Thank you very much for the kind introduction. I am very glad to be able to talk with you today. In the spirit of the broader introduction, which was the musical introduction, I want to start by making a very obvious point, which is that any story that we tell now about the world that we're living in is in some sense a Ukrainian story, because the very possibility of doing things like the thing that we're doing now depends upon what Ukrainians are doing elsewhere. Were it not for the fact that Ukrainians resisted the Russian invasion, we would be living in a very, very different world. And I tend to think the greatest human capacity is the capacity to take things for granted. There are many unfortunate, tragic features of us, but one of them is that we take things for granted. So I want to begin just by making the very general point that being here with you and speaking about other sorts of world stories, as I'm about to, is only possible because of the history that Ukrainians are writing very literally on the battlefield. Were they not resisting, none of this would happen. And so the stories that I'm telling, or I will tell, are all inside that story. They're all inside that world story, the world story which is underway around us, enabling us, in some cases inspiring us.
The spirit also of what I want to say is that the most important things are often what we don't see. So I'm going to be making a lot of connections between the history of Ukraine and culture, ancient culture, classical culture, familiar culture, popular culture. These are connections which, no matter how enthusiastically they taught you in Saturday school that Ukraine was the center of everything, these are connections that even the good Canadian Ukrainians might not know or find obvious. But my motto here is that, I mean, paraphrasing Antoine de Saint-Exupéry a little bit, what's essential is often invisible to the eye. Or to put it in a more historical way, what I found as a historian of the dark subjects that Bojana kindly mentioned is that we don't know things because they're important. Often we don't know things because they're important. The things that easily come to us as history are not necessarily the things that we need to know. And there are many examples of this around the world, of course, including in Canada, but one example of this is Ukraine. So while I'm going to, hopefully what I'm going to be telling you will be interesting and in some way uplifting, but for me the interesting part is how much labor it takes to bring to the surface these connections which really I think everyone ought to be aware of. So let me start.
I started by talking about the present war. And as many of you will know, the war of 2014, when it began, began among other things with an interesting cultural comparison. Ukrainians at that time, because a movie had just come out, were referring to sometimes Russia, sometimes occupied territories as Mordor. Okay, so I told you this would be about popular culture and it's going to be about popular culture and it's going to be about how, just to give you a sneak preview, our entire English-language popular culture is going to turn out to depend on ancient Ukrainian history within the next 45 minutes. Okay. You laugh now, but at the end you're going to be nodding sagely.
Okay, so in 2014, as some of you will remember, there was this characterization of Mordor. And then in 2022, in the full-scale invasion, there was this notion that the invaders were orcs, right? That they were orcs, which is another reference, and don't pretend not to know this, people, to J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Now, it might appear that this is intrusive, that Ukrainians are referring to something that has nothing to do with Ukraine, that this is a far-fetched reference to a Hollywood movie or to a story written by a dead Englishman. But that is not really at all the case. The story that Tolkien wrote, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit before it, is deeply structured around legends, legends which have a historical basis, which have to do with the Goths. And they have to do with the Goths at precisely the time when the Goths were in, I feel like I can do this as a call and response, when the Goths were in Ukraine. The most picturesque moments of the story of the movie involve episodes which Tolkien drew directly from Hervarar saga, which is a Viking saga which has fragments which draw from old Gothic stories of battles that took place in Ukraine in the 4th century. So, for example, and now I am speaking to you Tolkien fans, but don't worry, I'm going to speak to people who like even more superficial popular culture later. So, for example, the scene towards the end when Eowyn and Merry kill the Witch-King of Angmar with a sword that Merry has recovered from a barrow. That comes directly from Hervarar saga, which is a Gothic saga. The notion of a sword that comes from a barrow comes from Gothic barrows that comes from Ukraine. The notion of a female warrior who plays a decisive role in the saga, she's