The Albanian Absence

Albania's indigenous tradition is among the least documented of the European cultures, and what survives of it, 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; they do not project a terminal date or a final battle.

The absence is compounded by history. Albanian was long an oral culture with no 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 little native cosmology remains is etiological and this-worldly: the founding of clans, the binding of oaths, the continuity of the blood-feud and the besa. The cosmos is the stage for these, not a creation moving toward a verdict.

As with Ireland and the Baltic lands, the gap is best read as evidence rather than a missing piece. Albania had catastrophe in abundance, from Ottoman conquest to the twentieth-century wars, and produced a literature of resistance and origin rather than one of the last day. The end of the world is a specific construction, and the Albanian material did not build it.

The caution the comparative essays urge applies with force here. A silence in the Albanian record may mean a society had no terminal doctrine, or that nobody wrote it down, or that a later transmitter supplied one because the audience expected it. The mountain epics that survive are concerned with the honour of the blood-feud and the besa, the keeping of one's word, and the founding of clans, not with a closing of the cosmos. Where the record is thin, the honest move is to require positive evidence for an apocalypse rather than to assume one and hunt for material to fill the slot. The Albanian material is best filed, for now, as an absence.