The True Story of the Novel (5): The Sagas of Icelanders

Iceland: The Saga Trail

It's hard to know quite where to begin with a discussion of the Icelandic sagas. Why do people go on about them so much? Why are they so important? Are they so important? What makes them so different from other examples of medieval prose literature?

I suppose, from my own point of view, the main reason they need to be talked about here is because they so perfectly exemplify the aetiology of prose fiction I'm proposing: that it represents a fairly straightforward evolution from other pre-existing narrative genres.

Gabriel Turville-Peter's classic book The Origins of Icelandic Literature (1953) gives a very clear account of how the early chronicles of the settlement of Iceland, the Landnámabók (c.11th-13th century) and the genealogical treatise Íslendingabók by Ari Þorgilsson (1067–1148) - also known as "Ari the Wise" - provided much of the raw material on which the sagas are based. They were also much influenced by Saint's Lives, by the historical materials about the Norwegian kings also available to the early settlers, as well as the large body of summaries of Greek, Roman and Old Germanic literature compiled by the indefatigable early Icelandic scribes.

The sheer isolation of Icelandic society means that one can study the effects of all these blended materials as a kind of scientific case study in literary development. It's not that anyone could ever neatly explain away so unusual a phenomenon as the Icelandic family sagas (or Íslendingasögur, "Sagas of Icelanders") - with their unique blend of oral history and poetic creativity - but it is interesting to observe the parallels with (say) the origins of the Japanese monogatari or the Arthurian prose vulgate tradition.

In essence, then, the medieval Icelanders tried to summarise and copy all the literary materials available to them - from Homer's Iliad to the more recent stories of Tristan and Iseult or Sigurd the Volsung - and at some point in the process someone invented a break-off genre of more locally based stories, set in the farms and fields around about (though sometimes they range much further afield in time and space - as far, in fact, as America in the west and Constantinople in the East).

Snorri Sturluson: Prose Edda (1666)

Nobody knows if there was just one genius who originated the form, though it is true that Egil's Saga is sometimes attributed to the well-known historian Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), author of Heimskringla and the - so-called - Prose Edda, a kind of encyclopedia of traditional Norse mythology and commentary on the very complicated ancient poems known as the Elder Edda. Besides that, however, no single author can be identified with any of the many surviving sagas, though internal evidence certainly suggests a number of different authors for the different stories.

It's also true to say that an exclusive focus on this particular type of saga falsifies the immense variety of prose literature available to medieval Icelandic readers.

Norse sagas are generally classified as:

the Kings' sagas (Konungasögur),
Icelanders' sagas (Íslendinga sögur),
Short tales of Icelanders (Íslendingaþættir),
Contemporary sagas (Samtíðarsögur or Samtímasögur),
Legendary sagas (Fornaldarsögur),
Chivalric sagas (Riddarasögur),
Sagas of the Greenlanders (Grænlendingasögur),
Saints' sagas (Heilagra manna sögur)
and Bishops' sagas (Biskupa sögur).

- Wikipedia: Entry on "Sagas"

Of all these genres, it's really only the Sagas of Icelanders and the Short Tales of Icelanders which are of central interest to contemporary readers. The first substantial critical treatment of any of them in English was written by Sir Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century, after he'd stumbled across an (abridged) Latin translation of Laxdæla saga. The culmination of all the vast amounts of scholarly attention they've received since then must surely be the five-volume edition of the complete corpus of family sagas (together with selected short tales) published in Iceland by the appropriately named "Leifur Eiriksson" [Leif Ericson] Publishing in 1997:

Vidar Hreinsson et al., ed.: The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (1997)

The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (including 49 Stories). General Editor: Viðar Hreinsson, Editorial Team: Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz & Bernard Scudder. Introduction by Robert Kellogg. 5 vols. Viking Age Classics. Iceland: Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd., 1997.

1. Vinland / Warriors and Poets
   • Forewords
     • By the President of Iceland
     • By the Icelandic Minister of Education, Culture and Science
     • By the Former Director of the Manuscript Institute of Iceland
     • Preface
     • Credits
     • Publisher's Acknowledgments
     • Introduction
   • Vinland and Greenland
     1. Eirik the Red's Saga
     2. The Saga of the Greenlanders
   • Warriors and Poets
     1. Egil's Saga
     2. Kormak's Saga
     3. The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Poet
     4. The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People
     5. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue
   • Tales of Poets
     1. The Tale of Arnor, the Poet of Earls
     2. Einar Skulason's Tale
     3. The Tale of Mani the Poet
     4. The Tale of Ottar the Black
     5. The Tale of Sarcastic Halli
     6. Stuf's Tale
     7. The Tale of Thorarin Short-Cloak
     8. The Tale of Thorleif, the Earl's Poet
   • Anecdotes
     1. The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords
     2. The Tale of Brand the Generous
     3. Hreidar's Tale
     4. The Tale of the Story-Wise Icelander
     5. Ivar Ingimundarson's Tale
     6. Thorarin Nefjolfsson's Tale
     7. The Tale of Thorstein from the East Fjords
     8. The Tale of Thorstein the Curious
     9. The Tale of Thorstein Shiver
     10. The Tale of Thorvard Crow's-Beak


2. Outlaws / Warriors and Poets
   • Outlaws and Nature Spirits
     1. Gisli Sursson's Saga
     2. The Saga of Grettir the Strong
     3. The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm
     4. Bard's Saga
   • Warriors and Poets
     1. Killer-Glum's Saga
     2. The Tale of Ogmund Bash
     3. The Tale of Thorvald Tasaldi
     4. The Saga of the Sworn Brothers
     5. Thormod's Tale
     6. The Tale of Thorarin the Overbearing
     7. Viglund's Saga
   • Tales of the Supernatural
     1. The Tale of the Cairn-Dweller
     2. The Tale of the Mountain-Dweller
     3. Star-Oddi's Dream
     4. The Tale of Thidrandi and Thorhall
     5. The Tale of Thorhall Knapp


3. Epic / Champions and Rogues
   • An Epic
     1. Njal's Saga
   • Champions and Rogues
     1. The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty
     2. The Saga of the People of Floi
     3. The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes
     4. Jokul Buason's Tale
     5. Gold-Thorir's Saga
     6. The Saga of Thord Menace
     7. The Saga of Ref the Sly
     8. The Saga of Gunnar, the Fool of Keldugnup
   • Tales of Champions and Adventures
     1. Gisl Illugason's Tale
     2. The Tale of Gold-Asa's Thord
     3. Hrafn Gudrunarson's Tale
     4. Orm Storolfsson's Tale
     5. Thorgrim Hallason's Tale


4. Regional Feuds
   • Regional Feuds
     1. The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal
     2. The Saga of the Slayings on the Heath
     3. Valla-Ljot's Saga
     4. The Saga of the People of Svarfadardal
     5. The Saga of the People of Ljosavatn
     6. The Saga of the People of Reykjadal and of Killer-Skuta
     7. The Saga of Thorstein the White
     8. The Saga of the People of Vopnafjord
     9. The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Struck
     10. The Tale of Thorstein Bull's Leg
     11. The Saga of Droplaug's Sons
     12. The Saga of the People of Fljotsdal
     13. The Tale of Gunnar, the Slayer of Thidrandi
     14. Brandkrossi's Tale
     15. Thorstein Sidu-Hallsson's Saga
     16. Thorstein Sidu-Hallsson's Tale
     17. Thorstein Sidu-Hallsson's Dream
     18. Egil Sidu-Hallsson's Tale


5. Epic / Wealth and Power
   • An Epic
     1. The Saga of the People of Laxardal
     2. Bolli Bollason's Tale
   • Wealth and Power
     1. The Saga of the People of Eyri
     2. The Tale of Halldor Snorrason I
     3. The Tale of Halldor Snorrason II
     4. Olkofri's Saga
     5. Hen-Thorir's Saga
     6. The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey's Godi
     7. The Saga of the Confederates
     8. Odd Ofeigsson's Tale
     9. The Saga of Havard of Isafjord
   • Religion and Conflict in Iceland and Greenland
     1. The Tale of Hromund the Lame
     2. The Tale of Svadi and Arnor Crone's-Nose
     3. The Tale of Thorvald the Far-Travelled
     4. The Tale of Thorsein Tent-Pitcher
     5. The Tale of the Greenlanders
   • Reference Section
     • Maps and Tables
     • Illustrations and Diagrams
     • Glossary
     • Cross-Reference Index of Characters
     • Contents of Volumes I-V

Since I'm pleased to say that I recently acquired a copy of this rather sumptuous tome, it seems useful to list its contents in this comprehensive manner as a way of signalling the wealth of material available to the saga aficionado. As well as the 45 sagas included in this collection, the editors have also inserted 49 short tales of Icelanders (marked off with italics in the table of contents above).