called Hervor. In Tolkien's story, she's called Eowyn, that comes from the same saga. And from that saga as well comes a riddling game, a riddling game in which a king is trading riddles with an incredibly wise person who eventually turns out to be the god Odin. And at the end, and by the way, Odin, I don't know how much you've had to do with him, but he's very unfair and tricky. And at the end he betrays all of his friends and he cheats. And so in the riddle game he always asks the same last question, which is, what did Odin whisper into the ear of his son Balder at Balder's funeral? Which, of course, how do you know? You weren't there and he was whispering. From that story, oh, when Odin says that, the king realizes that it's Odin and he's angry that he's cheating and he pulls out his sword and he tries to kill Odin and Odin flies away in the shape of a hawk. He cuts off the tail feathers, which is why hawks' tail feathers are short, in case you were wondering. That story is transposed, that Gothic story, that story which comes from Ukraine, was transposed by Tolkien into the riddling match between Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit, in which Bilbo also asks an unfair question at the end, which is much more banal. What have I got in my pocket? How is Gollum supposed to know? Gollum gets angry and tries to kill Bilbo. So this basic story, oh, and by the way, this basic story, it comes straight from Gothic Ukraine, 1500 years ago, into the most popular, it's the basis of the most popular fantasy story of our time. And it goes on and on like this. Like one could give an entire lecture, and like for the five of you who are following what I'm saying now, I'll give that lecture later on, but one could give an entire lecture just about Tolkien and Ukraine easily. But Bilbo and the ring, Odin has a ring which creates nine rings, just like Sauron has a one ring that rules over nine rings. The Scandinavian layer of Lord of the Rings also has to do very much with Ukraine. Tolkien himself thought of Odin as a Gothic character. He called him Odin the Goth. And all of the characters, many characters in Lord of the Rings, not just Sauron, also Saruman, also Gandalf, also Aragorn, are based in one way or another on Odin.
Okay, so I want to make sure that you've learned a couple of things before we move on. The first is historically the Goths. The Goths often get lost. And I don't just mean like your friends, the Goths, who couldn't make it to this evening's event because they had other plans, because they were either more cool or less cool depending on your point of view. What I mean is the Goths, the European people who we know from the 1st century AD to the 8th century AD. The Goths who began at the Baltic Sea, who ruled what's now Ukraine for about three centuries, who were driven from Ukraine by the Huns, who end up killing a couple of Roman emperors, sacking Rome in 410, ruling the Western Roman Empire, founding medieval Spain, those Goths, those are people who came from Ukraine, who were incredibly historically important. Ruling the Western Roman Empire is pretty significant. Founding the first medieval European state, also pretty significant. But not even Ukrainians, I'm going to submit to you, generally remember that the Goths came from Ukraine, right? And they did. And their connection to Tolkien is just one little thing that one could say about them.
Okay, speaking of the Goths, another important story connected to Tolkien, if you want, Wagner's Ring Cycle, the story of Brunhilde, the Valkyrie, all this, the entire basis of modern German cultural nationalism. Where does that come from? Who was Brunhilde? I mean, are there women who actually, I mean, in this room there probably are some who once were Valkyries but made bad decisions in their love lives and now are regular women. I think there's some in the front row, I'm sensing. So if you don't know the story of the Ring Cycle and Richard Wagner, that's basically the story. There's a woman. She was a Valkyrie. She made some bad decisions in her love life. She became a normal woman. In the end, as women generally do, she has to get on a horse and kill herself in order to... Okay, you probably know the story. I mean, you probably live this story, at least some of you. So if you don't know Wagner and the Ring Cycle, it is an incredibly important bit of Western culture. Who is Brunhilde? Where did she come from? Brunhild was a historical figure. She was a real person. She was a Gothic princess. In other words, she came from this group of people who came from Ukraine. She was a princess in Visigothic Spain. She was married off into a kingdom which is now France. She managed, by hook or by crook, to rule over the course of three or four generations of men and therefore was remembered unkindly by Christian chroniclers later on, who had a way of taking interesting women and turning them into wicked women. So Brunhilda, the basis for the Wagnerian Ring Cycle, was also in some way a Ukrainian character. She was someone who came from what is now Ukraine.
