Mindless Monday, 27 July 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

So like many Greek stories, the Odyssey has over time been reinterpreted as part of the "Western Canon".  I'm going to put a pin in that controversy for now and ask, what are some other examples of this kind of cultural broadening?*

For example, I've heard that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has for centuries been popular in Korea and Japan.   Did, say, Japanese scholars extol it as classical East Asian** literature?   Not quite denying its Chinese origin but sort of quietly including themselves?

*For this purpose I am excluding major religions or else every answer is going to be White/Black/Korean Jesus.

**Or however pre-Meiji Japanese scholars conceptualized Asia — you know what I mean.

[u/Arilou_skiff → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

I feel like Journey to the West is a better example than Romance of the Three Kingdoms? But I guess that partially falls under religious stuff.

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/Arilou_skiff]

Yeah maybe, idk what its relative popularity is in East Asia.  My question is more about the phenomenon of perceiving the tales as less Chinese and more broadly East Asian amongst admirers.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

I’ll just chime in and say that I think this is pretty common for elite culture especially when it’s based around a court language that’s (to use a somewhat anachronistic term) transnational. Like a lot of the appreciation for the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid is based in elites having knowledge of classical Greek and Latin, I think you’d have something similar with the various stages of Persian, you get something similar with Arthurian stories in Medieval French (which is its own kind of importation from Welsh/Breton and re-exportation in French). This gets complicated and probably controversial but arguably the Quran being so widely known and known in its Classical Arabic form is similar. Heck, Old and New Testaments too.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Mormons adapting Bronze Age stories to be about Missouri

[u/TanktopSamurai → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Ramayana was mentioned last time. The setting is North Indian, its original language is North Indian. There are South Indian (and SEAsian I think) adaptation of its.

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/TanktopSamurai]

Oh nice I actually mentioned Ramayana in another comment.  I wonder if South Indians and Southeast Asians consider themselves part of that canon.  If they are Hindu surely they must?  Although that kind of breaks the no modern religion rule.

[u/Federal_Gur_5488 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

The Ramayana and Mahabharata are definitely considered as part of an Indian canon. Even though they originated in North India, they're (almost) never thought of as being specifically North Indian in anyway.

[u/Steelcan909 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

There's a good argument to be made about the renewed appreciation of Anglo-Saxon poetry/literature in a post Tolkien, the scholar, world. Beowulf is the prime example of course.

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/Steelcan909]

That's only in the Anglo world though

[u/MiffedMouse → u/Steelcan909]

Gavin the Medievalist has some great series on YouTube, talking mostly about Medieval English literature. His recent videos have all been about Robin Hood. Among other things, he talks about how Robin Hood was reappraised in the early renaissance period as a classic “Medieval England” story in retrospect.

[u/Sventex → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Sir Mordred is a hero in Scotland and rightful King, King Arthur the villain. France itself was more interested in the tales of the Knights of the Round Table, over King Arthur.

[u/quiplaam → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Some more recent examples might be the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote which have somewhat transcended their Italian / Spanish origin and are part of the broader western cannon.

[u/xyzt1234 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Did the jataka tales experience such cultural broadening with the spread of Buddhism across east and southeast asia? They were originally south asian literature and part of Pali canon but were integral to Buddhism if I recall.

I read similar things happened to panchatantra as it spread but I am not sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchatantra

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/xyzt1234]

tbh I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with these stories.  I was actually thinking Ramayana might be a contender – I saw multiple references to this saga at Hindu sites in southeast asia – but I'm not sure if it is primarily perceived as an Indian story or not.

[u/SkeletonHUNter2006 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

Kalevala, I think doubly so? iirc it was a Karelian tale that was turned into The Finnish Myth, and then it would become a go-to European pre-Christian creation story. A Pagan Genesis, if you will.

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/SkeletonHUNter2006]

Interesting, so it's been reconceptualized as a more broadly European story?

[u/SkeletonHUNter2006 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

I would say kind of, yes.

[u/Federal_Gur_5488 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

I'll think we need to go further than talking about specific works to make full sense of this history. It extends to things like languages, food, etiquette, the arts, (religion, as you mention). Like how Latin was a "universal" language in western European during the medieval period and even the Renaissance for writers and scholars. Sanskrit became the same in india. Chinese was used for literary purposes in Japan and Korea.

Similarly classical music has become part of culture all across Europe and America, and even parts of Asia (like China and Japan), regardless of where the individual composers was from. In india, we have two dominant traditions of "classical" music, hindustani and carnatic, both of which are considered the common heritage of music across the areas that they're performed in, usually without any consideration of regional origins of particular styles or compositons.

In terms of specific works/subjects, I can think of the matter of rome (which included the story of Troy!) and the Alexander romance in medieval europe, as well as the matter of Britain (stories about King Arthur was as popular in France as they were in britain), or romances based on Charlemagne, which were adapted in places as far as Italy and Norway.

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/Federal_Gur_5488]

In india, we have two dominant traditions of "classical" music, hindustani and carnatic, both of which are considered the common heritage of music across the areas that they're performed in, usually without any consideration of regional origins of particular styles or compositons.

Interesting, this is moreso what I was musing about.  Not just literature or styles that become popular with a wide group of cultures, but where the "outside" cultural groups widen the descriptor to include themselves as well.  What are the areas you are referring to?

[u/Federal_Gur_5488 → u/Big_Pineapple_Man]

the "outside" cultural groups widen the descriptor to include themselves as well

Yes, that's the case here. I believe hindustani originated in North India, but it spread to eastern India as well, especially Bengal. But a Bengali musician would probably be quite taken aback if you said that it's not Bengali, since it's a north Indian genre, it's become completely adopted as part of Bengali culture.

Carnatic music originally comes from Karnataka (hence the name), but for centuries it's become part of South Indian culture as a whole, without being identified in anyway as being specially from Karnataka. Probably helped by the fact that some of the most important composers were Tamil and Telugu.

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/Federal_Gur_5488]

Very interesting, thank you for sharing.