There are, of course, a great many other translations of individual sagas, some probably superior in literary merit to the somewhat bland and standardised version included in this complete edition (like modern editions of the Bible translated by committee).

The immense care taken by the editors of the "Leif Ericson" text to ensure consistency in vocabulary and (especially) names of people and places, makes it an indispensable resource for the scholar. If you don't want to invest in the complete edition, though, Penguin books have published some volumes of selections from the larger corpus:

The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection (2001)

1. The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection. From The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (including 49 Stories). Ed. Viðar Hreinsson, Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz & Bernard Scudder. Iceland: Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd., 1997. Preface by Jane Smiley. Introduction by Robert Kellogg. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001.


2. Cook, Robert, trans. Njal’s Saga. From The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (including 49 Stories). Ed. Viðar Hreinsson, Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz & Bernard Scudder. 1997. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001.


3. Whaley, Diana, ed. Sagas of Warrior-Poets. From The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (including 49 Stories). Ed. Viðar Hreinsson, Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz & Bernard Scudder. 1997. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.

Diana Whaley, ed. Sagas of Warrior-poets (2002)

The first of these is particularly good, with a fascinating preface by American novelist Jane Smiley, author of The Greenlanders (1988). It probably contains sufficient detail for most general readers, in fact, especially when combined with the separate translation Of Njal's Saga, by common consent the most individually "epic" of the Norse sagas, issued concurrently by Penguin Classics.

For any of you interested in pursuing the subject, though, I've listed below all of the other books on the subject I've collected since I first took a class in Old Norse at Auckland University with Professor Forrest Scott some thirty years ago in (I think) 1983:

Robert Cook, trans.: Njal's Saga (2001)

1. The Elder Edda
2. Sagas
3. Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241)

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The Elder Edda


1. Hollander, Lee M., trans. The Poetic Edda. 1962. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.


2. Larrington, Carolyne, trans. The Poetic Edda. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.


3. Magnúson, Eiríkr, & William Morris, trans. Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda. 1870. Ed. H. Halliday Sparling. The Camelot Series. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Walter Scott, 1888.


4. Morris, William, trans. Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs. 1870. Ed. Robert W. Gutman. 1962. New York & London: Collier & Collier-Macmillan, 1971.


5. Terry, Patricia, trans. Poems of the Vikings: The Elder Edda. Introduction by Charles Wisden. 1969. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1981.


Sagas


6. Blake, N. F. ed. The Saga of the Jomsvikings: Jómsvíkinga Saga. Nelson’s Icelandic texts, ed. Sigurður Nordal & G. Turville-Petre. London: Nelson, 1962.


7. Dasent, George. M., trans. The Saga of Burnt Njal: From the Icelandic of Njal’s Saga. Everyman’s Library. London & New York: J. M. Dent & E. P. Dutton, n.d.


8. Hight, George Ainslie, trans. The Saga of Grettir the Strong: A Story of the Eleventh Century. Everyman’s Library 699. 1914. London & New York: J. M. Dent & E. P. Dutton, 1929.


9. Johnston, George, trans. The Saga of Gisli. Ed. Peter Foote. 1963. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1984.


10. Jones, Gwyn, trans. Eirik the Red and other Icelandic Sagas. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 1980.


11. Pálsson, Hermann, & Magnus Magnusson, trans. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America – Grænlendinga Saga & Eirik’s Saga. 1965. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


12. Pálsson, Hermann, & Magnus Magnusson, trans. King Harald’s Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway – from Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


13. Pálsson, Hermann, & Magnus Magnusson, trans. Laxdaela Saga. 1969. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


14. Pálsson, Hermann, trans. Hrafnkel’s Saga and Other Stories. 1971. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


15. Pálsson, Hermann, & Paul Edwards, trans. Hrolf Gautrekkson: A Viking Romance. New Saga Library 1. Edinburgh: Southgate, 1972.


16. Pálsson, Hermann, & Paul Edwards, trans. Eyrbyggja Saga. New Saga Library 2. Edinburgh: Southgate, 1973.


17. Pálsson, Hermann, & Paul Edwards, trans. Egil’s Saga. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


18. Pálsson, Hermann, & Paul Edwards, trans. Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney. 1978. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.


19. Pálsson, Hermann, & Paul Edwards, trans. Seven Viking Romances. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.


Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241)


20. Sturluson, Snorri. Edda. Trans. Anthony Faulkes. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1987.


21. Sturlason, Snorre. Heimskringla: The Olaf Sagas. Trans. Samuel Laing. Ed. John Beveridge. Everyman’s Library 717. London & New York: J. M. Dent & E. P. Dutton, 1930.


22. Sturlason, Snorre. Heimskringla: The Norse King Sagas. Trans. Samuel Laing. Ed. John Beveridge. Everyman’s Library 847. London & New York: J. M. Dent & E. P. Dutton, 1930.


23. Sturlason, Snorre. Heimskringla, or The Lives of the Norse Kings. Trans. A. H. Smith & Erling Monsen. Ed. Erling Monsen. 1932. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990.

Egil's Saga

You'll notice that a great many of the saga translations listed above were done by Hermann Pálsson of Edinburgh University, initially in collaboration with ex-UK Mastermind host (and proud Icelander) Magnus Magnusson, and subsequently with my old English Department mentor Paul Edwards. Edwards was a very amusing character, who used to hold court around a huge wooden table with flagons of wine and lively conversation for any passing colleagues or students. I benefited greatly from his encouragement and example, and it's nice to be able to commemorate him here (he died sometime in the early 1990s, I believe).

But after all this bibliographical preamble, what are the sagas actually like to read? Well, they're very deadpan, pithy, understated. A few quotes may give you the idea:

In chapter 45 of Grettis saga, Þorbjörn knocked loudly on the door at Atli's farm, then hid. When Atli went to the door, Þorbjörn rushed up holding his spear in two hands and ran Atli through. When he took the blow, Atli said, "Broad spears are in fashion these days," and fell dead.

Ha, ha - very witty! Or the off-the-cuff remark by one of the characters in Njal's saga that the health of the thralls is poor that season, after a bunch of them have been murdered by his neighbour. Or the comment by the anti-heroine Guðrún in Laxdæla saga about her behaviour throughout to the hero Kjartan:

Þá mælti Guðrún: "Þeim var eg verst er eg unni mest."

Auden translated her answer as "He that I loved the / Best, to him I was worst" in his poem "Journey to Iceland." His friend Christopher Isherwood had once remarked that the characters in the sagas reminded him a lot of the personnel at their public school, and that thought appears to be the inspiration behind a lot of Auden's early poetry, as well as - in particular - his strange revenge drama "Paid on Both Sides" (1928).

Sagas tend to be composed in short chapters, and to begin with elaborate genealogies of the (eventual) main characters - hence the designation "family sagas." If you skip over these lists of ancestors, you'll often miss the reason for a murder, or a lawsuit, or an act of revenge two hundred or so pages later. The saga authors never discuss their characters' motivations, or delve into their psychology. All the action is described with the utmost objectivity, in a kind of super-hardbitten prose with no room for fluff or sentiment.

The characters do often compose (or inspire) poems, which are frequently quoted in context, but the technical demands of Old Norse skaldic verse are so exigent, that this generally gives little clue to their "inner feelings" or softer side. On the contrary, in fact.

The fascination of the stories lies in the difficulty of understanding just why their protagonists behave as they do. The impossible and self-destructive perversity of many of their deeds is such as to seem virtually incomprehensible without the elaborate framework of family relationships and overarching doom-laden pessimism which seem to have distinguished medieval Icelanders even from other Vikings.

