Paradise Lost

As we know, epic poems are characterized by a formal, elevated style, and Milton’s Paradise Lost contains perhaps one of the most elevated stylistic writing of all the epic poems. I found it interesting to note that the organization of Milton’s epic poem was in 12 books, similarly to Virgil’s The Aeneid, and I believe that Milton must have copied this organization, a tradition begun by Homer’s epics, to create his own. In class we learned that epics were more than simply narratives, they are also a reflection and celebration of the particular culture that wrote it. Thus, Milton’s narrative of the Fall of Man and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden is not a mere retelling of the biblical story, it is also Milton’s vision of the entirety of humanity; philosophy, theology, and other essential features that reflect our universe.

I am particularly interested in the depiction of Satan, as many readers are. Despite his fallen position and slow metamorphosis into more demonic forms throughout the poem, Lucifer is a charismatic figure and a very complicated character. His enigmatic person is reflected in his addresses to the other demons:

What Though the field be lost?
All is not lost: the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what else is not to be overcome? (I. 106-109)


And in subsequent moments, we see that the demons respond well to his speeches:

He spake, and, to confirm his words, out flew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty cherubim, the sudden blaze
Far round illumined Hell. Highly they raged
Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped arms,
Clashed on their sounds shield the din of war.
Hurling defiance tward the vault of Heaven (I. 663-669)

The ingenious of Milton’s decision to depict Satan as both the antagonist and the anti-hero in this way, instead of merely the antagonist, serves to create a conflict in the reader that furthers Milton’s moral imperatives. As Satan seduces the demons, we become seduced by Satan as readers, and begin to sympathize with him. This is Milton’s way of warning us of the dangers of temptation, and using his poem to create it in this way is quite clever.

Dante's Inferno: The Film (2007)

The film version of Dante’s Inferno certainly did justice to the epic. Since Dante’s poem depicted the society of his Italy and showed real figures receiving punishment, it was only fitting that this film version appropriated modern figures and politicians from our more recent history to populate Hell with. Virgil’s explanations to Dante within the film support and drive Dante’s moral imperative of God’s perfect justice, and explains the nature of the sins and punishments that they come across.

Is this an epic film, like El Cid? I am not certain that this film’s being based upon an epic necessarily makes it an epic film in itself. For one thing, the length of the film is not epic in scope, at 88 minutes, it is much shorter than the epic film we watched in class, El Cid. In fact, certain parts of Hell felt rushed compared to the poem. The first six circles of Hell are zipped through within the first thirty minutes of the film, and than it spends nearly the entire rest of the film on the last three levels of Hell. I agree that this was necessary for the film’s length, however it is a stark difference to the Cantos within Dante’s poem which do not vary dramatically in length.

The animation was enjoyable. Choosing to film it using stick puppets lent an aesthetically absurdist quality, which is fitting given that the territory explored in the film is Hell. The decision to depict Dante’s character as a bit of a drunken loser worked well too. Since in the poem, Dante declares:

Halfway through the story of my life
I came to in a gloomy wood, because
I’d wandered off the path, away from the light. (Canto I.1-3).

The path is an allegory for the path to righteousness and God’s grace. “Away from the light” refers to God’s light, and Heaven. So though Dante does not specify how he veered from his path and sinned, the film certainly gives us one possibility.

Dante's Inferno

I am continually fascinated by the ways in which epic poets from the Middle Ages were able to appropriate references and features of the epic poems of antiquity and incorporate them into serving their own moral imperative. As an epic, Dante’s Inferno contains a Hell populated by countless figures of Greek and Roman myth, including Odysseus and various Titans. Dante’s Inferno seems to be an epic exploration of his belief system and the strict moral doctrines of the Catholic church of his time. It is often called an allegory, and I was quite amused to find Dante himself calling it his poem an allegory within:

Men of sound intellect and probity,
weigh with good understanding what lies hidden
behind the veil of my strange allegory. (Canto IX.58-60)

Clearly, he is writing this poem to push both his moral and political imperatives.

