Review : The Norse Myths (2)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review/summary of Carolyne Larrington's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think. In part one I covered the trickery and tragedy of the Norse stories, of how lies and knowledge were two halves of the same coin, and how the heroes often suffered a much more raw deal than their Greek counterparts. While both Greco-Roman and Norse paganism have similarly complex, highly intricate mythological tales, the Norse myths are underpinned by a sense of fatalism lacking in the Greeks. Both present a series of often overly-complicated events in which protagonists act out of multi-dimensional motives rather than moral obligation, but while the Greeks might have at least some discernible morality to them, they don't often have any higher sense of cosmic purpose. 

The Norse, by contrast, are somewhat opposite to this. If the Greeks have a sense of underlying justice but are generally rooted in the concerns of mortals, the Norse myths are rife with doom – doom on a grand scale, no less, even when the stories don't obviously demand any sense of cosmological connection.

But we shouldn't dive in at the deep end. Let's work up to the big stuff and start off with the much more mundane.

3) Transgender

I'm going to be deliberately very liberal in this category and lump in other gender and political issues as well. Let's start with straightforward feminism. While Buxton only considers the stories told by the ancient Greeks, Larrington expands to the broader, dual-meaning of "myth", looking at popular but erroneous conceptions of Norse history as well as mythology.

In myth, though, female characters abound, especially female figures of death. The notorious Valkyries aren't always the busty young maidens of opera but can also be cruelly indifferent deities. One poem describes them weaving the fates of men out of the guts of fallen heroes; their loom is made of spears and human heads hang from the grisly cords. Similarly the Norns are three sisters who, less grimly, sit by a well of knowledge cutting wooden strips that determine the lives of men, or possibly braiding threads to weave the future. And Death in Norse culture was consistently female beyond the Valkyries, including a demon that crushed men in their sleep, female ancestor spirits who are blamed for rash decisions, and the woman-corpse goddess Hel. 

If there was a strong role for women in myth, then there was likely one in real history as well. Even the notorious Ragnar Lothbrok, who we met last time, was in one account female. Notably, women are absent from Valhalla, yet non-mythological stories of warrior shield-maidens abound. The hard evidence is thin, but at least one grave seems to have all the hallmarks of a typical Viking warrior burial but with the skeleton being female. 

Now here I have to bring in one of Larrington's rare but really stupid comments, that this could have been a transgender person (and so not "really" a woman at all). I find this a bizarre claim and I wonder if it was actually just intended to provoke, because surely biological gender would be in this case be much more interesting : the common bias is that biological women didn't fight because of their biology, not because they didn't think themselves "manly" enough. Similarly, I didn't think her claims that it made sense for a male-dominated warrior culture to have so many female depictions of death as a connection with birth, because plenty of other such cultures didn't have this.

Not that transgenderism in Norse culture isn't very interesting, mind you. On the one hand we have Thor, who in one popular story dresses up as a woman to pose as a bride for some typical sort of trickery, and yes he's otherwise as butch as Chris Hemsworth. This is clearly just a bit of silly, innocent  humour, because it's funny when great big bearded men dress up as stereotypically feminine women – people have laughed at this since literally forever. Which makes it a bit strange for Larrington to then note that modern retellings of Thor don't have him enjoying his feminine side, because nothing she discusses gives any reason to expect that he would.

Much better examined is Loki, who is transgender through-and-through, and sexually adventurous to the point of bestiality. Not only can he change gender but he can also give birth as a female. In the "master builder" story, Loki turns into a female horse who becomes impregnated by the builder's stallion, giving birth to Sleipnir the eight-legged horse. Any sexual ambiguity one might read in the modern stories featuring Loki pale in comparison with his original shenanigans. Nor is Loki vilified for this; his later actions are treasonous, but there's nothing wrong in his gender fluidity. And it's worth remembering that this was deemed important enough to be included in these mythological tales, with Loki's role being of ultimately negative but nevertheless pivotal importance : he wasn't some minor character, but one of the big guns of Norse mythology.

Which makes it all the sillier that the modern far-right have adopted their own particular view of Viking culture, a tradition stretching back to well before the Nazis. Granted, it doesn't come from nothing, but it's incredibly selective in ignoring both the legendary shield-maidens and the overtly mythical feminine figures of Death and other warrior goddesses. Describing the QAnon shaman, Larrington summarises :

Sentenced to forty-one months in prison for his activities in the Capitol, Angeli exemplifies through his theatrical self-presentation how the Vinland myth has come to represent an imaginary place in America's past - one in which violent masculinity and honour were supreme values, where whiteness and 'purity of blood' were a given, and where women were obedient and submissive. This 'Viking' imagery has been weaponised in American far-right politics to generate an aesthetic that acts as a dogwhistle for white men who hold racist, misogynist and paranoid views.

Quite what it is about American culture that fosters such raving insecurities I will not venture to guess.  

4) Transcendent

Finally we come to the great cosmic stories. At least in Buxton's selection, for the Greeks this wasn't so important : what mattered more was how the characters acted. Metaphor was a key part of it of course, but there didn't seem to be much direct relation to the nature of reality. For the Norse, this was inescapable.

One of the most beautiful conceptions is Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Its origins are unclear, seemingly something beyond the gods. It grows through the worlds, its branches in the heavens and with three great roots : one to Hel, one to the frost giants, and one to mankind. Deer, eagles and squirrels inhabit iis branches, forming a network which is not merely a direct, physical connection, but also a literal information network – the ultimate Wood Wide Web. At its base is a sacred well of knowledge, a concept used in many other cultures. As is the tree itself and its symbolism : in some Norse myths humans are first made out of driftwood, while in reality the early Norse made their idols out of wood, with many farms even having "guardian trees". 

But all is not well with Yggdrasil. While the sort of fluffy animals found in Disney movies inhabit most of it, dragons and snakes continuously molest its branches and roots. 

Even this central pillar of the imagined universe is subject to the effects of time and the attacks of predators : entropy is understood to be at work in the cosmos.

Yet Yggdrasil continuously regenerates, and while it is certainly affected by the apocalypse of Ragnarok, it's unclear if it survives. This theme of being immortal but not invulnerable, of being in a state of permanent renewal, is found elsewhere in Norse myth too. The gods themselves are sustained by magical apples without which they age and die, while in Valhalla warriors regenerate daily after their perpetual battles. On a rather less epic scale, Thor sustains himself on his travels by means of two regenerating goats.

Given all this, it's perhaps less surprising that the Norse converted to Christianity : with its wooden crosses and regenerative god, it might not have seemed like such a revolution as it might at first appear. And as with the dragon stories, Christianity itself is firmly rooted in a pagan past, however much it might profess to be monotheistic.

Whether Yggdrasil can be truly damaged or destroyed is as unclear as its origins, which Larrington never mentions. The same cannot be said of the gods, who share the Greek trait of being essentially just very, very powerful humans. They are immortal only in the sense of having an indefinite lifespan provided all their needs are met, including the life-sustaining apples. And they have definite origins, again like the Greeks being not the first creatures in existence. Odin, for example, was fathered by a giant, who himself was "the son of a male being who was licked out of the melting ice by Audhumla, the cow whose milk nourished the first of all beings, the giant Ymir." In some stories Ymir is killed to make the cosmos while in others the Earth rises up from the sea.

This kind of symbolism, in which one has to presume that the early Scandanavians didn't take things literally, is everywhere in pagan myths. In typical somewhat-comic fashion, Thor's efforts to undertake a series of challenges involve submerging a horn, which becomes an explanatory metaphor for the origin of tides. More dramatically, Loki is the sire of the wolf Fenrir, who "is made to signify time itself, which will come to its end after he gets loose", the serpent Jörmungandr which "lurks in the outer ocean, with his tail in his mouth, signifying the furthest limits of space", and Hel, "half attractive woman, half decaying corpse... She symbolises death, which is imagined as feminine and desiring."

Trying to see this as in any way coherent it likely impossible : the only option would seem to be idealism and even this feels like a struggle. Loki might be literally the father of time but it's the Norns who weave individual strands of lives. And if death is "feminine and desiring", then it seems odd that women are excluded from Valhalla; similarly, that Valhalla is only for the elite but some warriors are apparently there for others to taunt them also feels paradoxical. It is, in short, a mess.

Hanging over all of it is Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. In some stories the sundering of the gods and men is almost a non-event, with nothing more than Odin's spear shattering, yet he himself does not die. In complete contrast to this gentle fading is Ragnarok, in which Loki is bound by the innards of his children, a serpent drips venom over him which causes earthquakes; three savage winters break down human society; and finally war rages : the dead escape from Hel, Fenrir, Jörmungandr and Sutr the fire giant are unleashed. Gods and giants and monsters destroy one another. Wolves devour the Sun and the Moon, until finally "the heavens catch fire and the earth sinks back into the sea. It is over."

Yet the gods always know that this is their inescapable destiny. The heroes too often act knowing that they must in the end die, that they cannot cheat fate. For Tolkien this was profoundly meaningful, that the gods know themselves to be on the right and "think that defeat no refutation" : surely resonant with his own stories of persevering in the face of hopelessness. 

What Ragnarok symbolises appears to be anyone's guess. For some it represents simply the final end, the ultimate nihilism, that everything just dies. For others it "merely" means the end of free will, but for others, such as Wagner, it symbolises the beginning of free will, with mankind at last free of the tyranny of the gods. Some have viewed the Norse gods as having become irredeemably corrupt and deserving of death, others that their fate is a tragic grandeur but not inevitable, or that the whole thing is a metaphor for the triumph of Christianity.

There is clearly no "right" answer to this. A final point of confusion concerns what comes next. In some tales the Earth rises again and a new generation of gods reside in a new golden hall, with a new Sun in the sky and new humans in the fields. Yggdrasil survives and the conditions are eden-like, a rich, bountiful nature. Yet overhead a dragon files with corpses in its wings... is this the final cleansing of the debris of Ragnarok, or an indication that corruption is never fully erased, that it's all a cycle : all this has happened before, all this will happen again ?