For a long time the sagas were assumed to be basically factual, with a few historical inconsistencies here and there caused by oral transmission. More modern research has demonstrated how carefully composed and crafted most of them are, however, and - in particular - how little reliability there is in their accounts of people and places (within a larger framework of agreed-upon knowledge provided by such texts as Landnámabók and Íslendingabók). In short, they resemble contemporary historical novels far more than the family memoirs or local histories they were once thought to be.

Are they "novels"? Not in the traditional sense of the term. They demand far more from the reader than most modern novels can afford to. A lazy reader will understand little of what goes on in even the great set-piece sagas such as Njal's Saga or Laxdaela Saga, let alone the more diffuse and thematically mixed sagas such as Eyrbyggja Saga. The matchless precision with which the great scenes and personalities within them are recreated on the page does,however, make them every bit as compelling for the dedicated reader as, say, Homer or Virgil, and it would be hard to see the whole corpus of saga literature as inferior even to that created by such "epic" novelists as Tolstoy or Faulkner.

As what we understand by a "novel" continues to expand and diversify, it becomes clearer and clearer that the Icelandic sagas, one of the most impressive bodies of prose fiction in existence, still have a lot more to teach contemporary writers than we've so far been willing to learn.

Íslendingasögur (13th century)

The True Story of the Novel (4): The Medieval and Renaissance Romance

Steven Moore: The Novel: An Alternative History. Beginnings to 1600 (2010)

Well, an interesting thing has happened. Since I set out to write my own version of the "True Story of the Novel," I've discovered that the job has actually already been done: in a manner far more comprehensive than Margaret Anne Doody's somewhat idiosyncratic account, too:

Steven Moore: The Novel: An Alternative History. 1600-1800 (2013)

So who is this Steven Moore, and what is the nature of his "alternative history" of the novel?

Steven Moore (1951- )

Well, clearly he likes pictures of naked girls lying round reading books (more on this subject here); he's also (apparently) an authority on the works of Ronald Firbank and William Gaddis, and has published extensively on both authors. The views on the novel and prose fiction in general he outlines in his introduction to volume one of his massive masterwork are certainly pretty congenial to me, at any rate:

"Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate," the narrator is advised in Vikram Chandra's fabulous Red Earth and Pouring Rain. "Forsake grim shortness and hustle. Let us luxuriate in your curlicues" ... Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words, lashed with purple prose and black humor; novels patterned after myths, the Tarot, the Stations of the Cross, a chessboard, a dictionary, an almanac, the genetic code, a game of golf, a night at the movies; novels with unusual layouts, paginated backward, or with sentences running off the edges, or printed in different colors, a novel on yellow paper, a wordless novel in woodcuts, a novel in first chapters, a novel in the form of an anthology, Internet postings, or an auction catalog; huge novels that occupy a single day, slim novels that cover a lifetime; novels with footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, star charts, fold-out maps, or with a reading comprehension test or Q&A supplement at the end; novels peppered with songs, poems, lists, excommunications; novels whose chapters can be read in different sequences, or that have 150 possible endings; novels that are all dialogue, all footnotes, all contributors' notes, or one long paragraph; novels that begin and end midsentence, novels in fragments, novels with stories within stories; towers of babble, slang, shoptalk, technical terms, sweet nothings; give me many-layered novels that erect a great wall of words for protection against the demons of delusion and irrationality at loose in the world ... [p.19]

So is there any real need for me to persevere with my own series of posts on the subject? Possibly not, but there is a certain encyclopedic exhaustiveness about Moore's approach to the subject which might encourage more pointed discussions of particular parts of the story ("all the novels described in the preceding paragraph are real, by the way," he explains in a footnote to the passage quoted above).

In any case, with Moore as one's bedrock, it all of a sudden becomes much easier to substantiate the claim that there really are a lot of interesting and often exceedingly tricksy pre-modern fictions out there which are certainly hard to characterise as anything but "novels" - in the various ways we have learned to interpret that portmanteau word over the past couple of centuries of reading and producing them on an industrial scale ...

•


Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

... in a discussion of the digressive nature of French prose romance, [Eugène] Vinaver characterises it in terms of "the technique of tapestry. Just as in a tapestry each thread alternates with an endless variety of others, so in the early prose romances of the Arthurian group numerous seemingly independent episodes or 'motifs' are interwoven in a manner which makes it possible for each episode to be set aside at any moment and resumed later" (1990, 1: lxvi). Vinaver goes on to explain that the most convenient way of representing this interweaving is to designate each strand or motif by a letter, giving various examples in the discussion of the "Tale of King Arthur" in his introduction (1990, 1: lxviii-lxi).

By comparison with the French romancers, then [according to Vinaver], in Malory’s version of the story "The order of events is not a1 b c1 a2 c2 , but a1 a2 b c1 c2; the three threads of the narrative are unravelled and straightened out so as to form in each case a consistent and self-contained set of adventures" (Vinaver, 1990, 1:lxx). Vinaver sees this as "closely approximating to the conventional modern technique of exposition" (1990, 1: lxxi).

- Jack Ross, Malory and Scheherazade: A Study in Narrative Method (1992)

Leaving to one side, for the moment, the question of what exactly is the "conventional modern technique of exposition," it's probably useful here to start off with some remarks on the subject matter of most of the medieval - and even Renaissance - writers we'll be discussing.

The 12th-century French poet Jean Bodel remarked, in his Chanson de Saisnes:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant,
De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

There are only 3 subjects ["matters"] which no man should lack:
That of France, of Britain, and of Rome the Great.

Or, as Wikipedia explains it:

The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the body of literature and legendary material associated with Great Britain and its legendary kings, particularly King Arthur. Together with the Matter of France, which concerned the legends of Charlemagne, and the Matter of Rome, which included material derived from or inspired by classical mythology, it was one of the three great literary cycles recalled repeatedly in medieval literature.

(I guess, parenthetically, this was what made it difficult for me to understand why the Landfall Online reviewer of my recent book Celanie: Poems and Drawings after Paul Celan (2012: with artist Emma Smith), Andrew Paul Wood, should question my translation of the title of Celan's poem "Matière de Bretagne" as "Matter of Britain." It's hard for me to think of any more obvious way of drawing attention to the poem's indebtedness to, in particular, the Tristan legend. I suppose that I could have left it in French, as he suggests, but that seemed a bit of a cop-out - as well as unnecessary. Why not leave the whole poem in its original language, for that matter? Any translation is an interpretation: even so obvious a substitution as this).

I've arranged the romances and novels of chivalry I own myself under the nationalities of their various authors, but you'll note that there's a gradual temporal shift from works about the courts of King Arthur and Charlemagne into the more learned and eccentric novels of Renaissance figures such as François Rabelais and Francesco Colonna. One could choose any of these great proto-Cervantine figures as the centre of this post, but I have decided to stay with the mysterious Sir Thomas Malory, partly because Moore is content to see him more as a translator and transmitter of the Arthurian legend than a pioneer of the modern novel.

•


Malory

English

1. Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1100–1155)
2. Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–1471)
3. William Caxton (c.1415/22–1492)
4. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Geoffrey of Monmouth [Galfridus Monemutensis] (c.1100–1155)


1. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–1471)


2. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. Ed. William Caxton. 1485. Introduction by Sir John Rhys. 1906. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 45 & 46. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1953.


3. Vinaver, Eugène, ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 3 vols. 1947. 3rd ed. rev. P. J. C. Field. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.


4. Malory, Sir Thomas. Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 1954. Second ed. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.


5. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. 1485. Ed. Janet Cowan. Introduction by John Lawlor. 1969. 2 vols. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.


6. The Romance of Lancelot & Guinevere, Taken from Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. Illustrated by Lettice Sandford. London: The Folio Society, 1953.


7. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. 1894. Ware, Hertfordshire: Omega Books., 1988.


8. Pollard, Alfred W., ed. The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Abridged from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. 1917. New York: Weathervane Books, n.d.


William Caxton (c.1415/22–1492)


9. Caxton, William, trans. The Lyf of the Noble and Crysten Prynce Charles the Grete. The English Charlemagne Romances, Parts III & IV. Ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage. 1880-1881. Early English Text Society, Extra Series Nos 36 & 37. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


10. Caxton, William, trans. The History of Reynard the Fox. Ed. N. F. Blake. Early English Text Society, No. 263. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.