Okay. Now, Brunhilde, the Ring Cycle, Wagner, all of this, all of this is part of an ancient set of Germanic stories. And these ancient set of Germanic stories involving characters like Siegfried and so on, all of these have a basis in the Gothic lands. So insofar as you know anything about the set of Germanic stories, you should be remembering that those things have a connection to the territory of Ukraine. None of these stories, none of these famous German stories would exist without the Goths. They all have a basis in Ukraine. And interestingly, and this is the second part of what I want to say, interestingly these stories come back to Ukraine and they come back to Ukraine with the Vikings. So Brunhilde is, she's a Gothic princess. Her story, her story with Siegfried is remembered by the Vikings. The Vikings in the 9th century bring that story back to where it came from in the first place in some way, which is Ukraine. When the Vikings, or the Rus', as I realize many of you are more comfortable calling them, when the Rus' come to Kiev in the 10th century, they are literally bringing with them Germanic stories that started off in Ukraine in the first place. But, and here comes the interesting part, as the Vikings voyage with these Germanic stories, with their runestones, with a figure of Sigurd or Siegfried on the hilts of their swords, when they bring these stories with them back to Ukraine, they're encountering all kinds of other people. They're encountering Turkic speakers. They're encountering Iranian speakers. They're encountering Jews. They're encountering all kinds of Christians. And these Germanic stories get mixed up and mixed around and become much, much more interesting. So interesting that we find them interesting today. So this whole business of Norse mythology, one thing that Wagner got wrong, or one thing that Wagner, the great German composer, got wrong, or one thing that he convinced us of, was that all these stories represent some kind of pure German thing. In fact, these stories are interesting not for that reason. They're interesting for a completely different reason, which is that our nice Vikings, the Rus', as they traveled from Scandinavia down towards Kiev, where they eventually landed after three centuries of trying to make up their minds, along the way they brought into these stories elements that weren't there before. So the German gods before the Vikings get to them are a pretty boring bunch. But after the Vikings make their journey to Rus', suddenly you have this Thor character with all kinds of charismatic attributes who the Slavs call Perun. Suddenly Odin has all kinds of interesting character traits you didn't have before. Suddenly there's this thing called Valhalla, which you go to after you die if you're worthy, right? If you're worthy. Suddenly there's this business of Ragnarok, a dramatic clash at the end of time in which the gods fight and interestingly lose, right? Which leads to the moral notion that what is important is how you live and how you struggle as opposed to the outcome. All of those features are features of Viking mythology which we find, I think, interesting. They're certainly the features of Viking mythology which we know, and they all have to do not with ancient Germanic stuff. None of that can be found in ancient Germanic stuff. All of it has to do with the voyage of the Rus' to Kiev.
Now, I realize that for you, okay, I mean, I don't want to tell Ukrainians what you think, although I do sort of know, but I realize that for you, the voyage of the Rus' to Kiev is all about how eventually they're going to become Christian. And don't worry, I'll get to that. But it's very interesting that along the way they essentially created this very lasting theme of our culture, which is Norse mythology, right? Norse mythology as it's known, for example, okay, I told you pop culture, in the Marvel movies, right? These figures of Thor and Odin, Loki, all of them, as they turn up in Marvel movies or in Marvel comics, are a result of precisely culture which is developed in Ukraine.
Okay. So, what have we done so far? We've done The Lord of the Rings and we've done Marvel comics. There are a few things that Disney owns that we haven't done, but we are going to get to them all by the end. It's going to turn out that the horrifying American hegemony over world culture has its origins in things that began in Ukraine.
