[ { "story": 1, "id": "S01", "tradition": "Ancient Egypt · Heliopolis", "title": "Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt", "author": "James Henry Breasted", "date": "1912", "location": "ch. I, 'The Origins', pp. 8-12, quoting Pyramid Texts §§1248, 1652, 1778, 1818", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP quoting PRIMARY (Pyramid Texts, c. 2350 BCE)", "use": "Nun the primeval ocean; Atum appearing in it; the Benben stone and Phoenix-hall at Heliopolis; the self-generation; Shu and Tefnut; Shu separating earth and sky; the rival Memphite egg and lotus versions", "scholarship": "Breasted is a foundational Egyptologist writing in 1912; his developmental framing of Egyptian religion as progressing toward ethical monotheism is dated and is not adopted here", "translation": "Breasted's own English from the Egyptian; Pyramid Text section numbers are Sethe's", "framing": "Nineteenth-century translator reticence: the self-generation is explicit in the Egyptian and Breasted confines it to a Latin footnote. The act is in the source; the veiling is the translator's, and the story says so", "uncertainty": "The episode of the lost children, the searching eye and the tears is assembled from more than one spell; no single text runs it end to end", "notes": "Heliopolis, Memphis and Hermopolis each claimed the world began at their temple; the retelling follows Heliopolis and says the others exist", "workAuthor": "James Henry Breasted" }, { "story": 2, "id": "S02", "tradition": "Archaic Greece", "title": "Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica", "author": "Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White", "date": "composed c. 700 BCE; translation 1914 (Loeb)", "location": "Theogony ll. 22-34, 116-138, 154-206; Works and Days ll. 106-201", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "Chaos, Earth, Tartarus and Eros as the first four; Night and Erebos bearing Aether and Day; Earth bearing Ouranos 'equal to herself'; the castration; Aphrodite from the foam; the Muses on Helicon", "scholarship": "Hesiod is the earliest surviving Greek cosmogony and the earliest Greek text with an autobiographical author", "translation": "Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library 1914, public domain", "framing": "None colonial. The translator's 'Chaos' imports a modern English sense the Greek does not carry", "uncertainty": "Hesiod's own etymologies (Titans as 'straining ones', Aphrodite as 'foam-born') are folk etymologies rejected by modern philology; the story reports them as his", "notes": "The one text in this book whose author describes his own life", "workAuthor": "Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White" }, { "story": 3, "id": "S03", "tradition": "Vedic and Brahmanic India", "title": "Indian Myth and Legend", "author": "Donald A. Mackenzie", "date": "1913", "location": "ch. VI, pp. 99-101", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP quoting PRIMARY (Brāhmaṇa texts, c. 900-600 BCE)", "use": "'At first the Universe was not anything... Being non-existent it resolved, Let me be'; the heat/smoke/fire/rays/sea sequence; Prajāpati rising from the waters and weeping; earth, air and sky from tears and wiping; the rodasī etymology", "scholarship": "Mackenzie is a popular compiler, not a Sanskritist; this entry therefore works at one remove and is marked PRIMARY-QUOTED-IN-SECONDARY", "translation": "Mackenzie quotes an unattributed nineteenth-century English translation; the underlying text is Brāhmaṇa material", "framing": "Mackenzie writes within an Indo-European comparative framework of his period; that framing is not adopted", "uncertainty": "HIGH on the translation chain. The quoted English cannot be traced to a named translator in the source", "notes": "Ṛgveda 10.129, the Nāsadīya Sūkta, was originally to be named and not quoted because no public-domain English Mandala 10 could be found (correction C-1). Griffith's volume IV was subsequently located and the hymn is now quoted in full from it — see the second source record for this story", "workAuthor": "Donald A. Mackenzie" }, { "story": 3, "id": "S03", "tradition": "Vedic and Brahmanic India", "title": "The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X)", "author": "trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith", "date": "hymn composed in the late Vedic period; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892", "location": "Book X, hymn CXXIX ('Creation'), verses 1-7, with Griffith's notes", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the Nāsadīya Sūkta quoted in full at the close of the story: neither non-existent nor existent; no realm of air; the unfathomed water; no death and nothing immortal; That One Thing breathing breathlessly; darkness in darkness; tapas; desire as the primal seed; the line drawn across; the gods being later than the world's production; and the final 'he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not'", "scholarship": "Griffith glosses asat as that which does not yet actually exist but holds the latent potentiality of existence, and quotes an Indian commentator on the 'unapparent condition' that was neither entity nor non-entity. He notes that Wilson, following Sāyaṇa, renders tapas as 'austerity', and that Burnouf treated warmth as the Vedic principle of movement, life and thought", "translation": "Griffith's English verse from the Sanskrit", "framing": "A Victorian Indologist's translation, made in Benares, heavily annotated from Sāyaṇa's commentary. Griffith's diction is archaic; his notes are cautious and he marks the stanzas he finds obscure as obscure", "uncertainty": "LOW on the English quoted. The Sanskrit of verse 5 is notoriously difficult and Griffith says so; the retelling summarises that verse rather than quoting it", "notes": "THE SCAN HAS NO TITLE PAGE — it begins mid-Book IX. Identity established from content and recorded in the source register. The citation names the translator and volume and does not assert a printing year the file cannot support", "workAuthor": "trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith" }, { "story": 4, "id": "S04", "tradition": "Zoroastrian Iran", "title": "Pahlavi Texts, Part I (Sacred Books of the East, vol. V)", "author": "trans. E. W. West", "date": "Bundahishn compiled 9th c. CE from older Avestan material; translation 1880", "location": "Bundahishn I.1-11; Selections of Zādsparam I.1-8; West's introduction pp. xxiii-xxv", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "Light above, darkness below, void between; Ohrmazd omniscient, Ahriman ignorant of him; 3,000 years of spiritual creation with intangible bodies; Ahriman seeing a ray of light; the Ahunwar driving him back; the 9,000-year contract; the six creations and the damage to each", "scholarship": "West's SBE translation remains the standard PD English Bundahishn", "translation": "West 1880, from the Pahlavi", "framing": "Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship; West is philologically careful and doctrinally restrained", "uncertainty": "The Bundahishn is fragmentary and shows omissions and dislocations, which West states", "notes": "Zoroastrianism is a living faith with a small community; the story treats the cosmology as held now, not as a Sasanian curiosity. West's Auharmazd/Aharman are modernised to Ohrmazd/Ahriman in the prose and the change is disclosed", "workAuthor": "trans. E. W. West" }, { "story": 5, "id": "S05", "tradition": "Māori · Aotearoa", "title": "Oceanic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. IX)", "author": "Roland B. Dixon", "date": "1916", "location": "ch. I, 'Myths of Origins and the Deluge', pp. 6-7", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP quoting a recorded PRIMARY genealogy", "use": "The nine Te Kore and the nights with their English glosses; Whai-tua; Maku and Mahora-nui-a-rangi; Rangi-pōtiki and Papa; the 'From the conception the increase' recitation", "scholarship": "Dixon is a comparative mythologist working from other men's collections; he does not name the New Zealand informant for this list", "translation": "Glosses are those Dixon's source supplies", "framing": "Comparative-mythology framing of 1916, which classes accounts by type; the classification is not adopted", "uncertainty": "'The Delightful Void' for Te Kore-rawea is unexplained in the source; the story offers a speculation and marks it as one", "notes": "Macrons follow modern Māori orthography except where a source spelling is quoted", "workAuthor": "Roland B. Dixon" }, { "story": 5, "id": "S05", "tradition": "Māori · Aotearoa", "title": "Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race", "author": "Sir George Grey", "date": "1855", "location": "'The Children of Heaven and Earth', opening", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE (colonial compilation from named Māori informants)", "use": "'There was darkness from the first division of time, unto the tenth, to the hundredth, to the thousandth'; the divisions of time considered as beings, each termed a Pō; 'Darkness, darkness, light, light, the seeking, the searching, in chaos, in chaos'", "scholarship": "Grey's versions have been contested by Māori scholars for a century and a half for editorial combination", "translation": "Grey's English from Māori originals he also published", "framing": "NAMED IN THE STORY: Grey was the sitting Governor of New Zealand during a colonial administration in which he was a principal actor, and he collected these narratives from named informants while holding that office", "uncertainty": "Grey edited and combined what he was given; the degree is disputed", "notes": "The separation of Rangi and Papa is deliberately NOT retold — Agent C published it for young readers", "workAuthor": "Sir George Grey" }, { "story": 6, "id": "S06", "tradition": "Babylonia", "title": "The Chaldean Account of Genesis", "author": "George Smith; new edition revised, corrected and enlarged by A. H. Sayce", "date": "first published London 1876; this edition New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880 (Sayce's preface dated 21 May 1880)", "location": "ch. V 'Babylonian Legend of the Creation' (first tablet, fifth tablet, seventh tablet fragment); ch. VI 'Other Babylonian Accounts of the Creation' (the war fragments K 4832, K 3473, K 3938, K 3449 and the sixth fragment); ch. III (Berosus via Alexander Polyhistor; Damascius via Cory); ch. I (the discovery narrative); ch. IV (the table of deities)", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation (cuneiform tablets), embedded in nineteenth-century SCHOLARSHIP", "use": "the unnamed heaven and earth; destiny not fixed; Apsu as generator and Tiamat as she who bore them; waters collected in one place; the ungathered reed and ungrown marsh-plant; Lakhmu and Lakhamu, Sar and Kisar, Anu, Elum and Hea; the colophon of Assurbanipal; the making of the scimitar and Anu kissing the bow; the winds; Tiamat's spells and her determined return; the evil wind in her mouth and her death; the rout of her helpers; Kingu