11. Blake, N. F., ed. Caxton's Own Prose. The Language Library. Ed. Eric Partridge & Simeon Potter. London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1973.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


12. Ashe, Geoffrey. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. 1957. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1973.


13. Ashe, Geoffrey. From Caesar to Arthur. London: Collins, 1960.


14. Ashe, Geoffrey. Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America. London: Collins, 1962.


15. Ashe, Geoffrey, Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain. Ed. Geoffrey Ashe. 1968. London: Paladin, 1973.


16. Ashe, Geoffrey. All About King Arthur. 1969. London: Carousel Books, 1973.


17. Ashe, Geoffrey. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. 1971. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.


18. Ashe, Geoffrey. Avalonian Quest. 1982. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.


19. Ashe, Geoffrey, in association with Debrett’s Peerage. The Discovery of King Arthur. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.


20. Ashe, Geoffrey. The Landscape of King Arthur. With Photographs by Simon McBride. London: Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited, in association with Michael Joseph Limited, 1987.


21. Ashe, Geoffrey. Mythology of the British Isles. 1990. London: Methuen London, 1992.


22. Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, & Henry Lincoln. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. 1982. London: Corgi Books, 1988.


23. Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend. 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.


24. Stewart, R. J. & John Matthews, ed. Merlin through the Ages: A Chronological Anthology and Source Book. Foreword by David Spangler. A Blandford Book. London: Cassell plc, 1995.


25. Treharne, R. F. The Glastonbury Legends. 1967. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1975.


26. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. 1920. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.

I've been reading Arthurian romances, ancient and modern, for most of my life. I'm not quite sure what the fascination is, but certainly - when it comes to Malory's Morte d'Arthur, I think it has a lot to do with the sheer precision and elegance of his writing. The discovery of the Winchester Ms. of his "works" in the 1930s revolutionised study of his book (certain parenthetical marks make it probable that this was the actual copy used by Caxton for printing his own edited version in the 1480s). The editor of the standard edition, Eugène Vinaver, made no secret of his preference for the "inter-laced" compexity of Malory's French sources, however.

Steven Moore seconds him in this. They do have the advantage of having read far more widely than I have in French romance, but I feel that this may have the effect of blinding them to some of the more interesting innovations in Malory's work. Whether or not he himself saw his translations as constituting a single book of the adventures of King Arthur and his principal knights, Caxton certainly had no great difficulty in editing the various parts of his manuscript into precisely that.

That could be coincidental, but given the heroic efforts made by the French chroniclers to cobble together a complete version of the whole story in the early 13th century (the so-called "prose vulgate"), it doesn't seem too implausible to attribute a similar ambition to their English follower. Malory's disentanglement of the start-stop, tapestry thread method of narration employed by his French originals is also unlikely to be coincidental. Vinaver sees this as a disastrous over-simplification of the splendid originals, but the intensely readable nature of Malory's book - even for modern readers - does suggest that the appetite for such complex fictions was in decline (not to mention the ruinous expense of finding copies of each separate manuscript section of the massive French vulgate).

Malory's book was also one of the first secular texts to be printed in England, and its compactness and affordability meant that it set a pattern for most of the prose romances which would follow it. The French, it is true, maintained an appetite for monstrous novels of a couple of thousand pages each well into the seventeenth century, but in England the single-volumed masterwork was to dominate: Malory (1485), Sidney's Arcadia (1593), Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596) - Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), for that matter ...

•


Rabelais

French

1. François Rabelais (c.1494–1553)
2. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

---

François Rabelais (c.1494–1553)


1. Rabelais, François. Œuvres: Les Cinq Livres de F. Rabelais, avec notes et glossaire. 2 vols. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Éditeur, 1909.


2. Rabelais, François. Oeuvres Complètes: Tome illustrée. Ed. Pierre Jourda. 1962. 2 vols. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1967.


3. Rabelais, François. The Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick. Containing Five Books of the Lives, Heroick Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Sonne Pantagruel. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart & Peter Anthony Motteux. 1653-94. Illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. 1931. London: the Navarre Society, 1948.


4. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. 1564. Trans. J. M. Cohen. 1955. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


5. Bédier, Joseph. Tristan and Iseult. Trans. Hilaire Belloc. 1913. Unwin Books. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961.


6. Bédier, Joseph. The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. Trans. Hilaire Belloc & Paul Rosenfeld. 1945. Vintage Books. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. / Random House, Inc., 1965.


7. Béroul. The Romance of Tristan & The Tale of Tristan’s Madness. Translated together for the First Time. Trans. Alan S. Fedrick. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


8. Bryant, Nigel, trans. The High Book of the Grail: A Translation of the Thirteenth Century Romance of Perlesvaus. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, Ltd. / Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978.


9. Cable, James, trans. The Death of King Arthur (Le Mort du Roi Artus). 1971. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


10. Corless, Corin, trans. Lancelot of the Lake. Introduction by Elspeth Kennedy. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.


11. Einhard, & Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


12. Evans, Sebastian, trans. The High History of the Holy Graal. 1898. Everyman’s Library, 445. 1910. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1936.


13. Krailsheimer, A. J., ed. Three Sixteenth-Century Conteurs. Clarendon French Series. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.


14. Lacroix, Daniel, & Philippe Walter, trans. Tristan et Iseut: Les poèmes français / La saga norroise. Lettres gothiques. Le Livre de Poche. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1989.


15. Louis, René. Tristan et Iseult: Renouvelé en français moderne d’après les textes du XIIe et XIIIe siècle. Le Livre de Poche. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972.


16. Mason, Eugene, trans. Aucassin & Nicolette & Other Medieval Romances and Legends. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., n.d.


17. Matarasso, Pauline M., trans. The Quest of the Holy Grail. 1969. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


18. Mosès, François, trans. Lancelot du Lac. Roman français du XIIIe siècle: d’après l’édition d’Elspeth Kennedy. Préface de Michel Zink. Lettres gothiques. Le Livre de Poche. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1991.


19. Périers, Bonaventure des, Noel du Fail, Marguerite d’Angoulême. Contes. Ed. Paul Porteau. Conteurs du XVIe Siècle. Cent Romans Français, 12. Paris: Éditions Stock, Delamain & Boutelleau, 1948.


20. Robbins, Russell Hope, trans. The Hundred Tales: Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Illustrated by Alexander Dobkin. New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1960.


21. Sayers, Dorothy L., trans. The Song of Roland. 1957. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.


22. Skeels, Dell. The Romance of Perceval in Prose: A Translation of the E Manuscript of the Didot Perceval. 1961. Washington Paperbacks WP-10. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1966.


23. Sommer, H. Oskar, ed. The Vulgate Version of The Arthurian Romances, Edited from Manuscripts in the British Museum. 8 vols. Washington, D. C., 1909-1916.


24. Whitehead, F., ed. La Chanson de Roland. 1942. Blackwell’s French Texts. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957.

The distinction between "English" and "French" literature is a difficult one to make in this period. As late as the fourteenth century, a poet such as John Gower could write with equal facility in English, French and Latin, bequeathing us a long poem in each language. "Bretagne" - which can mean either Brittany or Britain in French (though the latter is generally referred to as Grand Bretagne) - is the central region of the Arthurian tales, but the overlap with Celtic, especially Welsh, traditions does make the precise geography of these stories exceptionally hard to pin down.

With the advent of Rabelais in the early sixteenth century, though, a distinctly new and wholly French voice begins to be heard in European writing. Rabelais is a satirist and a polymath. His works, repeatedly condemned for their obscenity and criminal facetiousness, have delighted non-pompous readers ever since (all the way down to H. G. Wells's Mr Polly in 1910 and Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels in 1981). While strictly impossible to translate, the classic version made by Urquhart & Motteux in the seventeenth century was itself a great influence on writers such as Smollett and Sterne. There have been numerous attempts since, some better than others.