Okay. So, I promised you Christianity. Let's give you a, I'm going to give you a little Christianity. So, and I'm going to try to make this local. So, here at University of Toronto, we have a Sheptytsky Institute, and the main Sheptytsky that people think about is Andrey. The other Shep, there are several other Sheptytskys. But the other one who is most closely associated with Andrey, I think it's fair to say, is Klyment or Klymentiy. It was Andrey and Klymentiy who cooperated during the Second World War to rescue more than a hundred Jewish children in a story which I imagine most of you do know. There's a reason why Klyment, I'm going to tell this now as a different kind of world story, there's a reason why Klyment becomes a major saint for Ukrainians. So Klymentiy Sheptytsky, this remarkable 20th-century figure, this remarkable Ukrainian churchman, he chose the name Klyment for a reason, and the reason was that Klyment was an important Ukrainian saint. What kind of character was this Klyment? And in answering this question, what I'm going to try to do is start a different kind of explanation. Explain how very familiar classical culture, Greek and Roman culture, also has a great deal to do with Ukraine if we're able to see it. So St. Klyment was an interesting character. We have from the, okay, I wanted to say from the real Klyment, we have from the historical St. Klyment one document, which frankly for early Christianity is pretty good, better than average. We got one document. Okay. I can tell they've got a lot of, like, I've got a tough Christian crowd out here. Didn't get any laughter from the no-documents joke. All right. So Klyment the... People in the middle are like, give me a funnier Christian joke. Okay. All right. Try.
So Klyment was, as some of you will know, he was an early bishop of Rome. He wrote one letter and then he died. But you know, as happens with early saints and with disciples of apostles, which is what Klyment was, there were many interesting stories attached themselves to Klyment. So the two most interesting are that he went on a voyage with St. Peter. And during this voyage around the Near East and Africa, he helped St. Peter as a kind of debating coach. He helped St. Peter deal with Simon Magus, who was of course the evil opposing magician in Acts and, you know, in the New Testament generally. And so there's like debate. It must have been fascinating. There was debate after debate in the story between Peter and Simon Magus. And Simon would perform magical acts, like he would fly up into the air and then Peter would make him fall back down. Early Christianity was a lot of fun. Like the things that happened in the first few centuries, I miss those things. Like why can't we have that now? Like why can't we have the evil magicians fly up in the air and then be brought back down by the good magician? Okay. So Klyment was like the educated person who was sort of helping Peter with the Greek philosophy and the Roman law and things like this. Klyment was a kind of, you know, he was a disciple of an apostle essentially. So it's a really interesting story and it involves, at the end of the story, it involves, as many of these Greek stories do, this is a Greek novel from the second or third century AD, it involves Klyment finding, it's really wonderful. It's like an American sitcom in this respect. It turns out that he finds his mother who he'd lost, and then he finds his father who he'd also lost, and then he finds both of his brothers who he'd also lost. It's almost a little bit much, but it turns out that the entire family which was thought to be lost, they're all still alive and they all convert to Christianity and it's a very happy ending. So that's one story associated with Klyment is this voyage, the debates with Simon Magus, the magic, the recovery of the family.
The second story associated with Klyment is that he's, this is maybe the one more familiar to Ukrainians, is that he's martyred in the Black Sea. So the idea is that Klyment was banished from Rome because he was too good at converting people. He was banished to Ukraine precisely. But in Ukraine he was also very good at converting people. He built dozens of churches. He converted thousands of people. And as a result, the Emperor Trajan was very upset and decided that Klyment had to not just be exiled, but had to die. And the way that Klyment was killed in the story was that he was taken out in a boat to the Black Sea. An anchor was tied around his body and he was thrown overboard. Happily, Klyment at the bottom of the Black Sea had a marble palace built for him by angels who kept him safe and sound, or at least his remains safe and sound, until Cyril and Methodius could turn up later. So Cyril and Methodius, as you know, did many good things. They invented Church Slavonic. They created the language which brought Christianity to Ukraine. One of the deeds of Cyril was that while he was on his way back from trying to convert the Khazars, which apparently didn't turn out that well, while he was on his way back there was a miraculous recession of the Black Sea and the marble palace became visible, as did the remains of Klyment. So Cyril picked up the relics of Klyment and carried them back to Rome, where you can still see them today at the church of San Clemente in Rome, as it happens.
