Epic
Caedmon’s Day
A Day for Epic Tales, Archaic Poetry, and Creation Myths
About Epic
Some days are made for verse. Epic is a day for deep verse, ancient sagas, burnt scrolls, and half-deciphered scripts that point to worlds beyond. We immerse ourselves in creation myths, in partial cosmologies written in blood and thunder. These are tales that hum with the energy of beginnings. They have plots scrambled through generations of retelling and point to value systems that can feel deeply alien. The fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the chants of the Popol Vuh, the tribal codes of Beowulf, and the surreal journey of the Egyptian Book of the Dead—masterpieces that are incomplete in more than one sense. Their interpretation requires scholarship, yes, and humility. You'll be moved by their weight and beauty as they call a world into being entirely unlike your own, yet uncannily resembling it.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Read a passage from an ancient epic: The Odyssey, The Ramayana, The Book of the Dead, The Popol Vuh, The Kojiki, Genesis.
(B) Recommended
Host an Epic Reading Hour. Each participant brings a mythic or poetic excerpt from an ancient text and reads it aloud.
(C) High effort
Become the primary source of your own creation myth. Write down a myth that explains your origin story; then create a ‘corrupted’ version of the myth. Share both around a fire, or a candle, or a projector screen playing silent footage of glaciers.
Inspiration
If you can make sense of the kinship rituals in Beowulf, congratulations on your professorship at Columbia. For the rest of us, these epics can be difficult to get your teeth into, with plots and themes that don’t translate well, or at all. Their most devoted translators wrestle with impossible trade-offs between rhythm, meaning, and cultural relevance. Consequently, they can feel wildly different from one translation to the next. Beneath all the battles, feasts, and genealogies runs the bedrock of human connection: friendship, loyalty, respect. Those currents flow as clearly now as they did in the halls of the Geats or the courts of the Maya. If you can bear the ambiguity, you’ll be rewarded with flashes of insight that stay with you. Today is also St. Caedmon’s Day, honoring the 7th-century cowherd who, according to Bede (the early English monk and historian) was gifted the miraculous power of song in a dream. Caedmon woke and sang the first recorded lines of English religious poetry, a creation story in the rhythm of his own people. He’s the patron saint of untrained poets with epic voices, of anyone who’s ever woken with a fragment of a story echoing through dream fog.
Adornments
Watch
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
A beloved classic of mythic cinema, Jason and the Argonauts is a 1963 fantasy adventure based on the Greek Argonautica. Renowned for Ray Harryhausen’s legendary stop-motion creatures, from the gargantuan bronze titan Talos to the infamous battle with an army of skeletal warriors.
Listen
Beowulf read by Seamus Heaney
Heaney’s award-winning 1999 translation of Beowulf revitalized the poem for modern readers, and in the audiobook he recites it himself, reminding us that this saga was first an oral tale.
Vishnu Sahasranama (Hindu Devotional Chant)
A devotional litany of names, the Vishnu Sahasranama is a core prayer of Vaishnava Hindu tradition. In Sanskrit, sahasranama means ‘thousand names.’ It consists of a thousand epithets of Lord Vishnu, the Preserver deity.
Read
Caedmon’s Hymn (Old English)
The earliest recorded poem in English was not about kings or battles, but a hymn of creation. Attributed to Caedmon, an illiterate 7th-century cowherd miraculously inspired to sing in praise of God, the entire hymn is nine lines long.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Anonymous)
The Epic of Gilgamesh was composed nearly 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, recorded on clay tablets in cuneiform. Its story follows King Gilgamesh of Uruk—two-thirds divine, one-third human—and his wild companion Enkidu.
Popol Vuh (Maya Creation Myth)
The Popol Vuh is the sacred narrative of the K’iche’ Maya, preserving their creation story, ancestral legends, and cosmology. Written down in the mid-16th century (1554–1558) by indigenous authors in the K’iche’ language, it draws on much older oral traditions (archaeological finds show its roots reach back to at least 300 BCE).