He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.
The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us. The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp- we mean, chiefly, to conceptualise- this something, are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they.
The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia) – author unknown
Iliad (Greece) – ascribed to Homer
Odyssey (Greece) – ascribed to Homer
Aeneid (Rome) – Virgil
Metamorphoses (Rome) – Ovid
Beowulf (Britain) – author unknown
Both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (Britain) – John Milton
Of course there are loads of more amazing epic poems and stories to read, but these are for me some that are must reads. Enjoy.
Acerbity [əˈsɜːbɪtɪ] 