Seems like Journey to the West is referenced and copied so much in Eastern cultures without any fear of it getting old or going stale.
Is there something similar for Westerners? Is there some Shakespearean story we keep re-imagining again and again without shame?
The Passion of the Christ?
Because that’s a story form that gets used and used all over again, or at least is able to be seen in many a story.
Illiad and Odyssey are big, but I don’t think copied so much these days.
Lives of the Ceasers, even though less fiction had a huge impact on European story telling and narratives that lasts to this day.
24
Starring Kiefer Sutherland
QED 😌I’d like to throw Goethe’s Faust into the ring. Someone being seduced by the devil while they think they’re playing the devil to do good deeds is a classic trope.
Tolkien. Copied over and over again. Essentially invented the fantasy genre.
Redefined and popularised is perhaps fairer to say than invented.
Story structure can be found in classical literature, setting can be found through European mythology.
Tolkien codified all the ingredients into a specific mix and brought the world to life, he didn’t invent the those ingredients
The Arthurian legends come to mind.
King Arthur isn’t “one story” though. King Arthur is closer to 1100s-era fanart / fanfiction culture.
EVERYONE was making King Arthur stories back then. And guess what? They contradicted. That’s why we have Excalibur vs Sword in the Stone (sometimes they’re the same sword. Sometimes they aren’t. Its a big contradiction because there’s no singular author).
The Chinese Great Novel “Journey to the West” is truly one story by one author with multiple millennia of copycats. Meanwhile, King Author is basically a millennia of copycats without anyone knowing who the original was to begin with. Very different fundamentally.
Journey to the West was written about 1400 (unless I’m missing some very key information), so not even one millennia of copycats, yet.
The odyssey
The Canterbury Tales
You see the theme a lot, sometimes quite literal, like Hyperion, sometimes just a group on an adventure where each member has a story, like LOTR. Also in movies like The Breakfast Club, Love Actually or Snatch
Hyperion is so fucking good, I recently re-read the entire series again.
Canterbury Tales also has some amazingly good stories despite it’s age. I guess some things are timeless!
If by “western” you mean “everything west of China”, then the Shahnameh.
If you mean “European/Mediterranean”, then Homer.
If you specifically mean “western Europe”, then yeah—probably Shakespeare.
If you’re okay restricting it to Britain, someone mentioned King Arthur.
Anything can be Shakespeare if you look hard enough
Hamlet is a favorite to repackage, I felt like I unlocked a cheat code to understanding media after I read it as a kid
Chronicles of Riddick was Macbeth.
I never thought about it until you said it, but yeah.
The Illiad and the Odyssey for sure. Pretty sure Homer is just the concept of a person that we think might have written them because all those stories were primarily told orally and told slightly differently with each recalling
The Odyssey for sure, for a given value of “west”.
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.
The plot of Hamlet gets reused again and again.
Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you’re thinking of?
You know, I read Hamlet and watched The Lion King. There’s an evil uncle and ghost dad visits. That’s a couple parallels but otherwise the plots are not overly similar.
There’s an evil uncle and ghost dad visits
Evil Uncle who becomes king. Former King becomes a Ghost Dad after Hamlet/Simba goes crazy on drugs. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Timone and Pumba) jump in and provide 4th wall breaking commentary and comedy.
You seem to have missed quite a few references.
Ophelia doesn’t get driven suicidally insane in the lion king.
I’m not sure there being a couple funny guys is unique enough to count, comedic duos are a very standard setup and appear in totally different Shakespeare plays as well. Both center on royalty though, that’s true.
The ghost dad thing happens in completely different places in the story. Simba grows up in exile instead of being back from college at the beginning. The Ophelia thing. Everyone doesn’t die at the end in an accidentally comical pileup of errors. There’s no Fortinbras, but there is Rafiki. I can’t remember if there’s anything like the hyenas in Hamlet, but I kind of don’t think so. At best the uncle had a couple of henchmen.
If the meme was that they’re strikingly similar, I’d agree with that, but the meme is that it’s an exact ripoff.
I can’t remember if there’s anything like the hyenas in Hamlet, but I kind of don’t think so
Gravediggers at the Elephant Graveyard.
Eh, it’s a stretch. Maybe they included a bunch of bones thinking of hamlet, but they used them in a totally different way. IIRC that was another comical duo with little connection to the story, and then Hamlet shows up and makes it edgy.
