Excerpt from The Rámáyan of Válmíki: Translated Into English Verse
Such, reduced to its bare simplicity, is the fundamental idea of the Remayan, a war of two hostile races differing in origin, civilization, and worship. But. As is the case in all primitive epopees, around this idea as a nucleus have gathered elements of every kind drawn from the very vitals of Indian tradition, and worked up by the ancient poet to embody his lofty epic conception. The epopea received and incorporated the traditions, the ideas, the beliefs, the myths, the symbols of that civilization in the midst of which it arose, and by the weaving in and arranging of all these vast elements it became the complete and faithful expression of a whole ancient period; and in fact the epopea is nothing but a system which represents poetically those ideas of a people which the philosophical systems expound theo retinally.
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