named; Berosus on Omoroka cut asunder and on the blood mixed with earth; the fifth tablet in full (mansions, zodiac, Nibiru, gates and bolts, staircase, the moon's instructions, 'judge judgment'); the four-line animal fragment", "scholarship": "Smith is the decipherer who found these tablets; his translations are careful and his statements of uncertainty are explicit. Sayce's 1880 revision adds material and corrects readings. Both write inside a Victorian biblical-comparative programme announced by the book's own title", "translation": "Smith's and Sayce's English direct from the Assyrian cuneiform; the Berosus and Damascius extracts are Smith's reprints of I. P. Cory's English of the Greek", "framing": "NAMED IN THE STORY AND IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: the volume is titled *The Chaldean Account of Genesis* and arranges the fragments against the six days of Genesis 1. The philology (tehom / Tiamat) is sound; the frame treats a Babylonian poem as an account of a Hebrew one. This edition keeps the translations and drops the frame", "uncertainty": "HIGH on sequence, LOW on wording. Smith states that the order of the war fragments cannot be decided and that one 'dry land' fragment probably does not belong to the series at all. Three tablets between the first and the fifth were entirely missing to him. The retelling marks the break rather than bridging it", "notes": "Later editions recovered much more of the poem — the standard next edition is L. W. King, *The Seven Tablets of Creation* (London, 1902). NONE of that material has been used here. Where Smith's clay stops, the retelling changes witness to Berosus openly. Spellings modernised outside quotations; disclosed in the source note", "workAuthor": "George Smith; rev. A. H. Sayce" }, { "story": 7, "id": "S07", "tradition": "Haudenosaunee · Onondaga", "title": "Iroquoian Cosmology, First Part — An Onondaga Version", "author": "narrated by John Buck (Onondaga chief and fire-keeper), revised with Joshua Buck; recorded, translated and annotated by J. N. B. Hewitt", "date": "narrated 1889, revised 1897; published in the Twenty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office)", "location": "report pp. 141 ff. ('An Onondaga version'), with Hewitt's introduction pp. 127-135; comparative details from 'A Seneca version' (p. 221 ff.) and 'A Mohawk version' (p. 255 ff.)", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE AS RECORDED (a named Onondaga narrator, in Onondaga, with interlinear and free English translation), embedded in United States federal SCHOLARSHIP", "use": "the grandfather's five generations; the sky world and its long lodges; the two down-fended persons and the combing; the unexplained pregnancy; the first illness and the first death; the burial case in the high place; the child who wept five days; the armlet and the necklace; the father's instructions; the bread and the burden basket; Aurora Borealis, Fire Dragon of the Storm and the chief at the crossing; the tree called Tooth and its blossoms as the light; 'Thou and I marry'; the mush ordeal, the two white dogs and the sunflower oil; the basket shaken seven times; the unroofed lodges and the raining corn; the breath caught in conversation and the origin of reproduction; the chief's illness and jealousy; the naming of Zephyrs; the dream feast and the list of those who came to divine the Word; Aurora Borealis divining it; the uprooting of the tree and the abyss; the fawn meat and the three fagots; the push; the blue light, the lake and the ducks; the Loon and the Bittern; the Otter sinking and the Turtle holding; the Muskrat surfacing dead with earth in his paws and mouth; the growing carapace; the waterfowl joining their bodies to catch her; the first fire, the deer, and the second birth of Zephyrs", "scholarship": "Hewitt's method — verbatim recording in the vernacular with literal interlinear gloss plus free translation, named narrators, dated and located sessions — is unusually rigorous for its period and is the reason the text remains usable", "translation": "Hewitt's English from Onondaga, printed beneath his own interlinear literal gloss", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Bureau of American Ethnology publication of the assimilation era, written inside a cultural-evolutionary theory whose vocabulary ('primitive people', 'barbaric man', 'the reified fictions of savage mentation') appears throughout Hewitt's commentary and nowhere in the narratives themselves. Hewitt was raised on the Tuscarora reservation and was of Tuscarora descent through his mother, which does not make the report a Haudenosaunee publication", "uncertainty": "LOW on wording, once the clean scan is used. The three versions in the report differ substantially from one another and the retelling follows one of them throughout, saying so and listing the divergences rather than blending them", "notes": "Hewitt records a fourth, fuller Onondaga version from Chief John Arthur Gibson, promised for a later report and not present in this one. The retelling stops at the growing earth and the second birth of Zephyrs; the cycle of the twin brothers Sapling and Flint that follows in the source is not told here, both because this is a book of cosmogonies and because DC-11 reserves hero cycles to the Codex Heroica series", "workAuthor": "J. N. B. Hewitt" }, { "story": 8, "id": "S08", "tradition": "Cherokee", "title": "Myths of the Cherokee", "author": "collected, translated and annotated by James Mooney, from narrators named in his introduction: A'yûñ'ini (Swimmer), Itagû'nahi (John Ax), Ta'gwadihi' (Catawba-killer), Ayâ'sta, and James D. Wafford", "date": "collected 1887-1890 and later at Qualla, North Carolina; published in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900)", "location": "myth no. 1, 'How the world was made', p. 239; Mooney's note on myth 1 in 'Notes to the myths', p. 431; the biographies of the narrators, pp. 236-238; the removal narrative in the historical sketch, pp. 130-133", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE AS RECORDED (named Cherokee narrators), embedded in United States federal SCHOLARSHIP", "use": "the earth as an island slung from the sky vault by four cords and the fear of the cords breaking; the crowding in Galûñ'lati; Dâyuni'si the water-beetle and the soft mud; the four cords fastened by no one remembered; the birds sent to test the ground; the Great Buzzard and the making of the Cherokee mountains; the sun raised seven hand-breadths and Tsiska'gili' the Red Crawfish; the seventh height; the underworld with reversed seasons reached by springs; the seven nights of watching, the owl and panther, the evergreens and the losing of hair; the brother, the sister and the fish; one child a year", "scholarship": "Mooney's note on this myth states that the Cherokee genesis account is 'too far broken down to be recovered excepting in disjointed fragments' through decay of tradition and admixture of Bible ideas, and identifies which narrator supplied which element. His comparative notes point to Creek and Yuchi parallels and identify the beetle as the Gyrinus", "translation": "Mooney's English from Cherokee", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Bureau of American Ethnology publication written on the salvage assumption that Cherokee tradition was in its final days, and measuring what Mooney recorded against a supposed complete original. Against that, the same volume records the removal of 1838 as an atrocity, in a report addressed to the government responsible for it", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on the completeness of the account, by the collector's own statement. LOW on wording. The printed myth is a composite of at least four narrators and Mooney's note says so; the variants are listed in the source note rather than merged", "notes": "Swimmer supplied roughly three-quarters of the whole collection and died in March 1899, before publication. This retelling does not use Mooney's myth no. 2 ('The first fire') or any other numbered myth", "workAuthor": "James Mooney" }, { "story": 9, "id": "S09", "tradition": "Finland · Karelia", "title": "Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland", "author": "compiled by Elias Lönnrot from oral runes collected in Savo, Karelia and Archangel; translated into English verse by John Martin Crawford", "date": "runes collected from 1828; Old Kalevala 1835; New Kalevala (50 runes, 22,793 lines) 1849; Crawford's translation New York, 1888", "location": "Rune I, 'Birth of Wainamoinen', in full; the Proem for the clasped-hands couplet; Crawford's preface for the collection history, the duck/eagle variant, the reception by Grimm and others, and his own acknowledgements", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation — but of a NINETEENTH-CENTURY COMPILATION, not of a single old text", "use": "the singer's call to a second singer and the clasped hands; Ilmatar alone in the ether and her weariness; her descent to the sea; the east wind, the tossing and the conception; seven hundred years and nine ages of man; her lament and her prayer to Ukko; Ukko's silence; the duck's search and its spoken reasoning; the raised knee mistaken for a hillock; six golden eggs and one of iron; three days' brooding and the burning knee; the shaken nest and the shattered eggs; the fragments becoming earth, sky, moon, sun, stars and cloud; the ninth year and the making of headlands, fish-holes, deeps, banks, bays, rocks and the wrecking reefs; Väinämöinen's thirty summers and thirty winters unborn; his petition to Moon, Sun and Great Bear and their refusal; the unnamed finger, the left toes, the threshold; seven further years in the sea; the bare promontory and standing up to look at the stars", "scholarship": "Crawford's preface is the source for the collection history and is detailed and specific. The Kalevala's status as a compiled national epic is not a modern criticism of it — it is stated by its own translator", "translation": "Crawford's English verse in the original trochaic metre. His acknowledgements record that his manuscript was compared against Schiefner's German translation and Barna's Hungarian; how directly he worked from the Finnish has been questioned since", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a work of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, produced under Russian imperial rule for a Finnish-speaking population whose language had almost no printed literature. Lönnrot arranged the collected songs 'under the central idea of a great epic'. Crawford's own account of Finland's political status in the 1820s is wrong and is corrected in the historical context", "uncertainty": "HIGH on the relation of any given line to any individual singer's version — the text is Lönnrot's arrangement. LOW on the wording of Crawford's English, which is what is quoted", "notes": "Rune I is used alone. Rune II (Väinämöinen's sowing) and the rest of the epic, including the Sampo and the Kullervo cycle, are not told here — DC-11 reserves hero cycles to