Women's Epics A to Z: Epics in general knowledge

As I was preparing for this year's challenge, reading several epics with women as protagonists, it kept occurring to me how unfair it is that most of these amazing, special stories didn't make it into the general consciousness (as much as I can tell with my Hungarian/American, generally Western educational background). Back when I was in high school, we got a pretty comprehensive look at a few of them: we studied Gilgamesh, the Kalevala, had to read the Odyssey, skimmed over the Iliad, and even the Ramayana and the Mahabharata got a mention. But that is still pretty narrow compared to the richness of the world's epic traditions.

So I put together a survey, asking people how many epics they recognized, and which ones they were generally familiar with.

I listed 50 epics in the survey, asking people to mark if they heard about them / read them.

The survey received almost 200 responses, mainly from people in Europe and North America. Here are some interesting things I observed based on these responses:

There were only 3 epics out of 50 that were universally known

As in, no one clicked the "Never heard of it" option. Wanna guess? 

The Iliad, the Odyssey, and Gilgamesh. Beowulf held on for quite a while, but then it got 3 negative responses. The Aeneid came close with only 11 negatives.

More importantly to this year's A to Z: none of the top 10-15 epics included a woman protagonist. We're gonna rectify that.

Some surprises

There were some epics on the list that I would have guessed are better known than they are. The Kalevala, for example, got 50 "never heard of it" replies, and 80 people only "heart about it". More than half of the respondents didn't recognize the Táin bó Cúailnge at all (although more might have, see below). Also more than half didn't know the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, which surprised me because I thought if any non-European epics were kinda sorta in the public knowledge, these would have been the ones. Great Chinese classics (Journey to the West, Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms) also didn't fare well, which surprised me, given that the first one especially has a lot of modern adaptations.

The least well known epics were mostly about women, and/or not from Europe

No surprise there. Out of the 50, there were 22 epics that received almost all "Never heard of it" responses. 12 of them were about women protagonists. Most of them were from Africa or Central Asia. The most generally unknown epic was Umesiben Mama (mentioned last week; makes sense, since it doesn't have an English edition). It only got two "heard about it" responses. Close behind her was Shirin Mama, which you will encounter in April, and it was one of my favorites. Also almost fully unknown was Bidasari (coming up in April), and Ibong Adarna, which I blogged about before. I am happy to report, that out of these 12 unkown women's epics, 9 will be included in the A to Z posts in April :)

People don't always immediately recognize epics

I often wondered, reading the comments to the survey, if people recognize these stories just by title. For example, Journey to the West didn't seem to get strong responses, but then people commented about "Monkey King" missing from the list later on. The same with people missing "Cú Chulainn" while the Táin was on the list, or missing "Jason and the Argonauts" while the Argonautica was right there. It seems like people recognize stories by the hero's name more so than the name of the epic.

There are a lot more epics than these 50, but people also don't always know what an epic is

I got a lot of great suggestions in the comments for many, many more epics that could be included. And then a lot of other comments added things that are not traditional epics by definition: anything from Lord of the Rings to Waterworld, from The Hunger Games to Star Wars to various folktales. There is an argument to be made for modern day epics, and stories that fill that role in our current popular culture.

Anyway, it was interesting to see how responses outlined general knowledge of epics. I know the sample was not nearly representative enough, but it was still a fun survey to do just out of curiosity.

Which epics are you familiar with? Which ones were mentioned at school?

See you next week for A to Z!