The Magpie (Oil on canvas, 1868) by Claude Monet (1840-1926). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
In a quiet land where the world often rested beneath a thick blanket of snow, a lone magpie perched on a wooden gate. The magpie, with its striking black-and-white feathers, was accustomed to the stillness and calm that the cold season brought.
One day, as the magpie foraged for food, it noticed a small bird struggling in the snow below. It was a young robin, shivering and weak, its bright red breast a stark contrast to the white landscape.
The magpie flew down to the robin and asked, “Why do you struggle here alone? This is no place for those unprepared for the cold.”
The robin, trembling, replied, “I lost my way in the snowstorm and now I am too weak to continue. I fear I won’t survive much longer.”
The magpie, though known for its cleverness and keen eye for survival, had a kind heart. Seeing the robin’s plight, the magpie said, “Come, I will help you. We must look after each other in difficult times.”
The magpie led the robin to a sheltered spot under a thick hedge, where the snow had not yet reached. It shared its small store of seeds and nuts, collected with care for such harsh times.
As the days passed, the magpie and the robin found warmth in each other’s company. The magpie taught the robin how to spot food even in the bleakest of landscapes, and in return, the robin shared songs of hope, lifting the magpie’s spirits.
In time, the robin’s strength returned, and she knew it was time to fly back to her own home. She thanked the magpie for her kindness and promised to return when the snow melted, to sing for her new friend the songs of spring.
The magpie, watching the robin take flight, felt a warmth in her heart that even the coldest winter could not freeze. She understood that while the snow had brought silence and stillness to the land, it had also brought them together, reminding her that even in the quietest moments, there is life, warmth, and connection.
Moral of the Fable
Adversity and difficulty often give rise to beauty, strength, and connection. In challenging times, the support and kindness we offer to others not only help them but also reveal our own inner resilience.
An Additional Treat – Lyrics based on the fable set to music
Lyrics by Donald S. Yarab, inspired by the fable “The Magpie in Winter,” set to music.
Swallow and Peony (woodblock print, pre-1945), Ohara Koson (1877-1945).
The Nightingale and the Rose
In a secluded grove, hidden deep within an ancient forest, there lived a nightingale whose song was unmatched by any other creature. Every evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, the nightingale would perch on a high branch and sing, filling the air with melodies so beautiful that even the stars seemed to pause and listen.
In the center of the grove grew a single rosebush, its flowers the color of a blush at dawn, delicate and fragrant. The nightingale loved the rosebush with all its heart, for it saw in the rose a beauty that mirrored its own song. Night after night, the nightingale would sing to the rose, hoping that the rose might hear the song and return its love.
But the rose, though beautiful, was unaware of the nightingale’s affection. It stood rooted in the earth, its petals turned toward the sun, drinking in the light and warmth. The rose did not understand the nightingale’s song, for it had never known love beyond the gentle caress of the morning dew or the kiss of the afternoon breeze.
One night, as the nightingale sang its most heartfelt melody, the moonlight filtered through the leaves, casting a silvery glow over the grove. The nightingale, filled with longing, poured all its love into the song, hoping to reach the rose’s heart.
The rose, touched by the nightingale’s song, began to stir. Its petals trembled, and for the first time, it felt something more than just the sun’s warmth or the wind’s touch. It felt the nightingale’s love, pure and unyielding. But the rose could not return this love in the way the nightingale desired. It could only bloom as it always had, beautiful but distant, its heart locked away in its delicate petals.
The nightingale, realizing that the rose could never love it as it loved the rose, sang one final song, a song of acceptance and farewell. It was a song that spoke of the beauty of love, even when unreturned, and of the joy in loving without expectation.
As the nightingale’s song faded into the night, the rose shed a single petal, a silent token of its appreciation for the nightingale’s devotion. The nightingale, with a heart full of love but no bitterness, flew away into the night, knowing that its love, though unrequited, had been true and pure.
The rose continued to bloom, its beauty admired by all who passed, but it was never the same after that night. It had been touched by the nightingale’s love, and though it could not return it, the memory of that love remained within its petals, giving them a deeper, more resonant hue.
Moral of the Fable
Love, even when unreturned, is a gift that enriches both the giver and the recipient. True love is selfless and does not demand reciprocation, finding its own beauty in the act of loving.
A Lyrical Treat Inspired by the Fable
A Four Stanza “Poem” based on the Fable set to a medieval-folk theme. Lyrics by Donald S. Yarab, Music by Udio.com.
Clay tablets. Story of Gilgamesh and Aga. Old Babylonian period, 2003-1595 BC. Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraqi Kurdistan. (CC-BY SA 4.0. Dr. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin).
