a week of Sacrificial Virgins

James Murray, editor and philologist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent the week putting in a little work every day collaborating with Lauren on our paper on Sacrificial Virgins in the Whedonverse, of which we now have a complete draft, approximately twice as long as anything we'd actually be presenting; so stage two, cutting it down to size and adding pictures, is next week.

We're comparing sacrifice of virgins in Greek tragedy to the same persistent trope in the Whedonverse.( Or do we mean motif?  And what is the difference?  Must check my Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (1), which I just downloaded (2)(3)(4)...)


I am running into a problem with our basic premise.  Sacrifice of virgins is a motif that shows up absolutely everywhere.  Andromeda for a start.  Every fairytale where the knight saves the princess from the monster-of-the-week.  I've just checked the Stith-Thompson searchable online index (http://storysearch.symbolicstudies.org/ ) and there are 318 motifs involving "princesses"; 159 involving "maidens"; 98 involving "virgins" (and another 95 involving the Virgin Mary).  Most of these aren't about virgin sacrifice, but the prevalence of stories about virgins/maidens/(always virgin) princesses demonstrates the persistent fascination Western culture has always had with the post-pubescent pre-marital phase of the female life cycle.  Sacrifice of women in that phase is always represented as particularly powerful in several ways (both magically or religiously efficacious, and emotionally wrenching), because of the supreme value of the victim, sacrificed at her moment of greatest desirability and perceived worth to the community.

a productive day that doesn't feel like it

English: Fallow And Productive The nearer field is left to grass whilst maize is growing in the further field. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We wrote another 1000 words for the Sacrificial Virgins paper, and I got two students set up to work on the Myth on the Map project, but somehow it still doesn't feel like a productive day.  I don't seem to be able to do three projects at once, let alone finish the administrative work I still have hanging over me from the spring.  And Oswald is getting pushed to the back, and I don't want to start yet another project and then not finish it; I have about 15 of those half-done and lying fallow about my hard drive already.  Must fix this.  But I'm not writing any more to-do lists, because they just make me feel guilty.

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Myth on the Map

English: Map of Homeric Greece with English labels Česky: Mapa homérského Řecka s anglickými popisky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Organizational day for the website project, "Myth on the Map".  I have enough money to get a functioning website up with 2 works mapped, Apollodorus and the Catalog of Ships. Question: should I then map the rest of the Iliad, or map a test book of Pausanias?  If so, which book?  Not sure yet.  Would link to the project but it doesn't appear to be working yet. The plan is, at any rate, to finish Apollodorus and the Catalog by the end of the summer, and have a map which, when one searches for stuff, finds it and displays it.

Tweaked the outline for the "sacrificial virgins" conference paper, and resolved another Oswald simile: a list of five (dead) Greeks, followed by the simile of the eagle attacking the geese by the river.  In Homer, it's about Hector, who's the eagle.  In Oswald, the geese are named but the eagle is not; the attacker is impersonal; the war.

THE WAR! RAHR! (Source)

(Okay, so I am foolishly reminded of Loki, leaping from the upper level upon Thor. "There is only - THE WAR! RAHR!" The only truly awful line in the Avengers...)

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Sacrificial virgins

Took the day off Homer to work on the conference paper I'm collaborating on for the Slayage conference in July in Vancouver, with my friend Lauren, who is doing all the actual work, including finding the bibliography, bless her.   We now have an outline that could easily produce a 90-minute lecture.  Trim out 80% of it, add some pictures, and we're done.  Only we have some hard choices to make.  Is the whole paper about River Tam?  Or Buffy?  Or Winifred Burkle? Or should we skip Whedon entirely and just talk about Iphigenia, and leave the Whedonverse application as an exercise for the reader?

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Medon the donkey

Cover of How to Read a Poem

Oswald skips several Trojan deaths here, and then attaches the simile of the island town on fire from invaders, lighting beacon fires asking for help, which Homer uses of the light from Achilles' head when he terrifies the Trojans by his scream alone, to the deaths of Stichius and Arkesilaus; but instead of the light (of the beacon fires) being like the light from Achilles' head, it is the smoke from the fires Oswald uses as a comparison, that vanishes from the earth like Stichius and Arkesilaus.