Perhaps its neither. Perhaps it's both. I think it speaks to a paradox of good storytelling, that to give anything meaning it must end, but we yearn for the good stories to continue. And perhaps of human nature too, that we long for a cleansing, a reset, but feel ourselves trapped in an unbreakable cycle. To give a single definitive answer would be quite impossible.

Conclusions

All this uncertainty is part of the appeal. Whether by the Church or its practitioners (more likely the former), Christianity has come to portray itself far more as offering clear, certain answers. This has an obvious appeal, but of course it can't and doesn't answer the Big Questions, being rife with contradictions and neo-pagan aspects in spades : angels and demons, monsters and devils, messiahs and spirits. At least the earlier pagan stories never claimed to have such answers.

The flexibility of the pagan myths gives them an often comic surrealism : the Sigurd tale begins with killing Fáfnir's bother who happens at that moment to be... an otter. During the early phases of Ragnarok Loki turns into a salmon to hide from the gods. Anyone thinking that Thor : Love and Thunder is too silly might be in for a rude awakening if they consult the original stories.

Like the Greek myths this flexibility is a great strength, but do they truly "shape the way we think" ? Quite probably. Like a mirror, what we see in them can be a direct reflection of our own values, but also gives us a way to examine ourselves and change what we don't like. But this flexibility comes with a weakness : the ability of the myths to be abused. Stories of the early voyages to Vinland have been co-opted to promote the idea of an America that was "always white" even in pre-Colombian times, while the idea of berserkers (who Larrington says were real but not always held in high regard, but see Lindybeige for the idea that they didn't exist at all) and the male-only Valhalla has come to be (in)appropriated by fascists and thugs.

This isn't inevitable, and the messages of the far-right certainly aren't intrinsic to the old tales : nor would we have to take those lessons even if they were. Larrington concludes :

Those of us who study the myths must counter this by reminding those coming to them afresh that the myths are historically contingent. They mean largely what they are made to mean at different times, and we can never know how they signified in the distant era when they took shape. They are supple, strange, radically different, and yet they engage, as we have seen, with far larger questions than the limited and self-serving obsessions of far-right politics, nationalism and the ravings of conspiracy theorists.

The Norse myths enable us to think critically about the climate crisis and humanity's place in the green world, about death and its place in life, about the inevitable end of the old order and the emergence of the new... These stories allow us to explore the paradoxes of hybridity and the limits of time, space and mortality. Revisting the tales of Vikings and their culture's greatest heroes has illuminated some of the changing ways we think about masculinity, its positives and its drawbacks, and the ways in which women inflect and reconfigure the familiar social roles. And... we have returned to the spectre of planet-wide destruction... and the ways in which we must work to imagine a brand-new world if one is to arise, green and hopeful, out of the old.

Review : The Norse Myths (1)

Following my absolute delight at reading Buxton's The Greek Myths That Shape The Way We Think, I immediately rushed to the bookshop for the others in the series. Alas, they only had the one, so I've had to order the Celtic one online to complete the trilogy. No matter. I have piles of booky goodness to keep me busy until then.

The Review Bit

It's interesting to note that the other two books get glowing reviews but this one only has four stars on Amazon, with one complaining that the myths have "been made palatable for modern audiences and feminists." The first part of the complaint here is actually not without foundation, but the second is garbage. Larrington does spend a long time describing modern retellings of the Norse myths, sometimes too long and without much analysis – sometimes. This I would agree is the book's biggest weakness. In addition, it can be a bit non-linear, referring to future sections more often than is perhaps ideal, but given the nature of the book, it's also hard to see how it could have been done otherwise.

But making the stories palatable for feminists ? That is laughable. She clearly sets out how there's a lot more abject feminism in the earliest known versions than in some of the more recent hyper-macho interpretations. What's more, it's never anything that's "in your face" or "rammed down your throat". There's maybe one or two remarks in the whole book that I'd say sounded very silly to me, but to get hung up on these would be stupid. In fact I found this aspect, on the whole, to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. She also very gently and non-judgementally relates how Norse myths have been culturally (in)appropriated* by the far right, but you'd have to be truly raving in your insecurities (and/or of such ill-bred ilk yourself) to let this lower your rating.

* As an aside, I've long been mystified by what anyone ever means by "cultural appropriation", which seems like a nonsense term to me. Then I remembered a comment on Tolkien trying to claim the fairy myths for the English at the deliberate expense of the Welsh, and finally it made sense. One culture adopting the practises of another is never, by itself, "appropriating" of any sort. But if that culture then turns around and denounces the original inspiration – that's where there's a legitimate grievance. 

By and large, the prose is excellent, especially the summaries at the end of each chapter which are invariably eloquent and concise. My only real complaints besides the occasionally excessive descriptions are minor : use of the original Nordic script is quite annoying (just Anglicise the names so I can read them properly !), and she seems a bit obsessed with disproving the myth that Vikings used skulls as drinking cups – I never heard of this as any sort of stereotype before. Even the excessive descriptions, though, are hardly a serious deficiency : the lack of analysis is only felt in some places, by no means all.

Overall, provided you take the subtitle "That Shape [PRESENT TENSE] The Way We Think" seriously, this work is every bit the equal of the Greek Myths book in the same series. In presentation it has a good balance of similarity and differences in style to keep it feeling familiar but engaging. I don't have any issue in giving this one too a 9/10, and I find myself an increasing fan of Thames & Hudson – they seem committed to making their history books both physically beautiful objects but also with excellent writing... a rare combination indeed !

As I was reading the book and then later distilling my notes, four main themes stood out to me. In this first part I'll look at trickery (how the Norse gods use both knowledge and deception in their quests beyond the popular image of Loki) and tragedy (exploring how the Norse heroes never seem to get any sort of lucky break). In part two I'll move to transgender issues (and also more broadly the feminist aspects of the stories) and the transcendent, the cosmic symbolism of the nature of the universe, time, fate, and free will.

1) Trickery

The Greek myths feature plenty of examples of the gods behaving badly, but the Norse take this to another level. Loki is of course the most famous example, but even Odin seems like the sort of chap who would lie for no particular reason – not even for funzies, but seemingly because he thinks lying is innately a good thing. His deceit is often intimately connected with knowledge. Odin promises to only take three draughts of the mead of wisdom but swallows the whole lot and flies away as a bird. Like Zeus, he's frequently found in disguise but his powers are distinctly limited. It's quite hard to imagine Zeus the Thunderer ever getting into a riddle contest with a mortal king and (again) turning into a bird to escape his wrath. 

Odin's association with knowledge runs deep. He hangs himself from Yggdrasill "without food or drink for nine days and nights", also loosing an eye, for the sake of knowledge of the World Tree. And he has two ravens, representing Thought and Memory, which fly out into the world each day and report back, with Odin worried more about the vulnerabilities of memory than thought, representing its decline with age. Finally, he's continuously seeking out information about Ragnarok, the apocalypse he's ultimately unable to prevent. Odin has wisdom aplenty, and apparently noble intentions, but seems to have few scruples about lying and manipulation when it suits his purpose.

A couple of stories Larrington relates are emblematic of the sort of trickery found throughout old folk tales, of the "too good to be true" variety. Gefjun asks her lover for as much land as she can farm in one day, which he grants, but then she turns her four huge sons into oxen and ploughs an entire island. Then there's the master builder who promises to build fortifications for the gods if they'll give him the Sun and the Moon. The gods agree but place a strict time limit on the contract, but the builder's stallion can "cart huge amounts of stone" so he easily succeeds. Not wanting to surrender the heavens, in response Loki draws him off, as we'll see next time, and Thor breaks the god's promise and kills the builder. He hasn't tricked them exactly : he agrees to their terms, but he hasn't revealed crucial information. The response is oath-breaking.

Loki himself is an even more inscrutable character than Odin, with an even stronger connection between lies and knowledge. While it's hard to know where to stand with Odin, who seems to be assumed to be basically good but actually is a bit of a bastard, Loki takes this further. He begins as a mean but essentially harmless prankster, loyal to the gods when push comes to shove, but ultimately is instrumental in Ragnarok. His very nature is even more unclear than Odin's : his father was a giant, there's no evidence he was worshipped as a god, and he can not only change shape but also gender.

Whereas Odin and Thor have clear adversaries to fight (the giants), Loki's stance is much more ambiguous. His initially amusing and inconsequential pranks (poking an eagle, shagging a horse, that kind of thing) evolve from trickery into outright treachery. He sires the world-destroying monsters of a wolf, a serpent, and the half-woman half-corpse goddess of Hel. Ultimately this ends in tragedy, with Loki's sons tearing each other to pieces and, in a particularly grisly finale, their guts are used to bind their father in torment.

2) Tragedy

Deceit rarely ends well, except occasionally during moments of comic relief. But, just like with the Greek myths, the stories rarely feel like moralising tales : the gods hardly seem like role models of any sort, and at most there might be aspects of their behaviour the audience was intended to emulate. Again, they're none of them any sort of goody-two-shoes like Jesus, nor are they even repentant sinners like Jonah. The tales have an almost history-like quality about them, as though they were telling the audience look, this is what happened without passing judgement, just relating the kind of weird shit the gods got up to. Sometimes there's deep physical and psychological symbolism about them, but the moral meaning is usually veiled in the extreme.

