Markup View

Author: LordGro

Jan 6th 2013 at 11:26:27 AM

^Added TallTale and some other amendments.

@Arcades Sabboth: I feel that culture/time period criterion is somewhat fuzzy. In late antiquity, when the Roman Empire was already Christian, the tales of the Trojan War were rewritten without all the elements that contradicted Christian teaching -- i.e. all interventions by pagan gods were written out. Where would you put works like [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dares_Phrygius "Dares Phrygius"]], [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictys_Cretensis "Dictys of Crete"]], or an Icelandic [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojumanna_saga Saga of the Trojans]]? IMHO these works are not ''fundamentally'' different from the ''Iliad'' in their attitude towards ancient Greek legend: They still claim that the TrojanWar happened, if not in exactly the way that Homer described it. They are only ''gradually'' different. So where to draw the lines where one culture ends and another begins, or when a time period ends and another begins?

I agree that modern fantasy retellings are not "legends", but between modern fantasy and the Homeric epics there is a lot of terrain where I don't feel so unambiguously.

I won't object much longer to launch the page in the current form if you want me to, but I still think [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=2qg4nwdf4or50yswbv8ure0o Heroic Literature]] is a genre deserving of its own page. I wouldn't want to cram all the description there into this page.