Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real.
“Throughout most of Chinese history, the Yellow Emperor and the other ancient sages were considered to be real historical figures. Their historicity started to be questioned in the 1920s by historians like Gu Jiegang, one of the founders of the Doubting Antiquity School in China. In their attempts to prove that the earliest figures of Chinese history were mythological, Gu and his followers argued that these ancient sages were originally gods who were later depicted as humans by the rationalist intellectuals of the Warring States period. Yang Kuan (楊寬), a member of the same historiographical current, noted that only in the late Warring States had the Yellow Emperor started to be described as the first ruler of China. Yang thus argued that Huangdi was a late transformation of Shangdi, the supreme god of the Shang pantheon.
[snip]
Most scholars now agree that the Yellow Emperor was originally a deity who was later transformed into a human figure.”
I said placed in recent history, and contemporaries. The Yellow Emperor seems to have been placed millenia in the past, compared to when belief in him existed.
The proper comparison of the Yellow Emperor would be someone like Noah or Enoch—someone placed many centuries or even millenia in the past of when he was known to be believed in—and I certainly would consider Noah and Enoch to be most likely fictions, never to have been based on real people at all.
Hm. Good point. I’m unwilling to give up the search quite yet, however, because I feel the boundary between myth and reality is so fragile in the past that an example like what you’re looking for must surely exist.
One gets a bit closer with Cú Chulainn and some other figures from the Ulster Cycle; the gap there is merely seven or eight centuries instead of two millennia.
Seven or eight centuries is an awfully long time in a culture that doesn’t keep good records.
I remember reading with some surprise a transcription of some tribal history of a group of Plains Indians, which ended with the assertion that their forefathers had been so living there for “at least seven generations, perhaps more.” In reality, it had been much, much longer, they simply hadn’t been keeping track.
How about Huangdi?
I said placed in recent history, and contemporaries. The Yellow Emperor seems to have been placed millenia in the past, compared to when belief in him existed.
The proper comparison of the Yellow Emperor would be someone like Noah or Enoch—someone placed many centuries or even millenia in the past of when he was known to be believed in—and I certainly would consider Noah and Enoch to be most likely fictions, never to have been based on real people at all.
Jesus is a different sort of fish altogether.
So, Jesus is the kind of fish that exists only as a symbol of Christian group identity? ;)
Philip K. Dick would have a lot to say on this.
About the casual use of double entendre? I bet he does.
Hm. Good point. I’m unwilling to give up the search quite yet, however, because I feel the boundary between myth and reality is so fragile in the past that an example like what you’re looking for must surely exist.
One gets a bit closer with Cú Chulainn and some other figures from the Ulster Cycle; the gap there is merely seven or eight centuries instead of two millennia.
Seven or eight centuries is an awfully long time in a culture that doesn’t keep good records.
I remember reading with some surprise a transcription of some tribal history of a group of Plains Indians, which ended with the assertion that their forefathers had been so living there for “at least seven generations, perhaps more.” In reality, it had been much, much longer, they simply hadn’t been keeping track.
If that’s an accurate quote from the Plains Indians, it’s much to their credit—they weren’t making claims wildly beyond their knowledge.