Knowledge skills for Mythology

[Phantasm]

For a Professor of Mythology, I'd permit any or all of the following:

Literature
Expert Skill (Mythology)
History (various Region/Ages When Mythology Was Recorded - e.g. Classical Greece or Medieval Iceland - specialties)
Theology (Comparative)

And let them all act as complementaries with each other.

[jason taylor]

If you want him to have Unusual Background give him expertise in something besides Classical and/or Germanic Myth. Those two dominate so overwhelmingly that it would be fairly routine to guess someone knows something about it if he is an intellectual even though Classics no longer have such an overwhelming reach in school.

Celtic is a good one. It wouldn't surprise anyone but would be more unusual than Germanic and Classical. You can go farther afield with Slavic, Oriental, African, American Indian, Sanskrit, etc.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

If you want him to have Unusual Background give him expertise in something besides Classical and/or Germanic Myth. Those two dominate so overwhelmingly that it would be fairly routine to guess someone knows something about it if he is an intellectual even though Classics no longer have such an overwhelming reach in school.

Celtic is a good one. It wouldn't surprise anyone but would be more unusual than Germanic and Classical. You can go farther afield with Slavic, Oriental, African, American Indian, Sanskrit, etc.

Egyptian used to be rather widely known. And Hindu is worth considering, though Hinduism still has a very large number of adherents as a religion, so there are a lot of people who might take it amiss to call it "mythology."

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Egyptian used to be rather widely known. And Hindu is worth considering, though Hinduism still has a very large number of adherents as a religion, so there are a lot of people who might take it amiss to call it "mythology."

Mythology is an ambiguous word. It can mean the form a story takes (in which case pretty much everyone has myths and their truthfulness is irrelevant to definition), or it can imply fictionality or more realistically untruth (arguably Homer had no concept of fiction though Virgil likely did).

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Mythology is an ambiguous word. It can mean the form a story takes (in which case pretty much everyone has myths and their truthfulness is irrelevant to definition), or it can imply fictionality or more realistically untruth (arguably Homer had no concept of fiction though Virgil likely did).

I would define a myth as a statement about things that are of cosmic importance told in poetic or semi-poetic format. C.S. Lewis once added the point that you can tell a myth because it can be done in one paragraph and say hundreds of pages worth. I several times parodied the style by saying I rode in a fiery chariot over slain dragons to the garden of delight (I.E. I went on a car up the freeway and around the Mt Hood loop which would be considered of cosmic importance to hunter-gatherers but not by me and is in mythical form).

The point is that every religion and every ideology has a myth. The Whig Theory of History is for instance obviously a myth (and only works because English speakers had a weird run of good luck if you don't count the ones that got musket balls in the process).

Curiously when people call the Bible a myth it doesn't annoy me because I think it not a myth (In the beginning God created the Heaven and Earth is mythical whether or not true and says the important part in one sentence) but because they not only hold myth in contempt but are ignorant in what a myth is (large parts of the Bible aren't myth, they are how-to manuals).

Similarly Hindu mythology is reasonably called myth. It is not my business that it be false other than the reasonable point that I am not a Hindu and believe in the law of Non-contradiction.

Be that as it may, yes Hindu mythology is worth considering for an Unusual Background. I should think I should go farther. Not only are there large numbers of real Hindus there were certainly plenty of sahibs who picked up a thing or two in a long career. On the other hand there is plenty of obscure stuff in Hinduism from all I understand and much of it would go great in a Cliffhangers.

Ethiopian stuff sounds pretty good though about the only thing I know is that they have the Ark and discovered coffee. It is worth trying though.

One thing I might suggest is some of the mythology of the triads. They have a bunch of stuff including that numerology about the tic-tac-toe cube with numbers in each chamber that add up to the same thing each way. They are also something only a few people would know.

And of course you can always just make up a mythology the way "Buffy" did and skip a few inconveniences. But then if you don't already know mythology you can't do it right ("Buffy" didn't do a bad job though I found the show kind of annoying).

[lugaid]

Originally Posted by whswhs

On one hand, I learned classical mythology from Bullfinch, and Scandinavian from Padraic Colum's The Children of Odin. But on the other hand, the Theogony and the Elder and Younger Eddas are pretty compendious.

