Every Greek and Roman myth showed their gods as fallible.

Yeah, but apparently Ovid was a little more blatant about it. I don't really know. I have never really paid much attention to the Greek and Roman playwrites, beyond a couple reditions of The Iliad. I just know -vicariously mind you- that the story of Apollo and Daphne doens't normally feature Cupid. That was Ovid's doing.

Not so much fallible I think, as being laughable at the same time. He would turn them into fools. Not being exactly respectful in his treatment of the deities, he likely pissed a lot of people off. Most of academia it would seem.

I would read stories of the myths, but not the actual plays or ancient poems.

Socrates ticked off a lot of people of his time, too.

Not to familiar with the philsophers, though with what little I did read, I wasn't terribly impressed with Plato either. I know more about more current philosophical theories but still not that much.

I have not actually read much philosophy.

I have studied ancient history, though.

Ah. Yeah, I'm not big on history, though I've taken a couple Ancient religion courses, Greece and Egypt, which covered some stuff given how religion featured in daily life. Some of my favourite things to read are just plain myth books, and they don't need to be fancy. The Illustrated Guide to Myths is one that I like because it covers many cultures and is sorted by type, such as creations myths, gods and animals, world ending myths, etc. The info they give is sparce, only a page or two on any particular myth unless it's really big, but so far it seems to be accurate.

I've also picked up a books on stories from Africa that I'm reading on occasions. The Woman Who Married a Lion it's called, by Alexander McAll Smith.

*Gets dragged in by Quiet*

I think this is my first post in this sub-forum....

Anyway, on the subject of philosophy, I'll admit to having a bit of a chip on my shoulder to the whole field. Philosophers just seem so self-aggrandizing (going all the way back to Plato's Philosopher-Kings) the way they make their work so ridiculously difficult to read and comprehend, when the ideas themselves aren't actually that complicated. It's just so elitist.

As for mythology, it's all just so... strange. The stories are full of literal Deus ex Machinae, but, it is a different form of story-telling, so I've never held that against it. They just don't function on the level most "stories" do today, which is largely due to the mutable nature of the myths. Not to mention, you're talking about a cultural tradition reinterpreted hundreds and thousands of times over its lifetime, not a single crafted narrative. Still, really weird plot devices in most myths.

And, as for book recommendations, I've literally never been able to sell someone on Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen (despite raving about it to everyone I ever talk to). It is the most beautiful, moving, majestic piece of literature I've ever encountered, all the more so for being a fantasy series. I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough, though I imagine the length (ten books, roughly 1k pages a piece, half as much again in spin-off books) is off-putting to a lot of people. Never stopped me, though, I've re-read the whole things four times now.

How big would that be compared to Wheel of Time? Never read Jordan but I know he was popular, and that the series had a mass amount of novels. Peirs Anthony's Xanth books too.

I think that's part of why I like some myths and folklore, the strangeness of it compared to typical stories. When supernatural critters are involved, along with beings of supernatural power and might, it's interesting to see how it get's worked around. Things like the Ocean being salty because of a perpetually grinding salt mill (Finnish myth of Vainamoinen) are intriguing to me.

I suppose it depends if you count the spin-off novels for both series. Taking just the core books of each, WoT is probably longer, just by virtue of being 14 books long. Malazan has way more spin-offs, though.

On the myth thing, take an easy example: the death of Baldr, as we were discussing in the other thread. That story (particularly Hodr's part in it) had the potential to convey genuine emotion, but, what do we get? Odin conceiving a child with some random giantess to murder the poor guy in a callous dismissal of empathic, empathetic storytelling. As I said, though, that's not really what the whole myth thing was about. It's just not to my taste, 'tis all.

I may need to read more of that myth methinks or are you talking about Hodr's birth there?

I think it's fair to assume that the stories were told with more emotion and colour by the people who were telling them when they were telling them. Unless the stories were meant to be read to begin with, rather than recorded for posterity what otherwise was an oral story, I imagine a lot of the impact would be drained out.

But then, what I've read of Nordic epic and myth doesn't lend itself to emotional and touching experiences. A man hits his wife once, and out of spite she refuses to lend him her hair to repair his broken bowstring causing his death and the loss of a major battle. The narrative didn't appear to be concerned with chastizing her for it, it was a matter of personal pride. Hrafnkel's Saga is interesting in that good and evil don't seem to play much of a role in anything, it's more pride, intelligence, and self examination.

No, not Hodr's birth. The response of the Aesir to Hodr's "murder" of Baldr is for Odin to go find some random giantess, get her pregnant, have the child be born and matured to adulthood in one day, and then kill Hodr. It's plot devices like that that turn me off from mythology.

I kind of like how fantasy and mythology have such interesting events in them. Although, if a god does something I think is in poor taste, I don't think much of them as a deity.

I'm going to go check out what those Malazan books are about.