the Codex Heroica series, and DC-12 records the Kalevala as a Vâliçe public-domain reserve title, which this book cites and does not reproduce", "workAuthor": "comp. Elias Lönnrot; trans. John Martin Crawford" }, { "story": 10, "id": "S10", "tradition": "Ainu · Hokkaidō", "title": "The Ainu and their Folk-Lore", "author": "John Batchelor, F.R.G.S., Church Missionary Society missionary to the Ainu", "date": "London: The Religious Tract Society, 1901", "location": "ch. III, 'The Creation of the World' — the general idea of creation; the water-wagtail legends; the legend why Yezo is rugged; the Aioina and Tureshmat variant and the nupe etymology; the axe rock at Moruran; 'How mattocks evolved demons' and Nitat-unarabe", "type": "HISTORICAL SOURCE — MISSIONARY ETHNOGRAPHY recording Ainu oral tradition; narrators unnamed", "use": "the quagmire of mixed earth and water incapable of sustaining life; the thunder demons and the Creator's subordinate deities; the wagtail sent down; the fluttering, trampling and tail-beating; moshiri, floating earth; the wagtail as the angel of God; the second version with God's mattocks and axes and the wagtail levelling; 'God is never conceived of as working without means'; the sixty mattocks decomposing into demons, bad water and disease-bearing trees; Nitat-unarabe, aunt of the swamps, and the Toihekunra; the two deputy deities and the race to finish Yezo; the chat with Aioina's sister and the botched west coast; the moral quoted at talkative women; Tureshmat's weeping and the nupe wordplay; mukara-so, axe rock", "scholarship": "Batchelor lived among Ainu for decades and compiled an Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary. His own commentary on this chapter is hostile to its contents and is quoted rather than used", "translation": "Batchelor's English from Ainu", "framing": "NAMED IN THE STORY AND THE SOURCE NOTE: a Church Missionary Society missionary writing for the Religious Tract Society, who introduces the chapter by calling much of the material 'absolutely absurd' and an illustration of 'what depths of intellectual blindness a race may sink into'. He also floats and then rejects the idea that the wagtail legend derives from Genesis 1", "uncertainty": "HIGH on attribution — no narrator is named anywhere in the chapter, and the one identified informant is 'an Ainu companion' on a walk. MEDIUM on completeness, since Batchelor selects. LOW on the wording quoted, which was checked against the scan", "notes": "OCR of the available scan is imperfect; quotations verified line by line. Yezo is the pre-1869 name for Hokkaidō. The retelling attributes to Batchelor's book, never to a named Ainu person, because the book supplies no names. Under the academic source and historical document model this book does not present the material as current Ainu belief", "workAuthor": "John Batchelor" }, { "story": 11, "id": "S11", "tradition": "Epic India", "title": "The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Translated into English Prose — Book 1, Adi Parva", "author": "traditionally ascribed to Vyāsa; translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, with acknowledged assistance from Charu Charan Mookerjee in parts of this book; published by Pratap Chandra Roy", "date": "epic material accreted over centuries around the turn of the era; translation published in fascicles, Calcutta, 1883-1896", "location": "Āstīka Parva, sections XVII, XVIII and XIX; the Translator's Preface for the method and the anonymity dispute", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "Nārāyaṇa's instruction to churn the Ocean for amṛta, drugs and gems; Meru and the assembled celestials; Mandara eleven thousand yojanas up and down; the gods' failure to lift it and Ananta tearing it up with woods and inhabitants; the request to the Ocean and its condition of a share; the tortoise-king's back; Vasuki as rope with Asuras at the hood and gods at the tail; the black vapour, flames, thunderclouds and refreshing rain; the flowers; the roar as at the Universal Dissolution; the crushed aquatic animals, the killed denizens of the lower regions, the uprooted trees with birds, the friction fires and the burned lions and elephants; Indra's rain; the gums and juices conferring immortality; the milky water turning to clarified butter; 'we are spent up'; the emergence in order of Moon, Lakṣmī, Soma, the White Steed, Kaustubha, Dhanvantari with the white vessel, and Airāvata; 'It be ours'; Kālakūṭa engulfing the earth and stupefying the three worlds; Śiva holding it in his throat and becoming Nīlakaṇṭha; the Asuras arming for Lakṣmī and amṛta; Nārāyaṇa's māyā and the enticing female form; Rāhu drinking in disguise; Sūrya and Soma informing; the discus and the head cut off at the throat; the head rising and crying, the trunk shaking the earth; the eclipses", "scholarship": "Ganguli's is the first complete English Mahābhārata and remains the standard public-domain one. His preface states an explicitly literal method and rejects making Indian ideas 'agreeable to English taste'", "translation": "Ganguli's English prose direct from the Sanskrit", "framing": "Not colonial in the usual sense of this book: an Indian translation, Indian-financed, Calcutta-printed, deliberately literal in resistance to the domesticating translations of the period. The anonymity dispute recorded in the preface is itself a document of what English readers of 1885 expected", "uncertainty": "LOW on wording. The epic is a composite text of uncertain and layered date, which is stated in the historical context rather than smoothed over", "notes": "The battle of the gods and Asuras that follows section XIX is deliberately not retold — DC-11 reserves hero cycles to the Codex Heroica series, and this is a book of origins. This is the second Indian entry and is kept distinct in period and literature from S03", "workAuthor": "trans. Kisari Mohan Ganguli" }, { "story": 12, "id": "S12", "tradition": "Norse · Iceland", "title": "The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (Poetic Edda)", "author": "anonymous Old Norse poems; trans. Benjamin Thorpe", "date": "poems of uncertain and disputed age, preserved chiefly in the Codex Regius of c. 1270; Thorpe's translation 1866, in the Norrœna Society edition edited by Rasmus B. Anderson", "location": "Vǫluspá 3-6; Vafþrúðnismál 20-21, 29-35; Grímnismál 40-41; Vǫluspá 9-10, 17-18", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the chasm with neither sand nor sea nor grass; Ymir's flesh, bones, skull and blood becoming earth, hills, heaven and sea; the venom drops from Élivágar and the sparks from the south-world; Bergelmir born countless winters before the earth and laid in an ark; Aurgelmir's self-generation under the armpit and foot on foot; the fuller Grímnismál inventory adding hair as trees and plants, brows as Midgard, brain as clouds; the sun, moon and stars not knowing their places; the council naming night, morning, midday, afternoon and evening so that years could be reckoned; the gods in council deciding who should create the race of dwarfs from the sea-giant's blood and bones; Móðsognir and Durin; Ask and Embla found nearly powerless and void of destiny; the gifts of spirit, sense, blood and goodly colour from Óðinn, Hœnir and Lóðurr", "scholarship": "The poems are the oldest witnesses; Snorri quotes them and the retelling follows them where the two differ", "translation": "Thorpe's English from the Old Norse. The file is Project Gutenberg #14726, whose title page credits Thorpe for the Elder Edda and I. A. Blackwell for the Younger", "framing": "Nineteenth-century Northern antiquarianism, issued as a subscription set. The translations themselves are literal and unembellished", "uncertainty": "HIGH on the age of the poems, which is disputed and not settled here. LOW on the English quoted", "notes": "THE FILE IS NAMED FOR BELLOWS AND IS NOT BELLOWS — correction C-2. Identity established from the title page inside the file", "workAuthor": "trans. Benjamin Thorpe" }, { "story": 12, "id": "S12", "tradition": "Norse · Iceland", "title": "The Younger Edda; also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda", "author": "Snorri Sturluson; trans. Rasmus B. Anderson", "date": "composed in Iceland in the 1220s; Anderson's translation copyrighted 1879, this printing Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1901", "location": "Gylfaginning, sections 5-8; Gylfaginning 9 and 14", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "Niflheim's ice and rime and Muspelheim's sparks; Ginnungagap warm and mild as windless air; the meltwater quickening into Ymir; the denial that Ymir is a god and the statement that he and his offspring were evil; the sweat, the armpit and the foot; Auðhumla and the four milk-streams; the licking of the salt-stones over three days producing hair, head and whole man; Búri, Borr, Bestla and the three sons; the killing of Ymir; the blood drowning all the frost-giants but Bergelmir in his ark; the dismemberment inventory; the ocean laid in a ring; the skull raised with four corners and a dwarf under each, named for the four directions; the sparks from Muspelheim fixed as lights with assigned courses; the dwarfs quickening in Ymir's flesh like maggots and being given understanding and the likeness of men while remaining in earth and rock; Borr's sons finding two trees on the sea-strand and making Ask and Embla, with the three gifts and the giving of clothes and names", "scholarship": "The Gylfaginning is a poet's handbook, not a scripture, and strings verse citations together with explanatory prose. Where Snorri supplies what no surviving poem contains, the material may come from a lost poem or from Snorri", "translation": "Anderson's English from the Old Norse", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Christian Icelandic author writing two centuries after the conversion, who in his preface explains the gods as misremembered human beings and ends the dialogue by revealing the whole vision as an illusion", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on details unique to Snorri — the cow, the salt-stones, the three days, the four dwarfs — which cannot be checked against a surviving poem", "notes": "THE FILE IS NAMED FOR BRODEUR AND IS NOT BRODEUR — correction C-6. Identified from the title page and confirmed by Anderson's distinctive spellings", "workAuthor": "Snorri Sturluson; trans. Rasmus B. Anderson" }, { "story": 13, "id": "S13", "tradition": "China", "title": "Myths and Legends of China", "author": "E. T. C. Werner", "date": "London: George G. Harrap, 1922", "location": "ch. III, 'Cosmogony — P'an Ku and the Creation Myth': the fashioner of the universe; the sun and the moon; P'an Ku and Ymer; P'an Ku a late creation; Nue Kua Shih the repairer of the heavens", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP SUMMARISING A TRADITION — not a primary text and not a primary text quoted; see correction C-7", "use": "Pangu as offspring of yin and yang set to give form to Chaos; the name elements 'shell of an egg' and 