The ultimate tragedy is of course that the gods and Loki and all the rest are ultimately doomed. But much smaller, more everyday sorts of tragedy pervade the tales as well, even when the consequences are mythically profound. I found the story of Fenrir (Loki's wolf-son) a particularly good example of the backfire effect and the self-fulfilling prophecy. Initially friendly, he only becomes suspicious of the gods when they mistreat him due to a prediction he will one day devour the world. The gods challenge him to break the bonds they put upon him; Fenrir allows this, but demands one of them puts his hand in his mouth at the same time. Realising the bonds are not the thin silk they appear, he bites off the hand, loses faith in the gods, and ultimately becomes the monster that brings about the end of time.

Other legends are decidedly more ordinary. In the earliest stories, Ragnar "Magical Trousers" Lothbrok (he of of History Channel fame) starts out by fighting a dragon with a traditional mixture of cunning and prowess – and dragon-proof trousers. But after that, while he raises many legendary sons, he himself has a series of failed marriages and dies on a hopeless expedition to England, taking just two ships to demonstrate his warrior mettle. It's all a bit sad, really. Later versions have made him a far more epic and interesting character.

Like Ragnar, Sigurd (or Siegfried) peaks early in his career by killing a dragon. And like Ragnar, he isn't especially likeable, with little about him that seems especially worthy of emulating. His life is certainly an interesting one, wrapped in stories of cursed gold and Valkyries surrounded by not-quite-impenetrable flame, but it's all a bit soap-opera full of narratively-unnecessary complications. The curse is by far the most interesting aspect, this notion of inescapable fate : Sigurd doesn't do anything wrong but cannot avoid his doom. He's brave, but whereas in Beowulf the hero's "naked will and courage" is successfully pitted directly against the cosmic forces of the dragon, in the Sigurd tale the dragon is almost incidental. It's the curse that matters, and that is something that no amount of bravery will overcome.

The hero dies, realising all too late how he has been deceived and what he has lost to his enemies flattery and manipulation. This most ancient of Indo-European mythological patterns resonates remarkably with modern preoccupations : our apprehension that the real horror does not emanate from the mythological monster, but rather from the multiple ways in which human beings are prepared to betray one another.

This is brilliantly argued by Larrington, but all the same, I cannot help feeling that using a dragon just to fool the audience is to rob it of its power unjustly. Yet, perversely, I don't agree that Euron Greyjoy's slaying of a dragon is "outrageously subversive", what with him being an utterly dislikable cunt. Well, I do, but the fact that he doesn't deserve to kill a dragon, that he isn't worthy of a such a pure and noble creature, is exactly why he's (deliberately constructed to be) easy to hate : he has no redeeming qualities and is just a brute, but in real life brute force too often succeeds. If not a very nice message, this is at least self-consistent within the world of Westeros, and the dragon's nobility and potency is never in doubt. The dragon is only partly undermined, remaining a potent and deadly force to be reckoned with : in contrast in the Sigurd story the dragon is ultimately just a man in disguise, having no greater cosmic significance himself.

---

In Greek stories the hero often gets some level of reward, at least for a time. Odysseus struggles but ultimately wins back his home, Jason recovers the fleece, Perseus becomes king, Hercules becomes a god. Of course plenty of them do end tragically (Paris, Agamemnon, Achilles) but there's at least some semblance that if you act well and the fates are kind, you'll live an honoured life : at the least you'll be remembered and emulated. But while Beowulf at least got to rule peacefully for many years before the final encounter with the dragon, many Norse myths seem to screw both gods and men alike. If in Greek myths some people suffer some of the time, in Norse tales it feels almost like everyone is suffering all of the time.

This may be an exaggeration, and there are plenty of comic moments in the Norse myths : it isn't all doom and gloom and it certainly isn't perpetual angst. There's a sense of fun about the world-devouring monsters, something appealing in this draw of the cosmic down into the ordinary. The Greek stories, at least those selected in this series, focus heavily on character, with actions and feelings we can relate to in principle if not in practise. The Norse have this aspect as well, but are replete with a sense of mortal dread that the Greek tales lack. Ragnarok can be avoided for a time but it's always looming in the background. So that is what we must face, head-on, in part two.

From Folkore To Fakelore

Before I continue my mythtical binge-readings, I want to say a few words about folklore. 

One thing I wondered about while reading the Greek Myths, Penguin Dragons, and the Norse Myths (next post) was just how sincerely people ever believed in this stuff. The dragon-writers address this almost directly, sometimes very critical about the supposed nature of dragons if not ever questioning their actual existence very much. Less explicitly, Greco-Roman writers were inherently flexible in a way quite alien to later religious doctrine : compare the wonton misogyny of Hesiod with the pseudo-feminism of Plato, or the myriad versions of the same basic myths told by people living a few miles apart. 

And yet, like the Norse, the stories are often incredibly specific and detailed, which doesn't feel like they they were just casually making it up as they went along. They must have had some level of actual belief in what they were saying, surely, but in what sense exactly ? Did they believe it mainly as metaphor, or largely as literal truth ? Did they see Zeus swallowing Athena's mother as symbolic or something that actually happened ? Did they believe the operatic-level details of Baldur's post-death romance as real occurrences ?

Belief, here in the simple sense of a sincerely-held opinion, is of course a spectrum. We can believe things with varying degrees of confidence and hold things only to be more or less probable in relative terms, rather than having absolute certainty or truth about anything. We can also, of course, be certain about things which are absolutely mutually exclusive, such muddled creatures as we are.

One aspect of how we evaluate evidence, a really crucial and perhaps the most important part of all (at least according to Damon Centola), is the metadata : the data about the data, especially the powerful heuristic of who-believes-what. After all, it makes sense to trust a hitherto-reliable source more than a stranger if you can't assess the situation for yourself.

But we can take this up another level. We ourselves have beliefs about what other people believe. We generalise. We assume all of demographic X believes assertion Y, which is hardly ever fully true but is a useful way to simplify things. This sort of metabelief itself forms a spectrum : we ourselves directly believe things; we don't believe them ourselves but think that other people do; we believe nobody thinks this any more but used to in the past; or we actively claim that a thing is not true at all (we can apply this in reverse as well, thinking that nobody actually believes in things they profess to when in fact they're quite sincere).

A myth, says a recent topical SMBC, has to be something that people actually believe... as well as not making any sense and featuring weird sex. Well it's tough to argue with the latter, even for dragons. For "not making any sense", that seems not unreasonable either. Put more charitably, a myth or folklore in this quasi-religious sense has to be irrational, something that's inherently unscientific and unprovable*. But I won't go into the distinction between folklore in the more general sense of folk-wisdom versus superstition here though, as this isn't really my point. I'll only add that folklore perhaps requires a few doubters and unbelievers : a thing which everyone believes is true and actually is is just common knowledge, which is hardly what we usually mean by "folklore".

* This is not the same as being anti-scientific, which is actively opposed to rational inquiry and at odds with tested and testable procedures. That would be the realm of conspiracy theories, not myths in the old sense.

But accepting this as a vague, rough, but workable definition, still doesn't answer my main question. Is it really actually necessary for people to believe in a thing for it to count as folklore ? What if people only believe that other people believe in it instead – does that still count ?

Like the folk beliefs themselves, this is satisfyingly murky and probably can't be entirely pinned down. But it does at least perhaps elucidate the difference between what was understood to be fiction from the outset and what was supposed to be taken as myth. There need be absolutely no level of belief in fiction whatever. One can read Tolkien and either accept or reject whatever moral lessons one cares to draw, but the works are unarguably fictitious. But with myths and legends, perhaps there needs to be some level of belief, maybe even just this meta-belief, for it to count as in some way authentic. 

This is perhaps why the "original" stories feel different to modern retellings. There's nothing wrong with reshaping the old stories, of course, but nowadays there is absolutely no serious level of belief in them whatsoever. This wasn't the case at the time, when people would at the least think that somebody else believed them even if they themselves didn't. The modern versions can be enormously interesting, but don't tell us much about the mindsets of those who actually thought some aspects of the stories were really true : only the earliest versions can tell us anything about the world view of those lost eras.

While I don't think we can or should put down strict rules regarding authenticity, it might be safe enough to attempt a rough guideline. Perhaps folkore can be said to be that for which there is a community of active believers (it can't be just some lone nutter), and when this ceases but people believe other people still believe it, this becomes fakelore.

The extra complication is of course that this metabelief itself can engender credibility. Not always, but sometimes. Even if half the group don't really believe a thing but are just acting out of conformity, our brains doesn't register this : we only see the sheer size of the group apparently acting in good faith, and so we give them more credence than we should –  this is of course closely related to a false consensus. Folklore can be self-sustaining because everyone knows it's true and knows that everyone else knows as well, so nobody sees any need to question it. The tales grow in the telling.

But beliefs can also go there and back again. Fakelore can become folklore if the group size is taken as evidence in lieu of anything better; but if direct evidence becomes readily available than folklore shifts to fakelore and eventually dies altogether. The shift is complex, and surely important beyond the mystical realm of legends and relevant for beliefs more widely. Things which feel true, or at least resonate with some moral or ideological thing we believe, are often political kryptonite to rational inquiry.

So did the people of days of yore believe in the lore ? My guess it that whether myths and folklore were regarded as literally true would be, for the ancient peoples, missing the point. They were perhaps often a mixture of true folklore and fakelore, but it wouldn't have mattered. The point wasn't usually to establish what was actually happening; such a level of rationality often didn't exist. Rather the stories were usually things you could believe in, not believe directly. As long as the story gave some useful message to the audience, whether anyone seriously thought it actually happened or not was irrelevant. I would suppose that some people took it very literally indeed, others as metaphors, but the majority never stopped to think about it : they'd take the general characters of the gods and the necessary rituals as "true" but be utterly unfazed by contradictions in any specific details.

It's also interesting to note how "myth" can also refer to something that needs to be disproved. Like conspiracy theories, some claims have apparent explanatory power but don't stand up under rational scrutiny. The difference with the old myths is that these ideas are explicitly intended to be taken literally, with no symbolic value : the myth that vaccines cause cancer isn't a metaphor for science run amok, whereas Fenrir's turn to aggression due to the gods treating him with suspicion has value completely independent of the wolf's actual existence. You can't disprove Fenrir, but you can easily debunk anti-vax nonsense.

