For this final analysis, I decided to take a step back and look at myths from a different perspective. Instead of looking for names, I looked for concepts. The research question that I developed, which would require a great deal more research, but could have a starting place here, is as follows: What areas of life were considered more important to what cultures? How important was the sun or sky in comparison to the sea or death? With these questions in mind, I chose to look at the Odyssey, Metamorphoses, and the Prose Edda, which would cover Greek, Roman, and Norse culture. These were three of the major mythologies; I wanted to incorporate Egyptian, but could not easily find a collection of myths that demonstrated the variety that was received from the others. For the purpose of this analysis, Metamorphoses will be “Text 1” on the charts, The Odyssey will be Text 2, and the Prose Edda will be Text 3. To start, I looked at the following frequency chart from Voyant:
In this frequency chart, I chose five big ideas that would come up frequently in most mythologies: sun, sea, sky, dead, and king. The goal of this method was to determine with what frequency each concept was used, and in which texts they were most often used. There were three things that I noticed immediately. The first was the consistent frequency of the word “sea.” This appears to demonstrate that each culture held a high regard for the sea, in comparison to the other ideas that I analyzed. The second was the consistent infrequency of the word “sky,” which demonstrates that, despite having gods for the sky, these ancient cultures did not value the sky nearly as much, despite some of their kings being gods of the sky. To get a better sense of how this might be talked about, I looked into different terms that might relate to the sky.
I returned to the frequency chart to look for terms that I could find that might relate to the sky. Most of the terms that I could think of had about the same type of frequency as "sky." However, I did manage to find two terms that can relate to the sky that had a relatively high frequency. The first was wind, and the second was a term that I had already searched before: sun. Looking at this frequency more closely, I was interested (but not surprised) to find that the sun has a much higher frequency than the sky. In reality, there are few "sky" gods, though many of the gods relate to the sky. The higher prevalence of the sun shows that across the board, a higher importance was placed upon the sun than any of the other "sky related" gods. However, I kept finding myself stuck on the relative frequency of the word "king." This brings me to the final point, where “king” blends in for the Odyssey and Metamorphoses, but has a drastic jump in frequency when looking at the Prose Edda. What was it about Norse culture that held such a high importance for kings? Or am I misunderstanding how kings are looked at? To help answer that question, I wanted to look at some of the context in which “king” was used, so moved over to another tool Voyant offers.
This allows a person to see, in context, how these words and phrases are being used. I specifically focused on king, since I noticed how important it was in the Prose Edda. What I found was rather interesting. Based on the contexts that I found, the Norse myths in the Prose Edda placed an emphasis not just on the gods in reference to “king,” as I was thinking about it, but talked a lot about the mortal kings that ruled in Midgard. This has opened a few new potential routes a research, namely looking at the prevalence and importance of mortal kings to Norse culture. This developing research question was challenged, though, when I looked at the correlations between the term “king” and terms that have similar rise and fall patterns to it. These correlations can be seen here:
In the Prose Edda, there is a higher correlation between “gods” and “king” than there is between “man” and “king,” even though the correlation between “man” and “king” is much higher throughout the entire corpus. This presents a limit of the Voyant analysis, because without actually reading the texts, I cannot fully understand these correlations and how the terms come together to create this dataset. However, all of this comes together to demonstrate that, despite my initial hypothesis that some of the deities of the sky would be more prevalent – I expected to see a much higher prevalence of “sun” than there is – it is actually the kings that are more talked about in my selections. It would be interesting, in an even further analysis, to expand my corpus even more and to see how these same datasets look when the corpus is bigger and has more text to analyze.