•


Boccaccio

Italian

1. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
2. Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)
3. Francesco Colonna (c.1433-1527)
4. Gianfrancesco Straparola (c.1480-c.1557)
5. Pietro Aretino (1492-1556)
6. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)


1. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron / Filocolo / Ameto / Fiammetta. Ed. Enrico Bianchi, Carlo Salinari & Natalino Sapegno. La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e Testi, 8. Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1952.


2. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Decameron. 1350-53. Ed. Carlo Salinari. 1963. 2 vols. Universale Laterza, 26-27. 1966. Torino: Editori Laterza, 1975.


3. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. 1350-53. Trans. J. M. Rigg. 1903. Introduction and Illustrations by Louis Chalon. 1921. 2 vols. London: Privately Printed for the Navarre Society Limited, n.d.


4. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. 1350-53. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Penguin Classics. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


5. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Elegia de Madonna Fiammetta. Ed. Carlo Salinari & Natalino Sapegno. 1952. Classici Ricciardi 10. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1976.


6. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Amorous Fiammetta: Revised from the Only English Translation. 1343-44. Trans. Bartholomew Yong. 1587. Introduction by Edward Hutton. London: Privately Printed for the Navarre Society, 1926.


7. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Filocolo: Scelta. Ed. Carlo Salinari & Natalino Sapegno. 1952. Classici Ricciardi 27. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1976.


8. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Corbaccio. Ed. Giorgio Ricci. Introduzione di Natalino Sapegno. 1952 & 1965. Classici Ricciardi 44. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1977.


Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)


9. Poggio Bracciolini, Giovanni Francesco. The Facetiae. Translated by Bernhardt J. Hurwood. New York & London; Award Books & Tandem Books, 1968.


Francesco Colonna (c.1433-1527)


10. Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream. The Entire Text Translated for the First Time into English with an Introduction by Joscelyn Godwin with the Original Woodcut Illustrations. 1499. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.


11. Caldwell, Ian, & Dustin Thomason. The Rule of Four. New York: The Dial Press, 2004.


12. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Real Rule of Four. 2004. London: Arrow Books, 2005.


Giovanni Francesco [Gianfrancesco] Straparola [Caravaggio] (c.1480-c.1557)


13. Straparola, Giovanni Francesco. The Most Delectable Nights of Straparola. London: Richard K. Champion / Luxor Press, 1965.


14. Straparola, Giovanni Francesco. The Merry Nights of Straparola. Trans. W. G. Waters. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2004.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556)


15. Aretino, Pietro. Sisters, Wives and Courtesans: Unexpurgated. Trans. Robert Eglesfield. New York: Belmont Books, 1967.


16. Rosenthal, Raymond, trans. Aretino’s Dialogues. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972.


17. Romano, Giulio, Marc-Antonio Raimondi, Pietro Aretino, & Count Jean-Frédéric-Maximilien de Waldeck. I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures. An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance. Ed. & trans. Lynne Lawler. 1984. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1988.


18. Aretino, Pietro. Selected Letters. Trans. George Bull. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


19. Swan, Charles, trans. Gesta Romanorum. 1824. Ed. Wynnard Hooper. The York Library. London: George Bell & Sons, 1905.


20. Komroff, Manuel, ed. Tales of the Monks from the Gesta Romanorum. 1928. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1947

I suppose that Boccaccio must continue to be celebrated as the founder of Italian fiction (in verse and prose), and - indeed - one of the principal architects of the European narrative tradition. And he is great, and he is still very readable. Margaret Doody casts him as the hero of her entire story.

One of the things I like most about Steven Moore, though, is his inclination to snout around for obscurer and stranger men of letters. He celebrates Francesco Colonna's mad Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (1499) with unmistakable enthusiasm, and even goes so far as to point out the greatness of Pietro Aretino as a stylist as well as a smut-merchant. I first read Aretino in a scruffy little paperback abridgement of his classic Dialogues of Sisters, Wives and Courtesans, and was struck at once by his complete unflappability as a narrator - not to mention the modernity of his imagination.

•


Ramon Llull (c.1232-1315)

Spanish

1. Joanot Martorell (1413-1468)
2. Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (c.1450–1504)
3. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Joanot Martorell (1413-1468) &
Martí Joan de Galba (d.1490)


1. Martorell, Joanot, & Martí Joan de Galba. Tirant lo Blanc. Trans. David H. Rosenthal. 1984. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1985.


Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo [Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo] (c.1450–1504)


2. Amadís de Gaula. 1508. Introducción de Arturo Souto. 1969. “Sepan Cuantos …”, 131. Ciudad de México: Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1975.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


3. Alpert, Michael, trans. Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes (Anon.) / The Swindler (El Buscón), Francisco de Quevedo. 1554 & 1626. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


4. Kennedy, Judith M., ed. A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s Diana [1559]& Gil Polo’s Enamoured Diana [1564]. 1598. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.


5. Yates, Frances A. Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays, Volume 1. 3 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

I have to confess to not having read widely in the Spanish part of the medieval narrative tradition. Even Ramon Llull is known to me principally through the various essays and attempts at interpretation of Frances Yates.

Judging by the famous inquisition held over Don Quixote's library of romances in chapter 6 of Cervantes' novel, though, I haven't missed all that much:

“No,” said the niece, “there’s no reason to pardon any of them because all of them have done damage. It’d be best to toss them all out the window onto the patio and make a pile of them there, and set fire to them; or take them to the corral and make a fire there so the smoke won’t bother anyone.”

Once again, however, Steven Moore has been there and done that. He's well up in the field, and is equipped to give length plot summaries of even the most turgid descendants of the Amadis tradition. It's a Herculean task he's undertaken, and my hat is off to him ...

•

Gustave Doré: Illustrations to Don Quixote

The True Story of the Novel (3): The Japanese Monogatari

Royall Tyler, trans.: The Tale of Genji (2001)

Is this novel, the greatest in Japanese literature, sentimental? I suppose one might say so, though more in an eighteenth-century sense, where "sentimental" merely means something that evokes strong sentiments in a reader: feelings of pathos, for the most part (hence the equally devalued term "pathetic").

In Japan it's called mono no aware:

literally "the pathos of things" ... also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera" ... a term for the awareness of impermanence ... or transience of things, and a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing.

The wikipedia article on the subject goes on to specify:

The term was coined in the 18th century by the Edo period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man'yōshū.

I suppose that it all comes down to that Virgilian tag lacrimae rerum [the sorrow - literally "tears" - of things]. Virgil's Aeneas sees a painting of the fall of Troy shortly after being shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, and rejoices at this proof that the inhabitants of the new land feel "the pity of things" [Aeneid, I: 461-2]:

Sunt hic etiam praemia laudi;
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

[... Here, too, the praiseworthy has its rewards;
there are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind.]

Edward G. Seidensticker, trans.: The Tale of Genji (1976)

The first time I picked up a copy of The Tale of Genji was in Scotland in 1981: in a little bookshop in St. Andrews, if I remember rightly. It was a Penguin edition of Edward Seidensticker's translation (still my favourite - possibly for that reason), and I could see at once that it was a very strange world I was entering.

Virtually everything seemed drenched in tears most of the time: pieces of writing paper with wistful verses on them, the silk sleeves of kimonos, the pillows they all propped themselves on. Nothing much seemed to happen, except long conversations through screens about the precise nature of one's feelings for shadowy lovers whom most of the characters had never actually seen in daylight.

Ivan Morris: The World of the Shining Prince (1964)

It was, in fact, the "world of the shining prince" (one of the many epithets for the novel's central protagonist Genji). I read and reread Ivan Morris's book to get some insight into the complicated mores of Heian society, as well as some larger sense of the precedents for the Genji's complicated plotting and unrivalled psychological insight. And certainly there were Japanese novels and romances before Lady Murasaki's - just as there was blank verse drama before Shakespeare. But there's still no real way of accounting for a work of genius on this scale when it comes along.

While I certainly do recommend Morris's book (along with his various translations of other classic Heian works of literature: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1967), and As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh Century Japan (1971)), it's true to say that the real pioneering work here - for English readers, at any rate - was done by the amazing Arthur Waley, first complete translator of the Genji (1935) and partial translator of the Pillow Book (1928).

