Robert Graves

[johnr60]

The Nazarine Gospel is a weighty, 1000 page tome, presenting the Jesus story from evidence in the literature and sayings of the time--the opposite of what I expected. It appears to be a presentation of the evidence for the ideas in KJ. The goddess has basically disappeared, Mary M has become the adoptive mother of Jesus. The final 200 pages is the gospel story retold based on the evidence presented. Not my cup of tea.

hdw--Cuch was off playing hurley when he got locked out and had to face the big dog. That's the best I can do.

 

[cuchulain]

I wonder how Setanta got to be the name of a cable-TV network? A few years ago the Scottish Football Association (SFA) sold their soul to Setanta, and now if you want to watch a Scotland international football match you have to go out to a pub and watch it on their big-screen TV. There's an unholy alliance between the Setanta TV people and the publicans, scratching each other's backs. But there is a move afoot to try and get big football matches back on terrestrial TV.

Sorry to have lowered the intellectual tone of this forum!

Harry

That's interesting. A short break for pub talk does no harm, IMO. No worries.

Another thing to think about with Graves. He did a lot of work without the benefit of some amazing discoveries in recent years. The discovery of several gnostic works (or fragments) as recently as the 1990s. He would have known about the Nag Hamadi find in 1948. But there have been more such things since then.

I need to double-check this, but the gospel of Judas was found in the 1970s, I believe, but not released to the public. There are many things that completely alter our understanding of Christianity and Judaism. I wish Graves had lived to explore these new finds.

I'm always fascinating by attempts to find sources and then analyze them. Going back to Cuchulain, he (and Irish myth in general) is the source for several streams of Arthurian legend. The Irish myths predate them. The story of the Green Knight, for instance, is in the Ulster cycle. Setanta's own discovery of royal birth has echoes with Arthur and Perceval. Many years ago, I took a Shakespeare class and brought some of those sources to the attention of the professor, who seemed happy for the input. She was expert on so many aspects of The Bard, but did not know of the Celtic connection.

 

[cuchulain]

hdw--Cuch was off playing hurley when he got locked out and had to face the big dog. That's the best I can do.

That's an excellent summary. Well done.

 

[hdw]

The Irish myths predate them. The story of the Green Knight, for instance, is in the Ulster cycle. (Quote from cuchulain's post above)

If you're talking about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, cuchulain, that's a real coincidence, because I have just (in the last five minutes) read a little item in the Travel section of today's "Observer" about The Roaches in Staffordshire - "mighty gritstone cliffs [with] knotted, lumpen faces" which are supposed to have inspired the Gawain poet. I quote -

"Start by following in the footsteps of Sir Gawain: along the ridge's high tier and down the far side through a tract of twisted oaks and beech trees straight from the pages of a medieval romance. Hidden in the depths of this fairytale forest is Lud's Church, a kind of miniature gorge draped with mosses and ferns, which scholars have identified as the inspiration for Sir Gawain's Green Chapel ..."

I remember from my university days that there was some dispute as to exactly where the Gawain poet was from, based on studies of the dialect of the poem. It is clearly north-western Middle English, but some scholars favoured Staffordshire and some neighbouring Cheshire. My teacher was a Staffordshire man called David Tittensor who was intensely proud of having a surname derived from a Staffordshire village, so no prizes for guessing which county we were taught to assign the Gawain poet to.

Harry

 

[cuchulain]

The Irish myths predate them. The story of the Green Knight, for instance, is in the Ulster cycle. (Quote from cuchulain's post above)

If you're talking about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, cuchulain, that's a real coincidence, because I have just (in the last five minutes) read a little item in the Travel section of today's "Observer" about The Roaches in Staffordshire - "mighty gritstone cliffs [with] knotted, lumpen faces" which are supposed to have inspired the Gawain poet. I quote -

"Start by following in the footsteps of Sir Gawain: along the ridge's high tier and down the far side through a tract of twisted oaks and beech trees straight from the pages of a medieval romance. Hidden in the depths of this fairytale forest is Lud's Church, a kind of miniature gorge draped with mosses and ferns, which scholars have identified as the inspiration for Sir Gawain's Green Chapel ..."

I remember from my university days that there was some dispute as to exactly where the Gawain poet was from, based on studies of the dialect of the poem. It is clearly north-western Middle English, but some scholars favoured Staffordshire and some neighbouring Cheshire. My teacher was a Staffordshire man called David Tittensor who was intensely proud of having a surname derived from a Staffordshire village, so no prizes for guessing which county we were taught to assign the Gawain poet to.