'to secure'; the bearskin, the leaves, the two horns, the hammer and chisel; the four supernatural creatures; the sun and moon in his hands; eighteen thousand years and six feet of growth a day; 'he died that his works might live'; the full transformation inventory from head to sweat; the insects becoming human beings and Werner's comparison to the tears of Khepera; the Taoist origin of the account and the later Buddhist adaptation; the sun and moon hiding in the Han Sea, Terrestrial Time, Ju Lai, the characters written on the palms and the charm said seven times; the dragon-headed and serpent-bodied variant and the breathing, eye-opening, thunder-voiced variant; Werner's attribution of the myth's invention to Ko Hung in the fourth century and his argument that the classical cosmogonies were impersonal; Nüwa the repairer, quoted by Werner from Sima Zhen", "scholarship": "Werner was a British consular official in China for more than thirty years. He distinguishes Taoist from Buddhist versions, marks late adaptations, and reports variants rather than harmonising them", "translation": "Werner's own English; no Chinese text is quoted in the Pangu section", "framing": "NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE: the confident comparative manner of 1922, including appeals to a national temperament ('the ordinary mind', 'the placid Chinese mind') and a diffusionist speculation about the Chinese bringing a cosmogony from Babylon. Neither assumption is adopted here", "uncertainty": "HIGH on wording — there is no primary text behind Werner's Pangu paragraphs that this book can check. MEDIUM on his dating and attribution, corrected in the historical context", "notes": "Werner independently compares Pangu with Ymir and adapts a stanza of the Vǫluspá to do it — the same poem used in the preceding story. DC-12 records Werner as a Vâliçe public-domain reserve title: this book cites it and does not reproduce it", "workAuthor": "E. T. C. Werner" }, { "story": 14, "id": "S14", "tradition": "Vedic India", "title": "The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X)", "author": "anonymous Vedic poets, the hymn ascribed by tradition to the ṛṣi Nārāyaṇa; trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith", "date": "hymn composed in the latest stratum of the Ṛgveda; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892", "location": "Book X, hymn XC, verses 1-16, with Griffith's notes and his closing bibliographic note", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the thousand heads, eyes and feet; covering the earth and extending ten fingers' breadth beyond; all that has been and is to be; the lord of immortality; the one-fourth of created things and three-fourths in heaven; striding over what eats not and what eats; Virāj born from Puruṣa and Puruṣa from Virāj; the sacrifice with spring as its oil, autumn as the gift, summer as the wood; the anointing on the grass and the participation of gods, Sādhyas and ṛṣis; the dripping fat producing birds and animals; the Ṛcas, Sāman, metres and Yajus; horses, two-rowed-teeth animals, cattle, goats and sheep; the question of the portions; the Brahman from the mouth, Rājanya from the arms, Vaiśya from the thighs, Śūdra from the feet; moon from mind, sun from eye, Indra and Agni from the mouth, Vāyu from the breath; mid-air from the navel, sky from the head, earth from the feet, the regions from the ear; the seven fencing-logs and thrice seven layers of fuel; and the closing line on the earliest holy ordinances", "scholarship": "Griffith notes that this is the only passage in the Ṛgveda enumerating the four castes, and that the hymn is of comparatively recent origin and appears to harmonise the ideas of sacrifice and creation. His notes print competing renderings — Wilson, Sāyaṇa, Colebrooke, Muir, Ludwig, Peterson, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa — without choosing between them", "translation": "Griffith's English verse from the Sanskrit, made in Benares with Sāyaṇa's commentary", "framing": "NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE: Griffith's gloss explaining why each caste derives from its body part — the labourer from the feet because on his toil all ultimately rests — is a Victorian interpretation, not a translation, and is quoted as his without agreement", "uncertainty": "LOW on the English quoted. Verse 5 (Virāj) is genuinely disputed and Griffith prints two readings; the retelling reports both and settles neither", "notes": "THE SCAN HAS NO TITLE PAGE — identity established from content and recorded in the source register. The same volume supplies the Nāsadīya Sūkta quoted at the close of S03. This is the third Indian entry and is kept distinct in stratum and literature from S03 (Brāhmaṇa prose) and S11 (epic)", "workAuthor": "trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith" }, { "story": 15, "id": "S15", "tradition": "Zoroastrian Iran", "title": "Pahlavi Texts, Part I (Sacred Books of the East, vol. V)", "author": "trans. E. W. West", "date": "Bundahishn compiled 9th c. CE from older Avestan material; translation 1880", "location": "Bundahishn IV.1-5 (the two deaths and the complaint of Gōshurvan); X.1-4 and XIV.1-5 (what grew from the ox and from its seed); XV.1-13 (the rhubarb plant, Mashya and Mashyoi, the soul-and-body question, Ohrmazd's charge, the false speeches, the goat); Selections of Zādsparam X.2-4 (the eight metals and Spandarmad receiving the gold)", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the ox falling right and Gayōmard left; the soul of the ox crying as a thousand men; her question about the guardianship of the creatures and the promised man; Ohrmazd's answer that the man cannot come while the enemy is oppressive; her journey to the star, moon and sun stations; the guardian spirit of Zarathustra shown to her and her consent to nourish the creatures; fifty-five species of grain and twelve of medicinal plants from the marrow; peas from the horns, leek from the nose, grapevine from the blood and 'on this account wine abounds with blood', rue from the lungs, thyme from the heart for keeping away stench; the seed purified at the moon station; two oxen and two hundred and eighty-two species; a thousand days without eating, then water, then herbage; the eight metals from Gayōmard and gold from the life and seed; Spandarmad receiving the gold for forty years; the one-stemmed rivās plant with fifteen leaves over fifteen years; Mashya and Mashyoi joined, of like stature, sex indistinguishable; the question whether soul or body is created first; the change from plant shape to human shape and the entry of the breath; Ohrmazd's charge to think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds and worship no demons; the washing and the first true speech; the corrupted second speech attributing creation to the evil spirit; the souls in hell until the future existence; thirty days without food clothed in herbage; the white-haired goat and the milk; Mashya's second false speech and the loss of ninety-nine hundredths of the taste of food", "scholarship": "West notes that the complaint of Gōshurvan is recorded in the Gāthās, the oldest part of the Avesta, at Yasna 29; that the animal's gender is doubtful in the Avesta and treated as female by Zādsparam; and that the rivās is a rhubarb-like plant whose acid juice the Persians used for preserves and drinks. He records manuscript variants in every figure", "translation": "West's English from the Pahlavi", "framing": "Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship, philologically careful and doctrinally restrained; the frame was set out in full at the earlier Iranian story and is not restated", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on the numbers, which differ between manuscripts and are given here in the majority reading with the variants recorded. MEDIUM on the ox's gender. LOW on the wording quoted", "notes": "Second Zoroastrian entry. As with the first, this is a living religion; the material is presented as what the ninth-century compilation records in an 1880 translation, and nobody Zoroastrian has reviewed it. West's transliteration characters are rendered unreliably by the available scan, which is a further reason the retelling paraphrases where it does not quote", "workAuthor": "trans. E. W. West" }, { "story": 16, "id": "S16", "tradition": "Aztec · Mexica", "title": "Latin-American Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. XI)", "author": "Hartley Burr Alexander, drawing on the *Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas*, Ixtlilxochitl, the *Annals of Quauhtitlan*, the *Codex Vaticanus A*, Camargo and Sahagún", "date": "Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920; the underlying documents are sixteenth-century", "location": "ch. III, 'Mexico (Continued)', section I 'Cosmogony' and section II 'The Four Suns'", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP reporting sixteenth-century colonial documents which themselves record pre-conquest tradition", "use": "Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl in the thirteenth heaven; the four sons — red Camaxtli, black Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl the wind, Huitzilopochtli born a skeleton; six hundred years of idleness with time uncounted while Huitzilopochtli was in his bones; the making of fire first and then a half-sun; Oxomoco and Cipactonal and their allotted work, with divination and curing maize given to the woman; the year of eighteen twenty-day periods; Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl; the heavens below the thirteenth; the sea and the monster Cipactli from which the earth was shaped; Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue over the Quarters; the wife made from a hair of Xochiquetzal; the second half-sun and Tezcatlipoca as sun-bearer; the true sun being invisible; the giants who uprooted trees and ate acorns; the four Suns with their lengths of 676, 676, 364 and 312 years; Tezcatlipoca cast down and becoming the jaguar of Ursa Major who devoured the giants; Quetzalcoatl treated by his brothers as he had treated Tezcatlipoca; the wind and the monkeys; the rain of fire; maize first used under Chalchiuhtlicue; the year 2,628 and the falling heavens and the people turned to fish; the four men and the re-raising of the sky by Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl; fire discovered from sticks and from the heart of flint; Piltzintecuhtli and his wife surviving because divine; Quetzalcoatl casting his son into the fire to make the Sun and Tlaloc casting his into the cinders to make the Moon; and the establishment of war so that the Sun might be fed with hearts and blood", "scholarship": "Alexander sets five incompatible orderings of the Suns side by side and states that no single account preserves the whole. His own proposal that the whole 'may be reasonably reconstructed' is a scholarly act and is not followed here", "translation": "Alexander's English, working from Spanish and Nahuatl documents and from earlier