Telling Legends Apart: “Animal Lives in Person's Stomach” Stories in Oral Tradition and the Printed Press

The well-known horse-racing ballad "Skewball" (hereafter, SB) has a well-established oral tradition in Ireland, with versions documented throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latest is a 1979 field recording of Derry folksinger and storyteller, Eddie Butcher (Shields 2011:58-9). (1) The ballad was also assimilated into African-American oral tradition, in which it was reconstructed and renamed "Stewball" (Lomax 1994:68-71; Scarborough 1925:61-4), and was still being documented in American folk tradition as late as the 1930s (Flanders 1939:172-4). In common with countless other folk songs, SB was appropriated by broadside (2) printers and subsequently enjoyed widespread public appeal throughout England in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, its popularity waning with the later decline of the broadside as a medium of ballad transmission and distribution. A comparative analysis of oral and broadside versions reveals clear differences between the two narratives. I argue that these variations were quite deliberate in origin, being a direct result of interpolations and excisions made by broadside ballad printers to the original oral narrative. By drawing comparisons between versions of SB collected from both oral and broadside sources, this paper will demonstrate that as a consequence of significant social and cultural advancements in the nineteenth century, SB was deliberately revised with the aim of enhancing its appeal and relevance to an increasingly literate middle class audience. Historical Context The narrative recounted in SB centres on a historically documented horse race held in Kildare, Ireland on March 30, 1752 (Heber 1753:106). (3) The race in question was a two-horse challenge between Sir Ralph Gore's Grey Mare (Pick 1803:504)--the clear favorite--and Arthur Mervin's Skewball (Pick 1803:91; Harewood 1835:309), a far lesser-known racehorse (if not completely unknown in Ireland), in which the latter unexpectedly triumphs to great acclaim. Unsurprisingly, the narrative of SB has changed considerably over time. Such variation is to be expected from a ballad that was based on eighteenth-century events in Ireland, enjoyed widespread popular appeal as a nineteenth-century English broadside printing, became established in African-American slave culture and later appeared as a work song among African-American prisoners, (4) and ultimately became popularised on both sides of the Atlantic in the folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are, however, key narrative features that are common to all documented oral and broadside versions of the ballad, (5) namely: (i) A two-horse challenge for a considerable purse is arranged to be held on "the plains of Kildare" between Sir Ralph Gore and Arthur Mervin, both of whom were well-known figures in eighteenth-century Irish horse racing circles, and served as presidents of the Irish Jockey Club in the late 1750s (Carpenter 1998:312). (6) (ii) Although fleeting comparative references are periodically made to other racehorses, only two are mentioned as participating in the contest related in the ballad. The race favorite is a grey mare owned by Gore and is referred to variously in the ballads as either Grey Mare, Maid Sportly, or Miss Portly/Portsley/ Sportl(e)y /Sportsly/Sprightly, or in later versions as Miss Grizzle. (7) The lesser-known challenger--a skewbald gelding--is owned by Marvin and known as Skewball8 throughout all documented versions (iii) Upon hearing of the challenge and the wager that has been put down, the skewbald--the clear second favorite in the contest--instructs his master to place a considerable bet as he is assured of victory. Despite the established reputation of the favorite, Skewball wins easily to both the surprise and delight of the assembled crowd. Despite both oral and broadside versions of SB sharing the overall subject matter and common structure shown above, a comparative analysis of the two genres reveals some striking differences. …