Then Aeneas kills off Medon and Iasus, with a line of description for each of them; Oswald concentrates on Medon, bastard son of Oileus, who killed his stepmother's kinsman, fled to Phylace, and wound up (after Philoctetes was abandoned) leading the Phthians at Troy.  Oswald adds that he then went on to Troy, and died in the 9th year.  To him she attaches the simile Homer uses of Ajax attacked by a flock of Trojans, who can't be moved by them any more than a sluggish donkey who's gotten into a cornfield and just keeps eating until he's had his fill and decides to move on, utterly unresponsive to the blows of the boys trying to drive him out with clubs.   Only she attaches this to Medon. How? Medon stubbornly killed a man, fled, fled on to Troy, kept fighting until he'd decided in his own sweet time that he was ready to die?

The translation, as always, is wonderful.  Oswald amplifies the mention of his father's wife (μητρυιῆς Ἐριώπιδος) to "grew up under the smile of a slim respectable stepmother", for example.  And the description of the donkey, who "thinking good I will wade and eat sideways/ ... does just that eats and eats sunk in a pond of corn".

I've begun reading Terry Eagleton "How to Read a Poem", since it's not something I've been trained in really (nor indeed something my teachers were trained in I think).  Eagleton identifies this problem in his students, that modern work tends to be content analysis which is largely oblivious to whether the "content" comes encased in a novel, a poem, or a real-life happening.  He says (instead of dealing with the 'literariness' of the work),

"... they treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page.  Maybe the computer got stuck." 

                                    (Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem; Blackwell, Oxford 2007: 3.) 

That, embarrassingly, would be me; but Memorial makes me want to really up my game, and be able to say precisely what's so cool about it, which isn't just content, or even just its relationship to Homer.

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a death scene today: Ilioneus

Ilioneus Statue (1850s copy after ancient greec original) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For a look at her translation practice here's Oswald 52-53, on the death of Ilioneus:

Ilioneus an only child ran out of luck

He always wore that well-off look

His parents had a sheep farm

They didn't think he would die

But a spear stuck through his eye

He sat down backwards

Trying to snatch back the light

With stretched out hands

I've bolded the parts that appear in the Greek.  Here's the Greek, with a literal translation - the bolded parts, in Greek, are translated by Oswald:

ὃ δ’ οὔτασεν Ἰλιονῆα

υἱὸν Φόρβαντος πολυμήλου, τόν ῥα μάλιστα

Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε·

τῷ δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπὸ μήτηρ μοῦνον τέκεν Ἰλιονῆα.

τὸν τόθ’ ὑπ’ ὀφρύος οὖτα κατ’ ὀφθαλμοῖο θέμεθλα,

ἐκ δ’ ὦσε γλήνην· δόρυ δ’ ὀφθαλμοῖο διὰ πρὸ

καὶ διὰ ἰνίου ἦλθεν, ὃ δ’ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας

ἄμφω· 

"And he (Peneleos, a Greek) wounded Ilioneus, the son of Phorbas of the plentiful flocks, whom especially among the Trojans Hermes loved and granted possessions; to him his mother bore the single (child) Ilioneus.  Him then he wounded under the eyebrow down through the base of the eye, and drove out his eyeball; and the spear went first through the eye and through the nape of the neck, and he sat down, stretching out both his hands."

Cool things: 

1. switching object to subject (Ilioneus is the object of the Greek, in the accusative until the last phrase, but is the subject in Oswald). 
2. switching personal to impersonal: in the Iliad the important thing is who killed him (Peneleos); in Oswald that's elided, and the spear killed him by itself.  A move Oswald frequently makes, because "who killed him" is not important to Memorial as it is to the Iliad.
3. "μοῦνον" = "an only child".
4. "μάλιστα Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε" (Hermes loved him and gave him stuff, the most of all the Trojans) = "he always wore that well-off look", but also.
5. "ran out of luck" - also a reference to Hermes, because a ἑρμαῖον is a "lucky find", a "thing sent by Hermes".  So Hermes loved his father, but eventually, he, or his father, ran out of Hermes.
6. ὃ δ’ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας ἄμφω gets amplified with "trying to snatch back the light", which then leads to the simile, which actually is fascinating, but this is enough for today.

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Promachus dies

Similes (Photo credit: teotwawki)

This was pretty straightforward.  I hunted around for stuff on Homeric similes; turns out others have noticed the similes in Homer.  Quite a few.  Wilamowitz among them.  Fortunately I'm not writing about the similes in Homer, hah, because if I were I'd be reading for 3 years before I could write a word.  I read Taplin's review of Moulton's book on similes (Homeric Similes, 1977, certainly much has been written since, but it was the first thing that came to hand). (See, for a very cursory list, my rapidly growing "Secondary Literature" page.  This is not, I need hardly say, a list of works I have already read.  It is aspirational.)

