Question: mythology preservation

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems that greco-roman mythology has been preserved to the present day much better than celtic or norse mythology.

My initial thought was that this was due to those respective cultures literary, but as far as i am aware we have few to no original documents from antiquity, and most everything that we do have are medieval and renaissance copies.

So why did those myths get preserved while we only have bits and bobs of most other mythologies? Did they consider greco-roman gods some how "less pagan" than those of the britons, irish, norse, slavs, rtc?
 
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems that greco-roman mythology has been preserved to the present day much better than celtic or norse mythology.

My initial thought was that this was due to those respective cultures literary, but as far as i am aware we have few to no original documents from antiquity, and most everything that we do have are medieval and renaissance copies.

So why did those myths get preserved while we only have bits and bobs of most other mythologies? Did they consider greco-roman gods some how "less pagan" than those of the britons, irish, norse, slavs, rtc?

They are medieval and renaissance copies of Greek and Latin literary works, which were put into writing in Antiquity already, and then copied (or preserved) and then printed to us (with more or less convoluted paths). Actually only a fraction of what was written in Antiquity has been preserved through copies; for instance, we only have a handful of the hundreds of tragedies and comedies performed yearly, for centuries, in Athens alone. We know that the Epic cycle of the Trojan War included more long poems, of which only the two attributed to Homer have survived. And so on.
The Irish and Norse (specifically Icelandic) pagan traditions have been written down and copied through a rather deliberate cultural operation (as far as I can tell, for the Norse tradition it was primarily the work of a single genius, Snorri Sturluson; but he wasn't isolated) that in both cases was done by Christians, with all the possible distortions this may bring. As far as I can tell, for other traditions the recollection was a lot more haphazard, with single elements recorded (o re-elaborated) in Medieval times, but with no attempt to preserve a full memory. In no cases there were genuinely Pagan written sources to refer to, as far as I know, and if there were (as it may be possible for Germanic mythologies at least, since a writing system indeed was present) they were entirely lost in their original form.
 
The problem is that in Celtic cultures, druids were prohibited from writing down any oral tradition. In the case of the Slavs, written language basically arrived with Christianization, which results in the same problem.
 
The problem is that in Celtic cultures, druids were prohibited from writing down any oral tradition. In the case of the Slavs, written language basically arrived with Christianization, which results in the same problem.
There was a different kind of problem with the Slavs. Still, we have heard the legends about Fiann and Cuchulainn, but the sliac traditions once, twice, were deceptive. The fact is that the Scandinavian and Gaelic legends were written by those people who were directly connected with the cultural traditions of those peoples - Snorri Sturluson was a skald (though baptized), and Irish monks were often from local tribes. The basis of the Russian clergy consisted of the Greeks and Bulgarians, who disdained the "barbarous" customs.

By the way - the druids still had a letter (Ogham), the Rusich didn't have it.
 
The problem is that in Celtic cultures, druids were prohibited from writing down any oral tradition. In the case of the Slavs, written language basically arrived with Christianization, which results in the same problem.
I agree. As Nordic tradition was recorded, you had the biblical issue of "no false gods," creating a watered-down version of traditional mythology. That issue, of course, did not affect ancient Greece or Rome.
 
I'd say it's as much an issue of both an oral tradition and a loss of continuity in that tradition-oral traditions can survive very long in the right circumstances(famously, there are oral accounts of the eruption that caused Crater Lake that go back 10,000+ years), and obviously traditions that are reduced in scope can survive in writing, but the combined loss is a lot. Also, there's a fairly substantial corpus of Celtic and Norse myth that survives no? I know in Wales, maybe Scotland, and Ireland there are quite a few mythological texts, as well as of course the Eddas.
 
I think a another issue is how much Myths was not codified till much later, and often was different from one city, or region to another. Upper and Lower Egypt had it share of differences.

The Norse Myths was written down by Christian monks near the end of the Christianization of Scandinavia, so there is that.
 
The environment may be one factor out of many. In Northern Europe it was common to write short messages on sticks. These sticks were not kept, instead they were left to rot. Allthough this was the routine some writing sticks have been found in Norway and Russia.
 
I remember hearing that the set of Greek mythology that has been passed down to us skews heavily toward the mythology of the urban elite generally, and to the Athenian versions of those myths within that. We know that myths could vary substantially between cities and authors, and sometimes between different works by the same author. IIRC there are also indications that the ancient greek religion, as practiced by common people of the time, could be very different from the religion we think of today. Basically, ancient Greek mythology might not be nearly as well preserved as it seems.
 
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