In Popular Culture
The witch appears as a character in oratorios (including Mors Saulis et Jonathae (c.1682) by Charpentier, In Guilty Night: Saul and the Witch of Endor (1691) by Henry Purcell, and Saul (1738) by Handel on the death of Saul) and operas (David et Jonathas (1688) by the afore-mentioned Charpentier and Saul og David (1902) by Carl Nielsen).
A year after the death of his son at Loos, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called En-Dor (1916), about communicating with the dead. It concludes,
| “ | Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road And the craziest road of all! Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode, As it did in the days of Saul, And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store For such as go down on the road to En-dor! |
” |
A British cutter with the name The Witch of Endor is commandeered by Captain Horatio Hornblower during his escape from France in Flying Colours (1938), a novel by C.S. Forester set in the Napoleonic Wars.
The poet Howard Nemerov wrote a one act drama entitled "Endor" (1961) in which Saul visits the Witch of Endor.
The mother of the witch Samantha on the TV sitcom Bewitched was named Endora.
In the book series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, the Witch of Endor is a secondary character.
"In Endor" by Shaul Tchernichovsky, describing King Saul's encounter with the Witch of Endor, is considered a major work of modern Hebrew poetry. Tchernichovsky particularly identified with the character of Saul, perhaps due to his own name, and the poem expresses considerable empathy to this King's tragic fate.
The Israeli Kibbutz Ein Dor derives its name from the Biblical witch's place of residence.
Endor is a fictional planet in the Star Wars universe, and is referenced in the sixth film The Return of the Jedi
"The Witch of Endor" is the title of a song by artist Moondog
Read more about this topic: Witch Of Endor
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)