Although it has been much analyzed, Dante’s morality based upon obedience to God as a paradigm makes the degree of certain offenses reverse from what we consider to be more or less of an offense in our reality. For example, the usurers are in a lower circle than the murderers, surely a violent crime is more of a transgression against God than fraud?

Virgil’s explanation of this hierarchy illuminates Dante’s justification of the different punishments:

All malicious crimes perpetuate
injustice: whether violence, or fraud,
they equally deserve celestial hate.
But since fraud is a very human vice, so God
hates it more, and puts the fraudulent
below, where they are more afflicted by his rod. (Canto XI.22-27)

In other words, violence is a sin of passion, while since fraud is premeditated, Dante believes it is more sinful and more of a transgression against God’s will. Therefore crimes of passion are less sinful than crimes of human reason. Clearly this moral system was very carefully thought out.

El Cid

I would like to take a moment to talk about epic film. In the case of El Cid, it seems that epic films are more often based upon epic tales that have already been written than are original tales that stand on their own. El Cid had already been written down, based off of a real figure that lived during the 11^th century AD, long before Charlton Heston became the Spanish hero in the more modern adaptation that we watched in class. This makes it somewhat difficult to analyze culturally. We can analyze the original text, like we did to Roland, in terms of the culture that produced it in medieval Europe, but we can not do the same to the film version of El Cid because it was made in 1961. For the purposes of analysis, however, I will look at it as a text produced during the time of the action rather than as a mid 20^th century film.

Many comparisons can be made between El Cid and Roland. Both take place in medieval Europe. Both heroes display aspects of idealized virtue, including fealty to king, perfect judgment, a master in battle (able to take on 13 men in El Cid’s case), and perfectly devoted to god. They were produced in a warrior culture that valued these things, and the result is that both tales feature a hero assisted by god and close to a king. El Cid has a courtly relationship with Jimena, and displays all the chivalric behaviors that knights of the time held. Following the rules prescribed for knights courting woman.

Mention of the epic villains should be made here as well. The Moors and their plotting can be easily paralleled with Ishtar’s plotting against the heroes in Gilgamesh and Ravana going up against Rama. Indeed, these epics bear so much similarities, that outside of plot, setting, and culture, they have almost all the same features.

The Song of Roland

One of the features of epics is that the protagonist, quite often, is a warrior. Gilgamesh, Rama, Achilles, Ulysses, all of these protagonists are fighters, warriors, and the epics that contain them are full of massive battles, duels, magical weapons, and other fighters. The fact that all of these epics are so fixated on battle is a reflection of their warrior culture. The Song of Roland, produced in the warrior culture of medieval France, is no exception. Even the priest within The Song of Roland, Archbishop Turpin, is a warrior, and slays many pagans by the end of the epic.

What sets the culture that produced The Song of Roland apart is that it was a monotheistic one. Unlike the Mesopotamia that produced Gilgamesh and the India that produced The Ramayana, the Franks pray to one god. Saying that there is one god within Roland would be a mistake however. We are frequently introduced to “Mahomet” and “Apollin,” the gods of the (ironically monotheistic) Moors. In this way, there are actually multiple gods within the epic, despite its creators praying to one. While the gods of Gilgamesh and The Ramayana act independently as developed characters themselves. The Christian god of The Song of Roland, whose purpose, it would seem, is solely to help the warriors of the poem to live and fight in battle.

One of the features important in both The Ramayana and The Song of Roland is that the hero adheres to a certain code. In Ramayana this is the code of grace and virtue held by Hindu culture. In The Song of Roland, it is the chivalric codes held by the knights of medieval Europe that include allegiance to one’s king, god, and other rules for conduct, that hold this spot. Of course, Roland adheres to these codes so strictly, that it results in his death. Part of the warrior code, as we discussed in class, consists of fulfilling one’s duties to the king even if it leads to death. Roland refuses to blow his horn when it is clear that his army is outnumbered, it is more shameful to call for reinforcements than to die fighting.

