Week 6 Lab: Crash Course Videos

("Heracles' Labors" by Egisto Sani via Flickr)

For my Story Lab assignment this week, I watched these three Crash Course videos about myths. Myths are quite interesting because it’s hard to tell where it originated, as many myths with known authors are just retelling of the stories. Therefore, I’m quite curious on how these myths started and how they were able to spread out throughout history, especially the older ones since literacy wasn’t giant back then. I also found it interesting how Crash Course explains how there isn’t just one way of interpreting a story. Stories can be interpreted in many different ways based on the person and their perspective and while these views on the story may differ, none of them are wrong. One major thing that I took away from the first video is that myths are not the same things as folktales or fairytales. I thought of them to be the same at first, but now I have a deeper understanding of what a myth actually is. As for the second video, I really enjoyed listening to how all these different people view mythology and how the study of mythology has really grown and broadened over the years. If you look back to where it started and how people viewed mythology back then, it is really interesting to see how far it has come. The third video is something that I am actually am familiar with as I believe I learned about the Hero’s journey in high school. I think that I learned about it in English class as we were reading Beowulf and after learning about the topic, I became able to recognize each part of the “hero” storyline in different stories. Overall, I think that videos were quite helpful in understanding exactly what myths and mythology are really about.