Harry

The contiguous sources for most Arthurian legends were Welsh and Breton. Both Celtic peoples. But Irish myths predate those sources, in most cases, which tells me that Celtic bards got around, that there was a real flow from campfire to campfire. Celtic being the root for pretty much all of it. The Irish myths also had the advantage of being written down much earlier than either Welsh or Breton. Irish monks were most often involved.

There is a push-pull issue involved with that as well. We can thank those monks for preserving what might otherwise have been lost. But it came at a price. They sometimes "Christianized" the stories that were clearly "pagan" in origin.

There was also the factor of Viking raids. Vikings must have had a particular dislike of Celtic myths. They burned a lot of those monkish enclosures, and we lost much literature as a result.

Going back to the early days of Christianity, we also lost a great many non-orthodox texts. A true tragedy. Those texts, of course, were not always thought of as non-orthodox or heretical. The people who won the battles got to write the history and call themselves "orthodox". Posterity was diminished in the process. We all lost a great deal of possibly wonderful biblical literature as a result of those battles . . . .

The same thing, btw, happened with the formation of canonical Judaism, in a sense. But Jewish scholars seemed to have been far more tolerant (and actually quite interested in) non-orthodox expressions of spiritual mysteries, working hard to preserve and extend stories that were only hinted at in the canon. Stories were extended outside "accepted" scripture, and many Jewish scholars throughout the centuries studied those alternatives texts, sequels, elaborations, etc.

In general, it seems that the official position of the Christian church was far, far more rigid and unbending.

Again, we all lose in that case. Graves often took the edge off of that loss for me . . .

 

[Cleanthess]

Today, December 7th. marks the 27th. anniversary of the passing of Robert Graves. Previous posters have already quoted the Ophelia's Wedding Cake and Juan at the Winter Solstice poems, so I'm left with third best, the Ogres and Pygmies masterpiece:

Those famous men of old, the Ogres
They had long beards and stinking arm-pits.
They were wide-mouthed, long-yarded and great-bellied
Yet of no taller stature, Sirs, than you.
They lived on Ogre-Strand, which was no place
But the churl's terror of their proud extent.
Where every foot was three-and-thirty inches,
And every penny bought a whole sheep.
Now of their company none survive, not one,
The times being, thank God, unfavorable
To all but nightmare shadows of them.
Their images stand howling in the waste,
(The winds enforced against their wide mouths)
whose granite haunches king and priest must yearly
Buss and their cold knobbled knees.
So many feats they did to admiration:
With their enormous lips they sang louder
Than ten cathedral choirs, and with their grand yards
Stormed the most rare and obstinate maidenheads,
With their strong-gutted and capacious bellies
Digested stones and glass like ostriches.
They dug great pits and heaped great cairns,
Deflected rivers, slew whole armies,
And hammered judgments for posterity
For the sweet cupid-lipped and tassel-yarded
Delicate-stomached dwellers
In Pygmy Alley, where with brooding on them
A foot is shrunk to seven inches
And twelve-pence will not buy a spare rib.
And who would choose between Ogres and Pygmies
The thundering text, the sniveling commentary
Reading between such covers he will likely
Prove his own disproportion and not laugh.

 

[Ben Jackson]

I guess Graves is one poet that's not talked about much these days. I read Graves' Collected Poems in 2020 because of my quest to read Nobel shortlisted writers (he was shortlisted for the Nobel in 1961 & 1962). The poems written before 1945 (the end of second Great War) weren't impressed for me, but the poems from the 50s onwards were the ones that made me respect Graves. His popularity as one of England's finest poet might have been eclipsed by Auden, nor even better than other poets shortlisted for the Nobel in the 60s: Pound, Celan, Neruda, Seferis, Sachs or even Robert Frost (though I don't really like Frost that much but I respect his technical control), but Graves can't Sachs neglected especially his poems from the 50s. I think anybody that want to Graves' Collected Poems should read from the poems from 50s. It's the highlight of his poetic vision.

I plan to read: I, Claudius, his memoir Goodbye to All That, and either White Goddess or Greek Myths next.

 

[Leseratte]

I probably read Goodbye to All That in some nebulous past, the title sounds very familiar.