Black Panther is clearly Hamlet in reverse.
Even got the spirit of ancestors / ghost scene, kings, wrong princes, duels and lots of killing.
The heros journey.
Its been copied so much no one really knows what the original was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey#/media/File:Heroesjourney.svg
Gilgamesh, the first story ever written, basically follows that construction, more or less. 5 indenpendent adventures written down separately in Sumerian around 2100 BCE (from a likely centuries older oral tradition), then compiled in a single Old Babylonian story around 1800 BCE, rewritten over the next 600 years. We literally don’t have any written story older than that beside individual poems.
Not: Gilgamesh is the oldest still surviving written story.
There was writing older than Gilgamesh. There were cities and culture before 2000BCE. Its just so old that nothing at all survived beyond that time period.
There’s the Bronze Age Collapse, Burning of the Great Library, and many other events that destroyed history in the 1000BCE period. Those old people may have had older records than Gilgamesh, but all we have today is Gilgamesh if that makes any sense.
Those places that were destroyed almost certainly didn’t have things older than Ur, Akkad, Nippur, Uruk. They would have had works from the periods before it, but just the Old and Middle Babylonian and Assyrian periods, not much more than that. Writing beyond religious centers was spread across Mesopotamia starting the Ur III dynasty then the Old Babylonian period, reaching to the end of Anatolia, so there wouldn’t have been a prolific writer like an ancient Tolkien or GRR Martin before Enheduanna in Akkad. We can actually pinpoint when writing began and when it spread, so we’re pretty sure there can’t have been anything big written and lost older than that. Because very few people knew how to write before Ur III, and these people simply weren’t writing epic stories, they were writing accounting receipts and religious praises, and that peak was Enheduanna. It’s only during the Ur III dynasty and then the Old Babylonian period that people started writing the stories that were popular outside temples.
What was lost in the big collapses, when it comes to stories, would be smaller individual texts, variations and extra details of texts we know, not entire bodies of work completely lost everywhere - and they would be texts written well after Ur III. Any big work that existed in that period would have spread everywhere during the multiple empires that came and went, and there’s always a place where fragments survive - if only because the place was lost and buried (not destroyed) before the various collapses, and only resurfaced in modern time. We knew about the Sumerian traditions without knowing what they were or that Sumer even existed until the 19th~20th century, because those stories survived through other cultures, starting with the Old Testament, and Greek myth, and then we found out that Gilgamesh and Atra-hasis predated them all, and we figured out when THAT turned from oral tradition into writing, and then from a handful of individual texts into a single epic. Because they weren’t actually destroyed - they were just buried. The bigger works that were lost in the various collapses and burnings from the Sea People to Alexandria, and weren’t already copied somewhere else would be texts of sciences, records, philosophy, that didn’t have a wide cultural impact beyond the capital - so not epic stories, and not older than Ur III.
So obviously, before writing was invented, we can only speculate so much on what existed. Surely there were people who had stories before all that, and not just in Mesopotamia, Europe and Asia obviously had their own cultures and stories, but that would have been oral tradition only, and when the culture dies without ever being written, the story is lost. We can actually take some guesses at the most distant roots of the dragon myths and some constellation stories, but we can’t guess into existence an epic from before writing was invented.
After writing was invented, there weren’t any stories written for a long time until the big empires, so nothing before Akkad, Ur III, and the Old Babylonian period. Even in other places where writing existed the earliest, it turns out that what they wrote didn’t include stories until relatively late (looking at you, Harappa and China’s Shang dynasty). The rare people who knew how to write simply didn’t write stories, they wrote religion and accounting mostly. It only begins with the Ur III texts, which is Gilgamesh (also the Enmerkar-Lugalbanda cycle that never made it to the same level of popularity).
After writing was spread across the Mesopotamian empires, there’s very little room for something that was entirely lost everywhere, there’s always a place where fragments survive and other cultures pick up on it. We have the Baal cycle in Ugarit, we have Greece, and then we have the Old Testament. Anything that could be truly lost and not just buried would be paper (and adjacent), much later, and wouldn’t have anything older that doesn’t already appear somewhere else. The odds of an entirely unknown, big enough story, existing before and disappearing in that period, are not very significant. If it existed, it spread into something else that survived.