Cuzeian epics

From Almeopedia

The Cuzeian epics are the earliest and most enduringly popular literature of ancient Cuzei. The Cuêzi word is roccâ, a nominalization of rōci ‘tell’. The epics are largely set in the same epoch as the later Count of Years, when the Cuzeians and the Meťaiun were still fighting for mastery of the Plain (Cēradānar). However, fantastic elements abound, and the theology and sense of chivalry are imported from the time of composition (roughly -100 to 50).

There are four major epics:

• The story of Antāu and his attempts to win Isiliē of the Castle Forest. Isiliē’s father opposed the match, imprisons his daughter in a room, and sets Antāu a series of tasks of absurdly increasing difficulty. He faces giants, talking beasts, ships that move of themselves, a magician who calls up an army of men without heads, a crone in a cave offering illicit draughts, the Half-Height King who imprisons him for a year. Antāu accomplishes each of the tasks, only to learn that Isiliē has been promised to a Meťaiun duke, Bodâyo. He rescues Isiliē from the castle and kills Bodâyo. Messengers from Antāu’s father appear: Antāu is not the penniless adventurer he had seemed, but a prince, and his exile is over. The father now consents to the match, and indeed prattles contentedly and dances jigs at their wedding feast.
• The story of Samīrex, another prince; the overall plot has to do with an evil lord’s attempt to murder Samīrex and his brother and take his House. This framework is only an excuse to send the hero on one adventure after another. He seeks mystic secrets in the south, is bound for a time to the Lord of the Forest, fights ktuvoks and múrtani, visits the land of the dead to learn the causes of his House’s quarrels, and encounters a magician who turns him into a giant and into a mouse-sized mannikin. He also occasionally visits his Lady in the Quarter of Fountains in Eleisa. Finally the plot takes over: he defeats the evil lord, but at the cost of his brother’s life.
• The story of Celōusio, the only epic hero who makes it into the Count of Years: he is the illegitimate son of Ravixuo, duke of Tevarē. Among his feats are defeating a dragon, tangling with a nation of warrior women (the Eguendeā, a staple of adventure writers ever since), and helping the elcari defeat an invasion of múrtani. The prince himself is rather bloodless; the epic is rather more interesting when it follows the roguish Pûntio, the brother of his Lady, a man of endless schemes and seductions.
• The story of the Sojourner (Enōtivas). Though the mysterious hero undertakes his share of fantastic feats (battling fire spirits; destroying eighty evil magicians; rescuing his friend Oromo from the Cloud Kingdom), the story is richly allegorical, and at the same time refreshingly naturalistic: the Sojourner often returns to earlier characters, and finds them older, and busy with new concerns: the princess he rescued is learning to rule; the lovers he brought together are busy with children; the villains he earlier defeated sometimes rise again, and sometimes repent, while the wise king he once helped may have become corrupt. The Sojourner never explains himself or his actions, and yet the reader comes away with an intense consciousness of meaning; in the popular imagination he is associated not so much with the epic heroes as with the prophets. This annoyed some Knowers, while others went so far as to proclaim him an avatar of Eīledan himself.

There are half a dozen minor epics, as well as an uncounted number of later imitations, usually attempts to fill in the gaps in the stories and link them together.

Taken together, the epics define the ideal Cuzeian noble: a masterful rider, deadly in battle, and yet just to the poor, respectful to Knowers, and above all devoted heart and soul to his namiēi cipatora yēve-to— his noble and virtuous Lady. The Lady is only rarely his wife— noble marriages were arranged, and were largely a business proposition, so that grand passions had to be adulterous. Nonetheless they were regulated by a scrupulous code of conduct, and it was considered extremely shameful to (like Pûntio) switch partners.

(Antāu manages to marry his Lady; but Samīrex’s lady is the married sister of the evil lord persecuting him, and Celōusio’s is the daughter, also married, of his father’s mistress. The Sojourner, alone of all the epic heroes, has no Lady.)