Homer, even if the fictive creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is inseparable in the mind from those masterful and inspiring works of literature. Equally inseparable should be Sin-lēqi-unninni from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Andrew George, whose engaging translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh is readily acknowledged by later translators of the epic as “a master class in philological precision and ingenuity,” has this to say about Sin-lēqi-unninni:
According to Babylonian tradition the [Epic of Gilgamesh] was the work of a certain Sîn-lēqi-unninni, a scholar from Uruk who was believed to have been a contemporary of Gilgamesh himself. However, Sîn-lēqi-unninni bears a name of a kind not found before the second millennium, so the tradition clearly preserved an anachronism. Instead, there is little doubt that Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s name was associated with the epic because he was the man who gave it its final, fixed form. Sîn-lēqi-unninni is thus one of the earliest editors in recorded history. From a comparison of the standard version of the first millennium with the older fragments we know that the person responsible for the standard version remodeled the poem. He provided it with a new prologue and recast the story to emphasize the theme of wisdom gained through suffering. Probably he was responsible for interpolating a version of the flood story, adapted from the old poem of Atra-hasis, and for appending to the epic as Tablet XII the rump of one of the Sumerian poems of Bilgames in an Akkadian prose translation. He left his mark also on the prosody, reducing variation in parallel and similar passages by combining their lines and repeating them verbatim to produce a text characterized by long sections of repetition where older versions had none. For this he often stands accused of damaging the poem’s literary qualities, but at the same time it can be argued that he introduced a profundity of thought that was probably lacking in the older versions.
Though the editorship of Sîn-lēqi-unninni probably changed the poem so radically that it is no wonder the Babylonians later named him as its author, it is clear from the multiple versions of the second millennium and from the existence of textual variants in the standard version of the first millennium, that he was not the only individual to leave his mark on the written epic. However, we know nothing of these others.
George, Andrew (2008) ‘Shattered tablets and tangled threads: Editing Gilgamesh, then and now.’ Aramazd. Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 3 (1). pp. 11-12.
George, perhaps, does an injustice to Sin-lēqi-unninni, by relegating him to the role of editor alone. Sin-lēqi-unninni was not mere scribe, nor compilator, nor even editor; rather, because of the number and weight of the substantive additions and structural changes he made to the epic, we may rightly view him as an ingenious co-creator of the ever-inspiring epic, such that modern publications could have a title page reading Sin-lēqi-unninni’s Epic of Gilgamesh.
The life that you seek you will never find: when the gods created mankind, death they dispensed to mankind, life they kept for themselves.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (2020), A. George, p. xlv
Two other translations of the poem in my library, both meritorious and worthy of note, include the recently published Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic, by Sophus Helle (2021), which sought to strike a middle ground between George’s scholarly translation and the “translations of translations,” which can be used to described the other work in my library, Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh (2004). Harold Bloom described Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh as the “best I have seen in English” at the time it was published.
Gilgamesh is a well I go to for reflection and creative thought repeatedly. This is not surprising, as The New York Review of Books concisely notes that Gilgamesh inspires reflection and creativity on a multiplicity of levels:
In the century and a half since its rediscovery, however, and especially since World War II, Gilgamesh has made up for lost time. It has been translated into at least two dozen languages and been the inspiration for countless works of theater, film, poetry, fiction, and visual art. Musical responses to Gilgamesh include several operas, a ballet, hip-hop, jazz fusion, and an ear-pummeling track called “Gilgameš” by the Greek extreme metal band Rotting Christ.
Gilgamesh has also been acclaimed as the earliest work of ecological literature and included in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature as a founding text of queer writing, for its treatment of the relationship between Gilgamesh and his wild-man friend, Enkidu. The cultural energy of Gilgamesh shows no sign of dimming; the novelist Naja Marie Aidt describes it as a “fireball” that “has torn through time,” constantly in a process of reentry to the present.
New York Review of Books (October 20, 2022), “A Fireball from the Sands,” by Robert Macfarlane.
Some of my favorite more recent creative endeavors include two musical works. The first is a Lament on the Death of Enkidu, set to music and sung in Akkadian, based on the poetry of the epic. Peter Pringle, the creator, notes that he was helped along in his pronunciation of the Akkadian by Dr. George. It is simply stunning. Take a moment to listen and reflect on your mortality.
Gilgamesh’s Lament for the Death of Enikidu
The second is a nod to the ecological message that many find in the epic related to the consequences of the indiscriminate felling of the cedar forest in Lebanon. As explained in the New York Review of Books:
During the UK’s pandemic lockdown, [Robert] Macfarlane cowrote an album with the singer-songwriter and actor Johnny Flynn, Lost in the Cedar Wood. They collaborated on lyrics, sharing photos of notebook pages while in their respective homes, and Flynn would set them to music. “It felt like a wild wonder, to be able to feed words into the Johnny Flynn Song Machine and get a demo back a few days later!”
In addition to daily life in lockdown, the album is inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh: “We wanted to write something both ancient and urgent,” said Macfarlane. “At the heart of Gilgamesh is the story of an unwise ruler, Gilgamesh himself, taking his axe to the Sacred Cedar Wood and felling these extraordinary trees. A few months after we began work on it, the Fairy Creek calamity started to unfold on Vancouver Island, with the premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, allowing the logging of the old-growth cedar forest there, including trees up to 2,000 years old.” Lines like “It was the first of the tellings/Of all of the fellings” (from the song “Tree Rings”), while unfortunately evergreen, took on a particular significance.
New York Review of Books (July 10, 2021), Ramblin’ Man. Robert Macfarlane, interviewed by Willa Glickman.
Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane’s Tree Rings
To circle back to the beginning, this remarkable creativity is very much, I believe, the result of the creativity and authorship of the ancient editor of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sîn-lēqi-unninni. He deserves more credit for the depth and reflection which is inspired by the ancient epic in its most familiar form. Let us celebrate his memory every time we read the epic or enjoy any of its derivative inspirational works.
Northcoast Antiquarian 