There is however a connection. In some ways the batshit insanity that is the Republican party would seem to argue that yes, actually, large numbers of people can be believe anything. It doesn't have to offer any symbolic value. It certainly doesn't have to be in any way beautiful. It can be an open, bald-faced liar with a more than passing resemblance to a bloated orange fish spewing incoherent word salad, and they'll still believe it.

At least the ancient peoples had the unprovable nature of their deities to fall back on. In contrast those duped by modern, very obvious liars have no such luxury. It's been suggested that people believe in Trump and Farage and the rest because of what they're against, not what they stand for, and similarly that there's a cult-like aspect in supporters following them, personally, rather than caring about their particular message. Both of these might be partly at work. The problem is that every time I hear them speak they just sound ever-more self-evidently ridiculous to me. And not at the level where it requires some specialist training to see through their charade, not because of being a self-identified lefty with a liberal agenda or some brand of elitist intellectualism, but at the bloody fucking obvious level of fire-is-hot inescapable reality.

This leave me with a paradox. I can accept value and beauty in the old, incomprehensible myths of wolves eating the sun, world trees and gods swallowing their own children our of spite, of demons turning the world to stone and monsters of the deep. All this is easier to understand, far easier(!) than modern right-wing Western politics. The ancients ? A mixture of folklore and fakelore, moralising and metaphors, crackpots and consideration. My contemporaries ? I'm beyond baffled. 

Review : Penguin Dragons (2)

Welcome back to my self-indulgent review of all things dragon, based on the collection of stories in the Penguin Book of Dragons. Last time I looked at the more superficial dragon-stories : the simple moral warnings, the cautionary but curious traveller's tales, and the often baffling and comic surrealist claims and fictions. None of these tend to go into much into detail about what the dragon's themselves are like, but in this next set of categories, dragons and their nature are vital to the narrative. So here I move on to the more interesting and sophisticated ways dragons are used : their super/natural histories, in complex literature that goes beyond simple morality tales, and in "true" myth.

(You don't need to have read the first post before this one, but it might help.)

As I said, the stories themselves don't always divide as neatly as this : think of it more as a rough guide to how dragons are used in different literature instead. Sometimes even traveller's tales contain elements of high myth, and sometimes myths feature bizarre surrealism. Nevertheless, if nothing else than organising things this way at least prevents this post from being a totally unstructured dragon-dump.

4) Unnatural Histories

Some of the records in the book are apparently sincere attempts to document the natural history of dragons. They're nothing like modern scientific reports, of course, taking the traveller's tales very seriously (what with having no physical subjects to work with, presumably). Their speculation ranges in credibility, from the, "this makes sense so long as a I accept the premise" to the surrealism of the "dude seriously stop you're not supposed to take that much" variety.

Of the more credible sort, many are related to the dragon's habitat. Most would-be dragonologists locate their quarry in hot countries, in keeping with their fiery temperament. But one or two say the opposite, that of course because dragons are so naturally hot they want to avoid overheating, so only live in the cold countries – much as they seek out elephants for their cold blood. A few go the whole way and say that dragons are cold creatures that kill by causing freezing cold in their wake. None of the authors of differing opinions on this comment on the others, seemingly reaching their conclusions entirely independently. 

It's interesting to note that some modern magical practise is based around the idea of "like causes like". While this is in keeping with the idea of fiery dragons in hot regions and cold drakes in cold countries, the idea that hot dragons deliberately seek out cold places to offset their own nature would seem opposed to this. Similarly, the idea that they're not naturally poisonous but only become so because of their diet firmly grounds them as entirely natural animals. Dragons, then, can be found across the whole supernatural spectrum, from the absolutely mythical to the almost-credible. 

Physical descriptions of dragon vary wildly, from the tiny Macedonian specimens that women suckle and keep as pets (!), to the most typical being perhaps a few tens of feet in length (the oft-mentioned Bagrada river dragon was supposedly 120 feet long), to a few real giants that might be hundreds of metres in length. They're typically but not always scaly, occasionally with hair or feathers, sometimes with the teeth of pigs of other chimeric qualities. Wings and legs are optional and come in various numbers, as do heads. Giant serpents are not uncommon, sometimes with wings for flight but sometimes managing to fly through abjectly supernatural means instead. They don't always breathe fire, but nearly always seem to have at least a noxious breath, sometimes able to kill over large areas with their poisonous fumes alone. Overall, the serpentine nature seems by far the most common aspect of all dragons, much more so than being like lizards or crocodiles.

It's also interesting to see the pre-modern writers wrestling with critical thinking in age where evidence was hard to obtain and even harder to duplicate : they took the anecdotal reports seriously because they had absolutely nothing else to go on. Some describe dragons in wonderfully mythic terms as the origin of storms, or are even deliberately pursued by thunderstorms which are trying to attack the dragons. One theologian in particular rejected this, declaring that ignorance is dangerous and that if people would only read the holy scriptures they wouldn't fall for such obvious errors. He goes on to present a remarkably rational description of thunder resulting from wind inside clouds, though he also notes that others believe that dragons not only exist but are also intelligent creatures capable of speech.

Even more impressive is the case of rejecting the idea of a fire-breathing creature and instead suggesting that this nothing more than bioluminescence like other animals have. Their scales are like shells of perfectly ordinary creatures. And yet this same Edward Topsell also puts forward other, altogether weirder suggestions. One idea is that the dragon is a hybrid of the wolf and the eagle but can itself reproduce sexually*... Surely weirdest of all is perhaps the idea that dragons originate in eagles nests by the combination of sperm from the mingled bodies of their dead prey. It's a heady, complex mixture of credible, almost-scientific lines of reasoning together with the absolutely bizarre. 

* In a slightly earlier era, theologian John Beleth describes dragons getting "lustful" in the air, which results in them polluting the waters below with their sperm, causing crop failures. His recommendation to prevent this is to build fires of bones to ward off the horny beasts.

5) Literature

Moving on to more substantial tales, there are of course plenty with good literary aspects to them. The medieval French poem Les Chétifs has at least some excitement to it, with the hero's life at last in genuine danger – piety alone will not save him, unlike in the simpler moral warning messages. Even some of the very early tales sometimes contain interesting snippets, such as the story of a fourth-century bishop who describes a dragon in the treasury of Constantinople that "killed many people by depriving them of wealth or through his breath". This direct association with money is far more interesting that the hoard in Beowulf, which is just an ancient, pre-existing collection that the dragon takes over to nobody's disadvantage. A later Byzantine tale also features a dragon which causes dreadful economic disruption as well as the more literal physical sort of destruction.

Two more famous tales are a bit disappointing in terms of their famous dragons. The story of Fáfnir I found rather plodding and dull, but quite possibly only because the extract here is simply too short to provide any context : it becomes a case of "this happened, and then this happened, and this happened as well for some reason." I reserve this for a future post, though, since the description in my current read The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think is much fuller. The curse of the gold is certainly interesting enough, the but the dragon himself is more incidental (in contrast the reverse is true of Beowulf, where the dragon is of pivotal importance to the story but the hoard is of almost no relevance, lurking as it was in the barrow anyway before the dragon came along).

The story of St George, as mentioned last time, also features the dragon only as a minor plot device, but with the rest of the story similarly much more interesting. The sacrifices in the original story aren't necessarily virgins or even exclusively female, they're just people to make up the numbers of the dwindling supply of sheep the townspeople can afford to placate the dragon*. There's also a genuinely tragic aspect to the king, who is sincerely torn between his duty and his love for his daughter. Perhaps most interestingly of all, St George only agrees to kill the dragon if the villagers convert from their heathen ways. One wonders what he would have done if they hadn't : to release the beast and let it devour them would hardly be an act of saintly forgiveness, whereas if this was an idle threat, than George is a big fat liar.

* This must say a lot about a town : either we'll run out of sheep faster, or we'll feed it some people instead. Presumably there's some Welsh influence at work here.

There's a distinctly fairytale aspect to the Asian stories presented. The case of the fishermen who rescues a turtle and is taken to the house of a dragon-god under the sea has a particularly tragic development. A kindly and virtuous man, he is taken by the turtle (who is actually a princess in disguise) to the undersea house of a dragon-god, where he marries her, forgets his family, and loses track of time. When he awakens from his dream-like state, he thinks three days have passed, but on returning to the world he finds it's actually been three centuries. He does nothing wrong, commits no sin, but loses everything, being now unable to return to his underwater home.

The acme of literary dragons here, the crowning jewel in the collection, is for me the excerpt from Edward Spencer's poem The Faerie Queen. This, now, this is proper stuff. Majestic language, terrific excitement, adventure and danger, and with dragons who are far more than plot devices, being fully realised characters described at considerable length – I immediately downloaded the rest of the epic (400 page) poem for later reading. Notably, the knight's virtues and Christianity are now fully recognised as insufficient in themselves to save him : it is no longer enough to simply believe but also necessary to act with chivalry and courage, and even this might not be enough ! Christian symbolism is delivered at last with some subtlety, with the knight rejuvenated by sacred wells rather than simple prayer. It's a fantastic piece, far more engaging than the excerpt of Paradise Lost (which briefly features a dragon), and definitely one of those, "why didn't anyone tell me about this before ?" moments. 

6) Myth

And so we come to the final and most potent use of dragons in storytelling : as truly mythic creatures. Here they act as literary devices of the deepest kind of symbolism, something intensely mysterious. Often they act as metaphors with explanatory power, be that the origins of specific phenomena (often aspects of human nature) or the whole cosmos. The sincerity of the belief in the story, I think, may be of critical importance. Everyone knew that Spencer's tale was pure fiction, whereas for the true myths this was not necessarily so. Either way, myths are the greatest and most noble forms of storytelling.