scholarship; he quotes Herrera and Fray Gregorio García directly elsewhere in the chapter", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: every underlying document is post-conquest, most produced by or for the colonial church and administration, after the systematic burning of the Mexica painted books. Alexander adds his own comparative identifications, of which only those present in his sources are used", "uncertainty": "HIGH on the sequence of the Suns, which the sources contradict each other about; the retelling follows one document throughout and prints the disagreement. MEDIUM on names, because the available scan's optical character recognition is poor and each proper name was checked against its least corrupted occurrence", "notes": "THE PLANNED STORY WAS NOT IN THE SOURCE — correction C-8. The Tlaltecuhtli dismemberment is absent from Alexander and its usual source, the Histoyre du Mechique, could not be obtained in public-domain English. S16 re-scoped and re-titled rather than written from memory", "workAuthor": "Hartley Burr Alexander" }, { "story": 17, "id": "S17", "tradition": "Japan", "title": "Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697", "author": "compiled by imperial order, traditionally under Prince Toneri and Ō no Yasumaro; trans. W. G. Aston", "date": "chronicle completed 720; Aston's translation published for the Japan Society, London, 1896", "location": "Book I, 'The Age of the Gods', opening pages: the egg and the separation; the reed-shoot and Kuni-toko-tachi; the five 'In one writing it is said' variants; the seven generations; the jewel-spear and Onogoro; the circling of the pillar; the birth of the islands. Aston's footnotes on Motoori and Hirata, on the later addition of the variant quotations, on the Kiujiki scheme, and on the name etymologies", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "heaven and earth unseparated, In and Yō undivided, a chaotic mass like an egg with obscurely defined limits containing germs; the purer part drawn out as Heaven and the grosser settling as Earth; the finer uniting easily and the gross consolidating with difficulty; heaven formed first; the soil floating like a fish sporting on the surface; the reed-shoot between heaven and earth becoming Kuni-toko-tachi; the five variant beginnings including the thing in the Void whose shape may not be described, the young land floating like oil, Ame-no-minaka-nushi and the two Musubi in the Plain of High Heaven, the cloud with no place of attachment for its root, and the floating oil; the paired generations Uhiji-ni and Suhiji-ni, Oho-to-nochi and Oho-to-mahe, Omo-taru and Kashiko-ne; Izanagi and Izanami as the seventh generation; the jewel-spear thrust down and groping about to find the ocean; the brine coagulating into Onogoro; Onogoro made the pillar of the centre of the land; the circuit left and right; the woman speaking first and being told it was unlucky; the second circuit; the exchange about the source-places of the body; Ahaji reckoned as the placenta and taken no pleasure in; and the islands of Oho-yamato, Iyo-no-futana, Tsukushi, Oki and Sado", "scholarship": "Aston reports Motoori Norinaga's and Hirata Atsutane's judgement that the opening is a Chinese rationalistic essay awkwardly prefixed to genuine Japanese tradition, and Motoori's point that the connecting word 'hence' is meaningless where it stands. He judges the variant quotations a somewhat later addition indicating a large lost literature, and appends the Kiujiki scheme as further evidence of the confusion of the traditions", "translation": "Aston's English from the classical Chinese of the original", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a court chronicle written to establish an imperial genealogy descending from the sun goddess, in a Chinese form adopted as part of state-building; and a translation made in 1896 for a British learned society while that genealogy was live political material in Japan", "uncertainty": "LOW on the English. Aston's name etymologies are his own and he hedges several of them explicitly, including Izanagi and Izanami, which he suspects may be folk etymology", "notes": "The Kojiki is not used and no material from it is imported; where the two differ, only the Nihongi is followed. The scan is a Google digitisation with poor character recognition and mangled Japanese characters; every quoted phrase was checked against surrounding lines", "workAuthor": "trans. W. G. Aston" }, { "story": 18, "id": "S18", "tradition": "Orphic Greece", "title": "The Birds", "author": "Aristophanes; anonymous English prose translation", "date": "produced at Athens 414 BCE; the translation is a late-nineteenth-century prose version, translator not named in the copy used", "location": "the parabasis, Greek lines 685-703, with the chorus's continuing address on the services of birds", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the address to mortals as creatures of clay whose life is darkness; the promise to teach the origin of the gods, the rivers, Erebos and Chaos, and the jibe at Prodicus; Chaos, Night, dark Erebos and deep Tartarus at the beginning with Earth, air and heaven non-existent; black-winged Night laying a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebos; Eros springing from it after the revolution of long ages with glittering golden wings; his mating in Tartarus with dark Chaos and the hatching of the birds as the first race to see the light; the Immortals not existing until Eros had brought together the ingredients of the world; Heaven, Ocean, Earth and the blessed gods arising from that marriage; the claim of priority over Olympus; wings and the assistance of lovers, with the quail, waterfowl, goose and cock; the crane signalling sowing, the hanging-up of the tiller and Orestes' tunic; the kite and the shearing; the swallow and the selling of the winter tunic; and the claim to be Ammon, Delphi and Dodona", "scholarship": "Aristophanes is the earliest surviving witness to the Greek cosmic egg, centuries earlier than Damascius and the other late sources for Orphic theogony. How closely his lines track an actual Orphic poem is disputed and is not settled here", "translation": "Anonymous English prose. THE TRANSLATOR IS NOT NAMED IN THE FILE and none is asserted", "framing": "NAMED IN THE STORY AND THE SOURCE NOTE: this is a comedy, and the cosmogony is spoken by a chorus of birds arguing that they should be worshipped instead of the gods. It is a parody, and it is presented as one", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on the relation between the parody and its target. LOW on the English quoted. The retelling gives what the comedy says, in the comedy's voice, and does not present it as Orphic doctrine", "notes": "THIS STORY REPLACED AN INTERNAL DUPLICATE — correction C-9. The comic material around the cosmogony is deliberately retained; removing it to leave a bare cosmology would misrepresent the source", "workAuthor": "Aristophanes; anonymous English translation" }, { "story": 19, "id": "S19", "tradition": "Vedic India", "title": "The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X)", "author": "anonymous Vedic poet, the hymn ascribed by tradition to Hiraṇyagarbha son of Prajāpati; trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith", "date": "hymn composed in the latest stratum of the Ṛgveda; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892", "location": "Book X, hymn CXXI, verses 1-10, with Griffith's headnote and his notes on verses 1, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 10", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "Hiraṇyagarbha rising in the beginning as born only lord of all created beings and holding up earth and heaven; the refrain 'What god shall we adore with our oblation?'; the giving of vital breath, power and vigour and the gods' acknowledgement of his commandments; 'whose shade is death, whose lustre makes immortal'; sole rule over the moving world that breathes and slumbers, and lordship of biped and quadruped; the snow-covered mountains, the sea and Rasā, 'his arms are these'; the heavens made strong and the earth steadfast, light's realm and the sky-vault supported, mid-air measured; the two embattled armies trembling and looking to him under the risen sun; the mighty waters coming containing the universal germ and producing Agni, whence the gods' one spirit; his surveying the floods containing productive force and generating Worship, and being god of gods with none beside him; the plea that he never harm us; and the tenth verse naming Prajāpati and asking for store of riches", "scholarship": "Griffith's headnote states that Ka, 'who', was applied as a name to Prajāpati and others 'from a forced interpretation of the interrogative pronoun which occurs in the refrain', and records that some translators render the refrain as 'Worship we Ka the god'. He glosses hiraṇyagarbha as the gold-germ and quotes Wallis calling it the nearest approach in the Ṛgveda to the later conception of Brahmā", "translation": "Griffith's English verse from the Sanskrit", "framing": "A Victorian Indologist's translation made in Benares with Sāyaṇa's commentary; Griffith prints competing readings where the sense is disputed", "uncertainty": "LOW on the English quoted. The status of verse 10 as a later addition is scholarship and not stated by Griffith, and is labelled as such in the claim ledger", "notes": "Third hymn used from Griffith volume IV, after X.90 in S14 and X.129 at the close of S03. The scan has no title page; identity established by content and recorded in the source register. This story sits in the part called From an Egg although garbha means germ or embryo rather than egg; the difference is stated in the source note and the literal egg of the later Brāhmaṇa literature is not told here", "workAuthor": "trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith" }, { "story": 20, "id": "S20", "tradition": "Polynesia · Society Islands", "title": "Oceanic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. IX)", "author": "Roland B. Dixon, compiling from collections he cites by footnote number without naming reciters or recorders", "date": "Boston: Marshall Jones, 1916", "location": "ch. I, 'Myths of Origins and the Deluge', pp. 11-13 for the two Society Islands versions, and p. 20 for the egg fragment; p. 11 for the equivalence of Ta'aroa, Tanaoa, Tangaroa, Tangaloa and Kanaloa", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP quoting recorded chants; no narrator or collector named", "use": "the chant from 'He existed. Taaroa was his name' through the four negations, 'Taaroa calls, but nothing answers', 'Existing alone, he became the universe', the identifications with root, rocks, sands, light, the within, the germ, the support, endurance and wisdom, the raising of Havai'i as a body or shell, the imperatives to the foundations rocks and sands, 'They do not unite', the stretching of the seven heavens and the ceasing of ignorance, darkness, immobility and the period of messengers, 'It is the time of the speaker', and the completion; the second version with Ta'aroa embracing the rock, the heralds of day soliciting a soul, 'It is done', and Ra'i-tubu looking up, down and into the abyss so that each region received the power to bring forth; and the one-sentence fragment that Ta'aroa existed in an egg in darkness from which he later burst forth", "scholarship": "Dixon classifies Pacific origin-myths by type — evolutionary, creative — in the comparative manner of 1916, and notes the region-wide equivalence of the god's name while recording that his rank differs between island groups", "translation": "English as Dixon prints it; the underlying collectors are not named in the passage", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Society Islands material was recorded chiefly by London Missionary Society personnel during and after the dismantling of the traditional religion from 1797. Dixon is at a further remove, a Boston comparativist working from other people's collections", "uncertainty": "HIGH on attribution — no reciter and no recorder is named anywhere in the passage. LOW on the wording quoted, which is Dixon's printed text", "notes": "Second use of Dixon's volume IX, after the Māori genealogy in S05; the two are different island groups with different cosmological plans, and the story says so. 