Where Achilles Loses It

The Iliad Translated by Samuel Butler by Homer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(As always, I'm ranking this work of literature by how much I enjoyed reading it, how much fun it was, how interesting I found it. I am not gauging it's worth--I don't know how to do that. Not gonna try.)

My review of the Iliad: I liked it some. It's okay.

I don't remember if I've read it all the way through before, though I've definitely read big chunks at different times. I got this new hardcover version of an old (1898) translation as a gift, and though I may still read one of the new translations sometime, I decided to start here.

I thought it was not too bad--speaking both of the original work and the English translation. My least favorite part of the translation was that he used the names of the Roman gods instead of Greek--Jove, not Zeus; Minerva, not Athena; Juno, not Hera; and so on. Apollo was still Apollo.

I kinda forgot how narrow the story was. This takes us from Achilles deciding not to fight anymore to Hector's funeral (sorry! Spoilers!). The origins of the war and the first 9 years are skipped over; the end of the war isn't reached. What we do have is a lot of fighting and arguing, and naming of men as they die and which gruesome way it comes to them.

The parts I found most interesting were the places where they talked about the allies that came from this region or that city, on both sides of the war, and when they referred to towns and cities taken by the Achaeans before reaching Troy and the events of those campaigns. (The woman Briseis was was taken as a prize of war in one of those earlier fights, as were many slaves and treasures.) To be honest, it's this background stuff and the everyday life of the region I'm most interested in, like how much they knew about other lands, how much they traded with neighbors, what languages were spoken nearby, how the societies were set up, things like that, and in the midst of this war story we get some clues.

As far as storytelling and modern expectations, where we look for tension and a conflict that the main character tries to work through, where they succeed or fail on their merits, the Iliad is disappointing. This is largely due to the years separating them from us, and part of the issue is that they have different literary expectations. For example, it's clear that a lot of the background would be well-known to ancient listeners long before they heard any of the Iliad. Many of the characters that we barely get to know or know only by name could be heroes in other stories that Homer's audiences already loved, like Spiderman showing up in an Avengers movie. We don't have their background knowledge, so any pleasure we should have taken from that name-dropping goes whoosh over my head. And back then they might have been cool with all of the Olympian meddling going on, but I hated that. The gods move people around, deciding who wins today and who wins tomorrow, who lives and dies, so that striving makes no difference. Intention, bravery, effort all become pointless as far as storytelling goes if the gods are deciding everything. In a way, the story that matters is just what falls in the cracks between the interventions of the gods.

Priam begging Achilles to return his son's body to him is the most human and entertaining (IMO) part of the story. Even this was preordained, but at least their conversation is in their own words, and it's very dramatic and sad. That scene was probably the most similar to modern literature you could find in the whole epic, and it was the one that worked best for me.

I found things to entertain me in this, and some parts of it are straight up engaging on their own. Lots of it is less fun, tbh, but anybody picking up an ancient piece of literature expects that.

My recommendation? If you think you might want to read this, look for one of the new translations. You may enjoy it.

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Where Hiawatha Shows Us How It's Done

The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quite a bit. As far as epic poetry goes, this is very readable and doesn't require a lot of footnotes or outside sources to make perfectly comprehensible. The stories it tells are naturally entertaining, leaning heavily toward mythology, though there are often moments of realism interspersed with something more like tall tales. Hiawatha feels usually like a normal human, living with his wife in a tent and going out hunting on cold days, but then he puts on moccasins that let him cover miles with every step, or he fights with an unbeatable immortal (rather like Jacob wrestling all night with an angel). Friends of his die, and the people suffer from disease, all very realistic and everyday in the worst way, but then they get some supernatural help. It's an interesting mix. (It reminded me of Monkey, Waley's version of Journey to the West, with its central character gaining in supernatural strengths as the novel goes on.)

It's funny to me that I just happened to read the Kalevala of Finland just before this, because Longfellow was a fan of that work and consciously modeled his epic after that one. There are a lot of parallels in landscapes, topics, and episodes, and I'll admit that made me think about the similarity, the equality, of very different people on two continents in some ancient time--say, 800 years ago--doing their best to survive in a cold, wet land, hunting and fishing and marrying and fighting. I pictured Hiawatha in his canoe he built alongside Väinämöinen in the boat he built, imagining them existing in the same world simultaneously, and that was somehow kinda mind-blowing. I'm still processing why.

