The title of this book—and specifically the notion that myths are written down(as opposed to written)—would seem to suggest that myths, or at least those considered here, are thought of as having circulated orally before appearing in written form. The fifteen contributions to this edited volume conform to that assumption in varying degrees. The two essays on Greek mythology, by William Hansen and Richard Martin, directly address the changes wrought by the writing down of orally circulating stories to form compendia or canons. Hansen emphasizes, among other things, the reduction of variants in the quest for consistency, while Martin emphasizes the transition from myth as speech act to pure story (though he makes clear that the two potentials do not correlate in entirely exclusionary ways with oral vs. written media). In other contributions, the writing down seems to mean something more like writing down written-down myths yet again in new compendia directed toward emergent political, religious, social, or artistic purposes; for example, Katherine McLoone’s contribution analyzes Geoffrey of Monmouth’s drawing on Virgil’s Aeneid to produce a unique history of Britain.

Writing Down the Myths stems from a 2009 conference at UCLA; on display are analyses of changes and developments in mythologies that can be studied through historical/written textual evidence. The geographical focus is largely Mediterranean and European (Celtic, Greek, Roman, Medieval Europe, Irish, British, Norse, Hittite), though there are also contributions on India and Japan. The analyses are erudite, bounce off one-another in provocative ways, and reveal a rich complexity in the motives, processes, and consequences through which the enterprise of mythography proceeds.

Many of the topics and arguments are technical enough that only a specialist will receive full benefit or be able to adequately respond. Non-specialists may well feel a mixture of frustration and amazement. Among the many topics and processes considered are the re-embedding and repurposing of mythologies for changing audiences and new religious and cultural contexts; techniques for maintaining coherence of chronology and voice in such processes; strategies for reconciling divergent accounts; political and aesthetic agendas of mythographers (from ancient kingdoms to modern nations); changing functions of myth (including the rise of myth as art and/or popular entertainment); principles of classification/organization in literary myth compendia; and changed intertextual strategies and dynamics ushered in through writing.

Beyond the specific arguments about mythography in particular world areas, the book offers much to think about, though no resolutions, in regard to a number of overarching issues in theory of myth. One of these, already alluded to, is the perennial issue of the definition of myth. How much, or in what way, should orality figure in that definition? There are of course approaches to conceptualizing myth that would downplay or even disregard the definitional significance of media, and emphasize instead other factors, e.g., specific types of protagonists and actions, a certain kind of social function, or a certain frame of consciousness or attitude of mind inhering in this genre. No one declares in Writing Down the Myths that a story’s first existence must be oral in order for it to be a myth, but even the analyses that focus on new written works drawn from older ones often imply that the material was originally oral and may retain stylistic and other characteristics of that state. One cannot but wonder from this volume, and even from the increasing popularity of the term mythography, whether myths that have entered the realm of writing should be seen as comprising a different species from myths that are spoken, or even whether they should be taken to be not quite the genuine article.

A second theoretical issue is the place of writing in world history, a topic brought to the fore in mid-to-late twentieth century by thinkers as diverse as Albert Lord, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Walter Ong, and Jack Goody. The message of Writing Down the Myths would seem to be one of caution. From the analyses presented here, it is clear that the motives and processes introduced by writing are many and complex more than uniform and unidirectional. In a thought-provoking contribution, Stephanie W. Jamison claims that the “fetishization” that is assumed by many Western thinkers to have accompanied the development of writing, is not a world-wide phenomenon. Jamison’s counter-example is India, but in many other parts of the world, including island Pacific and Africa, the relation of writing and orality cannot be reduced to a simple hierarchical displacement.

A third, and perhaps the biggest, of the overarching issues is the methodological one that editor Joseph Falaky Nagy raises in the opening lines of his introduction, specifically the relation of the literary/historical and the ethnographic traditions of myth study. The mid-twentieth-century anthropological/folkloristic study of myth in living contexts exerted tremendous influence on classically and literarily oriented myth scholars. The most important contribution was to suggest possible sociological contexts and functions for obscure, socially-detached texts (Jane Harrison’s Themis is a particularly notable attempt to mine, or over-mine, the potential of ethnographic analogy for classical textual scholarship). In the reciprocal direction, then, what does the kind of scholarship found in Writing Down the Myths offer to the ethnographic tradition of myth study? At the very least a taste of the historical complexity—the trail of refigurations—that may lie behind the mythology that the ethnographer discovers in a particular fieldwork encounter. There is no reason to assume that the sorts of motives and strategies visible in literary traditions are without counterpart in traditions encountered ethnographically; indeed the cases in which ethnographers have made repeated visits over time (for example, Raymond Firth to Tikopia) suggest that continuous reformulation in mythology is the norm. In either direction—ethnographic analogy for literary/historical mythologists, or literary/historical analogy for ethnographic mythologists—one can easily get carried away with speculation. But by maintaining familiarity with both the ethnographic and the literary/historical traditions of scholarship, a mythologist will at least be less prone to lapse into naïve assumptions about, on one hand, seemingly free-floating, socially-contextless texts, or, on the other, about changeless mythologies in timeless societies.

Whether schooled in ethnographic or literary methods, folklorists with an interest in mythology will thus find Writing Down the Myths a thought-provoking read. But its value is not limited to mythologically inclined folklorists. For much if not most of what we study as folklore has been written down, and folklorists specializing in most any genre will profit from these sophisticated ruminations on that fact.

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[Review length: 1062 words • Review posted on September 8, 2016]