The well-known horse-racing ballad (hereafter, SB) has a well-established oral tradition in Ireland, with versions documented throughout eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latest is a 1979 field recording of Derry folksinger and storyteller, Eddie Butcher (Shields 2011:58-9). (1) The ballad was also assimilated into African-American oral tradition, in which it was reconstructed and renamed Stewball (Lomax 1994:68-71; Scarborough 1925:61-4), and was still being documented in American folk tradition as late as 1930s (Flanders 1939:172-4). In common with countless other folk songs, SB was appropriated by broadside (2) printers and subsequently enjoyed widespread public appeal throughout England in early- to mid-nineteenth century, its popularity waning with later decline of broadside as a medium of ballad transmission and distribution. A comparative analysis of oral and broadside versions reveals clear differences between two narratives. I argue that these variations were quite deliberate in origin, being a direct result of interpolations and excisions made by broadside ballad printers to original oral narrative. By drawing comparisons between versions of SB collected from both oral and broadside sources, this paper will demonstrate that as a consequence of significant social and cultural advancements in nineteenth century, SB was deliberately revised with aim of enhancing its appeal and relevance to an increasingly literate middle class audience. Historical Context The narrative recounted in SB centres on a historically documented horse race held in Kildare, Ireland on March 30, 1752 (Heber 1753:106). (3) The race in question was a two-horse challenge between Sir Ralph Gore's Grey Mare (Pick 1803:504)--the clear favorite--and Arthur Mervin's Skewball (Pick 1803:91; Harewood 1835:309), a far lesser-known racehorse (if not completely unknown in Ireland), in which latter unexpectedly triumphs to great acclaim. Unsurprisingly, narrative of SB has changed considerably over time. Such variation is to be expected from a ballad that was based on eighteenth-century events in Ireland, enjoyed widespread popular appeal as a nineteenth-century English broadside printing, became established in African-American slave culture and later appeared as a work song among African-American prisoners, (4) and ultimately became popularised on both sides of Atlantic in folk revival of late 1960s and early 1970s. There are, however, key narrative features that are common to all documented oral and broadside versions of ballad, (5) namely: (i) A two-horse challenge for a considerable purse is arranged to be held on the plains of Kildare between Sir Ralph Gore and Arthur Mervin, both of whom were well-known figures in eighteenth-century Irish horse racing circles, and served as presidents of Irish Jockey Club in late 1750s (Carpenter 1998:312). (6) (ii) Although fleeting comparative references are periodically made to other racehorses, only two are mentioned as participating in contest related in ballad. The race favorite is a grey mare owned by Gore and is referred to variously in ballads as either Grey Mare, Maid Sportly, or Miss Portly/Portsley/ Sportl(e)y /Sportsly/Sprightly, or in later versions as Miss Grizzle. (7) The lesser-known challenger--a skewbald gelding--is owned by Marvin and known as Skewball8 throughout all documented versions (iii) Upon hearing of challenge and wager that has been put down, skewbald--the clear second favorite in contest--instructs his master to place a considerable bet as he is assured of victory. Despite established reputation of favorite, Skewball wins easily to both surprise and delight of assembled crowd. Despite both oral and broadside versions of SB sharing overall subject matter and common structure shown above, a comparative analysis of two genres reveals some striking differences. …

Beyond the Flickering Screen: Re-situating e-books

The conception of national music was from its earliest days linked closely to another idea: tradition. Tradition was not a long-standing idea waiting to be pressed into service, but was rather a construct coeval with the category of national music: “tradition” too was a component of the new quest for origins. (Thus the common substitution of the term “traditional music” for “folk music” in many contexts during the last two decades of the twentieth century did not entail a major cognitive shift.) In the course of the later eighteenth century, tradition began as a term employed – often derogatorily – to designate and investigate oral transmission itself, but it widened into a more abstract and regulative concept carrying tremendous cultural force. Many European cultural assets were passed predominantly by oral means until the printing press; and although printing itself brought about a massive social transformation, it took two or three more centuries for “oral” and “literate” culture to be acknowledged as inherently separate entities – with marked characteristics, and profound differences. As Nicholas Hudson points out, the identification of “oral tradition” in its current sense was part of this process; the modern conception of oral tradition was basically an eighteenth-century phenomenon. There was of course not a complete lack of earlier European observation on the differences between speech and writing, even long before the printing press, but until the eighteenth century the word “tradition” continued to be used almost exclusively in the specific domain of the church.

units of narrative content called motifs constitute sequences, also known as tale types. However whereas the dependency of tale types on the constituent motifs is clear, the strength of their bond has not been measured this far. Based on the observation that differences between such motif sequences are reminiscent of nucleotide and chromosome mutations in genetics, i.e., constitute "narrative DNA", we used sequence mining methods from bioinformatics to learn more about the nature of tale types as a corpus. 94% of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther catalogue (2249 tale types in 7050 variants) was listed as individual motif strings based on the Thompson Motif Index, and scanned for similar subsequences. Next, using machine learning algorithms, we built and evaluated a classifier which predicts the tale type of a new motif sequence. Our findings indicate that, due to the size of the available samples, the classification model was best able to predict magic tales, novelles and jokes.