There are clearly some concerns (or so we think now, in a way I doubt many people considered at the time) with a white English-speaking American telling the myths of a native people, reworking them and free-styling them to suit himself, which is what he did. It's pretty bold, and many would say not his place. Let them tell their own stories, we would say. Fair enough. But the one advantage Longfellow has over genuine native myth is that his work is accessible to an audience that has a background like mine, and it's only then that it can have the power to affect me. (And others.) It's not that I ever doubted the humanity of either Ojibway people or Finns, or questioned the equality between them and all of us, but unspoken assumptions create habits of thought we aren't even aware of. I always kept European history and Native history in two different timelines in my head, like they're two different worlds. Being forced to consider the parallels brought the two worlds into collision in my head. For example: the lengths that Hiawatha must go to in order to win a wife from among the Dakota people was reminiscent of Ilmarinen among the Northern people, completing impossible feats to win a wife. There's a lot like that in the story, and it refreshed my thinking. It's something like realizing your parents were just like you once, and you see them in a new way. Similar feeling.

I liked the heartbeat trochaic meter of the poem (BUM-bum, BUM-bum, BUM-bum, BUM-bum), as it put me in mind of native chants and drumbeats, though I think some people find the rhythm a bit too heavy. I also liked the lack of rhyme, because that would have been intense... not a fan. Anyway, the Kalevala was in trochaic tetrameter, which was Longfellow's reason to choose it, but I thought it worked. Even reading it silently, I kept the beat going in my mind, and it added something to my appreciation for the work. I don't usually feel that way about meter.

One disappointing aspect of this is the way it feels incomplete. We have Hiawatha disappearing into the west, so we have a kind of closure, but the episodes in his life feel sporadic and random with big gaps. It's like we got a half or a third of the story, and the rest just has to stay untold, like the unfinished Canterbury Tales or something. Longfellow leaves his readers with a lot of questions unanswered. In addition to that, I have quibbles with a few other elements of the work, ones that can be traced to the time and place he wrote, and I hardly need elaborate on them as they're so easily guessed.

Overall, this is a pretty entertaining read, easily accomplished in little bites over a few weeks or big bites in a few days. Before this, all I knew about it was what the Smothers Brothers told me, and I was a little disappointed that we didn't get very much about his mittens here. Overcoming that, I ended up liking this enough to recommend it.

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The Great Finnish Epic

The Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was expecting something else. TBH, I didn't much care for it, and it wasn't a fun read. It was, however, interesting and informative in a bunch of ways, which is why I gave it a 3. But I'm honestly surprised at how many people gave this a 5. We must be reading for very different purposes.

There are a lot of passages and sections that are clever and surprising and meaningful, interesting for its use of language, for the clever writing that one finds in the original. There's a vitality and an immediacy in the language that is very compelling. And as far as I can see, the English translation is fine, both readable and clear. In addition to these virtues, I liked getting a feel for past centuries in Finland and the land around there. It was interesting to read about people skiing or taking sleighs or going places by boat, people using saunas, tending flocks, making beer, hunting in the woods, fishing in rivers, fixing meals, and having big weddings. Snow and ice and slush and weather are all big in these stories, and it creates a picture in my head of old Finland.

The stories suggest a lot of things about the people and how they see their place in the world, and some of that is positive but a lot is negative: serfs and servants, for example, are pretty low and aren't given a thought. Women aren't much better off, even in wealthier homes. They get wooed, if they're lucky, but then get put to work as soon as they're married. Other women just get abducted, tossed in Lemminkäinen's sleigh, and carried off to live in his house. Old women were more likely than not to be referred to as hags. People to the north, with their witches using their power against the Finns, are feared and reviled, though sometimes their women are attractive enough to become wives. And pretty much all foreigners are disliked.

