The sky often has important religious significance. Many religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic , have deities associated with the sky.
55-438: The daytime sky deities are typically distinct from the nighttime ones. Stith Thompson 's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature reflects this by separating the category of "Sky-god" (A210) from that of "Star-god" (A250). In mythology, nighttime gods are usually known as night deities and gods of stars simply as star gods. Both of these categories are included here since they relate to the sky. Luminary deities are included as well since
110-564: A Celticist, English Metrical Romances, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Sir Orfeo , and Child's ballad course. Kittredge's students included Oscar James Campbell Jr. , Franklin Delano Roosevelt , John A. Lomax , whose lectures and collection of cowboy ballads Kittredge later supported, and the folklorists Robert Winslow Gordon , James Madison Carpenter , William S. Burroughs and Stith Thompson . Among
165-463: A Shakespeare course for women that was similar to Harvard's English 2. Kittredge's edition of Shakespeare was the standard well beyond his death and continues to be cited occasionally. He was also arguably the leading critic of Geoffrey Chaucer of his time and is considered largely responsible for introducing Chaucer into the canon of college English. His essay on "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" (1912) has traditionally been credited with introducing
220-472: A famous article in The Nation of 1913, Sherman accused Kittredge of pedantry and of squeezing the life out of his subject. Deep ideological disagreements lay at the bottom of these attacks. The New Humanists were social and cultural conservatives who conceived of literary studies as leading to moral improvement by providing a guide to conduct and "humane insight" through an appreciation of and reflection on
275-544: A member of the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate , the college literary magazine. In 1881 Kittredge was the prompter and pronunciation coach in a celebrated undergraduate theatrical performance of Sophocles 's Oedipus Rex in the original Greek, attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson , Julia Ward Howe , William Dean Howells , Charles Eliot Norton , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , and classicist B. L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University . In 1882, Kittredge
330-693: A mere "accomplishment", whereas when "a boy studies Greek you know he has worked hard". Philology "met the desire for facts, for accuracy, and for the imitation of the scientific method which had acquired such an overwhelming prestige" in the United States. It had yielded the discoveries of the Grimms and others, tracing the step-by-step relationships of classical and modern European to ancient Indian languages and their evolutionary development. A former Harvard graduate student, James H. Hanford, reminisced how under Kittredge, Students were expected to talk in
385-435: A polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a "sky father" god with an " earth mother " goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods and may be an air/sky goddess in her own right, though she usually has other functions as well with "sky" not being her main. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and
440-553: A scholarly way in the classroom and on a final examination about Grimm's or Verner's laws , the differentiating characteristics of Anglo-Saxon among the Teutonic languages, the changes in English phonology, inflection, and syntax from Anglo-Saxon times to the sixteenth century, the influence of Danish, French and Latin on the English language in its various periods. But these phases of language development were closely associated with
495-572: A storehouse for teachers. Kittredge was also responsible for the revision of the English used in a translation of the Psalms for the Jewish Publication Society, issued in 1903. According to his biographer, "Neither Child nor Kittredge, trained classicists and able linguists, had themselves bothered to undergo the limitations of a Ph. D. degree". There is a widely circulated story that when asked why he did not have one, Kittredge
550-602: A strong man to join a race." As the decade of the 1920s unfolded, the New Humanists began to seem increasingly irrelevant, and as the Depression of the 1930s hit, the intellectual climate turned decidedly leftward and other forms of criticism emerged, initially from writers outside the academy, some of which, in the coming decades would be incorporated as aspects of the New Criticism. Meanwhile, although there
605-571: Is considered the international key to traditional material. In the 1920s, Thompson began collecting and archiving traditional ballads, tales, proverbs, aphorisms, riddles, etc. At around this time, the study of the parallels and worldwide distributions of folktales were being studied in new ways by European scholars (particularly Antti Aarne in Finland). Thompson had developed an understanding of these new techniques through travel and research and published an expanded translation of Aarne's The Types of