Before the revival of Greek learning in the fifteenth century, the Æsopic fables of classical antiquity were known in Europe through Latin collections derived from Phædrus. Two of these collections were particularly well known; one which goes under the name of Romulus, written in prose in the tenth century; and a metrical version of the larger part of Romulus, written in the twelfth century. This metrical collection, called in the Middle Ages Esopus, is now ascribed to Walter of England, but is often called Anonymus Neveleti. Another metrical version of Romulus was made a little later by Alexander Neckam, and the fables of Avianus, also, were known to some extent. These collections, with numerous recensions and derivatives in Latin, and translations into many different languages, form a body of written fable-literature whose development can for the most part be clearly traced. At the same time, beast-fables were extensively employed in school and pulpit, and were continually repeated for entertainment as well as for instruction. Thus there was current all over Europe a great mass of fable-literature in oral tradition. The oral versions came in part from the written fable-books; others originated as folk-tales in medieval Europe; others had descended orally from ancient Greece, or had been brought from the Orient. Many are still current among the people in all parts of Europe, and beyond. From this mass of traditional material, heterogeneous collections of popular stories, including beast-fables, were reduced to writing in Latin and in other languages. An example of this process is found in the Esope of Marie de France, the earliest known fable-book in a modern vernacular, which was translated into French in the twelfth century from an English work which is now lost. Forty of Marie's fables, less than two-fifths of the whole number, came from a recension of the original Romulus called Romulus Nilantii; the others from popular stories of various kinds. Similarly, the important Æsop of Heinrich Steinhöwel contains the Romulus fables in four books, followed by seventeen fables called Extravagantes, others from the recently published Latin version of the Greek fables, from Avianus, from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus, and from Poggio,—in all, nine books, printed in Latin with a German translation about 1480, and speedily translated into many languages (including English, by Caxton in 1484, from the French version). The Extravagantes, like other collections, and like the episodes of the beast-epic (little known in Italy), came from popular tradition. Many writers show by incidental references that they were familiar with fables, although they may not have regarded them as worthy of serious attention,—writers like Dante, and his commentator Benvenuto da Imola. Moreover, the animal-lore of the bestiaries and of works like the Fiore di Virtù is closely akin to that of the fables. It is evident, then, that the collections descended from Phædrus, important though they were, represented but a fraction of the fable-literature that was current in the Middle Ages.

In oral tradition, as well as in literature, the theme is well known of the young man who takes leave of his betrothed or spouse, with the agreement that she is free to (re)marry if he does not return within a specified period of time. Upon his return after many years, unrecognized, he is told that her wedding will take place that night. He sends the bride a concealed message, they are reunited and he takes possession of his former holdings. The story is central to the Odyssey of Homer, and is likely even older. In its oral versions it is widespread, particularly in Europe from medieval times, and has been given the international tale classification ATU 974 ‘The Homecoming Husband’. Interesting variants of the story have been recorded from Scottish Gaelic storytellers by Lady Evelyn Stewart Murray in Perthshire in 1900, and by the present writer in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1978. The Gaelic variants are described, and situated within their international tale context.

different from the ones we find in popular collections and Disney's productions. She points out that Grimm's complete collection of tales does contain strong heroines, though not to the extent she has found in major Anglo-American collections. In Scandinavian folktales too, I would add, there are a number of proficient heroines who can take care of both themselves and others. Similar women appear in modern European collections.2 Careful investigation of folktale material reveals, in other words, that the model for female conduct reflected in folktales over a wide geographical area is far from confined to the submissive beauty promoted by popularizations of selected material. But editors and Disney are not the only ones responsible for promoting a sex-olased image of the folktale heroine. There is a similar tendency to present the image of a passive and subordinate heroine in such prestigious scholarly research tools as Aarne and Thompson's The Types of the Folktale3 (AT) and Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature.4 In fact, these works often do not acknowledge the fact that the heroine in many types of tales is the active leader of events. The misrepresentation of character in these works can be divided into different categories of bias, each with the same two dimensions: a) external; i.e., in reference to heroines as they appear in specific tales; b) internal; i.e., inconsistency in semantics of the indexes regarding identical events, depending on whether they refer to female or male character, or incongruity between title and plot synopsis disfavouring the female. In some instances there is an overlap between these dimensions. The largest category is characterized by selective labelling in which the female activities are made to seem less active or heroic than they in fact are. Selective labelling. A typical example of selective labelling concerns the concept of 'helper' in the folktale world. To 'help' carries with it a connotation of assistance rather than leadership. Both heroines and heroes in the folktales need and receive help to complete their tasks and overcome obstacles. They meet helpers in the form of animals, old women and men, magic objects and supernatural creatures who, for example, spin and weave, sift peas from the ashes, carry the protagonist from one place to another or give good advice. Helpers are supportive, their power is limited and they do not demonstrate a broader view of the situation. If we follow the Aarne and Thompson Type Index, the heroine of the Norwegian tale 'Mastermaid' would be classified as belonging to this useful but limited group of tools for the hero. But the title of this type 'The Girl as Helper in the Hero's Flight'