The stories read like mythology, with powerful characters who can work magic, like forging anything you can imagine, or winning a battle with a song, even bringing people back from the dead. And like so many stories of the gods, they get away with very bad behavior. Nobody shows much of a conscience in any of the stories. Some of this sounds more like tall tales, and I wonder if bits of the Kalevala aren't behind some of Paul Bunyan or Babe the Blue Ox. (I should google it.) But it's confusing like those kinds of stories, too; these powerful men ("wanton" Lemminkäinen, the smith Ilarinen, Väinämöinen, and others) can at times do almost anything they think of, wielding strange magics, especially using song, or can get the gods to do things for them, like changing the weather, but at other times they're vulnerable and afraid of things just like regular mortals and have to run and hide from their enemies. Their magic sometimes deserts them, it seems.

The biggest disappointment for me was finding very little that was heroic here. I like the fantasy feel of witches and magic, but I expected, knowing that Tolkien was inspired by this, to find heroic leaders of men doing great things. I thought I would see a version of Tolkien's elves. Instead, it's a lot more like Greek myth, with a lot of bad behavior--theft, abduction, assault, child abuse, murder, neglect, and senseless violence--that just can't be justified or excused. These are bad guys. I don't want to know them. I mean, I get it: folktales and myths just come to us that way. Nobody vets these things. Nobody really is the author of them. But it was, as I say, not what I expected.

I don't know how many people could pick this up and read it just for fun, just as a story, like at the beach or on the plane. Some, probably. But the people who would read something like this to see what it's about, to learn something about literary history, is probably quite a bit larger. I know a few readers like that, especially among my teacher friends, and they might have a go at it. For those curious people, I offer a tentative recommendation.

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Where Manohar Searches for Madhumalati

Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance by Mir Sayyid Manjhan Shattari Rajgiri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Okay, so what happened was I was looking for historical romances from other countries--not Italy or France or England, I mean--and eventually found a little information online about this epic poem. Otherwise, I'd never heard of it. It was kinda chance, but kinda on purpose, and I'm glad it turned out to be very cool.

Based on questions like "Is it fun to read?" and "Is it a lot of work?" and "Do you learn much reading this?" I'd score this a 4/5, almost a 5/5. I absolutely can't speak to its value or even how "good" it is; maybe then it's a 5. I dunno. But for me, it was quite entertaining and instructive. The front matter really didn't help me enjoy it, and unless you're studying this, or studying Sufi thought in general, I'd just skip it all. Maybe come back to it after reading to see if it speaks to you, but plowing through the long introduction before reading the actual poem almost made me drop the book.

I'm glad I didn't. As a story, sort of a fantasy, it's very cool. Prince Manohar is young and full of virtue, and he's so handsome that a group of nymphs watching him sleep wonder if there is any young woman as beautiful as him. They settle on a likely name, the eponymous princess Madhumalati, but to be sure they decide to compare them. Magically, they transport him, still asleep in his bed, to the princess's bedroom. This sets off the action of the whole story, because they wake up, freak out, fall in love, mess around a little (not too much), and then fall asleep. Then the nymphs separate them again, and they both are despondent when they wake up.

The rest of the story is about them trying to get back together, and it includes a sea voyage and angry demon and other dangers, including Madhumalati being turned into a bird. Both the young lovers get help along the way and eventually find their way back to each other. All of this is filled with (to a western reader like me) exotic settings, fantastic celebrations, unexpected customs, strange supernatural creatures, and a very different worldview, and that's the instructive part of the work. After a while, you understand that, yes, of course he waited outside the city while someone went ahead to notify the king that he has arrived, and of course the people lined the streets, and obviously every caste is considered and made part of the wedding celebration...

Stuff like that. The culture of a time and place unknown to me is revealed a little bit by such literature, and I find that very interesting, well worth my energy to try to understand it. Not that I get it all--I surely don't. I don't think that's necessary unless you want to dig deep. There's a great deal of Sufi symbolism intentionally embedded in all this, and the reader is free to investigate it in the introduction and end notes, but I don't think it's necessary for enjoying the story.

As far as the translation: I like the way it's done, keeping the basic format of ten short lines and two longer ones, written in clear, non-rhyming English with a hint rhythm but nothing forced. (Or so it seemed to me.) There was nothing jarring in the language to remind me it's a translation, so I think it's pretty good.

This might not be of interest to most readers, but I'm sure there are more who would find something to enjoy here. I think the historical romance and sort-of fantasy elements get it close to a fit for me, and the curiosity I have about the literature of distant lands and times does the rest, so maybe readers with some of those characteristics should take a look.

