{"id":5790,"date":"2009-10-07T09:55:26","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T16:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/?p=5790"},"modified":"2015-09-25T09:17:31","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T16:17:31","slug":"saunders-myspace-mwindo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/saunders-myspace-mwindo\/","title":{"rendered":"Saunders’ “Mwindo” Is On MySpace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most TC regulars are probably aware of the fact that Charles R. Saunders has recently posted some of his vintage fiction<\/a> on his website<\/a>. What I was unaware of (until very recently) is that Mr. Saunders maintains a MySpace blog upon which he has been posting his retelling of the Mwindo legend.<\/p>\n

\n

\"beninmask\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dating from the late 1980s, “Mwindo” is full-strength CRS, written just as he ended his first phase of writing about Imaro. Mwindo, in some ways, is the Central African equivalent to Theseus or Sigurd or Cuchullain: a culture-hero with a semi-divine background. He also appears to be a literary \"imaro-bohu1\"ancestor to Saunders’ own Imaro<\/a>. The Illyassai shares with Mwindo a not-quite-human heritage, an atypical childhood and a penchant for finding trouble (or trouble finding him). There is also the fact that in both epics, the hero’s character\/soul is said to be “forged”, though CRS has yet to reach the point in his retelling of “Mwindo” where that simile appears in the original Nyanga version.<\/p>\n

In his introduction to “Mwindo,” Charles R. Saunders encourages his readers to seek out A Treasury of African Folklore<\/a><\/em> by Harold Courlander, within the \"courlander-taf\"pages of which one can find “Mwindo” as well many, many other tales from sub-Saharan Africa. I can only second that emotion. I still have fond memories of Courlander’s magisterial collection from when I first discovered it over two decades ago.<\/p>\n

To date, Mr. Saunders has only posted sixteen chapters of his interpretation of the Mwindo epic (see below). He states that he one day hopes to see the completed work published. I certainly look forward to that day. Additionally, in his September 6, 2009 blog post, he states that he is hard at work on another Dossouye<\/a> novel. That’s good news as well.<\/p>\n

The chapters of “Mwindo” can be found as follows:<\/p>\n

Introduction and Chapter One<\/p>\n

Chapters Two and Three<\/p>\n

Chapters Four and Five<\/p>\n

Chapters Six and Seven<\/p>\n

Chapters Eight and Nine<\/p>\n

Chapters Ten and Eleven<\/p>\n

Chapters Twelve and Thirteen<\/p>\n

Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen<\/p>\n

Chapter Sixteen<\/p>\n

\"charles_saunders_photo-150x150\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most TC regulars are probably aware of the fact that Charles R. Saunders has recently posted some of his vintage fiction on his website. What I was unaware of (until very recently) is that Mr. Saunders maintains a MySpace blog upon which he has been posting his retelling of the Mwindo legend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-authors","category-saunders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5790"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16710,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5790\/revisions\/16710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}