Reviewed by: The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography Lee Haring (bio) The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson . By Hans-Jörg Uther . FF Communications no. 284. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004. Three volumes: 619 pp., 536 pp., 285 pp. The concept of a "tale type" arises in human experience. When people apply their innate capacity for abstracting to their experience of hearing a story in different words or with different features, they invent a concept of sameness. In folkloristic scholarship, the concept enabled anti-romantic Finnish scholars, beginning in the 1880s, to apply scientific methods, treat every recurrent plot as an entity, and establish to their satisfaction that each tale originated with a single author (monogenesis) and spread from a single point of origin (diffusion). When the American Stith Thompson took up the Finn Antti Aarne's Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (1910) and translated and enlarged it into The Types of the Folktale (1928, 1961), the catalog became indispensable to scholars tracking versions and variants of "The Animal Languages," "The Bremen Town Musicians," "Cinderella," and all the other hundreds of recurrent plots, now labeled and classified. The type concept was a territorial claim for scientific folkloristics: it asserted that the folktale, or märchen, was something existing in the world, and to study it would connect the natural and the human sciences. While the historic-geographic method underwent criticisms, the type concept it engendered survived. Its catalog too was criticized on major grounds which Hans-Jörg Uther succinctly summarizes (1:7–8) as a prelude to his masterly improvement on Aarne and Thompson (AT). Now Uther has brought the catalog up to date. His admirable work, already nicknamed ATU, transforms the folktale catalog into "an effective tool that permits international tale types to be located quickly" (1:8). So it brings in a new era. [End Page 103] Those who used the predecessor will have no difficulty finding their way around the revision. They will note the contributions made by co-workers Sabine Dinslage, Sigrid Fährmann, and Gudrun Schwibbe and will be grateful for Christine Goldberg's vetting of the translations. They will marvel at the speed with which the team, aided by the resources of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, have brought forward the project. They will cheer its improvements, beginning with its logical four-part division—animal tales, tales of magic, religious tales, realistic tales—to replace the illogical divisions of AT. Type numbers have been regularized, hence are easier to use. "Irregular" types have been eliminated. Tale descriptions, titles, and interconnections have been rationalized, to the relief of readers who found AT insufficiently informative and too narrow in focus. A typical entry summarizes the tale's general shape, gives facts "about the tale's age, place of origin, the extent of its tradition, or other distinctive features" (13), and lists the most important bibliographical sources; these appear in the excellent appendix. Then, upholding the original historic-geographic hypothesis that each tale must have its own life history, the author shows "the geographic spread of the tale type" by listing the many published catalogs of types and motifs, and also numerous versions supplied from the files of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens. The appendix volume offers, in addition to a bibliography, no fewer than eight lists, among which the "Geographical and Ethnic Terms" and the "Register of Motifs" are especially useful. An impressive supplement to the latter is the Subject Index, which reclassifies all the contents of the first two volumes, somewhat in the manner of the final volume of Thompson's Motif-Index. The most innovative and auspicious element in ATU is the listing of the interconnections, or "combinations," which are present in very large numbers. Combinations are "links" in the internet sense: they point to other tales from other voices, listed in the catalog's other "rooms." Thus they define performance, or authorship, as the combining of motifs. The consequence of inventorying more data and multiplying the links is that ATU tends to break down the ontological status of "tale type." The larger the number of versions...

