Albania
A founding myth without a closing one.
Albania's indigenous tradition is among the least documented of the European cultures, and what survives, the mountain oral epics, the cult of the goddess Zana, the sky-god Perëndi, shows no assembled end of the world. The myths explain how the world and its peoples came to be, and how a code of honour holds them together.
The absence is compounded by history. Albanian was long an oral culture without a standard literary language until the twentieth century, and the record was shaped by neighbouring Christian and Islamic scribes who supplied their own eschatology when they wrote. What native cosmology remains is etiological and this-worldly. The cosmos is the stage for the founding of clans and the keeping of oaths, not a creation moving toward a verdict.
Read beside The Irish Absence: a People Without an Apocalypse and The Baltic Fragments: a Sea That Will Cover the Land, the gap is evidence rather than a missing piece: catastrophe in abundance, but no built last day. The mountain epics are concerned with the honour of the blood-feud and the besa, the keeping of one's word, not with a closing of the cosmos. The world is the settled stage for these, not a creation moving toward a verdict.
The tradition is treated in The Albanian Absence, gathered with the other non-apocalypses in Documented Absences.
See also
- The Albanian AbsenceThe Albanian oral tradition carries no native end of the world; its cosmic myths
- Documented AbsencesNot every culture imagined an end. Ireland produced the richest otherworld in Eu
- The Irish Absence: a People Without an ApocalypseThe richest otherworld in European myth and no end of the world: Ireland's nativ
- The Baltic Fragments: a Sea That Will Cover the LandAn end in fragments: the Baltic tradition imagines the sea rising over the land
Further reading
- Edith Durham, High Albania · London, 1909