legends have had an impact on what we have come to know as fantastic fiction, I think we need to be clear about the issue of intention before calling any work the earliest piece of fantasy. I'd say that a fantastic tale can, broadly, be defined as a story that includes elements that the writer
knows are unlikely or impossible in reality, and that is not intended as a literal account of real events, but as a fictional offering that is intended to amuse and maybe instruct. As such, I'd certainly agree that Aesop, and the writers of the Indian Panchatantra (
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/panchatantra.html#about) are certainly fantasy writers. Homer, the author of Gilgamesh and other epics are not really fantasists in this sense.
I'd reckon, to reiterate a point I've just made, that mythology and legends are an important source since they provide archetypes and story-forms that the modern genre has mined. But the real development of the genre as a genre as a discrete entity should probably begin a little more recently. More on that later.
more points I agree with
J
Ainulindale said:
Off topic, but You just described 95% of all sub-par fantasy
Lol
Ainulindale said:
The question, where fantasy originated from has no answer (and if there is we certainly are not going to come up with it here) - it's much easier to look at the various time or movements and try to gauge there influences of that of individual authors.
It has an answer if you define the parameters. If we say ‘Intentional fiction which goes above and beyond reality, in which the main
purpose is entertainment, pleasure or escapism as such’ then we cut out a lot of stuff which to identify as fantasy is really uncertain.
“Mythology” is more a cultural construct, especially the Greek mythology which was never stable but constantly evolving as their identity and social circumstances changed.
Kelpie said:
Let's not lose sight of the difference between fiction, fantasy, and wishful thinking -- as I think we are beginning to do in some of the more involved explanations of why this or that ancient source was really writing fantasy.
Kelpie said:
And surely there is a different impulse involved in writing about things one believes to be true or could be true (no matter how fantastical in the eyes of later eras), and venturing out into the realm of "what if the laws of nature were not what they are, what if the world were a very different place?" Because the second requires an imaginative leap on the part of the writer and the reader. An imaginative leap, by the way, that a lot of people are unable to make, which is why they can never get into fantasy.
Agree.
Alia said:
Homer is mythology and I believe in one sense is fantasy. I believe that mythology is one of the earliest fantasy writing we have. Homer wrote to appease an audience using information provided to him at the time. Imagine what the man would write now if he were alive.
If he even existed.
The Homeric epics were originally told through oratory, with poets of every generation contributing.
I can’t remember the date for the earliest written fragment of Homer, but we have two key “events” for interpreting when written epic became ‘mainstream’ as such.
- Introduction of writing to Greece.
- Under the tyranny of Peisistratus, the Pan-Athenaic festival was created and the very first Homeric competition introduced. I can’t remember all the evidence, but there is a strong case for arguing that this is the point at which the written Homer started to supersede the oral Homer.
Homeric epic was constantly reinterpreted in order to convey specific messages, whether about morality or contemporary politics, to the audience of the time. This is one of the pieces of evidence that supports dating the setting down of “Homer” to the 6th century: once the Odyssey and Illiad were set in writing, they could not really be readjusted. What we see in these is a bronze Age story yet an Archaic social system with archaic heroes. The archaeology supports this.
Alia said:
It wasn't written as a fantasy story like Homer did for his audiences
Kelpie said:
Yes, but intent to entertain is a whole different matter, Alia, than the intent to write "make believe," which is what I would say distinguishes the fantasy writer from all others.
-
A point I was jumping to say after reading page one
J
Kelpie’s whole post there is so good, I don’t think I can say anything intelligent here.
gollum said:
I'd like to ask a question here "What is Fantasy?".
It’s like asking “what is ethnicity?”. You can get a text book definition, or a series or criteria. But in both cases you can never get a definition or methodology of identifying and classifying that covers every example, every opinion, every circumstance.
I love it
J there seems to be a driving need to classify, box and label things neatly in so much of humanity, but we can hardly ever do so, not even to our own creations!
It just tickles me
Ah, kelpie, yet another good post, I think you’re my hero
Brys said:
authors is that they were not expecting most people to read their work, but to listen to it. This meant that they often embellished a lot of what they wrote,
it also meant they had to conform to a metric metre and the aural aesthetics, nuances of translation are highly affected by this: words which were put there to conform to a specific metre are often argued to have a greater significance.
Alia said:
But there are some similiarities between her religion and other modern day religions
Similarities are very different to including the real deal as it was contemporarilly known and relevant.
Alia said:
Whose to say that Homer wasn't as inventive as Kate and only kept the names of the gods and heroes?
[font="]Mythographers, archaeologists and historians for one
[/font]