One of the earliest examples of myth in the book is also the most badly-told. A "South Asian" myth tells of the storm god Indra slaying the dragon Vrta, "a monstrous manifestation of drought who held the waters of the world captive in a mountain". When Indra killed the dragon, the waters are released and become the rivers. It's told in epic imagery but in short, disjointed and highly repetitive phrases, but what can you expect for ~1500 BC ?

A massively more sophisticated piece of literary storytelling is found in Pharsalia, a first century AD poem by Lucan. The extract here concerns Medusa, who though not a dragon herself, is here depicted as the Mother of Dragons. Now I will here mention again that the evolving Medusa myth is a fascinating example of a benevolent guardian figure transmuting into an evil sorceress, but for all the damning effects of the patriarchy, the evil version is still a damn good story. And Lucan tells it well, claiming that it was Medusa who turned Atlas to stone and giants into mountains. This makes her massively more dangerous than a snake-headed lady, with her gaze being a weapon of unstoppable force. As Perseus flies back with her severed head, it releases "the poison of Medusa's dripping gore", which gives birth to a whole clutch of monsters, dragons included. 

A much later Dark Age retelling of the old pagan myths makes similarly dramatic claims, with the the River Styx itself being purported not to be a river at all, but a dragon : "the largest serpent in the entire world, so huge that it wraps its black coils nine times around Tartarus through the dark fen of wailing souls in such a way as to invoke tears." In the Bible, Leviathan and the dragon of Revalations are described in even more demonic terms : "He will consider the deep as though it grows old. There is no power upon the earth compared to him, who was made to fear no-one. He will see everything that is high. He is the king over all the children of pride."

Swords are no more use against such creatures : they are literal embodiments of the forces of nature and the soul. In some cases they almost seem to be sin incarnate. One late Roman story describes a dragon as consuming the corpse of an adulterous sinner to torture their soul in the afterlife, providing a physical and graphical connection with hell itself. 

In many medieval tales dragons are comet-like portents of doom and change, no mere large scaly beasts but truly monstrous, some aspect of them which is fundamentally, unfathomably different from material, observable reality. An 11th century monk recounted the story of a Pannonian dragon which was a creature of air and darkness, the stuff of which storms are made, killing widely with its cold until blown away in the clouds by God. Geoffrey of Monmouth relates dragons to the truly cosmic, describing shapeshifting "incubus demons" that live between the Earth and the Moon, purporting one of those to be the father of Merlin. Merlin, of course, uncovers the reason that Vortigen's castle is falling down is because of the dragons underneath it, though Geoffrey is obviously quite wrong to claim that the red dragon (i.e. the Welsh) will ultimately be defeated by the white (the English). Though in fairness he does at least depict this as a tragic outcome. 

Merlin's dragons seem neutral towards mankind, and while most European dragons are hostile, a few are benevolent. Edward Topsell, who we previously saw relating some examples of both commendable critical thinking and fanciful nonsense, gives a tale of a saint who was crucified and his body protected thereafter by a dragon. He goes even further, noting that some people (though not himself) claim that dragons actually originate from the bone marrow of noblemen. Mother of dragons indeed !

Conclusions

I find the end of the Penguin Book a bit depressing. Dragons were for millennia a vital literary force, potent, ancient and dread. Yet to make them acceptable to modern audiences they became the stuff only of children's stories, and the examples given in the book are just... bad writing. I'm being a little unfair. I don't say I wouldn't have enjoyed them myself as a kid (I liked very much the Dragon in Class 4 books when I was very young), but they are definitely only enjoyable for children*.

* The Norse Myths book, however, makes it clear that mythical-fantasy tales for grown-ups were always a thing, though perhaps there was a period when inventing new material was frowned upon. Retellings were fine, but making up new dragons, not so much.

Of course dragons were sometimes comic and parodied throughout history. Mercifully, any bias in including dragons in modern serious literature appears to have diminished, and if the literatii might still turn up their noses, it's clear that the plethora of science fiction and fantasy writing means that this other-worldly writing still speaks to a wide audience.

The range of uses to which the dragon has been put in literature is enormous. They've been surreal, comic, cautionary stories about sticking to the path, moral tales about what will happen if you leave the abbey, demons who torture your soul by consuming your body, the source of storms, creatures of the deep, beasts easily killed by a sufficiently sharp sword, and dark monsters born of hell. 

One of the fascinating aspects of these tales to me is how literally people believed in them. Some traveller's tales read like obvious fiction today, but were reported for centuries as being actual truth. And myths embody this most fully : did people really in believe Leviathan in the deeps as a physical creature, or was it always understood to be a metaphor ? Did they actually think of dragons causing wind and storms ? Were these sorts of explanations and interpretations viewed as literal truth or known generally to be placeholders, perhaps reflecting human tendencies to see patterns ? Or in other words, did these stories actually help us distinguish fantasy from reality, as Tolkien thought, or did they only muddy the waters ?

There is surely no one answer to this. All are valid in different circumstances. Even the word "myth" itself has (at least !) a dual meaning, sometimes being a thing that's in need of disproving and sometimes something actively intended "only" as a story. Like dragons themselves, the nature of human belief just isn't so easy to pin down, but remains, nonetheless, an endless source of fascination.

Review : Penguin Dragons (1)

Immediately following on from The Greek Myths I proceeded to devour the Penguin Book of Dragons. I simply had to find something to fill the mythological gap until I could get back to the shop for the other books in the "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" series, so what better than one all about my favourite creature of myth and legend ? Admittedly "The Penguin Book of Dragons" sounds a lot like The Usborne Children's Guide To Scary Lizards, or something, but in fact it's a delight : I only wish there was an expensive, hardback, fully-colour-illustrated edition I could display proudly on my bookshelf.

The book is a wide-ranging collection of translated storied about dragons, covering pre-antiquity, classical Greece and Rome, medieval Europe (the main focus) and Asia, and even modern America. It's a wide-ranging and eclectic mix indeed, from the absolutely bizarre to the profound to the childish and boring. It doesn't feature much at all in the way of analysis by the editor, which is a shame – sometimes it would have been useful to have some context as to why the stories are significant*. Nor is it in any way comprehensive – rather disappointingly it misses one of my favourites, the Lambton Worm, while including many which are so dull that they're only bearable because of their pathetic brevity.

* I'd like to say this makes it more interesting to do my own analysis, but in this case I'm often lacking enough information to get a handle on it. 

That said, it's still a very nice collection overall, featuring many stories I'd never even heard of. It doesn't really seem fair to give it a review but I would definitely recommend it for anyone who likes stories about dragons. There's a lot more to them than the standard scaly-scary-lizard, and even the really boring stories are interesting in adding variety to the dragon-as-plot-device motif. 

I don't have a particular question I want to answer here. Rather I'm going to just give a summary of the different ways dragons are used in the old stories, ordered roughly by how interesting I found them. These categories don't always divide quite so neatly as this, but as a guide, it's probably not awful. As I see it there are six main types of story : 

• Dragons as simple warnings and moral instruction
• As anecdotal traveller's tales asserting little more than that they exist as real creatures
• Surrealist fantasy where the symbolism is unintelligible
• Natural histories concerned with some degree of critical thinking on the nature of the beast
• High literature with complex characters, moral reasoning, and subtle symbolism
• Mythological explanatory metaphors in which dragons have a deep connection to the natural world and human nature.

To avoid spreading myself too thin, I'll cover the first three parts here and the second three in the next post.

1) Dragons : A Warning From History

A great many of the stories – too many – consist of very very simple warnings aimed at converting the heathens to Christianity. "So-and-so the blessed saint", they say, "came along and made the sign of the cross, and lo! the deadly beast was thwarted." And that's about it. They contain very little information of any kind, with the dragon itself barely even described.

I suppose if used together, delivered by a priest suitably skilled at oratory, listing a whole series of examples of devout Christians defeating dragons might have some rhetorical, persuasive power behind it. "Did not St Butface not smite the dragon with his mighty club ? And did not St Windolene not crush the heathens as St Gertrude did vanquish the firebeast of Moronia ?". That sort of thing. As it is, without context there's not much to say about them. Typically the dragon is very easily vanquished, literally in some cases just by the sheer power of belief or making the sign of the cross, nothing more than that. 

On its own each of these sort of stories are deadly dull. There's nothing at stake, no risk to the protagonists, the defeat of the dragon is assured. The dragon usually seems to symbolise paganism or some such, but is barely developed beyond merely naming it as a dragon. Everything about these stories is zero dimensional and presumably aimed at very simple, very stupid people.

There is one interesting exception that nevertheless fits the general description though. The twelfth century Abbot Herman of Tournai describes how God, rather than the Devil, sends a dragon which lays waste to an entire town for the relatively minor crime of refusing to welcome visitors carrying holy relics. Herman's gracious host himself escapes by the usual virtue of just being sufficiently pious, and the offending deacon has to seek God's forgiveness. These are all the usual tropes of the genre, but still, for God to send a five-headed dragon to burn a town to ashes for such a minor misdemeanour is surprising. Tolkien held that the earlier writer of Beowulf was no muddled Christian-Pagan hybrid, but this story only bolsters my disagreement* : even in these later ages, the distinction between the two is not at all sharp. Christianity itself, with its prophets, saints, messiah and holy trinity, has never really managed (in some ways) to fully escape the pagan past.

* And also Tolkien's claim that "a dragon is no idle fancy", with so many of the stories presented here being quite literally nothing more than that. It should be no idle fancy, but it often was.

