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Lost legends and myths

Benst

Member
I was recently listening to a TTC lecture series on the Norse, and I've been studying them off and on over the past year. I'm kind of curious, the lecturer said that there were many references in the Eddas and some of the Sagas of events that don't appear anywhere else in surviving literature. Little references to events that by themselves are cryptic but allude to stories and tales that were probably well known to audiences, but are now lost.

I'm just curious, does anyone have any thoughts or theories about how much of the myths were lost over time?
 
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Benst

Member
That's what I mean though. Does anyone have any thoughts on how much larger the number of myths could have been? I realize that it was oral retellings of common themes by different skalds and only really late was it that they were written down.
 

Benst

Member
Nope, sorry Granpa... not seeing any connection. incidentally, citing wikis that you yourself created is not scholarly.
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
That's what I mean though. Does anyone have any thoughts on how much larger the number of myths could have been? I realize that it was oral retellings of common themes by different skalds and only really late was it that they were written down.

A bald guess would be that 99+ percent of the stories once told have been lost because either no one wrote them down, or if they were written down, they have since been lost. And every story probably changed over time, so the story told 2,000 years ago in a village, clan or tribal tradition could have been significantly different than one told 1,500 years ago, and so on.

The Eddas and many other "religious" texts each represent one, or at most, a few versions of the stories that had been told. The Pentateuch, for example, apparently was created during the Babylonian Exile to unify the Jewish people by unifying several of their divergent stories into a single text. If I remember correctly, there are 30+ existing versions of the story of Sigurd, and some are quite divergent, even incompatible. The authors likely picked one version out of the many available, or created a new version to incorporate the major common features (or desired features) into the now-authoritative written version.
 

EyeofOdin

Active Member
Lore is a very interesting topic.

To ancient Europeans and North Africans, Myths and Lore was used to describe truths about the characters, not facts or historical events. If I wanted to say that Bob is a humble and giving person, I would write a story saying that one day he gave thousands of dollars to random charities, but didn't tell anyone. Did Bob actually do that? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but the point of the story is lost when you're getting into the details such as "which charities did he give money to?" or "When did he do this?"

So the Lore was at some point created to express truths, not facts. So theoretically we can create new Lore and new stories describing the gods and it will still have the same effect.

I also think that we need to address the unnamed gods more, such as Tyr's unnamed wife.

At this point we should probably ask ourselves, where did the names of gods come from? They come from titles, not names. They ultimately derive from titles that encompass their attributes. The gods didn't literally descend down and say things like "My name's Odin!" "Sup? I'm Tyr" or "I am Thor!" Rather the people gave these abstract entities titles such as "Rage Master" "Sky Father" or "Striker".

So theoretically again, we can create names for the gods without names. Example: Tyr's wife. There's some sketchy evidence to suggest that she is named Ziza, and etymological double to Zeu, a central German name for Tyr. This makes sense considering that many wives of Tyr's cognate deities (Zeus and Jupiter to be exact) are also etymological doubles (such as Dione or Juno).

If we are to fully reconstruct her, it would probably be something to the effect of Teiwo or Teiwa, The Queen of Heaven.
 
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