Okay. Now what does this have to do with Ukrainian Christianity? It has a lot to do with Ukrainian Christianity because our good friend Volodymyr, our sainted friend Volodymyr, essentially converted to Christianity in a very typical Ukrainian oligarchical smash-and-grab operation, which may not be the term that you were taught, but the way that Volodymyr converted to Christianity was that he stole it, which I think is actually a very good way to become Christian. I mean, it's not the way that your saint story is going to remember it, but it's effective. No, because it shows them who's boss, right? It shows them who's boss. I mean, in the traditional way that it's told, like the Byzantine emperor is the boss and he consents to give his sister and so on. That's not how it happened at all. It was a smash-and-grab operation. The Byzantine emperor was down. He was weak. And so what Volodymyr does is he storms Chersonesus, which is a city, of course, on the Crimean Peninsula, and he takes Christianity. He just physically takes it. He takes priests. He takes relics. He takes books. He takes whatever he needs. And then he says, "I'm Christian and I'm going to decide what Christianity is going to look like in Kiev." That's basically how it goes. We can, like, I'll settle this with our nice people from the Volodymyr Institute later on. But that is how it goes.
Okay. He also takes the relics of St. Klyment, which of course are already in Rome, but as the wise scholar of Franco pointed out, these relics had the happy property of being where and when they were needed, right? So Volodymyr also takes the relics of Klyment and brings them to Kiev, where they're installed on the heights of Kiev in the Desiatynna church, a site where I'm sure many of you have been and where they remain at least for a couple of centuries, and where Volodymyr and then after him Yaroslav show them off. I mean, particularly the skull, show them off to European visitors. Okay, so it's not a story which is familiar to us, but this is a world story coming into Ukraine. What we have is a Greek novel about Klyment, and that Greek novel translates itself into the story of how Ukraine becomes Christian by way of this figure Klyment. We have a Roman story about a martyr, and that Roman story about a martyr translates itself into the Rus' story, the Ukrainian story of how the country becomes Christian. And of course, there's another global element of all this, which is that St. Klyment, for understandable or maybe slightly ironic reasons, becomes the patron saint of sailors.
Yeah, because of the anchor, right? Because of... No, there's... Yeah, I mean, the anchor, the cross. How's the saying go? The cross is my anchor, as a saint associated with St. Klyment. So he becomes the patron saint of sailors. But the Vikings, or our friends the Rus', also take Klyment with them out of Kiev. They take Klyment with them back to Scandinavia. They found churches named after St. Klyment when Scandinavians convert on Gotland, the island east of Sweden, which was a major center of Viking economic operations, on Visby, which was the major port, they found a church of precisely St. Klyment. So St. Klyment also goes out into the world thanks to Rus' or thanks to Ukraine.
All right, final example of how all this works. And there are many, many more examples, like I can do vampires too. Like there are many, many other examples of this. But the final example I want to give you is the classics. So we're going to move deeper back. You might have noticed we're slowly moving back in time and to stories which hopefully are more and more familiar. But the last example I want to give are the Greek classics. And so just like Nordic mythology has a lot to do with Ukraine, but we don't see it, Greek mythology also has a lot to do with Ukraine, but we may not see it. And before I go into a couple of the specific examples, I just want to make the general point that the entire Athenian culture that we so treasure, or even if we don't treasure it, we acknowledge its existence. You know, whether or not we are big fans of them, we acknowledge the importance, I think, still of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and the mathematicians and so on. That entire fifth, fourth century BC culture was dependent on Ukraine economically. I mean, this is just a very basic point. You can't actually live, I mean, unless you're a grad student, you can't actually live on olives alone. The Athenians grew olives as a cash crop for export. I mean, they did eat them, but it was a cash crop, and they couldn't feed themselves. They couldn't grow enough wheat to feed themselves. It made more sense to grow the olives and to sell the olives and to get the grain from Ukraine, which is what they did. They got the grain from towns that they founded on the north coast of the Black Sea, particularly towards the east, from people who were known as Scythians. And the entirety of Greek civilization coincides in time and, in an important way, also in place with the arrival of these Scythians. So as the Greeks arrive by ship to the north coast of the Black Sea, in the exact same moment the Scythians are arriving by land, on horseback, to the same place, and the two cultures meet and merge economically, but also, I want to say, culturally.