The Ramayana

Nowhere in the epic genre are we given a more colorful story than The Ramayana. Supernatural weapons, such as Rama’s bow, of great strength, are used against ten-headed monsters such as Ravana, while an army of monkey-people are pitted against demons in battle. The themes of The Ramayana are timeless, as the themes of epics must be. The scope of the epic takes place on the entire Indian continent and Sri Lanka (Lanka, in the story).

Our protagonist is an interesting figure. He possesses near-perfect virtue and was an incarnation of a god, Vishnu. In R.K. Narayan’s prose translation, we learn that “Although Rama was Vishnu, his human incarnation made him unaware of his identity at the moment” (Narayan 13). This allows the epic to take place on a human level, as the protagonist must deal with situations as an ordinary human would, though without supernatural strength of course. Rama is a demigod or, more correctly, as an incarnation of Vishnu, a god in human form. He is imbued with godlike traits like exceptional speed, strength, and power and, except for a couple questionably moral moments- such as Rama killing Vali in a “cowardly” way with his bow from a distance, has perfect morals and judgment in all things, similar to the god of Roland’s Christians

What sets the Ramayana apart from Roland and Gilgamesh is, as I said before, the colorfulness of the story. The world is populated by a monkey race of people, of which Hanuman is one. Monsters and demons with multiple heads fight against armies. It is all quite exciting.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Our criteria for what constitutes an “epic” includes a story containing a heroic or semi-divine figure and told in a formal, elevated style. With these criteria before us, it is impossible to deny that the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories known to man, is indeed the epic that it claims to be.

Thematically, the story itself begins with the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the first part, and Enkidu’s death with Gilgamesh’s subsequent search for immortality in the second. That such an ancient story deals with such a timeless and oft-repeated theme—man’s yearning for immortality, the idea that it is man’s natural inclination to seek this Holy Grail—is reinforced. We see that from the ancient time of Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamia to our present world, the human condition has remained steadfast in this respect: we yearn for immortality.

Though written down, the power of writing and reading cuneiform was not held by all citizens of Mesopotamia’s cities. As the earliest known form of writing, this still new medium had not yet eradicated a culture that told stories orally, sometimes memorizing hundreds of lines. The oral nature of the cultures that wrote Gilgamesh is very visible in the text. Many lines in Gilgamesh are repeated, especially the capabilities and stations of the characters, as well as actions undertaken. For example, the characterization of Gilgamesh’s mother, Ninsun, is repeated both in the same stanza, as well as one page later:

[The mother of Gilgamesh] was clever and wise,

well versed in everything, she said to her son –

[Wild-Cow] Ninsun was clever and wise,

well versed in everything, she said to Gilgamesh (255-256)

This exact verse is repeated on lines 287-288. In a still orally based culture like Mesopotamia’s, repetition aided the storyteller in several ways. For the reciter, it helped with memorization. Repeating information in the story the same way each time helps the speaker of the poem to remember it. This also holds true for the listener. When hearing the name of Ninsun, listeners of the poem will recall that she “was clever and wise,/ well versed in everything” and this helps them retain a characterization of her as she performs an action, in this case giving Gilgamesh advice, in the poem.

As Walter Ong tells us in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, oral cultures developed mnemonic patterns to help them with recall. Forming thoughts, or poetry, in

“rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or anthesis, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic setting (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the hero’s “helper,” and so on), in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic form. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems. Mnemonic needs determine even syntax” (Ong 3).

In other words, the reason for repetition within the poem simply reflected the thought and speech patterns held by these oral peoples, and were done for purposes of retention. Looking at Ong’s list of the way poetry was developed in oral cultures, The Epic of Gilgamesh contains rhythmic balanced patterns throughout, repetition, and formulary expressions (as with the flaterring description of Ninsun), standard thematic setting (Enkidu as “the hero’s ‘helper’”, the meal, the meeting, the battle). If Ong is correct and “mnemonic needs determine even syntax”, then the form of the verses and the syntax of the lines in The Epic of Gilgamesh was determined by this need to be easily recalled by those who recite the poem. This differs from today’s writing, in which multiple things, including imagery, theme, etc, determine form.