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#1732765907030660-526: Is descended from a Costin Beauchamp (born 1738) from Somerset County, Maryland which extends back to John Beauchamp one of the members of the Plymouth Company. George Lyman Kittredge George Lyman Kittredge (February 28, 1860 – July 23, 1941) was a professor of English literature at Harvard University . His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in
715-718: The University of California, Berkeley in 1912, where his dissertation was titled "The Idea of the Soul in Teutonic Popular Tales and Ballads". He studied at Harvard University from 1912 to 1914 under George Lyman Kittredge , writing the dissertation "European Borrowings and Parallels in North American Indian Tales," and earning his Ph.D. (The revised thesis was later published in 1919). This grew out of Kittredge's assignment, whose theme
770-650: The American Folklore Society between 1937 and 1939 and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1947. He received a number of Honorary Degrees from universities including University of North Carolina (1946), Indiana Central College (1953) and University of Kentucky (1958). Thompson's 1954 article for The Filson Club History Quarterly entitled "The Beauchamp Family" continues in use by genealogists as of 2011 . In this article Thompson states that he
825-534: The Folktale in 1928, creating a catalogue of folktale types , that included tales from Europe and Asia. Thompson used this classification in his Tales of the North American Indians published in 1929. Building upon this, Thompson published his "landmark work" The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature in six volumes between 1932 and 1936. The Motif-Index organised thousands of motifs drawn from
880-572: The German Romanticists to the modern languages. When the various modern language departments were introduced into American universities in the 1880s, speakers at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1883 had been concerned to counter the popular perception that "English literature is a subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual study for serious workers",
935-680: The Near East were called Queen of Heaven . Gods may rule the sky as a pair (for example, ancient Semitic supreme god El and the fertility goddess Asherah whom he was most likely paired with). The following is a list of sky deities in various polytheistic traditions arranged mostly by language family, which is typically a better indicator of relatedness than geography. Twenty Four Sky Emperors (Tiandi 天帝) Twenty Eight Sky Emperors (Tiandi 天帝) Thirty Two Sky Emperors (Tiandi 天帝) Sixty Four Sky Emperors (Tiandi 天帝) Stith Thompson Stith Thompson (March 7, 1885 – January 10, 1976)
990-493: The classroom by students who took advantage of his extremely sweet nature, Kittredge's dramatic classroom manner kept his students on the edge of their seats – lateness, wearing of hats, yawning, and coughing (one student was permanently expelled from the class for this offense) were strictly forbidden. His manner with his graduate students was entirely different. With them he was extremely collegial and invited them to his home for weekly fireside gatherings. There, in dim light,
1045-542: The coming of the Cold War in the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s disagreements between the historical and "literary appreciation" schools in English literature studies were subsumed by the ascendancy of the New Criticism which favored, like Kittredge, rigorous study of literary text, but sidestepped potential controversies over ideology by ruling out mention of historical context or social questions. In consequence,
1100-549: The concept of philology itself fell into disrepute and never recovered, even after social engagement once again became respectable and the New Criticism gave way to Structuralism , Gender Studies , postmodernism , and the New Historicism . Thus, the context of Kittredge's prestige and his place in the history of English literature studies became obscured and forgotten, a situation which in recent years some scholars are attempting to rectify. As Jill Terry Rudy writes: In
1155-722: The desert before returning to Boston to marry a widow, Mrs. Deborah Lewis Benson, and start a family. Their precocious and bookish son George attended The Roxbury Latin School , which then had about a hundred pupils. George consistently led his class in marks and won a scholarship to Harvard , which he entered in 1878. As a freshman, George lived at home in Boston and walked to Harvard every day to save money. Kittredge garnered highest honors and joined several clubs, wrote light verse, and won Bowdoin prizes for his essays and translations, including one from English into Attic Greek. He also became
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#17327659070301210-749: The early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press . One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England and New England. Kittredge was born in Boston on February 28, 1860. His father, Edward "Kit" Lyman Kittredge, participated in the California Gold Rush of 1849, been shipwrecked, and had walked 700 miles across