Okay, let me give you a couple of examples of this. You may not have the Iliad on your mind as much as I do. I have the Iliad on my mind because my child had to read it. And so I reread it. I've got Oedipus Rex in my pocket because my child now has to read Sophocles. So I've recently read the Iliad again. But, you know, whether or not you've recently read it, the Iliad is the foundation. It's the literary foundation of ancient Greek culture. It's the text that the ancient Greeks themselves revered because they regarded it as historically true and as being several centuries before their own time. So in the world after the Iliad, in the world after the Trojan War, we see all kinds of interesting Ukrainian things happen. And I'm just going to give you a couple of examples. One of them is the best play by the Greek playwright Euripides. And I mean this in complete earnest. The best play by Euripides is Iphigenia Taurica, which was known for about two thousand years as his best play and then went out of fashion in the twentieth century, which just shows you how rotten the twentieth century was. And it needs to come back into fashion because it's his best play. Iphigenia Taurica is a rescue romp in which you have a guy and his best friend and they're under a curse and they have to come from Greece to Crimea in order... It's a heist movie also. In order to take a wooden idol of Artemis, they've got to cooperate. They're kind of bungling, you know, they're both quite bungling. One of them has psychological issues, or he's under a curse. I'm sorry, he's under a curse by the Furies because he killed his mother. As one does in Greek stories. Don't clip that and send it to my mother.
Okay, so you have Orestes and Pylades and their friends and they've got to do this thing and they arrive and then there's Iphigenia and Iphigenia is Orestes' sister, but they don't recognize each other. And Iphigenia is a death priestess because at the beginning of the Iliad, her father has to sacrifice her in order to get good wind so the Greek ships can push off. But at the last minute, you'll be happy to know, Artemis swoops in, replaces her with an animal, takes her back out to Crimea, where she becomes Artemis' death priestess and helps to sacrifice all the sailors who land nearby. Okay, so that's the backdrop. So Iphigenia is doing this, this is her life, and then her brother shows up and they don't recognize each other. But eventually Iphigenia, who is the central figure in this plot, figures out what's going on and she thinks up a way to get the idol into her brother's hands for all three of them to escape in a way in which the natives won't be too upset. Okay, so the interesting thing about this plot is that it's the only example in Euripides or anywhere else in Greek tragedy, or this isn't a tragedy actually, it's more of a comedy, I think, but in the Greek dramas of the period, in which a woman has the main idea, figures things out, and rescues everybody else, and it has a happy ending. I don't think there's any other play, and I don't think it's a coincidence that this play happens where it does, that it happens in what we now think of as Ukraine. And that is because, and here's my second example, that women in what is now Ukraine played a different role than women did in Athens was a very commonly understood fact in ancient Greece and a fact which emerges quite prominently not only in the plays but also in the plastic art and really in every possible aspect of the culture. Okay, where do we see this?
This, my second example, is Achilles. Okay, so you heard Achilles, right? The Greek hero. He dies at the... he dies. He dies and he has to die. But fortunately his mother loves him. And she's a goddess. And after he dies, she spirits him off to... you guys got to know this, Snake Island. Okay, so she spirits him off to Snake Island, which the Greeks call White Island. It's probably called Snake Island because Achilles' mother could turn into snaky things, which we don't like, you know. So Achilles after his death is conveniently spirited off to Snake Island, where he is worshipped as a god for about a thousand years. So after Achilles is... so Olya, which is a town in what's now Mykolaiv Oblast, okay, it doesn't exist anymore, but for a long, long time, trust me, it was a Greek city. And in this Greek city, the main deity was Achilles, who was worshipped as having been brought back to life by his mother and who lived on what Ukrainians call Snake Island, but which the Greeks call White Island. He lived there. He had a temple. Sailors who passed by would stop and leave goats or coins as offerings. Later on he was worshipped in Poteidaia. But the entire time he was apparently the main deity of the city Olya. And he was there for a thousand years. And during that thousand years he had various wives and girlfriends. Helen of Troy, herself, pretty much anybody you would care to name. I mean, a thousand years is a long time, right? Especially if you're a stud like Achilles. I mean, think about it. So...