Printed words are used to convey and conserve knowledge. The history of printing dates back to 3000 BC when documents were written on clay tablets. Other materials used were pottery imprints, wood and cloth such as silk. Printing on paper started in China in the 7th century during the Tang Dynasty which lead to the printing of books. The first printing press was created by Johannes Gutenberg from Germany in the 15th century which lead to printing of the ‘Gutenberg Bible’, opening the gateway to fast dissemination of knowledge and start of ‘Gutenberg Revolution’ with spread of the printing press and mass production of books.1 The offset printing was introduced in the late 19th century and was considered the best printing method. At the start of the 21st century, the computers further revolutionised the printing methods by replacing them with digital or electronic format. This new electronic method was a competitor for the offset printing. In developed countries, newspapers and magazines adopted the on-line digital versions for swift distribution of the material over the printed version. Comparing the two modes of publishing, the electronic form definitely offers many advantages; like ease in availability, being exceedingly visible to a large audience and user friendly links for citation.2 Journals in the e-form have more citations and particularly if open access, have a worldwide readership. Readers can provide immediate feedbacks and corrections if needed, which are easier to incorporate. The printed journals have to be purchased and physically distributed, a cumbersome process. Moreover, in printed format, any correction of errors is included in a forth coming issue as an erratum. Last decade has seen rapid transition of printed format to digital format and many journals now exist in both the forms and are steadily converting old articles as electronic archives, while others have completely phased out printed format.3 Environmental concerns of the printed media products are grave. Printing less conserves forest and natural resources. Offset printing uses chemical laden inks which release large quantities of greenhouse gasses including carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.4 The rising inflation and its impact on cost of printing cannot be ignored, especially in the developing countries. In contrast the electronic journals are gaining acceptance and popularity for being environmentally friendly and economical. Medical journals are publications which help the medical community to keep abreast with the latest research. They deliver new knowledge, foster research and disseminate information. History shows that the medical journals were published on paper as early as the 17th century and were mailed to the subscribers. The digital era with advent of portable computers and smart phones in the late 20th century, transformed the way we read medical literature today. For instance, the Journal of American Medical Association has 1.8 million subscribers linked on line every week.4 The Journal of Pakistan Medical Association (JPMA) this year completes 73 years of its purposeful life. Since its first publication in 1950, it continues to provide results of research to its worldwide readers. It is the oldest medical journal in Pakistan, and being the organ of the Pakistan Medical Association, a matter of pride for all medical professionals. To shape the future and move forward we must look back at the past. During its 73 years journey, JPMA has provided cutting edge research and high-quality contents. Launched as a quarterly publication, the journal became a monthly publication within three years and now exists in print and electronic format. It is further enriched by periodic supplements on specialised topics; thus fulfilling the appetite of its ardent readers. To keep pace with the developments in publishing, JPMA made many improvements in the past. A user friendly website was introduced with links to the latest and previous issues. The forthcoming articles can be accessed on the website by the middle of the month. Comments and appreciative remarks are received from readers residing in all countries of the world, an evidence that JPMA reach out to the medical community internationally. With a successful digital version of JPMA leading to a wider readership, the decision to discontinue the print version is being considered. JPMA will be completely digitalised which will make it environment friendly and easy to access. The digital version will increase the capacity and space for inclusion of more educational and original research articles, reviews, opinion notes, case reports, commentaries and letters to editors. As rightly quoted by Albert Einstein : ‘The measure of intelligence is the ability to change’, this change in the mode of publication will further enhance the global visibility of the journal. We hope that our readers will embrace this change and continue our patronage in the future too.

SUMMARY The treatment of bibliographic information in library catalogues is biased by the primacy of printed written resources. This legitimate bias hinders oral tradition resources from being accurately described and accessed. This kind of resource is important in any society, but central in indigenous societies, at least for the comprehension of the printed written resources of these societies. The FRBR Model allows a better treatment of oral tradition works, versions, and items. It can express the essential fact that oral tradition works are independent even when their manifestations are not, collective and not anonymous, plural but not impossible to grasp. One deep doubt remains concerning the compatibility of the FRBR notion of expression and the notion of version.

