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Mythology & Folklore Hard ⚡ 10 Questions ⏱️ ~7 Mins +100 XP

Epics and Where They Come From

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Almost every literate culture produced a long poem about its own beginnings. These are ten of the ones that survived.

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~7m

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Hard

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+100

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About this topic

An epic is usually the oldest thing a culture has written down about itself, and often it was spoken for centuries first. The Epic of Gilgamesh reached us on clay tablets in cuneiform, some of them close to four thousand years old. Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that was nearly lost to a library fire in 1731. The Kalevala was not written at all until a Finnish doctor spent years walking through Karelia collecting the songs from people who still sang them. That mixture of oral and written transmission is the interesting part. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana circulated in performance long before anyone fixed a text, and versions in Tamil, Javanese and Thai differ from the Sanskrit in ways that reflect where they were told. The Epic of Sundiata was carried by West African griots for centuries as a professional oral inheritance. What survives is rarely the original, and usually the version somebody decided to write down.

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Epics and Where They Come From: all 10 questions and answers

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1The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down in which region?
- A Egypt
- B Anatolia
- C The Indus valley
- D Mesopotamia Correct
Answer: D. Mesopotamia

Why: It survives on clay tablets, the oldest of them close to four thousand years old. Its flood narrative has clear parallels with later accounts from the region.
2In which language is the poem Beowulf written?
- A Middle English
- B Gothic
- C Old English Correct
- D Old Norse
Answer: C. Old English

Why: It survives in a single manuscript that was damaged by fire in 1731. The story itself is set in Scandinavia rather than in England.
3Which widely read shorter text sits inside the Mahabharata?
- A The Panchatantra
- B The Bhagavad Gita Correct
- C The Upanishads
- D The Rig Veda
Answer: B. The Bhagavad Gita

Why: It takes the form of a conversation held just before a battle. The Mahabharata as a whole is among the longest poems known anywhere.
4The Shahnameh, completed around AD 1010, is the national epic of which country?
- A Iran Correct
- B Turkey
- C Armenia
- D Georgia
Answer: A. Iran

Why: Ferdowsi worked on it for roughly three decades. It runs to some fifty thousand couplets and traces both mythical and historical kings.
5The Kalevala was compiled in the nineteenth century from oral poetry collected in which country?
- A Iceland
- B Estonia
- C Hungary
- D Finland Correct
Answer: D. Finland

Why: Elias Lonnrot gathered the songs on field trips, mostly in Karelia. The work fed directly into the growing Finnish national movement.
6The Popol Vuh records the mythology of which people?
- A The Inca
- B The Zapotec
- C The K'iche' Maya Correct
- D The Aztecs
Answer: C. The K'iche' Maya

Why: The surviving version was written in the K'iche' language using the Latin alphabet in the sixteenth century. It includes a creation account and the story of the Hero Twins.
7Who wrote the Aeneid?
- A Lucan
- B Virgil Correct
- C Ovid
- D Horace
Answer: B. Virgil

Why: It follows a Trojan survivor to Italy and ties the origins of Rome to the Trojan war. He left it unfinished and reportedly asked for it to be burned.
8The Song of Roland is set during the reign of which ruler?
- A Charlemagne Correct
- B Clovis
- C Otto I
- D Alfred the Great
Answer: A. Charlemagne

Why: It describes a rearguard action in the Pyrenees, greatly enlarged from a minor skirmish in 778. The poem was written roughly three centuries after the event.
9In which language were the Ramayana and the Mahabharata originally composed?
- A Pali
- B Tamil
- C Prakrit
- D Sanskrit Correct
Answer: D. Sanskrit

Why: Both circulated in performance long before they were fixed in writing. Retellings in Tamil, Javanese and Thai differ from the Sanskrit in significant ways.
10The Epic of Sundiata, carried for centuries by griots, tells the founding story of which state?
- A Benin
- B Asante
- C Mali Correct
- D Songhai
Answer: C. Mali

Why: Griots are hereditary oral historians and musicians in parts of West Africa. The story was transmitted by word of mouth long before anyone wrote it down.

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