Skip to main content

Iliadic Platypus: The Platypus Reads Part CXXXI

I'm in the middle of prepping a talk on the "Iliad" for a colloquy in November.  This means that I've gone back to my roots as a student of Ancient History.  While I've done some heavier reading on early Greece in the form of Robin Lane Fox's "Traveling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer" and Oswyn Murray's "Early Greece," there's also been an opportunity to try more popular works like Caroline Alexander's "The War That Killed Achilles."  Though Alexander's book is not "The Best of the Achaeans" or "Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Death of Hector," it's still been an enjoyable and thought provoking read.  Alexander's great virtue is that she doesn't treat the "Iliad" as a mere mine of data for other interests but rather seeks to engage the text on its own terms in an effort to gain real wisdom.

This approach reminds me quite a bit of J.R.R. Tolkien's treatment of "Beowulf" in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."  In that essay, Tolkien compares the Beowulf poet to a man who inherits a piece of land on which is sprawling complex of ruins.  The man gathers these ruins and adds to them in order to build a magnificent tower.  After the man dies, others come and complain that the building of the tower has destroyed the purity of the ruins and decide that it would be best to tear it down.  What they fail to realize, as Tolkien points out, is that the man built the tower because from its pinnacle he could catch a glimpse of the sea.  This parable applies equally well to the "Iliad."  So often scholars come to Homer only for what they can get out of him; a scrap of Mycenaean culture, a glimpse into Dark Age trade networks, a buried fragment of Hittite myth.  All of that is valid, but it misses the real point; for centuries, men and women have read the "Iliad" because it spoke to the profound truths of the human condition.  In Tolkien's metaphor, they read it because it showed them the sea.

I may not agree with everything Alexander says and "The War that Killed Achilles" is not on a scholarly level with the books above mentioned.  I wrote my thesis on Homeric tropes in Classical literature and as such I did my fair share of strip mining the blind bard and am prepared to defend my right to.  Nevertheless, I have to say that in the final analysis Alexander's work gets my resounding recommendation.  It is a reminder to all of us with scholarly agendas that while we are out quibbling over minutia Homer is trying to show us Life.    

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

California's Gods: Strange Platypus(es)

We've noticed lately a strange Californian dialectical twist: there, freeways take the definite article.  In other parts of the country one speaks of I 91 or 45 North.  In California, there's The 5, The 405, The 10.  Each of these freeways has its own quirks, a personality of sorts.  They aren't just stretches of pavement but presences, creatures that necessitate the definite article by their very individuality and uniqueness.  They are the angry gods to be worked, placated, feared, for without them life in California as we know it would cease.  Perhaps that's fitting for a land whose cities are named for saints and angels.  Mary may preside over the new pueblo of our lady of the angels, but the freeways slither like gigantic serpents through the waste places, malevolent spirits not yet trampled under foot.
9 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more