Arthur Waley, trans.: The Tale of Genji (6 vols: 1925-33)

A pioneer can't always get everything right, though - and there is a certain Proustian languour to Waley's Genji which is (apparently) not quite true to the original.

Or so says Edward Seidensticker. My favourite book about the Genji is definitely his translator's diary Genji Days. Among other things, it contains extensive reflections on the differences between his version and Waley's - and interesting comments, at one point, on the discovery that he's translated the same short poem completely differently in two different places! So allusive and complex is Heian Japanese that this, it seems, is quite easy to do.

It's the contextual detail which is most fascinating - and, in the final analysis, most rewarding, though. He writes about Yukio Mishima and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy; he talks of his last evening with Yasunari Kawabata, whom he also translated, just before the latter's suicide (which Seidensticker sees as a personal betrayal ... I'm still not quite sure why).

But it's this engagement with (then) contemporary Japanese literature which gives him his greatest insights into Lady Murasaki and her curious mixture of emotional realism and extreme intricacies of sentiment, I suspect. The sense of a continuum is strong, however hidden its details must remain to this linguistically ignorant foreigner.

Edward G. Seidensticker: Genji Days (1977)

I'd like to write more about this motley collection of books I've assembled in an attempt to put flesh on my ongoing obsession with The Tale of Genji. There's a famous passage in Murasaki's diary where she mentions a chance remark by the Emperor (she was a lady-in-waiting at court for at least part of her life) after some chapters from her work-in-progress were read out loud to him and his courtiers:

"She must have been reading the Chronicles of Japan."

This earned her the nickname "Our Lady of the Chronicles" - and she was accused of flaunting her learning by teaching the Empress Shōshi Chinese literature. The diary continues, "How utterly ridiculous! Would I, who hesitate to reveal my learning to my women at home, ever think of doing so at court?"

Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that the one obvious precedent for so coordinated and complex a piece of prose was immediately assumed to be a work of history rather than one of fiction: The Nihongi (listed below), rather than The Tales of Ise or the Tale of Flowering Fortunes ...

Edward Seidensticker (1921-2007)

Classical Japanese Prose:

1. Kojiki (early 8th century)
2. Nihongi (720)
3. Kagerō Nikki (c.974)
4. Ochikubo Monogatari (late 10th century)
5. Sei Shōnagon (c. 966-1017)
6. Murasaki Shikibu (c.973-c.1014/25)
7. Sarashina Nikki (c.1058)
8. Lady Daibu (c.1157-c.1235)
9. Heike Monogatari (12th century)
10. Lady Nijo (1258–c.1307)
11. Yoshida Kenkō (c.1283–c.1350)
12. Miyamoto Musashi (c.1584–1645)
13. Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)
14. Ueda Akinari (1734-1809)
15. Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831)
16. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

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Kojiki (early 8th century)


1. Chamberlain, Basil Hall, trans. The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters. 1882. Tokyo & Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988.


2. Philippi, Donald L., trans. Kojiki. Princeton & Tokyo: University of Princeton and University of Tokyo Press, 1969.


Nihongi [Nihon Shoki] (720)


3. Aston, W. G., trans. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A. D. 697. Translated from the Original Chinese and Japanese by W. G. Aston. 1896. Tokyo & Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988.


Kagerō Nikki (c.974)


4. Seidensticker, Edward, trans. The Gossamer Years (Kagerō Nikki): The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan. 1964. Tokyo & Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1981.


Ochikubo Monogatari (late 10th century)


5. Whitehouse, Wilfrid, & Eizo Yanagisawa, trans. Ochikubo Monogatari: The Tale of the Lady Ochikubo. A Tenth-Century Japanese Novel. 1934. London: Arena, 1985.


Sei Shōnagon (c. 966-1017)


6. Waley, Arthur, trans. The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon. 1928. Unwin Books. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960.


7. Morris, Ivan, trans. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon: Introduction & Translation. Vol. 1 of 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


8. Morris, Ivan, trans. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon: A Companion Volume. Vol. 2 of 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


9. Morris, Ivan, trans. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. 1967. Abridged Ed. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


10. Sei Shōnagon. The Pillow Book. Trans. Meredith McKinney. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.


Murasaki Shikibu [Lady Murasaki] (c.973-c.1014/25)


11. Murasaki, Lady. The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts. Trans. Arthur Waley. 1935. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957.


12. Murasaki, Lady. The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts. Volume One: Part 1. The Tale of Genji; Part 2. The Sacred Tree; Part 3. A Wreath of Cloud. Trans. Arthur Waley. 1935. 2 vols. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965.


13. Murasaki, Lady. The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts. Volume Two: Part 4. Blue Trousers; Part 5. The Lady of the Boat; Part 6. The Bridge of Dreams. Trans. Arthur Waley. 1935. 2 vols. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973.


14. Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. 1976. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.


15. Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. 1976. 2 vols. Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1997.


16. Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Royall Tyler. 2 vols. New York: Viking, 2001.


17. Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Royall Tyler. 2001. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.


18. Bowring, Richard, trans. The Diary of Lady Murasaki. 1982. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.


19. Bowring, Richard. Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.


20. Dalby, Liza. The Tale of Murasaki. 2000. London: Vintage, 2001.


21. Morris, Ivan. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan. 1964. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.


22. Seidensticker, Edward G. Genji Days. 1977. Tokyo & New York: Kodansha International, 1983.


Sarashina Nikki [The Sarashina Diary] (c.1058)


23. Morris, Ivan, trans. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh Century Japan. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


Lady Kenreimon-in Ukyo no Daibu (c.1157-c.1235)


24. Harries, Phillip Tudor, trans. The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980.


Heike Monogatari [The Tale of the Heike] (12th century)


25. The Tale of the Heike: Heike Monogatari. Trans. Hiroshi Kitagawa & Bruce T. Tsuchida. Foreword by Edward Seidensticker. 2 vols. 1975. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978.


26. The Tale of the Heike: Heike Monogatari. Trans. Hiroshi Kitagawa & Bruce T. Tsuchida. Foreword by Edward Seidensticker. 1975. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1981.


27. The Tale of the Heike. Trans. Helen Craig McCullough. 1988. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.


28. The Tale of the Heike. Trans. Royall Tyler. Viking Penguin. London: Penguin, 2012.


29. Tyler, Royall, trans. Before Heike and After: Hōgen, Heiji, Jōkyūki. 2012. Lexington, KY: An Arthur Nettleton Book, 2013.


Lady Nijo [Go-Fukakusain no Nijo] (1258–c.1307)


30. Brazell, Karen, trans. The Confessions of Lady Nijō. 1304-7, 1975. London: Zenith, 1983.


Yoshida Kenkō (c.1283–c.1350)


31. Kenko. Essays in Idleness. Trans. G. B. Sansom. Ed. Noel Pinnington. Wordsworth Classic of World Literature. Ware Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1998.


Miyamoto Musashi (c.1584–1645)


32. Tokitsu Kenji. Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings. 2000. Trans. Sherab Chödzin Kohn. Art captions by Stephen Addiss. Boston: Shambhala, 2004.


Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)


33. Ihara Saikaku. Five Japanese Love Stories (Koshoku gonin onna). Trans. William Theodore de Bary. London: The Folio Society, 1958.


34. Ihara Saikaku. Five Women Who Loved Love. Trans. Wm Theodore de Bary. 1956. Tokyo & Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2000.


35. Ihara Saikaku. The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings. Ed. & trans. Ivan Morris. London: Chapman & Hall, 1963.


36. Ihara Saikaku. The Life of an Amorous Man. Trans. Kenji Hamada. Illustrations by Masakuza Kuwata. 1963. Boston, Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2001.


Ueda Akinari [Ueda Shūsei] (1734-1809)


37. Ueda Akinari. Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. A Complete English Version of Eighteenth-Century Japanese Collection of Tales of the Supernatural. 1768. Trans. Leon Zolbrod. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1974.


Sadakazu Shigeta ['Jippensha Ikku'] (1765–1831)


38. Ikku Jippensha. Shanks’ Mare, or Hizakurige: Being a Translation of the Tokaido Volumes of Japan’s Great Comic Novel of Travel and Ribaldry. 1802-20. Trans. Thomas Satchell. 1960. Tokyo & Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1976.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


39. Omori, Annie Shepley & Kochi Doi, trans. Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan: The Sarashina Diary; Diary of Murasaki Shikibu & Diary of Izumi Shikibu. Introduction by Amy Lowell. 1935. Tokyo: Kenkyushu Ltd., 1961.


