I started listening to Stories of Old Greece and Rome as well as The Sons of Odin (Norse mythology) about a year ago. I was intrigued that there were different points of view about the old myths of gods, titans/giants, and heroes; I became intrigued in the Stories of Old Greece and Rome because of Ovid and his epic poem The Metamorphoses - in The Sons of Odin because of Neil Gaiman's story American Gods.
One of these differing accounts I noticed was about one hero Perseus - flying with Hermes' winged shoes - who deals with one of the Titans by the name of Atlas and in Ovid's account confronts the giant - who wants to shove Perseus away for fear of the theft his Golden apples; another account says that Atlas is weary of holding up the sky and requests that Perseus do him a favor - either way the Titan ends up becoming stone from looking into the eyes of the decapitated gorgon Medusa.
I listen to the story about the Sons of Odin and I'm telling my aunt about it - how the story uses simple, more Nordic, words to describe the scenes in Asgard among it's inhabitants - and she says to me 'you know that's just myth right?' and I affirm that - but these are interesting and wonderful stories to know about.
I've been thinking about the simplicity of the language in one story, Sons of Odin, and about the complexity of the language in the other story, Ovid's Metamorphoses. I'm thinking about the words we get from these myths, the stories behind these old words - and I think about the one story my family would probably like me to treat as truth - the stories told in the old and new testaments of the Bible - where even those stories have contradictory accounts in and of themselves. How much of the language that I read and hear in stories that are in English are limited by the language they use?
Why shouldn't I treat the testaments as I do the myths of Old Greece, Old Rome, and Old Norse - just interesting and wonderful stories to know about? What happens if I respect these old stories of gods, godesses, the curiosity of Pandora, Odin's sacrifice at world-tree, and other things just as much as I respect the testaments of my childhood? How limited are we modern English speakers by the limits of the old myths and stories that have been told? The symbols we see - in myth, logic, ethics, politics and plays - are not new and seem to just be new combinations rather than entirely new words ... this makes me wonder about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: how much of what I as a native English speaker perceive and categorize in my experience is determined by what my ancestors perceived and categorized as their experiences?
Perceptive insights. There is much taught in modern-day seminaries that supports your thought. Amazing to see how Christians in general seem to think that their Bible was written directly by God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, when, in fact, playing the telephone game -- passing along a message to the next person -- shows the inaccuracies that occur in translation and transliteration.
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