1265-494: The entire cultural history of which they were a part. The philologist is the person who makes his approach to the past through the phenomenon of language. "In the beginning was the word." The objective was the equipment of a man of real erudition, about whose professional and scientific status there should be no doubt and who could hold up his head in pride among his fellows in the older and more reputable field of classics ... Source and background study, so decried by [later] critics of
1320-472: The establishment of folklore courses elsewhere in US academia by his former students - Thompson has been claimed to have been "largely responsible for establishing folklore on a firm academic footing in the United States". He organized an informal quadrennial summertime "Institute of Folklore" beginning in 1942 which lasted beyond his retirement from tenure in 1955. This brought together scholars with an interest in
1375-584: The faculty at Harvard as an instructor in the autumn of 1888. He was soon promoted and in 1896 succeeded Professor Francis James Child as Professor of the Division of Modern Languages, which included languages other than Latin or Greek . He and Child had shared the teaching of Harvard's English 2 course of William Shakespeare , which Kittredge took over solely in 1896 following Child's death. Because Child had died without quite finishing his work of ballad scholarship , Child's publishers asked Kittredge to see
1430-493: The field of folklore and helped to bring structure to the growing discipline. In 1962, a permanent Institute of Folklore was established at Bloomington, with Richard Dorson serving as its administrator and chief editor of its journal publication. While Thompson wrote, co-wrote, or translated numerous books and articles on folklore, he became arguably best known for his work on the classification of motifs in folk tales. His six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955–1958)
1485-477: The folktale types he had catalogued in The Types of the Folktale. By introducing these techniques to American folklorists, Thompson has been described as having a "marked influence on the direction of American folklore scholarship in the 20th century". For nearly twenty years after his retirement, Thompson continued to work on his Motif-Index and The Types of the Folktale - he published revised editions of
1540-763: The general public published by the Atheneum Press . At Harvard he collaborated with E. S. Sheldon in editing eleven volumes of the Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature , which appeared in 1907, and was a founding member and supervisor of the Harvard University Press. His popular book, written in collaboration with J. B. Greenough, Words and their Ways in English Speech (1901) met with great success and served as
1595-602: The idea of the "marriage group" in the Canterbury Tales , though he was not the originator of this phrase. Through his historical researches Kittredge also identified Thomas Malory , author of Le Morte d'Arthur (1485), and hitherto an obscure figure, with a knight and member of Parliament who served with the Earl of Warwick, a discovery that paved the way for further researches into Malory by Edward Hicks, to whose 1928 book on Malory's turbulent career Kittredge supplied
1650-496: The introduction. Kittredge's work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was influential as well. Kittredge also collected folk tales and songs , writing extensively on the folk lore of New England and on the New England witch trials . He also wrote and co-wrote introductory Latin and English grammar text books. While still teaching at Phillips Exeter he undertook the general editorship of popular English masterpieces for
1705-455: The lack of it in others, he famously remarked, "There are three persons who know what the word 'Victorian' means, and the other two are dead." Kittredge and Child belonged to the philological school of scholarship pioneered in 19th century German universities. Philology, especially in its early years, had been conceived as a "total science of civilization, an ideal originally formulated for the study of classical antiquity and then transferred by
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1760-450: The medieval scholarship so dear to Kittredge, represented a dilution of the real goal of literary studies and a waste of time. Kittredge's students and colleagues defended him vigorously, however. One former student, Elizabeth Jackson, writes of Kittredge's sheer enthusiasm: "Kittredge taught Shakespeare as though every single human being could go on reading Shakespeare through time and eternity, going from strength to strength and rejoicing as
1815-535: The modern languages to replace the study of Greek and Latin, and Kittredge would oppose Harvard president Charles W. Eliot's efforts to abolish Greek as a requirement for graduation. Kittredge's administrative power, vast erudition, prestige, and the histrionic attitude he assumed with undergraduates provoked resentment. A notable critic was his colleague, Irving Babbitt (a professor of French) and Babbitt's former student, Stuart Sherman , who together founded so-called "New Humanist" school of literary appreciation. In
