| | Best known as the author of I, Claudius and Claudius the God as well as the difficult and scandalous historical novel King Jesus Robert Graves also wrote one of the most famous non-fiction works of the 20th Century, The White Goddess. In it he explores the nature of poetry and artistic inspiration, the pre-Aryan myths of the peoples of Europe, and the snake and bird-goddess myths known from the British Isles to the Caucasus, from the Levant to Central Asia. The subject matter from which he induced his theories (published in 1948) were primarily old Welsh poems, but also stories known to, but misunderstood by the classical Greeks and others. The work is an inductive tour-de-force on the scope of Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness and Paterson's God of the Machine. Graves was considered a crackpot by most. His theories on the White Goddess (also known in such incarnations as the triple godess, the fates, the furies, the Norns, the three hags of MacBeth) have largely been validated through the independent archeological studies of the late Indo-Europeanist Marija Gimbutas and her school.
Ted Keer
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But, after all, what is a scholar? One who may not break bounds under pain of expulsion from the academy of which he is a member.