Science for the people, of the people and by the people: The potential of citizen science 11 Ever since language and script evolved, humans have documented their own lives, their business transactions, the lives of animals and of plants, and the movements of the stars. The earliest recorded diary was kept by Merer, who lived at the time of the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza; Merer writes about the Tura limestone that he loaded on his boat to take down the Nile to the site of pyramid construction. This was nearly 4500 years ago. Before this, and since then, besides written documentation, oral traditions in the form of stories have served to provide a sense of the times, and have given us, our ancestors' descendants, the history of their experimentation with food, medicine, clothing and shelter. The great tradition of natural history observations came from careful observations of native animals and later exotic creatures that were collected, watched and recorded by the likes of Cuvier, Humboldt, Belt, Wallace and Darwin, and that gave us a profound understanding of what animals did, when they did what they did, and why. Many of these natural historians had personal wealth, rich patrons, or made their living selling their specimens to museums or to private collectors. Individuals began to sow the seeds of collective science. Hans Christian Cornelius Morgensen, a school teacher in the town of Viborg in Denmark, began the science of studying bird migration by ringing starlings in nest boxes in 1890 (Preuss 2001). Mortensen devised aluminum rings that were numbered. Because this was such a novel exercise, and received newspaper coverage, and because Morgensen was an astute observer of human nature, he introduced random codes into the serial numbers, so that people who wanted to claim that they had caught a ringed bird, when actually they had not, could be easily found out. Thus, he had already established a way to deal with spurious data that all science must guard against. Later with grants from the Carlsberg Foundation, Morgensen was able to expand the ringing operations. Bird ringing has mostly remained a non-governmental and privately funded exercise, and a vast number of volunteers have and are still engaged in this extremely important activity throughout the world. It was by bird ringing that the Indian ornithologist Sa ´lim Ali was able to determine that it was the same grey wagtail from central Asia that visited his garden in Bombay (now Mumbai) every year for five successive years in the winter during the 1940s (Nickell 1968). This provided valuable data not only about individual survival but also about fidelity to migration destinations. Later the natural history lens was trained on human tribes in Oceania, Amazonia and other areas. It was on Malekula in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) that Tom Harrison observed the Big Nambas people as an anthropologist would, and on returning to England in 1935, felt that the same anthropological principles could be applied to observing the 'tribes' of northern England. He homed in onto Bolton, in Lancashire, and named it 'Worktown'. In conjunction with the like-minded Charles Madge, the Mass-Observation project was initiated in 1937 (Hall 2015) . Charles Madge was a reporter with the Daily Mirror and he was disturbed by 'the largely fabricated and contradictory accounts that appeared in the newspapers, including my own' (Hall 2015). Madge and Harrison decided to team forces to conduct 'Anthropology at Home'. ''How little we know of our next door neighbour and his habits; how little we know of ourselves. Of conditions of life and thought in another class or another district, our ignorance is complete. The anthropology of ourselves is still only a dream. It is left to the intuitions of men of genius to cope with the unknown mass. Such intuitions are to a human science of the future what cookery is to chemistry. The building up of such a science is an urgent problem for mankind''.

Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 1 Introduction Chapter 4 2 Egypt Chapter 5 3 Babylonia Chapter 6 4 The Oral Tradition and Greek Civilization Chapter 7 5 The Written Tradition and the Roman Empire Chapter 8 6 Parchment and Paper Chapter 9 7 Paper and the Printing Press

This chapter recovers the history of the Harvard Indian College and highlights the multiple cultural, literary, and oral traditions that intersected in colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes analysis of the missionary schools in which Wawaus, or James Printer, a young Nipmuc scholar, and his Wampanoag, Patucket, and Nipmuc peers were trained alongside English students. Native scholars were trained in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literatures and participated in the production of the first bilingual works of American literature, including the “John Eliot” bible, printed at the Harvard Indian College, where the first printing press in the colonies was housed. This chapter includes an extensive interpretation of the Latin address of Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. The Harvard Indian College provides a necessary foundation for understanding the complex role of “praying Indians,” or members of Indigenous mission communities, as scribes and scouts during King Philip’s War. The chapter demonstrates that Indigenous scholars were not merely students who received, or were subjected to, colonial education but became significant contributors to a multilingual American literary tradition.

The Greek poet Homer was one of the greatest and most influential poets of all time. His epic Iliad and Odyssey were the foundation of Greek education and culture in the classical age (Our earliest infancy was entrusted to the care of Homer, said Heraclitus 2500 years ago) and are widely read today. Nothing is known of Homer's life (some even doubt his existence) or of the composition of the two epics but we can assume that the texts that survive are not as they were originally formed in oral tradition. This is a publishing and translation history of the written forms of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It first considers who Homer might have been and then explores the when and how of the creation of the written forms of the works. The Homeric text in classical times and in medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire, and the Homeric text, the printing press and Renaissance humanism are next taken up. The successes and failures of the many who attempted to translate the works are analyzed critically and then - a major portion of the book - all the known texts, editions and translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey from 1470 to 2000 are listed. Finally, the author considers the future of the Homeric texts and the Poet's relevance to this and future generations. Seven valuable appendices (e.g., Modernizing of Latin City Names; First Printings in Vernacular Languages), a bibliography, and an index complete the work.