Guest Blog: Geoffrey Ashe (excerpt)

[alanajoli]

I've had the good fortune, since my first trip to England in 2000, to have stayed in contact with Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe and his wife (a scholar in her own right, and former professor) Pat. When I first began working at Gale, I was given the project that I now manage as a freelancer: coordinating the autobiographical essays to be featured

Comments

[alanajoli]

You should go back in my guest blog tag and check out Mark Vecchio's definitions, which he kindly allowed me to post. Mark talks about Arthurian "myth" as being in the "legends" category, rather than mythology. I think it comes down to where your definitions break up: I tend to build an order of degradation (if you will):

Religion -> Mythology -> Folk-tales/Fairy-tales

Most folk stories start off in mythology, and one could argue that mythology comes out of an old religion. (Although you could also argue that religion, with all its formal rules, comes out of mythology -- the reason I put it between religion and fairy-tales is based on where I see it falling in the academic spectrum: religion is a field of study, mythology (as in classics) is respectable, and fairy-tales are for lit departments.) Legends seem to be primarily concerned with the realm/domain of men, so Arthur would be legendary, and Odysseus might even fit better in legends than in myths. But they're all so interrelated, it's hard to tell.

I haven't yet read all of the Maginogian, so I can't speak to that, but I think the last of the three Irish Myth cycles is firmly fairy-tale territory. (I think this ought to elevate fairy-tales, rather than degrade the cycle, but I suspect that wouldn't hold up in an academic paper. *g*)