Similarities Between Beowulf And The Iliad

Many, in fact most, classical texts and origin myths were not written down in their original form. As most stories started out verbally and were repeated and spread by bards they were subject to deviance from the original narrative. By the time most of these stories were actually written down it had been not only many years since the events they describe, in the case of Beowulf and The Iliad hundreds of years, but it had also been many years since the myths had first been told and started passing from bard to bard. This fact is important because with many years between a stories creation and its first written record it becomes hard to know what of the story was original and what was embellished. In the case of many of these tales, culture had

The mention of Cupid within The Iliad stands out starkly as Cupid was a Roman god who would clearly not be known of by the Greeks at the time of the Trojan War. But these disparages between the plot of the original stories and the details added retroactively allow us to understand how many hands these myths have passed through and while some ideals from the original text ultimately shine through, others are covered up or even erased in order to further whatever ideals the person transcribing this myth is trying to get across. In the Enuma Elish the writer is adjusting a preexisting myth with no written record in order to center around and favor another god and by doing so attempts to shape the culture around Marduk rather than another god. Aside from attempting to influence its own culture by exemplifying Marduk to stand for the values the story tries to express it also sheds light on the broader phenomenon: revision to further the authors agenda. They seek to revise a story or history in order to suit the values they intend to promote. Similar to the case of the Enuma Elish, Beowulf was transcribed to reflect Christian faith and ideals instead of the paganism of the original story and though the Christian influence is strong there are ideas and parts of the pagan origins that shine through to reveal the revision done. The way these changes shine through is telling of how many hands a story has

The revision of myths serves to adjust a preexisting story to serve a modern audience, of the audience of the time it was transcribed. When it comes to old myths such as the ones we’ve examined in class it can be almost impossible to tell when a story was first told and who was telling it thus even with stories such as Gilgamesh that appear to have been unaltered by whoever wrote them down there is still room for doubt that aspects were changed and omitted from the original oral telling. Because so many stories originated, spread, and survived through oral tradition before they were ever written down there is no way to know what the original story was or how exactly it evolved before it was penned. For this reason it is important to understand how these anachronistic and adaptive changes have impacted the source material. In cases such as the Shahnameh or Beowulf the impact can be profound. In the case of Beowulf it shifts a large portion of the story onto a sense of spirituality and promotes faith in God as a driving moral force in a way that clearly would not be reflected in the source material. For the Shahnameh history is rewritten in order to fold Alexander the Great into the narrative Persians wanted to see, taking extreme liberty with fact in order to get across the message it intends to. For both texts the impact is profound and neither