I hope you do. And shoot me recommendations of your own.

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Where We See Whose Fault It All Is

Paradise Lost by John Milton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's a bunch of stuff I read in college that I didn't like, but I remember liking this. I've barely touched it in the forty years since, but I decided to give it a second go. You know what? I still liked it.

The first time, I found an annotated version written by Isaac Asimov, and it was super helpful. That guy knew a bunch of stuff. (I tried to find it again, but the only copies are super expensive.) This time I just read it without supports, and I still found it very readable, especially considering the time, coming out in 1668.

Written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, it just reads (to me) like everyday English, but that's probably because the author was brilliant. Sure, there are a lot of historical and Biblical references that I only kinda knew, but it doesn't impede comprehension. It helps that it isn't contorted into rhyming lines, IMO.

He had to make a case for that, though. In fact, it cracks me up that he had to write an introductory page explaining how all the really good epics in Italian and Spanish are also unrhymed, as well as the best drama. At the end of this introduction, he says:

This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.

I agree, but it's kinda funny to see it.

Most of the first half of the epic, maybe even two-thirds, is very entertaining from a fantasy point of view. It has lots of action and cool settings, lots of supernatural stuff that mere humans can usually never get a glimpse of, all packed into a tight plot. You get hell from the demons' perspective, with the fiery lake and Pandemonium, and their view of their fall. Their unrepentant evil is perversely entertaining. This is followed by Satan breaking out of hell and into Eden to cause trouble. Then, kinda out of order, we get Raphael explaining to Adam all about the fighting up in heaven, telling how the war went, how the angels eventually won by pulling up whole mountains and dumping them on the rebels. Then he tells all about how the world was created.

The imagery is very effective. It looks like a big, bright superhero movie in my head.

From that point, however, it gets pretty preachy. I almost wonder if he didn't see himself writing a bit of pseudo-scripture... Eve listens to the snake and eats the fruit, and then Adam figures he might as well do the same, and then comes the lesson. Milton has to work really hard to make the language found in Genesis--things like "in that day you will die"--make sense, since they don't actually die that die. And he has to explain why Eden was booby-trapped in the first place. (Seems cruel, doesn't it?) Also, when Michael comes to explain to Adam how badly they screwed up and how they will have to leave, he takes time to soften it by showing him all of earth's future. But it's got so much death--Cain and Abel, the great flood, wars--it's a bit hard to see why Adam is so psyched about it. I found it depressing, but whatever.

With Michael explaining more and more stuff to Adam in the last couple books, Milton goes into a lot of doctrine, taking the reader to church, and it's the dullest part. Really drags. But he had to do it, I guess.

Taken as a whole, this a very entertaining long poem. Unfortunate that the bad guys are so much more entertaining than the good guys, but I guess that's how it works.

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Where Orlando Loses It but Gets It Back

By Ludovico Ariosto - Orlando Furioso (Oxford World's Classics) (1999-02-12) [Paperback] by Ludovico Ariosto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you've got the time, this is amazing.

Partly, I wanted to track down whatever stuff Don Quixote had been reading, see what he loved so much, and this is one of those chivalric stories (a long epic poem, actually) that he supposedly read. And yeah, it's very cool. I'd like to have a chat with Don Quixote about it.

This poem by Ariosto is the continuation of another Italian poem--Orlando Innamorato, or Orlando in Love, [or Roland, actually, to use a more familiar form of his name], written by Boiardo--but that poem was less successful and has received much less attention over time than this continuation. The Orlando here is the same Roland we might know better from The Song of Roland, the story of Charlemagne's withdrawal from Muslim Spain back to France, where Roland and his men, the rear guard of the army, are ambushed by a Muslim army (or a Basque army, depending on the version) and Roland is reluctant to use his horn to call for help. This epic brings together many of stories found in other forms that are collectively called the Matter of France, mostly stories of Charlemagne's knights. The so-called Matter of Britain, mostly King Arthur stories, is thrown into the mix.