1870-546: The most popular of Harvard's teachers throughout his career, Kittredge's students affectionately nicknamed him "Kitty". Kittredge was named Gurney Professor of English at Harvard in 1917. He retired from teaching in 1936 and continued to work on his edition of Shakespeare until his death in 1941, in Barnstable, Massachusetts . Women were not admitted to Harvard University until several decades after Kittredge's lifetime, but Kittredge made trips to Radcliffe College to teach
1925-671: The other hand, situated the study of languages and literatures in their historical contexts, seeking to capture "the spirit of an age" and often ranging far afield of the traditional Western canon. For Kittredge, reading Chaucer illuminated the world of the Middle Ages, which Kittredge often stated had points in common with our own age and thus helped students understand the world in which we live. Often he guided his students into newly opening fields that he had not had time to investigate, such as Finnish and Celtic studies. According to David Bynum: In an age of literary ethnocentricity, Kittredge
1980-439: The philological regime, was conceived of both as a means of interpretation and as an independent contribution to cultural history. Undergraduate Shakespeare students were required to read six plays extremely slowly and to virtually memorize the texts. "It is the purpose of this course", Kittredge used to remark, "to find out what Shakespeare said and what he meant when he said it." Where Professor Child had often been imposed on in
2035-463: The process of overthrowing Kittredge's perceived pedantry in order to enshrine New Critical methods of rigorous research and institutional control over graduate training and doctoral degrees (without offering the concomitant grounding in cultural history and linguistic concerns that Kittredge promoted), New Critical literary scholars assured that the term philology itself would be denigrated and then ignored as their newly trained graduate students conquered
2090-497: The project through to publication and to supply a short introduction to the five-volume opus. Later, Kittredge helped expand ballad and folklore studies to include American folklore , serving in 1904 as president of the American Folklore Society . Kittredge also took over Child's graduate course in the English and Scottish popular ballad. English 2, a Shakespeare class for which Kittredge became well known at
2145-515: The responsibility of overseeing its composition program. Within a year he began offering courses in folklore: these were among the first courses in the field taught in the United States. His commitment to the promotion of academic research in folklore resulted in the creation of the PhD programme in folklore at Indiana in 1949 - the first of its kind in the United States. The first doctorate was awarded (to Warren E. Roberts) in 1953. For this - along with
2200-753: The son of John Warden and Eliza (McClaskey). Thompson moved with his family to Indianapolis at the age of twelve and attended Butler University from 1903 to 1905 before he obtained his BA degree from University of Wisconsin in 1909 (his undergraduate thesis was titled, 'The Return from the Dead in Popular Tales and Ballads'). For the next two years he taught at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon , during which time he learned Norwegian from lumberjacks. He earned his master's degree in English literature from
2255-505: The students read papers which, with his encouragement, would often form the nucleus of subsequent dissertations. As chairman of the Division of the Modern Languages Division of Harvard, a position he inherited from Child, Kittredge was in a position to set graduate degree requirements and he insisted that graduate literature candidates master several foreign languages, as he himself had done. Neither he nor Child wished
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2310-500: The sun and moon are located in the sky. Some religions may also have a deity or personification of the day, distinct from the god of the day lit sky, to complement the deity or personification of the night. Daytime gods and nighttime gods are frequently deities of an " upper world" or "celestial world" opposed to the earth and a " netherworld " (gods of the underworld are sometimes called "chthonic" deities). Within Greek mythology, Uranus
2365-469: The timeless beauties of prescribed "great works." Babbitt bitterly opposed the introduction of elective courses for undergraduates. Deeply suspicious of democracy, he envisioned the goal of a university education as the formation of a superior individual in whom the "will to restraint" would counter what he saw as the degenerate modernism he traced back to pernicious ideas of social progress initiated by Rousseau and his followers. Kittredge and his students, on
2420-662: The universities of Leipzig and Tübingen , in Old Icelandic and other subjects. In 1887, he published an article for "a learned German periodical" on "A Point In Beowulf." The couple had three children: Francis Gordon (1887–1973), Henry Crocker (1890–1967), and Dora (1893–1974). Kittredge was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1898. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1901. In 1905, he