2) Traveller's Tales

By number if not by total length, these probably make up the bulk of the collection. Anecdotal incidents abound of unwary travellers who had an unlucky encounter with a dragon, in which still nothing much is at stake except (at least) the traveller themselves. These aren't usually adventurers or explorers, just ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point of these, if there is one at all, seems to be only to tell people to take care on the roads, much as we'd take note of a traffic report. At most they're concerned with establishing the existence of the beasts and their general characteristics, but nothing more than that. Everything is presented in a very matter-of-fact way.

This often makes the dragon itself narratively uninteresting. It doesn't carry any greater significance, it's just an animal which exists and does its thing, with no supernatural attributes of any kind except perhaps size. Even in the story of St George, the poor dragon itself only gets a walk-on part, though at least the rest of the story has some surprising redeeming qualities (see "literature" in the next post).

The Roman story of the dragon of Bagrada river in Tunisa exemplifies this sort of "traveller's tales" variety of dragon. It reads an awful lot like fan fiction : not actually at all bad in its description, but only hopelessly boring in narrative. The dragon is at least, unlike in the Christian warning stories, described in truly fearful terms, but in the end it's just an animal. The characters are still pretty lifeless : the main protagonist is brave but his companions are not, and in the end he goes forth and kills the beast without too much fuss and bother. More interesting is how often this particular story was repeated by later chroniclers, being held up as a standard piece of evidence that of course dragons existed – even though it reads very obviously as pure fiction.

Rather surprisingly, the last tales in the book purporting to be sincere encounters with dragons are from late 19th-century American newspapers. I have to wonder how seriously these were ever intended, with, for example, the otherwise extremely boring Abergavenny Chronicle currently having rather more fun than one might expect for a paper that usually describes such things as how much everyone likes cake. Critical thinking is a recurring theme with dragons and myth, on which more next time.

3) Surrealism

Much more fun but completely unintelligible are the stories which are truly bizarre. Few of these are pieces of pure surrealism : they tend to be halfway towards genuine literature but then with aspects which are absolutely random and baffling. One exception is the deliberately comic Dragon of Wantley, which, rather surprisingly, is a genuinely funny ballad about a giant flatulent dragon defeated by a local knight.

More typically, the surrealism is merely peppered throughout all the other sorts of dragon stories, even the natural histories. Pliny was convinced that dragons were the mortal enemies of elephants for some reason, describing their battles as almost chess-like in their careful tactics. This became widely accepted, it being proposed that dragons are particularly keen to drink the blood of elephants for its cooling properties. Then there was another author who insisted that dragons were afraid of lightning as, being so dry and hot themselves, it would easily cause them to burn up. The very obvious question of "well why doesn't their own fire ignite them ?" (and this author does assert that dragons breathe fire, unlike many others) is left cheerfully unraised.

More of these in the next post. Others are truly weird allegories and surely not intended as literal. Such as the idea, found in a medieval bestiary, that Jesus was a panther whose sweet breath scared dragons, and viewed the dragon's hatred of elephants as a metaphor for the corrupting effects of sin.

Yes, well.

Then there's the story of the demon-dragon Rufus. This mainly fits the description of the warning tales, in which the heroine Maria defeats the dragon by making the sign of the cross... except in this case she's inside the dragon at the time, so rupturing his innards and killing him. Then his relative appears and Maria grabs him by the hair and beard, makes the sign of the cross, and the story ends with him declaring (and this is a direct quote), "Ow, my beard really hurts !".

An honourable mention must be made of Onachus. This beast is mentioned in passing as one of the parents of dragon (the other half being Leviathan, see "myths" next time). It's described as, "a native of the region of Galatia, which lets fly its dung like an arrow at anyone who gives chase and can shoot it up to an acre away, scorching whatever it touches as if it were fire." This particular story is otherwise a classic of the utterly boring heroine-easily-defeats-dragon variety.

The final ones I have to mention are bizarre through and through. The Japanese god "Rushing Raging Man" defeats a dragon by getting all eight of its heads really drunk, then he chops it up and finds inside a sword he decides to call the grass-cutter great sword. God knows why. Generously, I suppose it's testament to how Western myths have indeed shaped modern thought – that is, presumably it makes more sense if you've grown up in Japanese culture. I'm reaching though, it could well be just pure silliness for all I know. And a Ming dynasty tale describes a dragon with "the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a rabbit, the ears of an ox, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales [81 of them] of a fish, the claws of an eagle, and the paws of a tiger". Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Frankensteinian concoction was afraid of coloured silk – well, I mean how could the poor thing know if it was coming or going ?

---

Dragons are indeed versatile plot devices able to fill a multitude of different roles. But the dragons in the stories considered thus far aren't really much developed. Even the tales purporting that they exist aren't really concerned with the the beasts themselves. For that, we need to go to the second set of stories, ones where not only are the dragons crucial to the tale but the whole nature of the dragon is often of fundamental importance. Dragons can be silly, comic, and fanciful, but sometimes they also raise very much deeper and more interesting questions about our place in reality and our rational and irrational mindsets.

Review : The Greek Myths

I went on a book-buying splurge the other day, and for no particular reason I decided to start with Richard Buxton's The Greek Myths That Shape The Way We Think. There's a question which has been ticking over in the back of my head for a while... what makes these bizarre, surreal tales still appealing ? How is it we keep returning to these intensely other-worldly stories which so often feature behaviour that must have seemed reprehensible even at the time ? 

Or in other words : What's the appeal of a god who turns into a swan and rapes people, as opposed to helping the sick and destitute ?

This book presents a compelling answer. My only gripe is that it's too short : I would have been happier if it had been about double the length. Each chapter is about the right length but I wanted there to be more of them.

In terms of style it's light and accessible but articulate and thoughtful. At times the author lapses into an academic style of prose that might be daunting if you happen to alight on such a passage when perusing it in a bookshop, but for the most part he's almost poetic. He's clearly distilled his conclusions with expert precision down to his key findings in a brilliantly readable way, as comfortable in discussing pornography as he is with Renaissance epic poetry. Each section begins with a description of the myths in their "original" tellings, followed by an analysis and a history of the re-tellings right through the ages to the present day. It's a carefully curated selection, thoughtfully and lively described, never lacking in interpretation and really just a delight to read.

I'm giving this one a "I immediately want to buy the other books in this series"* 9/10. Sadly the others (Norse and Celtic myths) aren't by the same author, so very possibly I'll have to buy more by him as well. Really, I would have just liked it to be longer. 

* Quite literally. I've already begin the Norse book in the same series, and only didn't buy the Celtic one yet because the bookshop didn't have it.

To summarise this one is a challenge : I took a full six pages of notes while reading it. Trying to give a blow-by-blow account of each myth examined would be a simply hopeless task. Instead I'll try and pick out what seemed to me to be the most interesting major themes that emerge.

1) Versatility

I said "originally" with the quotes because this is one of the author's more explicit points : that there are original versions plural of the myths, not one single tale you can point to and say that all the other versions are illegitimate. The Greeks themselves certainly had no problem with retelling the tales to suit their own preferences and purposes. It's a bit like Doctor Who's fixed points in time, certain core features of each myth that remain similar (but by no means identical) between authors, around which the myth is shaped and endlessly reshaped. Throughout the Protean shiftings, all the while there remains something recognisable about the whole thing, much like Trigger's Broom a.k.a. the Ship of Theseus.

Two things about this appeal to me. First, that fiction can be interpreted differently but legitimately according to the reader is something I've mentioned here many, many times. But while I do get the annoyance of making changes from the book to the screen, as long as a change has an interesting message to convey, does it really matter ? The Greek answer would have been an emphatic no. They would have completely accepted changing characters, the setting, and even the whole storyline as absolutely valid. They wouldn't have seen it as being somehow "untrue" in a way that, say, as a Christian might see a story about Jesus fighting a robot dinosaur with lasers for eyes.

Pew, pew pew....

Yes, that was a terrible and intentional pun. You can't stop me.

Which brings me to the second point : the pagan peoples of antiquity didn't have the same concept of religion itself as later thinkers did. Tom Holland analyses this in more detail in Dominion, but here I think the concept comes across more clearly. There simply are no pagan bibles, no foundational texts or dogma that believers in Zeus had to adhere to. It didn't seem to bother the Greeks a jot when foreigners claimed that Hercules had visited their country, or that locals of one part of Greece believed in different traditional stories than the others : they all believed nonetheless in the same gods, and their stories weren't supposed to be "true" in the modern sense. More important was that the stories were instead felt to contain truths.

This meant that the religious practises were tremendously adaptable and the tales were incredibly flexible. And that means that all the later versions, even the modern ones, have some claim on being "true" in this very loose sense. That's not to say they're all good, of course : plenty of them are utter crap. Taking out the nasty, naughty bits in the interests of making the tale more moral is a particularly bad idea, as we'll see later on. But they are valid. "Old gods do new jobs", as Pratchett put it.

Later authors looked back to the myths as allegory, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes these, such as Promethean fire being a symbol for wisdom and knowledge, seem at least halfway plausible that this is a message the myth conveyed to the earliest audiences. This fits particularly well given that Prometheus is also (as is less well-known these days) the creator of mankind, thus explaining the subtitle to Frankenstein and the Alien spin-off movie. It would present a nice, coherent character at least.

But most other allegorical readings seem extremely forced and often absurd, though this isn't to say they're without their own pseudo-mythic value. For example interpreting the fall of Icarus to point to too much knowledge as a dangerous thing seems fairly obviously a weird claim given his more knowledgeable father's successful flight. Or Francis Bacon's truly tortured use of the Sphinx as an analogy for science : get the findings wrong and you'll come a cropper – this isn't wrong or inappropriate, but it seems dubious in the extreme that the early audiences would have seen it this way*. Even in antiquity, the idea that Hercules was actually a deep thinker and the boar he hunted represented "the common incontinence of men" is... strange.

* Saying that you think there's a similarity between [insert situation or character here] and [insert mythology here] is of course fine. It's the assertion that the mythology is supposed to represent something in particular which is problematic.

