The Atlantic as Mythical Space: An Essay on Medieval Ethea

by Alfonso J Garcia-Osuna, Alfonso J Garcia-Osuna

'The Atlantic as Mythical Space' is a study of medieval culture and its concomitant myths, legends and fantastic narratives as it developed along the European Atlantic seaboard. It is an inclusive study that touches upon early medieval Ireland, the pre-Hispanic Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, courtly-love France and the pagan and early-Christian British Isles. The obvious and consequential ligature that runs throughout the different sections of this text is the Atlantic Ocean, a bewildering expanse of mythical substance that for centuries fueled the imagination of ocean-side peoples. It analyzes how and why myths with the Atlantic as preferential stage are especially relevant in pagan and early-Christian western Europe. It further examines how prescientific societies fashioned an alternate cosmos in the Atlantic where events, beings and places existed in harmony with communal mental structures. It explores why in that contrived geography these societies' angels and monsters were able to materialize with wonderful profusion; it further analyzes how the ocean became a place where human beings ventured forth searching for explanations for what is essentially the origins of the universe and the reason for our existence in it.

298 pages, Hardcover

Published January 10, 2023

Reviews

[Arietta · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To look out on the ocean from the limits of medieval western Europe was to perceive a place that transcends the bounds of experience. Ancient and medieval individuals could not live in its waters, could not work there, could not survive there; the sun, the light went there to die, only to be born again from the opposite direction; it was extraordinary beyond the limits of their everyday experience; it was implausible, and yet, there it was.”