In general, this tells how certain key knights (including women, several of whom are nearly unbeatable) participate in the war between North African Muslims on the one side, who are trying to take Paris, and the multi-national force of Christians led by Charlemagne, who are trying to defend it. Most of the story, though, follows individuals as they go on separate quests and fight strangers and save maidens or warriors or whoever from monsters and sorceresses and all sorts of bad guys, especially the type who will stand on bridges and challenge all comers. The story starts with Orlando in love with Angelica, though she doesn't love him back (because they drank from different magic streams in the original poem by Boiardo) and he is chasing after her. Other knights are just as in love with her, which she doesn't enjoy. The "furioso" part of the book (meaning crazy, not angry) comes in the middle when Orlando learns Angelica has fallen in love with someone else and has gone off to live with him. (She leaves the story at that point.) He loses his reason, rips off his clothes, and starts tearing up the countryside, killing people everywhere he goes.

(The English knight Astolfo goes to save Orlando, with direction from a kind sorcerer. He rides a hippogriff to Africa, where he helps the Christian king Prester John with his harpy problem and has many adventures, eventually being allowed to ride Elijah's flaming chariot up to the moon where lost things, like Orlando's wits, can be found. He eventually restores them to Orlando, who as a result no longer loves Angelica.)

One of the best passages, earlier on in the poem, tells how Angelica is captured (even though she is a top fighter) and is chained to a rock like Andromeda to be a sacrifice to the sea creature called an orc.

The orc, seeing the shadow cast by the spreading wings flitting here and there across the water, left its certain prey awaiting it on shore and started a furious chase, curving and coiling, after the elusive one instead. Ruggiero dropped down and struck a blow, like an eagle dropping from the sky when it has spotted a snake weaving through the grass, or lying on a bare stone in the sun...

Ruggiero--supposedly an actual ancestor of the poet's patrons, the Este family, even though he was a Muslim--defeats the orc and rescues her from the rock with the help of the hippogriff that Astolfo later rides to Africa. He gives her a ring of invisibility and she uses it to go hide from all the guys trying to find her.

So many modern fantasy elements and tropes are found here that, with a little revision and updating of some 500-year-old stylist things, it could be on the shelves beside LotR or Wheel of Time or Mistborn books. Like a grandpa fantasy near it's descendants.

The original ~40,000-line poem in Italian was in ottava rima stanzas, which rhymed abababcc. There are English versions that attempt a similar format, but that's a terrible thing to do to a nice poem. This translation is given in prose, split into paragraphs, written in a way that doesn't do violence to the poem's meaning. The only sign of the original format is a / placed between stanza breaks. This translation is very readable with only a hint of quaintness, and it has an extensive annotated index in the back for those of us who need help remembering who is Brandimart (a knight who is Orlando's best friend) and who is Bradamant (a female knight who ends up marrying Ruggiero) and things like that.

I read this in tiny pieces. That worked for me. I don't know about other readers. In any case, I really enjoyed it. 5 stars.

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Where Tasso Reads Like Fantasy

Jerusalem Delivered: An English Prose Version by Torquato Tasso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I definitely liked this more than I expected to.

This English version of the 16th Century Italian epic is in rendered in prose, which I always prefer, and the translator has made it both wonderfully comprehensible (compared to say, The Faerie Queen in the original quaint English) and decently poetic. That makes it simple to enter into the narrative, and I found that really engaging.

Naturally, an account of the First Crusade from the perspective of a Christian author in the 1500s will be partial and prejudiced, inclined toward a double standard and committed to religious bigotry. Yep. It is all that. No avoiding it. In some ways, though, Tasso does a decent job of portraying the Muslim characters, the villains and enemies in the story, as humans just as capable of greatness and honor and sacrifice and love as the heroes. This is at least a little corrective for the inevitable chauvinism.

As far as plot and action, the poem is awesome and strangely modern. It unspools so much like speculative fiction that it's impossible to miss the through-line from epic poetry and romance to epic fantasy, and I found myself reading it much like I would JRR Tolkien or Tad Williams. In addition to castles and palaces, pitched battles and single combat, hidden vales and lonely beaches, fallible heroes and love at first sight, warrior women and soothsayers, it has sorcerers and demons and enchanted forests and magical islands. It's a fun story with a thousand creative touches.