Though the strangeness is part of the appeal. Of course, such interpretations can be absolutely self-inconsistent, with the Amazons being variously interpreted as models of both chastity and promiscuity. Or my favourite example, in which the murderous murderess Medea flies off in a magical snake-pulled aerial chariot declaring that the gods do not exist. Since they don't aim to be true, the stories are often deceptively simple, readily lending themselves to endless reinterpretations, with no few contradictions along the way.

2) Complexity

Heroes, says Buxton, are "a special kind of mortal, whose behaviour challenges the boundaries of what humans can achieve". Many of the myths feature gods and heroes alike very prominently, but they're never much like the modern idea of heroes : they aren't archetypal personifications of virtue. The Greek stories are not morality tales, they don't set out to say "this is how you should act" or even "this is who you should imitate". It's up to the reader to decide when the hero is behaving respectfully and when they're being a massive arse : and most of the time they do both.

Take the Judgement of Paris. Paris is asked to choose which of three goddesses is the most beautiful. As a mortal he's chosen for this task because he's beautiful himself and also has a divine wife, so has experience in judging supernatural beauty. He selects Aphrodite, who in turn helps him abduct Helen, thus precipitating the calamitous Trojan War.

This is not an especially feminist tale according to many modern thinkers... but why not ? In the earliest versions, there's no way to choose between the goddesses based on their appearance, because divinity has no "real", set appearance, and consequently the early artists depicted them as all very similar. From the offset it's not the beauty contest it appears to be.

Paris needs some other criteria to make his impossible choice. So the goddesses bribe him with different options : power, skill, and sex. It's corrupt from the very beginning, explicitly unfair despite Paris being ostensibly qualified to make the judgement. The goddesses themselves receive nothing, because there's nothing Paris can give them. Paris isn't even choosing them at all; he doesn't get one of them as a reward. He's choosing instead only what matters to him. In short, it's nothing to do with the goddess' own attributes but everything to do with with what Paris wants.

He chooses sex : adulterous sex, no less. The result is war, disaster, and death.

Now this to me does not feel like a ringing endorsement of manly virtue but the exact opposite, a commentary on male weakness. Paris is a skilled warrior but his lack of ability to keep it in his pants brings about utter ruin*. His betrayal of his wife leads her to refuse him medical treatment when he needs it. No, to me this seems like a tale of natural male desire run amok, a cautionary tale that in no way promotes Paris' actions – rather the reverse ! Paris isn't one-dimensional, but he is a sexist pig, or at least a sex-crazed one, but the tale itself doesn't endorse this.

* Whether the other options on offer would have had better outcomes is an interesting counterfactual that isn't considered.

Or take Hercules. At heart he's a man with "huge biceps and a massive club", and there is a certain base appeal in a big strong manly man beating up monsters. But he's also, on occasion, capable of shrewd diplomatic negotiations and thinking his way through problems rather than just employing brute force. He's also radically reinterpreted. Sometimes his divinity is a reward for his Labours while sometimes he undertakes his quest only to atone for his accidental murder of his uncle. He's a mighty figure but at the beck and call of a weaker character who happens to have a hold on him. He can been seen as heroic but ordinary, but also even Christ-like in his divinity. He may not have the lasting metaphorical value of some of the other myths, but the ambiguity of the character definitely gives him staying power.

Finally Orpheus. Told he mustn't look back as he and Eurydice flee from Hades, his love for his wife overcomes him : sensing her distress, he can't avoid glancing back to check she's okay, confining her back to the underworld. It's a fundamental paradox of human behaviour, that the very thing we hold most dear can cause us to lose it. And of course Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. He has, he thinks, done nothing wrong, and always acted in good faith, but discovers he's committed the very worst of sins. It's a damn good bit of drama which speaks to a tragic paradox in human life. Complexity, indeed.

3) Primal metaphors

"The very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood", said Pratchett. A big part of the appeal of the Greek myths is that they resonate with us emotionally if not intellectually. All of us have faced difficult choices where we can't decide our own truest wants, even if they didn't have any divine consequences like Paris. All of us have have undertaken great labours even if they weren't of the Herculean variety. All of us have to deal with things which are, as for Tantalus, just out of reach.

And we often encounter sudden revelations that come from nowhere, much as Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus... which raises that issue of blood. An interesting detail in Hesiod's Theogony is that Athena is born from her pregnant mother who Zeus swallowed to prevent her from rearing dangerous children. This is an image as ludicrous and incomprehensible as it is viscerally terrifying. Myths have staying power because they combine this deep, physical-emotional resonance with the ordinary, everyday life we all experience.

I want to mention a couple of other myth-metaphors (mythtaphors ?) of particular resonance. The first is the story of Daedalus and Icarus. What's often forgotten here is that Daedalus murdered his own student/rival and had to flee to escape persecution (or rather prosecution), and then helped create the Minotaur by constructing a magnificent sex costume... to wit, a giant cow for Pasiphae to hide in while being impregnated by a bull. This extremely disturbing image is then countered as he creates not only lifelike statues (robots by some interpretation) but also the gift of flight, itself a mythical accomplishment. Buxton notes a common theme of linking of opposites : human with animal, statues with life, flying between earth and sky. Add to this the hubris of his son, who he genuinely loved, and the especial poignancy of the grief because Icarus was in competition but no-one but himself, and the story becomes wonderful precisely because of its complexity, tragedy, and violence.

But if the brutality in the Daedalus story is somewhat incidental, the same cannot be said for Medea. The villainy of the wronged mother who murders her children may have a moral complexity to it, but the heart of the appeal is that Medea commits horrifying actions. Her humanity, shown by her chronic indecisiveness, heightens the sense of monstrosity by making her more believable without taking away from the shocking nature of the crime. 

And yet Pratchett continued :

Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it’s being shed by the deserving), and then wondered where the stories went.

Which perhaps points to when revisionism simply doesn't work. While it's absolutely understandable that later interpretations have focused on her status as a woman and an outsider wronged and scorned, sometimes this would seem to miss the point. In one later retelling Medea basically does nothing at all, becoming friends with a woman she originally murdered. This would seem to be ludicrously bland and dull, sacrificing the whole point of the story for the sake of making a feminist statement. The point, surely, is that some things in a good story should be bad. And that women too can be evil, for that matter.

By contrast, History Hit's Medusa documentary presents a far more compelling case for a myth retold in ever-more unjustified misogynist tones, with Medusa originally being a giant, protective guardian figure and only later made into the evil demon-woman of modern popular depictions. Nevertheless, the appeal of the villains, that they are villains, should not be overlooked, especially given their complexity and depth. There's nothing wrong with stories that feature villains, and though there absolutely are misogynist aspects to some of the Greco-Roman myths, there are far better and less insulting ways of dealing with this than simply making all the women wonderful models of virtue.

Conclusions

One version of the myth of Prometheus has him cheating the gods not once but twice : stealing fire, and deceiving them into accepting the worse cut of the meat for sacrifices. But not everyone accepted this. Plato in particular didn't think that such things were even possible : of course the gods were good and of course they couldn't be deceived, or, as he went on at some length, placated with actual physical offerings of something as trivial as a side of beef. He also used the stories of the Amazons as proof of the viability of a more feminist society, whereas others used them more for misogynistic titillation (notably, while they were often said to cut off a breast, they were never depicted as having done so in paintings or sculpture).

This enormous versatility of the myths, that nobody would much care if you rewrote them, is part of their longevity. Not all changes are always to the good. Much of the political symbolism of this and that leader wanting to associate themselves with Hercules or Achilles is superficial and vain, and many artists have gone for unfathomable surrealism in trying to depict the indescribable. 

At their core, though, the myths couple primal themes with everyday reality. They make the normal world seem that little bit extraordinary. They join the predictable blandness of everyday life with the brutal and often bloody realm of fantasy. And they succeed in part with ambiguity : I'm particularly gratified to learn that the myth of Pandora's Jar, where she closes it to keep hope inside, isn't something with an obvious message that I've just missed but confusing to historians as well. Which is probably why we're still talking about it.

I've suggested at some considerable length that part of the appeal of Tolkien is in linking the worlds he describes with the cosmic, the very grandest of themes embodied in the otherwise basically-normal figures. This is true in part for the Greek myths too, but Buxton chooses here not to concentrate on the cosmology but the ordinary : the forces driving the characters, their flawed and complex personalities, and the similarities we infer with them. I've not given Buxton many direct quotes, but I'll let him summarise the nature and the appeal of myths :

One serviceable definition of myth is 'a socially powerful traditional story'... Myths are first and foremost thought experiments. What myths do [is] exaggerate, sharpen, and heighten issues taken from everyday life. About Oedipus' fate each one of us might say : there but for the twists of fortune go I.

A crucial difference between the world of mythology and the world of the everyday is that myths crystallise and dramatize and highlight and sharpen the concerns of everyday life, making the tensions more extreme, the disasters more catastrophic, and the achievements more glorious – and everything more memorable.

Another strategy, called 'rationalization', consisted in asking the question, 'What ordinary truths underlie these myths ?' ... The Hysperides were two ordinary women who owned sheep; Hydra was the name of a fort. This perspective can display a good deal of ingenuity and remains incredibly popular today (a centaur is just a confused memory of a man on a horse). But such an approach involves one fatal drawback : to regard myths as stories that simply reflect the ordinary world is to bleach out the very quality of imaginative daring – the departure from the everyday – that makes a myth a myth.

Do any myths reflect literal truths ? Quite probably. Does this matter ? Surely the most appropriate answer can only be, given the ambiguous versatility of a good myth : yes... and no. 

AI images are art, not theft

Far more for my own benefit than anyone else, I want to summarise my perspective from a recent and fruitless discussion. If that thread is anything to go by, then I suspect readers will already agree or disagree with my position, and my arguments here won't persuade anyone either way. Even so, I thought I should set it out, if to no other purpose than to get it out of my system*.