40. The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike: Being Two Thirteenth-Century Japanese Classics, The “Hōjōki”and Selections from the “Heike Monogatari.” Trans. A. L. Sadler. 1928. Tokyo & Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1972.

Hiroshige: Murasaki Shikibu (1880)

The fact of the matter is, though, that I don't think anyone I've ever recommended the Genji to has succeeded in getting to the end. Which is a pity, as the end, the last 12 or so chapters (the so-called "Uji Chapters"), after the shining Genji has died and his rather futile nephew Kaoru has taken centre-stage, are probably the best and most original in the whole book.

Why is that? Is it just that the book is so long, and so little is happening most of the time except for people passing poems through screens and paying calls on one another? The same could be said of Henry James or Edith Wharton, and people read them.

Or do they? Whether I'm alone in having a taste for long, delicately phrased, poetic novels or not - and if I am, I have to say that I think I'm the clear winner in this competition: you just don't know what you're missing, as the middle-aged pervert Genji buys a young girl (the character known as Murasaki) and then raises her to be his perfect sexual companion: a situation Lady Murasaki treats as brutally and insightfully as Nabokov himself; or as Kaoru embodies the "superflous man": Goncharov's Oblomov or Lermontov's Hero of Our Time Pechorin 800 years before their time - whether I am or not, all I can say is that reading this novel over and over again, in each of the three complete English translations, has been one of the great experiences of my life.

You can find some notes on the latest translation of the Genji by Royall Tyler (who's recently completed one of the later, and to me far less approachable, Tale of Heike as well), here.

"A sad tale's best for winter," says the doomed child Mamillius in Shakespeare's late masterpiece The Winter's Tale. My father died just a month ago today. it's books like The Tale of Genji - in particular its revelation that here (as in other places) "there are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind" - that get you through at such times.

It's therefore hard for me to entertain seriously the suggestion that it isn't among the greatest novels ever written, perhaps the very greatest of all, but perhaps I'm wrong. Speaking strictly for myself (you understand), I'd trade a haybale of copies of Clarissa for just one of the Genji Monogatari ...

Genji Monogatari (c.1800)

The True Story of the Novel (2): The Greek and Roman Novel

Apuleius: Asinus aureus

As well as specifying one crucial text from each tradition which you really should read in order to appreciate the myriad possibilities of the novel form, I've decided that it's probably a good idea to recommend at least one useful critical book as well. For the Eastern frame-story, the essential reading was (of course) The Thousand and One Nights themselves, while the critical text was Andras Hamori's On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

For the classical novel, I've selected The Golden Ass, Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius - with John J. Winkler's Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's Golden Ass (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) serving as the most ingenious reading of Apuleius' text I've encountered to date.

John J. Winkler: Auctor & Actor (1985)

However, like (I suspect) quite a number of other readers, I have to confess that my first acquaintance with Apuleius came via a battered second-hand copy of Robert Graves's 1950 Penguin Classics translation:

Apuleius: The Golden Ass (1950)

Wow, what a book! Talk about sex and violence! When I first came across it, some time in my teens, I could hardly believe how racy and modern it seemed. Since then I've consulted (and collected) a lot of other editions and translations:

Lucius Apuleius (c.125–c.180 AD)


1. Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass, Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius. Trans. W. Adlington. Rev. S. Gaselee. Loeb Classical Library. London & New York: William Heinemann & The Macmillan Company, 1915. [dual text: Latin & English]


2. Apuleius, Lucius. The Works of Apuleius, Comprising the Metamorphoses, or Golden Ass, The God of Socrates, the Florida, and His Defence, or a Discourse on Magic. A New Translation. To Which are Added. a Metrical Version of the Cupid and Psyche and Mrs. Tighe’s Psyche, a Poem in Six Cantos. Bohn’s Libraries. London: George Bell & Sons, 1893. [Literal translation]


3. Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Trans. William Adlington. 1566. London: John Lehmann, 1946. [The standard translation in English]


4. Apuleius, Lucius. The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. Penguin Classics. 1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950.


5. Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass. Trans. Jack Lindsay. Indiana University Greek and Latin Classics. 1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.


6. Apuleius, Lucius. The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. 1950. Rev. Michael Grant. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.


7. Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass. Trans. P. G. Walsh. The World’s Classics. 1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.


8. Apuleius, Lucius. The Golden Ass, Or Metamorphoses: A New Translation. Trans. E. J. Kenney. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.


9. Winkler, John J. Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's Golden Ass. 1985. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.


10. Manara, Milo & Lucius Apuleius. Les Métamorphoses de Lucius. Paris: L’Echo des Savanes/ Albin Michel, 2007.

It's a bit hard to go past Graves's, though. While he doesn't really do justice to the tortuous complexities of Apuleius' prose style, it's doubtful that any translation into modern English could and still remain readable. Drastically abridged and simplified though it is, one might perhaps regard Milo Manara's graphic novel version of Apuleius' Metamorphoses as a kind of visual companion to Graves. Here's his rendition of Lucius' crucial transformation scene (the servant-girl Photis has stolen the wrong vial of ointment from her mistress, the witch Pamphile, so instead of turning Lucius into a bird, instead he is in the process of becoming an ...)

Milo Manara: Les Métamorphoses de Lucius (2007)

And here's a slightly more decorous version of the same scene, from a late eighteenth-century French translation of the same book (I think you can also see how this scene influenced Shakespeare's magical translation of Bottom into an ass in A Midsummer Night's Dream):

J. F. Bastien: L’âne d’or (1787)

I guess the really interesting thing (to me) about Apuleius' masterpiece is the fact that how we read it depends very much on which literary era we happen to inhabit. St. Augustine of Hippo (as I mentioned in my previous post) saw it as a confession of his sins by his fellow North African Lucius Apuleius - who had indeed been accused of witchcraft and a lack of sexual scrupulosity (i.e. seducing a rich widow) during his youth, and had been forced to defend himself (at great length) against these charges in court. Augustine accordingly used it as a model for his own Confessions, which culminate with a similar conversion scene.

In the eighteenth century, it was seen instead as a somewhat risqué romance: along the lines of Gil Blas or other picaresque tales of adventure. There was even a (very popular) rewritten version designed to compare and contrast Apuleius' versions of the "floating world" of the Imperial underclass with their Enlightenment equivalents:

Charles Gildon: The New Metamorphosis (1708)

One of the later editions of this work even had illustrations by Hogarth.

William Hogarth: The New Metamorphosis (1724)

Robert Graves was (allegedly) introduced to the work by his friend T. E. Lawrence, who (again allegedly) kept a copy of it in his saddlebags all through the Arab revolt. Certainly his translation must have seemed like a breath of fresh air in the stultifying 1950s: the kind of book one always wished the Ancients would have written ...

It also had the crucial advantage of being complete. The only other existing Latin novel, Petronius' Satyricon, is little more than a collection of fragments - admittedly every bit as titillating and sexually frank as Apuleius, but somehow lacking his charm - particularly such interpolated tales as the "Cupid and Psyche" story which occupies most of the middle section of the latter's narrative.

Fellini: Satyricon (1969)

Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c.27–66 AD)


1. Petronius. Satyricon. Trans. Michael Heseltine. Seneca. Apococyntosis. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. 1913. Rev. E. H. Warmington. 1969. Loeb Classics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.


2. Petronius. The Satyricon of T. Petronius Arbiter (Burnaby’s Translation, 1694). Introduction by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. The Abbey Classics. London: Remainder Centre, Ltd., n.d.


3. Petronius. Satyricon. Trans. Paul Dinnage. 1953. Ed. Costas Panayotakis. Wordsworth Classics of World Literature. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1999.


4. Petronius. The Satyricon. Trans. William Arrowsmith. 1959. A Mentor Classic. New York: New American Library, 1960.


5. Gillette, Paul. Satyricon: Memoirs of a Lusty Roman. A reconstruction in Modern English of the Classic Novel of Imperial Age Rome, The Satyricon of Titus Petronius Arbiter. Los Angeles, CA: Holloway House, 1965.


