I see that it has been nearly three weeks since my last post. My intention is to 'blog once or twice a week.

I've just finished R. K. Narayan's abridgement of the Mahabharata. The plot is very similar to Peter Brook's film of the Mahabharata, which makes me think that Brook must have used this as an outline. Almost everything in here is in the film, and vice versa. The Mahabharata itself is eight times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and has a great many more episodes, even ones that are fairly central to the main theme, that aren't included here. But the book is a good skeleton on which to hang further readings of the Mahabharata. I love this material as much as the Iliad or the Ulster Cycle. I have the feeling that these great battle epics must have ancient Indo-European roots, though I don't really have any evidence for that. (Surely someone must have addressed this at some point.) I also suspect that the Battle of Arderydd and the connected stories in Welsh tradition of the Gwyr y Gogledd, the men of the North, were on their way to becoming an epic cycle. These stories survive in fragments of stories, in the triads, in poetry, and in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini. I'd like to try and put it all back together some day.