ABSTRACT
A self-appointed task of many national poets – including Burns, Goethe, Lönnrot, Kollar, Shevchenko, Njegoš, de Rada, Wergeland, Tagore, Yeats and Bialik – is to spend years studying, editing and writing poetry about national myths. These poets use myth in their poetry as the royal road to a nation’s identity. National poets are often ideological brothers to national historians. After the French Revolution, Hobsbawm (2001: 345) wrote, Europe was overwhelmed by a veritable ‘epidemic of history-writing’ – in France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Bohemia, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland, among others. Poets, too, recreate an ancient world, largely forgotten, whether of historical fact or myth, which allegedly anticipates and justifies longed-for aims of nationalists in the here and now. If the nation is to have a future, as poets, historians and folklorists fervently believe, – it must know its past. A nation with no past must invent one. Myth is most potent among peoples who lose sovereignty or land, such as the Armenians, the Jews, the peoples of the Balkans or the Gikuyu nation in Kenya. Scholars of nationalism are sometimes inclined to relegate myth to a minor part of historical, anthropological, or sociological studies.1 In fact, myth is the heart and soul of nationalism.