6. Petronius. The Satyricon and The Fragments. Trans. John Sullivan. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.


7. Petronius Arbiter. Satyrica. Trans. Frederick Raphael. London: the Folio Society, 2003.


8. Walsh, P. G. The Roman Novel. 1970. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995.

Fellini: Capucine [Germaine Lefèvre]

Probably the most familiar version of this is Federico Fellini's 1969 film, which certainly does full justice to the more decadent and pornographic elements of Petronius's satire. Whether there was more to the original novel or not is anyone's guess, unfortunately. We probably have less than half of the original text to judge from.

A kind of sea-change in reactions to Apuleius seems to have coincided with the growth of postmodernism in fiction. The fact that his story is not at all original (it's based on an earlier Greek novel, which survives - possibly only in summary form - as Lucius or the Ass, attributed to Lucian of Samosata, a contemporary of Apuleius, itself conjectured to have been based on an earlier version by a certain Lucius of Patrae, its author and protagonist) had new resonance in an age of adaptations and retellings of "originals" (Joyce's Ulysses, among many others). The religious aspects of his novel, too, seemed less perfunctory and more worthy of analysis in the age of Jung. There were various new readings which saw it as a kind of embodiment of the Eleusinian Mysteries, or some other of the mystery religions of late Antiquity.

Lucius re-transforms (1345)

Winkler's book, cited above, situates Apuleius firmly in the poststructuralist era. Above all, he makes great play with the fact that the book has an entirely different resonance for a first-time reader (who is encouraged it as a rather amoral and decadent adventure story - up until the very end, that is, when the apparently sincere conversion scene takes place), and the repeat reader, who is forced to look for clues and prefigurings of this dénouement, and is thus caught in a complex of net of textual ironies and self-contradictions. Gérard Génette's classic work on Narrative Discourse (1972) is brought into play, with its multiple levels of implied narrative, and the whole thing starts to sound very self-conscious and intentional indeed.

Winkler cites, on p.vii of his analysis, an very important point from Frank Kermode:

For the traditionalist in us all I would recall Frank Kermode's words: "what we are learning about narrative may be, in a sense, new, but narrative was always potentially what we have now learned to think it, in so far as our thinking is right." [Novel and Narrative, W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture 24 (Glasgow, 1972): 6]

Is our thinking on these matters "right"? Who can say? But I'm afraid that the days of reading Apuleius as a naive, semi-autobiographical wordsmith are long over. They can't stop his book from being lots of fun, though. If you like that kind of thing, that is.

•

B. P. Reardon, ed.: Collected Ancient Greek Novels (1989)

If you don't like that kind of thing - if you find the classical Roman novel a bit too much like Fellini's films: decadent, depraved, overlong, and packed to the gills with mostly irrelevant detail, there's always the Greek novel instead.

Most of these are pretty violent and sexy too, admittedly, but there's a certain sentimentality about them which shades them into something a bit more digestible for the more squeamish palate. The book above, which contains translations of all the classical texts which might qualify as "novels" (including "The Ass") is probably the best place to start.

Unless, of course, you'd rather just read the best of them on its own: some would call that the Aethiopica (it's certainly the longest), but I greatly prefer the most famous of them all: Longus's Daphnis and Chloe. There are a few scenes of rape and violence within it , admittedly, but for the most part it's a delightful tale of young love in a pastoral setting: The Blue Lagoon in Arcadia.

There just isn't enough space here to go into detail about all of them, but I would certainly recommend part one of Margaret Doody's The True Story of the Novel (1996) if you want an especially ingenious and comprehensive reading of the whole group. They're clearly rather more to her taste than the Latin novels she also discusses, and since my inclinations are in the opposite direction, this is one more reason to recommend her book!

Ravel: Daphnis and Chloé

Greek Fiction [c.7th century BCE to 4th century CE] (chronological):

1. Aesop (c.620-564 BCE): Fables
2. Pseudo-Callisthenes (c.360-328 BCE): The Alexander Romance
3. Chariton: Callirhoe (mid-1st century)
4. Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon (early 2nd century)
5. Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century)
6. Lucian of Samosata (c.125-c.180): Lucius, or the Ass
7. Heliodorus of Emesa: Aethiopica (3rd century)
8. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_________________________________________________________

Aesop (c.620-564 BC)


1. Handford, S. A., trans. Fables of Aesop. Illustrations by Brian Robb. 1954. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


2. Aesop. The Complete Fables. Trans Olivia and Robert Temple. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.


3. Aesop’s Fables. Illustrated by William K. Plummer / Arabian Nights. Illustrated by Mamoru Funai. Companion Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1963.


Pseudo-Callisthenes (c.360-328 BC)


4. Stoneman, Richard, trans. The Greek Alexander Romance. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.


Longus (c.2nd century AD)


5. Longus. Daphnis & Chloe. Trans. George Thornley. 1657. Introduction by George Saintsbury. The Abbey Classics. London: Simpkin Marshall, n.d.


6. Longus. Daphnis and Chloe. Trans. Paul Turner. 1956. Unexpurgated edition. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.


7. Longus. The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. Trans. George Moore. Introduciton by Samuel Roth. N.p.: Boar’s Head Books, 1953.


Lucian of Samosata (c.125-c.180)


8. Lucian. Satirical Sketches. Trans. Paul Turner. 1958 & 1961. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.


9. Lucian. Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches. Trans. Keith Sidwell. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.


Heliodorus of Emesa (c.3rd century AD)


10. Heliodorus. An Æthiopian History of Heliodorus (Underdowne’s Translation, 1587). Introduction by George Saintsbury. The Abbey Classics. London: Chapman & Dodd, n.d.


11. Heliodorus. An Æthiopian Romance. Trans. Thomas Underdowne. 1587. Revised and partly rewritten by F. A Wright. Broadway translations. London & New York: George Routledge & E. P. Dutton, n.d.


12. Heliodorus. An Ethiopian Romance. Trans. Moses Hadas. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957.


Anthologies & Secondary Literature


13. Beaton, Roderick, ed. The Greek Novel AD 1-1985. London: Croom Helm, 1988.


14. Reardon, B. P. ed. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.

•

Lines of Aryan Migration

As for where either (or both) of these traditions began, well, the Latin novel presumably came from the Greek (like its tradition of epic poetry: Virgil from Homer, Horace from Hesiod and the other Greek bucolic poets). The Greek may well have come, by a round-about route, from Ancient Egypt, but there's little direct evidence of this beyond a few repeated motifs and plot devices.

Maybe all of these storytelling cultures come from the same Central Asian, Sanskrit-speaking roots - that was a favourite theory among the nineteenth century diffusionists, at any rate. For myself, I tend to suspect that similar cultural conditions produce similar effects even in completely independent traditions. That's really the point of trying to identify the earlier genres prose fiction may have arisen from in each of the seven traditions I'm looking at, in fact.

Actually it's probably a false dichotomy. There certainly has been a good deal of transmission of cultural freight between India, Persia, the Middle East and Europe over the past couple of millennia. I doubt that it's enough to allow us to postulate a single point of origin for the novel - defined here (for the sake of argument) as "an extended prose fiction incorporating action and character development in varying proportions" - either in Egypt or the Ancient Aryan Highlands of Central Asia ...

Miriam Lichtheim, ed.: Ancient Egyptian Literature (1973)

1. Petrie, Sir Flinders, ed. Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri. 1st Series: IVth to XIIth Dynasty. Illustrated by Tristram Ellis. 1895. London: Methuen, 1926.


2. Petrie, Sir Flinders, ed. Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri. 2nd Series: XVIIIth to XIXth Dynasty. Illustrated by Tristram Ellis. 1895. London: Methuen, 1926.


3. Wallis Budge, Sir Ernest A., trans. Egyptian Tales and Romances: Pagan, Christian and Muslim. 1931. Keystone Library. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1935.


4. Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. 3 vols. Vol. I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. 1973. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1975.


5. Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. 3 vols. Vol. II: The New Kingdom. 1974. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976.


6. Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. 3 vols. Vol. III: The Late Period. 1978. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1980.

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Ancient Egyptian Scribe