So a lot of women were brought into the picture, but in particular, there was one set of women who were brought into the picture, and here I want to make a... you might have noticed I'm actually making a serious point. One set of women who were brought into the picture were the Amazons. The Amazons at one point tried to storm Achilles' island. And of course, if any of you are students of all this, you'll know that Achilles during the Trojan War in one of the accounts has an encounter with Penthesilea, who's an Amazon, and they battle and he kills her and then he falls in love with her, which is the wrong order, guys. Like, you know...
But from this, you know, from that one example, you can leave, you realize, well, actually, pretty much every important Greek hero had an encounter like that. Hercules had an encounter with Hippolyta. Theseus ended up marrying an Amazon. Bellerophon had to fight a troop of Amazons. They pretty much all of them had encounters with these Amazons.
Now, of course, these Amazons weren't real, though, right? There couldn't have been these Amazons. I mean, that's obviously a fantasy that there were these women who fought. That couldn't have happened. And interestingly, that's how the whole 20th century dealt with the Amazons. There was a lot of evidence that there were such things as Amazons in the Greek art, but the way we handled it was in an interesting Freudian way, which I think says more about us than it says about the Greeks or the Scythians. And that way was to say, well, the Greeks had boring wives and therefore they fantasized about more interesting women. And their notion of more interesting women was women who rode horses and shot arrows. And remember, sometimes an arrow isn't just an arrow, right? And so that was like... [snorts] I told you there'd be better jokes. I'm very happy with the reaction from the third row in particular here because you seem like a tough crowd and like now you're like started to come along. Okay, good.
So, but that was the... I mean, this is probably the way you were taught if you were taught about the Amazons, because this is the way we treated it. The notion was it had to be a fantasy and like some kind of weird sexual fantasy because the Greeks subordinated their own women. Therefore, they had this idea, then they so therefore they got they got this displaced desire onto these imagined creatures, these women who rode horses and shot arrows. Oh, and lassos too. Lassos were part of this fantasy.
I'm learning a lot about y'all. Okay, so don't worry. I'm going to bring the lasso thing is going to come home before this is over. So, okay, you won't be surprised to learn that the Amazons were real. The reason why the Greeks portrayed the Amazons over and over again in their art and in their stories was because they had regular contact with mounted female warriors on horseback who used recurve bows. Those people were Scythians, precisely. As far as we can tell from the burial evidence in Crimea, about one in five of the people who fought in combat for the Scythians were biological women. And that fact took a long time to establish because we've had remains that looked like this for about a hundred years, or a bit longer. But for the longest time, these remains were characterized as small warriors with unusual pelvic structure.
I have some of those in my life. I don't know about the rest of you. So because we were, we were like, from our point of view, it was so obvious there couldn't possibly... like the Amazons had to be a fantasy. Like the evidence is staring you in the face, right? The Amazons are the single most popular motif for the Greeks, and you have these burials of, you know, people who are five feet tall and have hips like women, but somehow you managed for more than a century to decide that those were in fact just males. And here, interestingly, technology comes to the rescue because the ancient DNA technology allows one to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that these were actually biological females. Okay. So, oh, and I should mention the scholar Adrienne Mayor, who's written a great book about this, and the Ukrainian archaeologist Olena Fialko, who's also written, from the archaeological point of view, written the basic book about this, which if you read Ukrainian, you can find Olena Fialko. So, this has now been established that the Amazons are real.
And okay, where does that lead us in popular culture? Well, you've already guessed, right? There is a major figure in the comic book world who is an Amazon and who has a lasso and can tie you up and make you tell the truth. That's Wonder Woman from DC Comics. And if you're interested, my colleague Jill Lepore has a fascinating book about the origins of Wonder Woman, which has all of those things that you were thinking about that I didn't say. All of those things are in the book, because that does turn out to be the origin of Wonder Woman. But in the deeper historical way, the origin of Wonder Woman is, of course, the story of the Amazons.
