The Fate of the Gods in the Poetry of Charles Leconte de Lisle and Lucian Blaga
The Fate of the Gods in the Poetry of Charles Leconte de Lisle and Lucian Blaga

Summary/Abstract: The present article, which uses the hermeneutical strategies promoted by Pierre Brunel’s mythocritique, aims to investigate the Germanic eschatological myth of the “Fate of the Gods” in the poetry of Charles Leconte de Lisle and Lucian Blaga. After a historical-religious introduction on the “Fate of the Gods”, the article outlines its peculiar symbolic constellation. Subsequently, the article turns the archetypical approach into the mythocritical application to poetic texts. The poem La Légende des Nornes (The Legend of Norns, 1862) by Leconte de Lisle is a case of flexibilité of the “Fate of the Gods” myth in a literary text: the French poet reproduces the mythologeme of great winter and combines the outcomes of the deluge and those of conflagration into the original image of a smoking ocean. The poems Peisaj transcendent (Transcendental Landscape, 1929), Satul minunilor (The Village of Miracles, 1938) and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, 1970) by Blaga are instead a case of irradiation of the “Fate of the Gods” myth in a literary text: although never mentioning the Germanic eschatological event, the Romanian poet depicts its dying god and the world renewal that follows it.

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