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I'm working on the Ramayana now, with the main thrust being parallels with other Indo-European epics, mainly the Iliad; hardly original work, though I do see a few new details here and there.
The main reason for thinking that these similarities mean anything is the hypothesis that the stories of the bards go back to a common original tradition of the steppe that descended and changed between India and Greece in something like the way the language did..That is the kind of argument I generally like, but here is the problem. I just read the scene where the monkey god Hanuman acting as a spy visits Sita during her captivity in the ogre Ravana's fortress. Supposedly this scene is supposed to be a parallel for Odysseuss' visit to Helen in the Iliad. However, it struck me as being much closer to Papageno's rescue of Pamina in The Magic Flute, and there's no possibility of a connection of any kind between that and the Ramayana. Oh well...
The main reason for thinking that these similarities mean anything is the hypothesis that the stories of the bards go back to a common original tradition of the steppe that descended and changed between India and Greece in something like the way the language did..That is the kind of argument I generally like, but here is the problem. I just read the scene where the monkey god Hanuman acting as a spy visits Sita during her captivity in the ogre Ravana's fortress. Supposedly this scene is supposed to be a parallel for Odysseuss' visit to Helen in the Iliad. However, it struck me as being much closer to Papageno's rescue of Pamina in The Magic Flute, and there's no possibility of a connection of any kind between that and the Ramayana. Oh well...
