Title: Quantifying the role of supernatural entities and the effect of missing data in Irish sagas
Author(s):

P. MacCarron (MACSI, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Limerick, Limerick V94 T9PX, Ireland; Centre for Fluid and Complex Systems, Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB, England)

For over a decade, complex networks have been applied to mythological texts in order to quantitatively compare them. This has allowed us to identify similarities between texts in different cultures, as well as quantify the significance of some heroic characters. Analysing a full mythology of a culture requires gathering data from many individual myths which is time consuming and often impractical. In this work, we attempt to bypass this by analysing the network of characters in a dictionary of mythological characters. We show that the top characters identified by different centrality measures are consistent with central figures in the Irish sagas. Although much of Irish mythology has been lost, we demonstrate that these most central characters are highly robust to a large random removal of edges.

Key words: complex networks, social networks, mythology

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