Wonder Woman is an Amazon princess. And the story of the Amazons is present in our culture for more than 2,000 years because it is historically grounded in actual warfighting female archers in what's now Ukraine, precisely. Okay. So, what have we done so far? We've done DC Comics with Wonder Woman. We've done Marvel Comics with Thor and Odin. We've done Lord of the Rings. Got that checked off. That's pretty much the entire Disney franchise, I think. I forgot to mention about Iphigenia Taurica, that like, if... and this is Edith Hall's argument, which I'm just stealing, but that plot of Iphigenia Taurica of like the two guys who show up and like they're kind of bungling and they don't really know what to do. They're brave, but they're a little bit confused. And then they meet the smart woman, and maybe the woman is their sister, but maybe they're in love with her, too.
And she turns out to be the one who has the brains, and she figures out what to do and gets them out of the mess. That's the plot of Star Wars. And that is the plot of essentially all of those kinds of caper movies, right? And I won't have the time to trace this back, but that does actually go straight back to Iphigenia Taurica. So, we've got Star Wars, we've got Lord of the Rings, we've got Marvel Comics, and we've got DC Comics. And I think, by the way, that's serious, right? I mean, it's funny, but it's also serious because we're talking about major parts of the actual popular culture of the world today, putting the claim in a minimal way, which could not have existed without a Ukrainian element. Let's put it that way. Without a Ukrainian element or an element of Ukrainian history, none of those major stories could possibly have existed.
And if you don't care about those things and you only care about the more serious, you know, bits of culture, I think it's also just worth noting that the Nordic stories, the Germanic stories, the Greek stories, whatever they might have led to in our modern world, all of those major clusters of what we think of as world culture are dependent in a pretty powerful way on Ukraine. And if I could just add, they're dependent on a part of Ukraine also in a beautiful geographic sense, that these stories have to do with the Black Sea, but they also have to do with the steppe. They also have to do with the rivers. So when you encounter these stories at first hand, you recognize not just the Ukrainian cultural origins, but also the Ukrainian physical origins. The Goths and the Vikings using the rivers, the Greeks using the sea, everyone moving along the steppe, it's all recognizably Ukrainian.
So, let me just add one more thing for those of you who are not... like if there's anybody out there who's not satisfied that without Ukraine there is neither the culture that my child is forced to study in school nor the culture that he would prefer to be watching, right? I'm just going to make one more point. I said at the beginning that in a basic way all of our stories depend upon... right now all of our stories depend upon Ukrainians because of the war. But when we get all the way back in time, there's another very fundamental way in which all of our stories depend on Ukraine. And that has to do with language. So, insofar as I've made myself clear in English, or insofar as you understood the songs in Ukrainian, or insofar as you know anything about Indian languages or Iranian languages or Romance languages, Slavic languages, Greek, Latin, Celtic, insofar as you have any connection with the languages that are spoken by half the people in the world, the Indo-European languages, that element of story, language also seems to come from the territory of what is now Ukraine.
It's been debated for a good 200 years, this question of what is the Indo-European homeland? What is the place from which the basis of all of these languages comes? What is it? And we've used archaeology and we've used comparative philology, we've used these various tools, and it's been debated, and the consensus was moving towards southern Ukraine, but again, the technology now seems to be close to actually settling this dispute. It appears that roughly 5,000 years ago, the Proto-Indo-European language was established by a group of people of very interesting and mixed genetic origin who were pastoralists in what is now Ukraine. And that the movement of people from what is now Ukraine, again a very long time ago, 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, that the movement of those peoples stands behind the existence of Sanskrit and Farsi and English and German and French and all of these languages that people speak.
And insofar as that is correct, and this is interestingly, I've been talking about all these classical themes, but what I'm talking about now is on the pages of Science magazine and Nature magazine right now in early 2026, late 2025. This is playing out as ancient DNA radically alters our picture of the prehistoric world. But insofar as this is confirmed, it means that Ukraine is part of a world story in a very broad sense, in that people who are from what is now Ukraine... I mean, obviously, you know, Saturday school teachers don't get carried away and call these people Ukrainians, but people who are from what is now Ukraine were, it seems, the bearers of languages which shape the kinds of stories that we are now able to tell. Thank you very much. [applause]