* For the record, in this case I respect my opponent very much, and they absolutely qualify as someone who I still view as credible despite disagreements.

The issue began as whether AI-generated images constitute art. The allegation is that they're not, which spiralled into the accusation that they're actually theft. I here refute both of these claims. There's some overlap between them, but I think I can separate them enough to cover them as different issues.

1) Yes, It's Art

A rigorous, all-encompassing definition of art is well beyond the scope of this post, and arguably impossible given its subjective nature. In fact even fully defining theft might be a bit of a challenge (as we'll see), but I think certain working definitions will do well enough for my purposes here.

As I detailed in the art-meets-science solarigraphy workshop last year :

How you visualise your data really does affect how you interpret it, not just aesthetically but also scientifically : some information is far easier to discern using one technique than another. I think none has a claim to be more valid or true than another, but each can be more appropriate for tackling different questions.

Nobody, including the many professional artists present, raised any issue with this. To me art involves choices, the creation of material for emotional self-expression. If you decide to dance or sing or paint or whatever, you've created something which expresses emotion, and you choose how to communicate your emotions to others. It doesn't really matter what your medium is, and it certainly doesn't matter if it's any good or not : bad art is still art. I would unhesitatingly accept that most AI-images are rubbish (with an annoying, hard-to-define "samey" look), but then so is most conventional art and indeed most content in any field of endeavour.

So what's different about AI-generated images with regards to choice and expression ? Nothing significant. When you write a prompt, you choose what to express. You make the further choice of selecting which of the generated images to share – which one either most closely meets or improves upon (or otherwise modifies in some beneficial way) your expectations. In some systems you even get at least a measure of direct control of the resulting image by using simple drawings to modify the result or generate the initial image. In many others you can refine the resulting image by continuing to respond via the prompt (and always you can simply reject all the output images, write a different prompt and begin from scratch if the output wasn't what you wanted). Just like all art, including writing, there is a measure of both accident and deliberate choice at work.

The counter-argument is that because the user does not (always) have any direct control over the image, then they are not the artist. They are creative only in regards to the prompt, the thinking goes, not the image itself. After all, "causing to be" is not the same as direct, deliberate creation.

But this is to woefully misunderstand the entire creative process. The process of accident and self-reflection is vital, not incidental. Tolkien, for example :

I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horselords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear on September 22nd.

This isn't rhetoric or hyperbole. The vast corpus that is the History of Middle Earth is full on almost every page of accidents in which Tolkien really does "discover", in a sense, what happened, or at least what he wanted to happen : until he set things down on the page, he didn't know for sure (and very often not even then).

Now it's true that you have less direct control in most cases of AI image-generation : the author doesn't move pixels around on the screen. But the analogy of commissioning a piece, claiming that those who pay the piper don't create the tune, doesn't work. I've been on the receiving-payment end of this myself many times and I know from direct first-hand experience that the the client absolutely can have creative control, as stipulated by the contract. "Causing to be" is indeed not the same as "create", this is true, but they're not mutually exclusive either. Without a client paying me money, some works I never would have created at all. Without them further directing me to "move this over there, make that bigger, make that bit more orange", the piece would have ended up quite different from the final result. Claiming that the client had no creative hand in the image, just because they themselves didn't move the pixels on the screen, seems to me to be quite plainly silly.

With AI, the user modifies the image with the only tool available to them : the prompt. They can refine this to the nth degree, just as with commissioning a piece. What's more, the deliberate choice to surrender some level of control is absolutely, unequivocally, unarguably, a valid artistic choice – again see the solarigraphy workshop post. Sometimes this is the very point of art, especially experimental art. Choosing not to choose is still a choice. Writing with a squiggly pen, or using a spirograph (if you arrange its patterns rather than just making one pattern and leaving it at that) : yep, the user is still expressing themselves. AI is just a tool, and the fact it operates differently and can carry out so much more of the process than a paintbrush is the very thing that makes it artistically interesting.

The claim seems to be that in this case, neither the user nor the AI is artistically creating the image, that the whole thing isn't even a creative process at all but an outright sham. I look aghast at this, with the idea that an image can be created without any sort of creativity at all just being incomprehensibly silly. It doesn't have to be the human, emotion-driven creativity, fair enough, but the very fact that something gets created that didn't exist before is self-evidently a creative act. It simply cannot be anything else.

The argument goes that AI doesn't adapt, interpret, or draw on inspiration. It simply regurgitates stolen content, doing nothing more than rearranging stolen data.

I think this is in no sense true. There simply must be adaptation in the sense of transforming text to an image : by its very nature, text is not the same as an image, and the one must be adapted into the other. And there is demonstrably interpretation in that many (sometimes radically) different images can result from the same prompt, just as human artists would have to interpret a request. And there is inspiration in that the models do not simply rearrange pixels, but extract generalised trends to apply them in specific and novel situations. This moves us to the second charge of theft and plagiarism.

2) No, It's Not Stolen

There is at least a legitimate question here as to where creativity ends if it's not strictly limited to the person directly creating the work. Is the guy handing an actor a sandwich responsible for creating Star Wars ? Nah, but what about George Lucas, who wrote and directed, but didn't act in any of the parts or directly create any of the sets or props* ? Clearly there are grey areas and I don't propose a full, generalised answer.

* Did he ? I dunno, but plenty of directors don't, so the specific example doesn't matter.

It's also true that patrons don't always have direct creative control : they can do, but this isn't necessary. Great artists of yesteryear flourished because people paid them money to get on with doing what they were good at without micromanaging them. But when this does happen, when somebody directs the precise details of how an image is constructed – not only what aspects it has but where, their style, arrangement and pose – how can they not be a part of the process ?

Clearly, the guy with the paintbrush or the actor speaking the role are involved too, and to my mind the only sensible interpretation for AI is that both the prompt-writer and the AI itself have claims of responsibility for what's produced. Nothing else makes sense.

But an AI model, it's argued, can be coaxed into reproducing its training data precisely. This is of no matter because humans can do the same, albeit to a more limited degree. Few of us can reproduce detailed images from scratch (but some people can !), but pretty much everyone can remember a perfectly exact quote or two. And people can create digital-level precision images, for example forgeries. These of course are rightly illegal, but we don't say that because the forger is so good that this invalidates the entire artistic process. 

Going further, of course even copy and paste can be used for theft, but this doesn't mean that this fundamental aspect of the digital world is inherently immoral or invalid. It's the use to which it's put that matters, not the process itself. It doesn't matter if someone has a photographic memory unless they use that to actually produce perfect forgeries which they go on to sell for money.

More often with AI, as with human artists, people don't want perfect recreations of what already exists. They want something new. That AI has a memory inspired by the training data doesn't mean it's stolen anything any more than merely visiting an art gallery constitutes stealing the pictures. Some semblance of the paintings are stored in your brain which, if you're an artist, you can then draw on (consciously and deliberately or otherwise) when you yourself create a new work. Just as with the AI, if you try to create an image in a particular style, you find general trends and apply them to the specifics. Nobody would describe it as theft if, because you once saw a Monet or a Turner in a gallery somewhere, something about your piece had a vague resemblance to a speeding train or some waterlilies.

There is, however, the issue of how the data was acquired in the first place. Exactly how human memory works is still far from understood, but each experience affects us and changes us a little bit, giving us new information from which to draw on. We accept this, encourage it, thrive on it, charging each other money to enjoy our creative works. Nobody says, "you can visit this gallery but you're forbidden to be inspired by anything". But they might well say, "don't take photographs", and of course they would certainly say, "don't take the paintings home with you".

In fact they'd rarely these days have a problem with taking photographs. Taking the pictures off the walls and digitally scanning them without permission would cause greater consternation, if only for the potential damage done. In general the quest to digitise everything is a good one though : it doesn't give you the infinite analogue precision of the original but it can give you enough to be useful. Art which is inherently digital is different, as there the "copy" and the original can be literally identical (caveats about original files often being vector formats notwithstanding). Would this copy then constitute theft ?

My answer is sometimes yes, but not necessarily. If a gallery themselves puts a digital scan online and freely available, or allows people to take pictures, then they have no reason to expect security for the digital copies. They simply have to take it as a given that people might use this for any purpose because to impose specific restrictions on what anyone can access is sheer folly. The obvious solution for controlling access (which I myself use) is to limit the resolution of the images they put online, or paywall it, and forbid taking photographs. And by this token, if AI companies have not paid for the access rights to copyrighted content, then even though what they've done amounts to copying rather than taking a physical product, then it can be constituted as theft. What they've done is not steal the product itself, but steal access rights. This is still taking without permission, i.e., theft*.

* There is of course a very important moral difference between increasing access rights without permission (making a copy, and/or making that copy available more widely) versus taking a physical product – the latter denies access rights to the original owner, which is hardly the same as giving more rights to more people.

It's a bit like paying to access a gallery versus sneaking in after hours for free. Authors and owners surely have some rights to control access, not just the thing itself. Perhaps a better analogy : it's like breaking in to take high resolution scans without permission. But if they're just paid for regular access rights, and/or ingested the vast amounts of freely available online data that anyone can access anyway, and this gets copied as part of the training process... then no, this not theft. Neither the original product itself nor access has been compromised in any way. This would be like erecting a statue in your own front yard and declaring that anyone who took a photograph was a thief, or even saying that if anyone even looked at it then they would be guilty of stealing the image.

That's my take then. AI images constitute art because they express human choices and will, the only novelty here being their particular method. Using publicly available data for the training doesn't constitute theft because it doesn't change the original products or affect their access, provided the AI companies paid for access in the usual way. If they didn't, of course that's theft and they shouldn't have done that.

Seems perfectly straightforward to me.