Moulton assumes that when he sees subtlety in Homer it's because it's there, not because it accidentally accreted into the poem.  I'm inclined to agree but again I am not writing about that, I am so very grateful to say; I am writing about Oswald, and I can certainly argue that subtlety in Memorial is "part of the poem and not there by coincidence" (Taplin, 184).  I have to admit though that Memorial's reading of the Iliad highlights a great deal of subtlety in the original text; I suspect that's by design too.

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Archelochus and the changing will of Zeus

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Homer, the gods decide to kill Archelochus, so a spear flung at someone else hits him.  In Memorial, the spear decides of its own free will to miss the other guy and hit Archelochus.

But then Oswald continues (p. 52),

Like the changing mind
That moves a cloud off a mountain
And makes rocks and cliffs appear
Pushing the landscape's sharp edges up
Through more and more air

This simile comes from Bk 16, where Patroclus has just suited up in Achilles' armour and is leading the Greeks to fight back the Trojans, who have just set fire to Protesilaus' ship.  The Greeks take heart and beat back the Trojans and put out the flames, the way (says the Iliad) Zeus lightning-gatherer moves a cloud etc etc., but (says the Iliad) not forever; this gives them a breather, but the war doesn't stop.  ("Changing mind" I take as a translation of στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς, since nothing changes more quickly than lightning.) 

So in the Iliad, Greeks pushing back the Trojans and putting out the flames = Zeus (temporarily) moving a cloud off a mountain. In Oswald, a spear decides to kill one man rather than another, the way a "changing mind" moves a cloud off a mountain and reveals the (sharp, clear) landscape.  Oswald highlights the changeability of the spear and of the mind; one man could have been killed just as easily as another.  And where the Iliad's simile focuses on those who are benefitting by the divine choice (of the moment) - the Greeks are forcing the Trojans back and putting out the flames - Oswald's simile, as always, focusses on the one that did not benefit; Archelochus, who died because of the will of the gods, rather than Poulydamas who lived.

A further point of context: Zeus' favour is not going to rest with Patroclos forever, either; this simile, in the Iliad, also foreshadows his eventual death.  Its use here in Oswald grants the all but unknown Trojan Archelochus' death the importance of Patroclus's eventual death. Finally: I have yet to find anywhere in Oswald that the gods get a mention. But should re-check that.

I need to start collecting these points, and decide what matters most, and what article to write.  I'd like to just write an article on the similes, and how they work in Oswald.  I would need to talk about how they work in Homer, for comparison.

Euchenor goes to heaven

English: Arabian mare standing in a show halter pose (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Was prepared to find nothing much interesting happening here, but Oswald has cleverly turned another simile on its ear.  The simile about the well-fed, pampered aristocrat of horses, happily breaking its halter and running off to the river and where the mares are, is applied by Homer to Paris when he runs off home to visit Helen in the middle of a battle in Book 6 (granted, with Aphrodite's help); Paris is exactly that pampered, over-nourished, over-sexed, gleaming, self-centred figure, beautiful but wholly dedicated to his own pleasure, and inclined to break his halter and run away from his duty when he sees a mare.  

But here the simile is turned round and it is used of Euchenor, whom Paris has just killed. (So once again, subject to object, or object to subject; Euchenor, the object of the arrow, becomes the subject of the simile, whose former subject was the man who killed him).  Euchenor was happy to die because his father the seer told him it was die gloriously and quickly at Troy or miserably of illness at home.  So he knew this was going to happen.  And the simile is of a horse breaking free of its halter - its duty, its life - and going running on, a young happy horse, forever, in Paradise. 

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Harpalion, and more deer

Homer Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Didn't get far today.  Harpalion, son of Pylaemenes, gets killed by Meriones (who kills a lot of people, without ever really having much of a story himself).  His weeping father follows his body back to Troy.  Which is odd, because his father died in book 5.  Did Homer/ the bardic collective/ the oral tradition forget?  I bet someone has written a lot about this.

A simile about panic-stricken deer.  I may not have found the right one, because the deer is described as fearing her guests, and guests don't appear in the Greek (but they do, in the passage about the death of Harpalion, so maybe that's it).  Harpalion is apparently a scaredy-cat.  Like the deer. Though unlike the deer around here, who are scared of nothing, and have just eaten all our spinach.  Maybe we should import some wolves.

  I suspect I'm missing something.

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