Like Paradise Lost, some of the most exciting and compelling parts involve the spirits of hell who are called for a time to harry the crusaders. Satan, here referred to as Pluto, is described this way in canto 4:

A fearsome majesty in his fierce countenance increases the terror and makes him even more proud: his eyes burn red, and his gaze glowers infected with poison like an ill-omened comet; his huge beard envelops his chin and shaggy and thick comes down over his hairy chest, and like deep-yawning maelstrom his mouth stands open, filthy with black blood.

And here is the scene when he calls the spirits of hell:

The piercing sound of the Tartarean trumpet calls up the inhabitants of the eternal shades. The black capacious caverns tremble and the blind air echoes to that reverberation; nor ever so strident plummets the lightning from heaven's supernal regions nor ever so stricken trembles the earth when she locks up vapors in her pregnant womb.

Straightway the deities of the Abyss in various troops come running from all sides to the lofty portals. Oh how strange, oh how horrible the shapes! how much of terror and death is in their eyes! Some print the earth with beastly tracks, and on a human head have twining snakes for hair; and behind them writhes an immense tail that like a whip coils and uncoils itself.

There are many other exciting supernatural touches in the story, but there are also many human moments, quieter moments, when individuals are trying to decide what to do, whether to fight or to search out a lost love, whether to indulge in private disputes or put aside pride to commit to a greater cause. Despite the miraculous events and supernatural intervention, there is still a core of humanity in the epic, telling the story of men struggling with the competing demands of desire, conscience, faith, and frailty. Tancred and Godfrey and Armida and Erminia and Argante and Solyman and many others are quite human, filled with their own wishes and desires even while they're competing in a terrible war to control Jerusalem.

It is certainly a useful view into the minds of men 500 years ago, but it's also an entertaining bit of art that, despite its flaws, stands on its own as an absorbing work of imagination.

Historians and fantasy nerds can both find a lot to engage them here. Recommended.

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Where I Found It Quite Epic, Actually

The Lusiads by Luís de Camões
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this to be a very readable and entertaining epic poem, and while it represents a problematic period in history, it is remarkable art as well as a unique look into the 16th century mind.

The edition is excellent, with a great translation. It is still organized by 8-line stanzas, but instead of trying to make all the lines rhyme (which I would hate), the translator opted to only rhyme the final couplet of each stanza. It all reads like decently poetic prose, and with the bit of rhyming it still feels enough like a poem that you don't forget what you're reading. Nothing feels forced in the translation, which means that the reader isn't stumbling over tortured rhymes. Nice.

Also, this edition has a useful introduction and very helpful notes in the back. I tended to read with a finger in both parts, which maybe isn't ideal, but it is much nicer than ugly notes cluttering up every page. IMO. (Of course, if you really want to get the full experience, you could learn Portuguese and read the original. I don't feel like I have that kind of energy.)

Speaking of the work itself, I found it interesting and more dramatic than I expected. I'm not a big fan of introducing Greek gods into a story about overtly Christian men, but it makes sense considering the models the poet was following--especially Homer. The ocean voyage and interaction with various peoples just make a fun story. (My favorite part is where Venus arranges an island full of nymphs to be in the path of the ships on their homeward journey, rewarding the sailors with every comfort imaginable. It's pretty explicit, surprisingly.)

The story comes with its own set of problems, though. It tends to argue in favor of colonization, treating it as an honorable act, one bringing glory to Portugal. I found it fascinating to hear the thoughts of someone unironically supporting that kind of projection of power, but it's clear that even then some amount of rationalization is going on. Comões talks about the abuse of power in a number of places, condemning tyrants ("Passing laws in the interest of the king while the rights of the people are decreasing") and those who "uphold the law only to harass and despoil the poor." He talks about the cruelty of war, including how it affects those subjugated, but the key is that he seems only to really care when it's war between Christian nations:

You lay claim to other Christian lands
As if your own were not enough
So why not to Barbary and Egypt
Historic enemies of the sacred name?

Ultimately, it's spreading the religion which is used to legitimize empire-building, and I might be reading into it, but it seems like even the poet doesn't totally buy it, feeling a bit in the wrong; but colonizing and controlling and exploiting people that European Christians don't care about all that much isn't bad enough to worry about.

In any case, as poetry and story-telling, it's entertaining and impressive, and as a glimpse into the mind of another human in an important historic period, I found it enlightening.

Well worth reading, if you've got that kind of time. :)

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