'Hawaii' in the chant is Havai'i, the old name of Ra'iātea, not the Hawaiian Islands — an identification recorded as scholarship because Dixon prints the name without comment", "workAuthor": "Roland B. Dixon" }, { "story": 21, "id": "S21", "tradition": "Ancient Egypt · Memphis", "title": "Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt", "author": "James Henry Breasted, translating the Memphite theology from British Museum Stela No. 797", "date": "the stone inscribed under Shabaka c. 700 BCE, copying an older papyrus; Breasted's book 1912", "location": "ch. II, 'The Origins', pp. 43-47, quoting the stela ll. 48-61; Breasted's footnote on the stone's history and the earlier copies by Sharpe and by Bryant and Read", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation, embedded in SCHOLARSHIP", "use": "Ptah the master craftsman and his Memphite ennead of a primeval Ptah and eight emanations; the borrowing of the ennead from Heliopolis; 'he is the heart and tongue of the ennead' and the identification of that heart and tongue with Atum; the Egyptian use of 'heart' for mind and the absence of a word for mind; the power of mind and tongue proceeding from Ptah and controlling all gods, men, animals and reptiles; the eyes, ears and nose transmitting to the heart, the heart bringing forth every issue and the tongue repeating its thought; the fashioning of all gods including Atum and his ennead; every divine word coming into existence by the thought of the heart and the commandment of the tongue; the making of the kas and the qualities, all food and offerings, that which is loved and hated, life to the peaceful and death to the guilty; the making of every work and handicraft, the going of the feet and the movement of every limb; Atum's statement concerning Ptah-Tatenen; Thoth perceiving his strength greater than all gods; 'Then Ptah was satisfied'; the making of cities and settling of nomes, the installing of gods in holy places, the likenesses of their bodies and the gods entering into bodies of every wood, stone and metal; and the summoning of the gods to the storehouse of Ptah-Tatenen", "scholarship": "Breasted's footnote gives the stone's history: used as a nether millstone, acquired by the British Museum in 1805, copied by Sharpe with the lines numbered backwards, copied again by Bryant and Read in 1901 still backwards, and corrected by Breasted himself in a facsimile in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache. He also asks whether the document is the primeval germ of the Alexandrian Logos, and states that the world Ptah made was merely the Egyptian Nile valley", "translation": "Breasted's English from the Egyptian", "framing": "NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Breasted dates the underlying composition to the Pyramid Age and presents it as the earliest philosophical system in the world. The stone is Shabaka's, c. 700 BCE, and whether the text it copies is genuinely Old Kingdom or an archaising composition of that period has been argued since. This book gives his translation and does not repeat his dating", "uncertainty": "HIGH on date. MEDIUM on wording in the abraded passages, by Breasted's own warning that the signs are very faint and reading excessively difficult. He also flags the verb rendered 'thinking' as questionable and notes that heart and tongue share a gender so the pronoun may refer to either", "notes": "Second use of Breasted after S01. The two stories are the rival Heliopolitan and Memphite cosmogonies, which the Egyptians never reconciled and which this book presents as answers to each other", "workAuthor": "James Henry Breasted" }, { "story": 22, "id": "S22", "tradition": "K'iche' Maya", "title": "Latin-American Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. XI) — the opening chapter of the Popol Vuh", "author": "anonymous K'iche' authors, 16th century; copied and translated into Spanish by Francisco Ximénez c. 1701; K'iche' text and French translation published by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, 1861; English by Hartley Burr Alexander", "date": "K'iche' manuscript mid-16th century; Brasseur 1861; Alexander 1920", "location": "Alexander, ch. IV, 'Central America', pp. 160-162, quoting the first chapter of the Popol Vuh entire", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE at three removes of translation", "use": "the list of absences — no man, animal, bird, fish, wood, stone, bog, ravine, vegetation or marsh, only the sky; the face of the earth not yet to be seen; nothing formed into a body, nothing joined to another thing, naught poised, not a rustle nor a sound, naught standing upright; immobility and silence in the darkness and the night; Tepeu the Lord and Gucumatz the Plumed Serpent alone upon the waters like a growing light; their envelopment in green and azure whence the name; the Heart of the Sky naming himself; the word coming to them in the shadows and speaking with them; their consulting and joining of words and counsels; light coming while they consulted; Hurakan and his three signs, the Lightning, the Streak of Lightning and the Thunderbolt; the council on seed, light and the sustainer of all; the order to the waters to retire, with the stated reason that they will receive neither glory nor honour until sentient human beings exist; 'Earth, they said, and immediately it was formed'; the formation like fog or cloud and the mountains appearing like great lobsters, instantly grown with cypress and pine; Gucumatz's welcome to the Heart of the Sky by four names; the reply that what they have created will have its end; the dividing of the waters and the streams running serpentine among the mountains; and the closing description of those who first made fruitful the heaven and the earth while suspended in the midst of the waters", "scholarship": "Alexander introduces the passage as the first chapter of the Quiché Genesis and comments on it in the comparative idiom of 1920; his interpretation is not adopted", "translation": "Alexander's English from Brasseur's French. THE CHAIN WAS VERIFIED: Brasseur's 1861 volume is held for this edition and his French at the Hurakan passage was compared against Alexander's English and corresponds exactly", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a text written in the Roman alphabet introduced by the friars, within a generation of the conquest; copied by a Dominican; published by an editor who also wrote about Atlantis; and translated for an American comparative series", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on wording, given three translation steps. The mountains 'like great lobsters' is Brasseur's image and later translators working directly from the K'iche' render the comparison differently; this is flagged in the source note", "notes": "Brasseur's French edition is held and was used only to verify the chain, never quoted: its optical character recognition is too degraded, rendering the book's own running head as 'IWYTHES DE L'AN lOUITE AMERICAINE'. BOUNDARY: the making of human beings from mud, wood and finally maize is not told here — Vâliçe has published that portion for young readers in another series, and this book takes the cosmogony only", "workAuthor": "Hartley Burr Alexander" }, { "story": 23, "id": "S23", "tradition": "Inca · Tawantinsuyu", "title": "History of the Incas", "author": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, by order of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo; trans. Sir Clements Markham", "date": "written at Cuzco, 1572; Markham's translation for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1907", "location": "ch. VII, 'Fable of the second age, and creation of the barbarous Indians according to their account'; with Sarmiento's statement of commission and method at the opening of ch. VI, and Markham's footnotes on unu pachacuti and on Taguapaca", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE — a colonial chronicle recording Andean tradition from Inca informants", "use": "the flood called unu pachacuti; the three men preserved, one named Taguapaca; the decision to people the land a second time and to make it more perfect by creating luminaries; the great lake in the Collao and the island Titicaca, the rock of lead; the order that sun, moon and stars come forth, 'and it was so'; the moon created brighter than the sun, the sun's jealousy and the handful of ashes; Taguapaca's disobedience, his binding hand and foot, his launching on a balsa, his blasphemy and threat of vengeance, and his disappearance down the drain of the lake; the sacred idol set up as a sign; the crossing to Tiahuanaco; the sculpturing and designing of all the nations on a great piece of stone; the servants charged to memorise the names of all tribes and of the valleys and provinces where they were to come forth; the three roads — the coastal range, the heights over the Andes, and Viracocha's own road between them; the shouted command to go forth and multiply and settle the land; the naming of every tribe and place; people coming forth from lakes, fountains, valleys, caves, trees, rocks and hills; and the variant account in which the creation was made at Titicaca, the first shapes being out of proportion and remade at the creator's own stature", "scholarship": "Sarmiento states that the history rests on attested proofs from the general testimony of the whole kingdom, old and young, Incas and tributary Indians. On completion it was read aloud in Quechua to an assembly of Inca elders and keepers of the knotted-cord records in Cuzco for certification", "translation": "Markham's English from the Spanish", "framing": "NAMED IN THE STORY, THE SOURCE NOTE AND THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: the