Hello everyone and welcome back to Myths Matter with James Portnow.
It's been convention season for me so I've been on the road for a month.
I just finished rebooting in Dubrovnik which some of you may know is the Republic of Ragusa
or Cantabite or more likely King's Landing.
Uh, so you'll have to forgive because this being done on the road. There's probably a lot of background noise,
I apologize. Um, we're using what gear we got.
So I'm just gonna jump right in and because what was really fascinating to me about this series was,
thinking about how mythology teaches us about history. Because as I was reading these,
and I saw the evolution of some of these myths over time,
it really made me think about how the cultures were thinking about themselves and
and thinking about these, these myths in regard to who they were now as those cultures evolved and
Some of you were really good. I was hoping people would get it. Uh, in these episodes,
I occasionally use the term Persian and Arab interchangeably. They're not interchangeable at all.
These are two different cultural groups, but I want to preserve that from some of the myths I read
because what was really interesting is the largest of the volumes about this particular myth set,
is done a couple of centuries after the Arab conquests. And it's from a Persian patriot who is, uh,
very much writing this to celebrate Persian culture and to make sure that Persian culture isn't lost,
and even goes out of his way, somewhat, to make sure it's use of Persian words and to have words
they've been borrowed from Arabic when writing this thing down.
But as you go through the centuries, later on later scholars especially Arab scholars writing about this,
sort of call these characters Arab characters and, uh, use Persian or Arab, not only interchangably,
but sometimes just completely replace Persian with Arab in order to sort of co-opt these myths in the way
that cultures around the world have, right?
When we talk about something like Beowulf, and we talked about the Christian symbolism that works its way in
that works its way in, we see that in, uh in the Christian culture, adopting a Celtic or Norse,
depending on where you think he came from, myth, and then relating their own version that reflects
their own culture. And this is really, really, REALLY fascinating to me because then, when you get to sort of
the more modern period, where uh modern where Iran is trying to establish itself as, with its own national identity
and tying a lot of that identity back to Persian culture. Then all of a sudden you get a very very careful usage
of the word Persian again. And you get all these characters, once again, being Persian characters.
Even though you get some uh, a lot of Muslim symbolism and Islamic symbolism in these pieces.
Uh, but,
It's just so fascinating to see how this culture has changed, how it thinks of itself, and how it thinks of these myths,
through the way that these myths evolve. Which leads me to my second point which is romance.
That second episode, what is going on?! Right?
This guy, Zal, falls in love because somebody read him a 4 sentence description of how pretty somebody was.
This is totally batty to me, right? And Rudahbeh gets, decides that she wants to be with this dude
because she sent her serving maids to go check him out and they're like
"yeah, he's really good at hunting ducks, you should totally get that"
This is a very different concept of romance than the modern concept of romance,
but when you look at a lot of myths, this is something that you see very often.
How much our idea of romance and romantic love has changed over the centuries.
And what's really interesting to me about this is, this is absolutely a marriage for love within the cultural context
of the time. These two people have to fight their dads to actually be allowed to get married.
This is not a political marriage. This isn't an arrangement of any type. This isn't about anything except love
within the context in which they understand it, which is totally beyond me, right?
Like I don't get this at all, and this will happen throughout a lot of myths, whether they be Greek,
Roman, or cultures around the world, really. It's so valuable to me to be able to look at cultures
through this lens even as we're studying their history, right?
Because this tells us the cultures that propel things that we may not from a modern context understand
why certain events happened.
Why wars are fought over things that seem to us small? Uh or petty?
And I was ready to take away in what I wanted to talk about this episode series is how much
by watching the evolution of myths, and looking out for how people think about things within myths,
we can understand how a culture at a historical period in time thinks about themselves.
And that's really powerful. Couple that with the history that we actually learned
and now we're getting a full picture to think about, and to help us see our modern world through a different lens,
and maybe not repeat some of the mistakes or the past.
But that's it for me today. Join us next week for some Russian Myths. There are some fun ones here,
so I guess I will see you all then. Take care everybody
*Extra Mythology outro*