2475-621: The university, was a lecture course of about 275 Harvard students. Other courses and subjects which Kittredge taught or co-taught were English 28, a survey course covering Chaucer, the epic, and the ballad; Historical English Grammar, and Anglo-Saxon, a prerequisite for his course in Beowulf . In the German department, Kittredge taught Icelandic, Old Norse, and, for many years, a course in German mythology. His graduate courses included Germanic and Celtic Religions, which he co-taught with F. N. Robinson,
2530-415: The vocabulary and intricacies of critical scholarship (Wellek 1953). As suggested previously, the philosophical methods and ideologies that informed the early history of English department organization deserve continued conversation and critique rather than simply being erased or ignored. In 1886, Kittredge married Frances Eveline Gordon, the daughter of Nathaniel Gordon and Alcina Eveline Sanborn. Her father
2585-535: The volumes of the Motif-Index between 1955 and 1958. During this Thompson also collaborated on projects with other folklorists such as Jonah Balys' The Oral Tales of India and Warren Roberts' Types of Indic Folktales . He even produced an anthology at the age of 83, One Hundred Favorite Folktales . In 1976, Thompson died of heart failure at his home in Columbus, Indiana . Thompson served as President of
2640-680: Was a lawyer and philanthropist who had served as president of the New Hampshire Senate and was a deacon in the Second Church of Exeter, New Hampshire . The couple honeymooned in Europe, remaining for a year in Germany, which at that time was a mecca of graduate studies and the mother of distinguished philologists and folklorists. Kittredge had already studied German and, although not formally matriculated, attended courses at
2695-600: Was an American folklorist : he has been described as "America's most important folklorist". He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index , which indexes folktales by type, and the author of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , a resource for folklorists that indexes motifs, granular elements of folklore . Stith Thompson was born in Bloomfield , Nelson County, Kentucky , on March 7, 1885,
2750-466: Was as readily and as genuinely interested in Russian ballads or American Indian folktales as in the plays of Shakespeare ... Kittredge's intellectual hospitality toward "foreign" traditions and his equanimity toward "vulgar" ones appear in retrospect as the most important sources of his influence. For Babbitt, a self-proclaimed classicist, on the other hand, such disciplines as anthropology, folklore, and
2805-434: Was continued chafing against the supposed antiquarianism of the philological school in some quarters, Kittredge's prestige and influence continued unabated, and the extensive list of language requirements for a Harvard graduate degree in English literature, including Old and Middle English, Old French, and Gothic, stayed in effect until his retirement in 1936, after which these requirements, viewed as onerous, were dropped. With
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#17327659070302860-636: Was elected Ivy Orator, and charged to deliver a humorous speech to his graduating class. Graduating with Kittredge that year was Philadelphian Owen Wister , who authored the first Western novel, The Virginian . Lack of money prevented Kittredge from immediately pursuing graduate studies. From 1883 to 1887, he taught Latin at Phillips Exeter Academy . About six feet tall and, at 140 pounds, slightly built, Kittredge impressed his prep-school students with his exacting standards, sense of humor, and apparent ability to converse fluently in Latin. Kittredge joined
2915-695: Was investigating a certain tale called "The Blue Band", collected from the Chipewyan tribe in Saskatchewan may derive from contact with an analogous Scandinavian tale. Thompson was an English instructor at the University of Texas , Austin from 1914 to 1918, teaching composition. In 1921, Thompson was appointed associate professor at the English Department of the Indiana University Bloomington , which also had
2970-410: Was supposed to have replied, "But who would examine me?" However, according to Clifton Fadiman , "Kittredge always maintained that the question was never asked, and if it had been he would never have dreamed of answering in such a manner." On May 17, 1932, during a lecture tour of England, Oxford University conferred on him a D.Litt. honoris causa . Burdened with no illusions about his erudition, or
3025-443: Was the primordial sky god, who was ultimately succeeded by Zeus , who ruled the celestial realm atop Mount Olympus . In contrast to the celestial Olympians was the chthonic deity Hades , who ruled the underworld, and Poseidon , who ruled the sea. Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods , taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon . Such king gods are collectively categorized as " sky father " deities, with
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