book was written by order of Viceroy Toledo as part of a programme to establish that the Incas had been usurpers and that Spanish rule was therefore legitimate. It was written in the year Toledo had the last Inca ruler beheaded at Cuzco", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on the flood, by the translator's own warning that unu pachacuti was probably coined by priests after leading questions about a universal deluge. LOW on the wording quoted", "notes": "Chapter VI, the first creation and its destruction, is told separately as S27 in the part of this book called From Many Attempts; the two chapters are consecutive in the source and are not the same story. Markham collects the variant names of Taguapaca from Cieza de León and Yamqui Pachacuti and concludes nothing more can be recovered", "workAuthor": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa; trans. Sir Clements Markham" }, { "story": 24, "id": "S24", "tradition": "Yoruba", "title": "The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa", "author": "A. B. Ellis, Colonel, 1st West India Regiment", "date": "London: Chapman and Hall, 1894", "location": "ch. III, 'Chief Gods', the sections on (1) Olorun, (2) Obatala and (3) Odudua; with the migration tradition in the later chapter, cited in the source note but not retold", "type": "HISTORICAL SOURCE — COLONIAL-ERA ETHNOGRAPHY recording Yoruba tradition; no narrator named", "use": "Olorun as Owner of the Sky, maker of Obatala, who handed over the management of the firmament and the world and retired to rest; his lack of priests, symbols, images and temples and his survival in greetings and exclamations; Obatala as Lord of the White Cloth and the whiteness of his temples, images and followers; Odudua as the Black One, chief goddess, always shown seated nursing a child, coeval with Olorun and not made by him; the identification of the pair as Heaven and Earth; the priests' image of two large cut calabashes which once shut can never be opened, and the two whitened saucer-calabashes in the temples with the rim as the horizon; the myth of the two shut in darkness in a large closed calabash, he above and she below, for many days, cramped, hungry and uncomfortable; her complaint and blame, the violent quarrel, his tearing out her eyes because she would not bridle her tongue, and her curse that he should eat nothing but snails, whence the snail offerings; Ellis's observation that the myth never restores her sight yet no native regards her as blind; the disputed myth of Obatala making the first man and woman from clay, with the titles Owner of the Best Clay and the Orisha Who Kneads Clay; the agreement that he forms the child in the womb; and the minority view that the two are one androgynous divinity symbolised by a one-armed, one-legged figure with a tail ending in a sphere", "scholarship": "Ellis gives etymologies and marks the disputed ones, prints variants without choosing, distinguishes common belief from minority view, and notes where a myth fails to follow through", "translation": "Ellis's English; no Yoruba text is printed", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: an officer of the 1st West India Regiment writing in 1894, during the British extension of authority across Yorubaland, in the racial idiom of his decade, with a recurring interest in whether religious practice is trickery", "uncertainty": "HIGH on attribution — every account is credited only to 'the priests', 'some natives' or 'other natives', with no informant, place or date. LOW on the wording, which was checked against the scan", "notes": "THE PLANNED STORY IS NOT IN THIS SOURCE — correction C-12. The chain, the snail shell of sand and the five-toed hen come from later works not obtainable in public domain; Ellis's nearest equivalent, the palm-nut and the scratching fowl, belongs to his migration tradition and is described in the source note rather than told. Material in the chapter concerning albinism, congenital disability and a divination cylinder is not used", "workAuthor": "A. B. Ellis" }, { "story": 25, "id": "S25", "tradition": "Kuba · Bushoong · Congo", "title": "African Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. VII)", "author": "Alice Werner, reporting the fieldwork of Emil Torday among the Bushongo of the Kasai", "date": "Boston: Marshall Jones, 1925; Torday's fieldwork 1907-09", "location": "the chapter on myths of origins, in the section on creation legends", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP reporting an ethnographer's field record; no narrator named", "use": "Bumba described as a gigantic white being in human form, existing alone in a universe where there was nothing but water; the severe internal pains and the vomiting up of the sun, moon and stars, giving light to the world; the sun's rays drying the water so that sandbanks appeared, with no life anywhere; the production in the same manner of the living creatures — leopard, crested eagle, crocodile, a small fish parent of all fish, tortoise, the lightning described as a beast like a black leopard, white heron, beetle and goat; the subsequent production of men; the animals undertaking to people the world, with the goat producing horned beasts, the beetle insects, the crocodile serpents and the iguana, and the white heron all birds except the kite; Bumba's three sons, the first producing white ants and dying in the effort, the second a plant from which all vegetable life sprang, and the third producing only the kite; and Werner's statement that why the kite should be set apart is not explained", "scholarship": "Werner states she has met no parallel to this legend elsewhere in Africa; she raises the resemblance to Genesis I herself and defends the material's independence on the grounds that the Bushongo were untouched by missionary influence and that Torday was unusually independent of interpreters. She also notes that Bumba is First Ancestor as well as Creator and that the reigning chiefs preserve every link of descent from him", "translation": "Werner's English, reporting Torday", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: collected in the Kasai in 1907-09, during and immediately after the Congo Free State, in a kingdom whose rising had been put down in 1904; and gathered as part of a museum-collecting expedition", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM. Werner's claim that the Bushongo were entirely untouched by missionary influence is a strong one for the Kasai at that date and is questioned in the source note. Her count of the creatures — eight stated, nine listed — is left uncorrected because the error cannot be located", "notes": "The plan called this people Bakuba; Kuba is the standard modern name of the kingdom and Bushoong of the group. No Bushongo narrator is named anywhere in the source", "workAuthor": "Alice Werner" }, { "story": 26, "id": "S26", "tradition": "Archaic Greece", "title": "Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica — Works and Days", "author": "Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White", "date": "composed c. 700 BCE; translation Loeb Classical Library, 1914", "location": "Works and Days ll. 106-201, with ll. 202-211 for the hawk and the nightingale", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the promise to tell another tale of how gods and mortal men sprang from one source; the golden race made under Cronos, free from toil and grief, dying as if overcome with sleep, fed by the earth unforced, and becoming pure spirits clothed in mist who watch judgements and give wealth; the silver race, less noble by far, the child reared a hundred years as an utter simpleton, their brief and sorrowful maturity, their refusal to sacrifice, Zeus putting them away, and their becoming blessed spirits of the underworld of second rank; the brazen race sprung from ash-trees, terrible and strong, eating no bread, hard as adamant, with bronze armour, houses and implements and no black iron, destroyed by their own hands and leaving no name; the fourth race of hero demi-gods, nobler and more righteous, destroyed in part at seven-gated Thebe over the flocks of Oedipus and at Troy for Helen, the rest settled by Zeus in the islands of the blessed where the earth bears fruit thrice a year under the released Cronos; and the fifth race of iron, Hesiod's wish to have been born at another time, the labour and sorrow, the good mingled with the evils, the sign of grey hair at birth, the catalogue of failing bonds, the praise of evil-doers, the departure of Aidos and Nemesis in white robes, and the absence of help against evil; then the fable for princes of the hawk and the nightingale", "scholarship": "The insertion of the heroes between bronze and iron interrupts a scheme of metallic decline and is generally read as Hesiod combining an inherited myth of decline with a heroic age his audience knew from epic", "translation": "Evelyn-White's English, Loeb 1914, public domain", "framing": "None colonial. The poem is a partisan document in a family inheritance dispute and an attack on the magistrates who decided it, and the historical context says so", "uncertainty": "LOW on the English. The exact sense of the line rendered 'grey hair on the temples at their birth' is debated, though the image is not", "notes": "Second Hesiod entry, from a different poem than S02. Aidos and Nemesis are left untranslated because no single English word carries either; the source note explains both", "workAuthor": "Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White" }, { "story": 27, "id": "S27", "tradition": "Inca · Tawantinsuyu", "title": "History of the Incas", "author": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, by order of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo; trans. Sir Clements Markham", "date": "written at Cuzco, 1572; Markham's translation for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1907", "location": "ch. VI, the first creation and its destruction; Markham's long footnote on the derivations of Viracocha; Sarmiento's own remarks fitting the Andean flood to the biblical one", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE — a colonial chronicle recording Andean tradition from Inca informants", "use": "the being called Viracocha existing before this world was created; his creation of a dark world without sun, moon or stars and the resulting name Viracocha Pachayachachi, Creator of all things; the race of giants of disproportioned greatness, painted and sculptured, made to see whether it would be well to make real men of that size; the making of men in his own likeness, living in darkness; the order to live without quarrelling and to know and serve him; the single precept to be kept on pain of being confounded, and the statement that it is not mentioned what it was; the keeping of it for some time; the arising of pride and covetousness and the transgression; the confounding and cursing; the turning of some into stones, others into other things, the swallowing of some by the earth and others by the sea; the general