The Theogony is pretty short, actually. It takes up just 35 pages of the Penguin Classics translation, which is why they also include Hesiod's other major extant work, Works and Days, along with 1388 lines of Theognis's Elegies—and it's still a fairly slender volume at just 170 pages including the index, introductory, and administrative matter.

Anyway, in the ancient world, Homer was considered more authoritative, and the Iliad and Odyssey were adopted as the central texts of late-era Hellenism, especially as Julian attempted to restore it, but even before that Homer provided a textual center for polytheism in the classical world.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Egyptian used to be rather widely known. And Hindu is worth considering, though Hinduism still has a very large number of adherents as a religion, so there are a lot of people who might take it amiss to call it "mythology."

Egyptian - or at least pseudo-Egyptian - used to be very popular amongst occultists IIRC.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Literature seems to be the skill of literary history, on one hand, and of determining the meanings of texts, on the other. Connoisseur (Literature) seems to be a cultivated taste for the qualities of literary works, just as Connoisseur (Wine) is a cultivated taste for wines. I don't think either is a subset of the other.

I was mostly trying to suss out the difference between Connoisseur as an Easy skill and Literature as a hard one. IMO, if you've got Literature skill, you don't need Connoisseur (Literature), just like if you have Expert Skill (Enology) you don't need Connoisseur (Wine).

Due to the "great interlocking fandom" with overlap between horror, SF, fantasy, and gaming fans, I used the term "imaginative fiction" to describe a broader sort of connoisseurship than just Connoisseur (Comic Books, Horror, SF, or Fantasy Literature). I'd still allow more specialized versions of Connoisseur, however, which trade depth of knowledge of breadth.

For example, authors like Terry Pratchett & George R. R. Martin started off as (or at least had some experience as) roleplaying gamers, but obviously draw from tropes as different as Hammer Studios horror films and Italian Renaissance politics in their works.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Neil Gaiman I would say is a better writer, he covers different mediums and is more engaging to read. Campbell came across to me as a bit dry and sometimes pedantic.

Neil Gaiman writes fiction, and it is his job first and foremost to be entertaining. He is allowed to change and invent myth as he sees fit, as long as it's dramatically appropriate and results in an entertaining tale.

Joseph Campbell was an academic writing about academic themes, and it was his job first and foremost to be accurate. If he changed just about anything at all to suit his amour propre, he would've been discredited and discarded. Comparing them is unreasonable.

That being said, my vote on the general subject is Literature. Theology? Not really. Most popular treatments of "mythology" involve stories. We hear relatively little information on the doctrine and dogma of the faith of Odin, the practices of his priests, the details of his worship. Instead, we see stories: Odin giving life to Ask and Embla at the creation of the world, Odin and the Valkyries, Odin sacrificing his eye for wisdom, Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, Odin foretelling and seeking to stave off Ragnarok.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

I was mostly trying to suss out the difference between Connoisseur as an Easy skill and Literature as a hard one. IMO, if you've got Literature skill, you don't need Connoisseur (Literature), just like if you have Expert Skill (Enology) you don't need Connoisseur (Wine).

Due to the "great interlocking fandom" with overlap between horror, SF, fantasy, and gaming fans, I used the term "imaginative fiction" to describe a broader sort of connoisseurship than just Connoisseur (Comic Books, Horror, SF, or Fantasy Literature). I'd still allow more specialized versions of Connoisseur, however, which trade depth of knowledge of breadth.

* Actually, Connoisseur is an Average skill, not an Easy one. The Easy skill is Hobby Skill, and I would certainly accept "science fiction fan" or "comics fan" as a Hobby Skill.

* But I don't agree that Literature skill necessarily subsumes Connoisseur (Literature). Both do include literary criticism, but Literature includes it in the context of knowledge of literary history, literary classics, and so on, whereas Connoisseur includes it as an aspect of appreciation and taste. The two circles overlap in the Venn diagram but neither encloses the other.

* I prefer to use "fantastic" rather than "imaginative." I'm not prepared to say that Jane Austen, or Arthur Conan Doyle, or Sinclair Lewis lacked imagination or were any less imaginative than Mary Shelley or J.R.R. Tolkien. I think of "fantastic" as an opposite pole from "realistic." I would accept the coinage "speculative," which Heinlein (for example) favored, though personally I don't like it quite as well.

* I should also prefer to say "literature" rather than "fiction" because movies and TV shows are not "fiction" but "drama."