flood called unu pachacuti, water that overturns the land, raining sixty days and nights and drowning all created things; the surviving vestiges of those turned into stones as a memorial and an example to posterity in the edifices of Pucara, sixty leagues from Cuzco; and Sarmiento's note that other nations say a few were saved and that each nation has its own fable", "scholarship": "Markham collects the competing derivations of Viracocha from Garcilasso, Cieza de León, Acosta, Montesinos, Molina, Betanzos and an anonymous Jesuit without choosing, and glosses Pachayachachi as Teacher of the Universe. He warns in the following chapter that unu pachacuti was probably coined by priests after leading questions about a universal deluge", "translation": "Markham's English from the Spanish", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: written by order of Viceroy Toledo as part of a programme to establish the Incas as usurpers; and containing Sarmiento's own accommodation of the Andean flood to the biblical one, with an Atlantic land connection, so that recording it should not require setting aside the Scriptures", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM on the flood, by the translator's own warning. LOW on the wording quoted. The content of the broken precept is stated by the source itself to be unknown", "notes": "Chapter VII, the second creation, is told separately earlier in this book. The two chapters are consecutive in the source and describe two different worlds", "workAuthor": "Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa; trans. Sir Clements Markham" }, { "story": 28, "id": "S28", "tradition": "Mixtec", "title": "Latin-American Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. XI) — the Mixtec cosmogony", "author": "narrated by Fray Gregorio García, early 17th century; quoted and summarised by Hartley Burr Alexander", "date": "García early 1600s; Alexander, Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920", "location": "Alexander, ch. III, 'Mexico (Continued)', section I 'Cosmogony', where he quotes García's opening sentence and summarises the narrative in four numbered episodes; and the following paragraph on the Zapotec Coqui-Xee, Piye-Tao, Cozaana and Huichaana", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP quoting a colonial document that records Mixtec tradition", "use": "the opening sentence quoted in full — the year and day of obscurity and darkness when there were as yet no days nor years, the world a chaos sunk in darkness, the earth covered with water on which scum and slime floated; the Deer-God and Deer-Goddess, also known as the Puma-Snake and the Jaguar-Snake; their magical raising of a cliff above the abyss of waters; the axe placed edge upward on its summit, upon which the heavens rested; the Place-where-the-Heavens-stood and their dwelling there many centuries; their two sons, Wind-of-the-Nine-Serpents and Wind-of-the-Nine-Caves, able to transform into eagles and serpents and to pass through solid bodies; their inauguration of sacrifice and penance and the cultivation of flowers and fruits; their prayer to their ancestral gods that the light appear, that the water be separated from the earth and that the dry land be freed from its covering; the peopling of the earth; and the flood that destroyed the First People, after which the world was restored by the Creator of all Things; and, from the Zapotec paragraph Alexander links to it, Coqui-Xee or Coqui-Cilla, Lord of the Beginning, 'the creator of all things and was himself uncreated'; his second name Piye-Tao, the Great Wind; Seler's reading of him as a spirit of the beginning in the sense of dawn, the east and the rising sun; the statement that he is merely the principle or essence of deity without reference to the act of creating; and the primeval pair Cozaana, Maker of all Beasts, and Huichaana, Maker of Men and Fishes, given as the Zapotec equivalents of the Mixtec Deer-God and Deer-Goddess", "scholarship": "Alexander observes that the opening's description of the void by negation resembles Genesis and the Babylonian cosmogony, and explains the device as characteristic of an early stage of human thought — the evolutionary anthropology of 1920, quoted and not adopted. His identifications of the deer as an emblem of fecundity, of the Puma-Snake and Jaguar-Snake as day-sky and night-vault, and of the two boys as demiurgic twins are his own and are not used", "translation": "Alexander's English; the opening sentence is his quotation of García", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Dominican collecting American origin traditions in part to test theories about where the peoples of the New World had come from — a purpose unlike the tradition's own", "uncertainty": "MEDIUM. Only the opening sentence is quotation; the rest is Alexander's summary of García's account, so the wording of the narrative is at two removes and no phrasing beyond the first sentence should be treated as the source's own", "notes": "THIS STORY REPLACED AN INTERNAL DUPLICATE — correction C-10. The Mixtec are a distinct people from the Mexica, with their own language, dynasties and codices; the two Mesoamerican entries in this book come from different peoples and different documents", "workAuthor": "Hartley Burr Alexander" }, { "story": 29, "id": "S29", "tradition": "Samoa and Tonga", "title": "Oceanic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. IX)", "author": "Roland B. Dixon, compiling from collections cited by footnote number without naming reciters or recorders", "date": "Boston: Marshall Jones, 1916", "location": "ch. I, 'Myths of Origins and the Deluge', pp. 18-19, in the section on the creative type", "type": "SCHOLARSHIP reporting collected tradition; no narrator named", "use": "the Samoan account — Tangaloa in the high heavens seeing a stone floating in the boundless sea, bringing it up, shaping it into human form, inspiring it with life and taking it to wife; her bearing him a bird; his sending the bird down and casting a great rock into the sea to serve it for a home; the bird's return complaining of the shadeless character of the land; the casting down of a vine which grew and gave shadow; Tangaloa in anger sending worms which fed on the vines and killed them; and man later made from the worms or maggots developed from the rotting vines. And the Tongan account — Tama-pouli-alamafoa the King of Heaven, Tangaloa-eiki the Celestial Chief, Tangaloa-tufuga the Celestial Artisan and Tangaloa-atu-logologo the Celestial Messenger; the messenger sent down on a bird and finding only a sandbank; the instruction to wait seven days and look again; the land found risen; the further instruction to wait and look once more; his complaint that there was nowhere to rest; the instruction to ask the artificer to cast down chips and shavings from his work; the rising of the island of Eua; his report of a great land with no plant or tree; and the seed given by the divine chief, which grew into a great vine covering all the land", "scholarship": "Dixon identifies the constant features of this type as a pre-existing world of the gods above, a universal sea below, something cast down from one into the other from which the world is made, and a bird who is messenger or offspring of the sky-deity. His division of Pacific origin-myths into evolutionary and creative types is a scheme of his period and is not adopted", "translation": "English as Dixon prints it; the underlying collectors are not named in the passage", "framing": "NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Pacific material recorded in the nineteenth century by missionaries and residents after the London Missionary Society reached Tonga in 1797 and Samoa in 1830, published in collections, and compiled at a distance in Massachusetts in 1916", "uncertainty": "HIGH on attribution — no reciter, recorder, place or date is given for either account. LOW on the wording, which is Dixon's printed text", "notes": "THIS STORY REPLACED A PLANNED SLAVIC ENTRY THAT ITS SOURCE DOES NOT CONTAIN — correction C-13. Third and final use of Dixon in this book, after S05 (Māori) and S20 (Society Islands); the three are different archipelagos and share no material. The source gives no reason for Tangaloa's anger and none is supplied", "workAuthor": "Roland B. Dixon" }, { "story": 30, "id": "S30", "tradition": "Norse · Iceland", "title": "The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson — Vǫluspá", "author": "anonymous Old Norse poem; trans. Benjamin Thorpe", "date": "poem of disputed age, preserved in the Codex Regius of c. 1270; Thorpe's translation 1866, in the Norrœna Society edition", "location": "Vǫluspá 56-65, with 7-8 for the golden tables", "type": "PRIMARY / HISTORICAL SOURCE in translation", "use": "the sun darkening, the earth sinking in ocean, the stars falling, fire assailing the all-nourishing tree and playing against heaven; the seeress seeing earth rise a second time, beauteously green, with waterfalls descending and an eagle over the fell catching fish; the Æsir meeting on Ida's plain to speak of the earth-encircler and recall their deeds and the supreme god's ancient lore; the wondrous golden tables found again in the grass, which the ruler of the gods had possessed in days of old; the unsown fields bringing forth, all evil amended, and the coming of Baldr, with Höðr and Baldr inhabiting Hropt's dwellings; the refrain 'Understand ye yet, or what?'; Hœnir choosing his lot and the two brothers' sons inhabiting Vindheim; the hall brighter than the sun, decked with gold, at Gimlé, where righteous people dwell in everlasting happiness; the coming of the mighty one from above to the great judgment, pronouncing dooms, allaying strifes and establishing a holy peace; and the dark dragon Níðhǫggr flying from Niðafjöll over the plain bearing a corpse on his wings, followed by the seeress's descent", "scholarship": "The closing stanzas' resemblance to Christian eschatology — Gimlé, the mighty one from above, the sinless renewed world — has been argued over since the poem entered scholarship; three positions are set out in the source note and none is adopted", "translation": "Thorpe's English from the Old Norse", "framing": "NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT: written down in Christian Iceland some two and a half centuries after the conversion, and heavily enlisted since the nineteenth century by nationalist and later by extremist movements; the version given is the thirteenth-century Icelandic one", "uncertainty": "HIGH on the poem's date and on the pagan or Christian character of the closing stanzas. LOW on the English quoted. Thorpe's numbering skips stanza 63 and nothing has been supplied", "notes": "Second and final use of the Elder Edda, after S12. The file is named for Bellows and is Thorpe — correction C-2. Some editors move or discount the final stanza on the grounds that a renewal ought not to end with a corpse-eating dragon; Thorpe prints it last and this book keeps it there", "workAuthor": "trans. Benjamin Thorpe" } ]