Epic Poem Research Articles

Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia

Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia

"ГНЕВ БОГОВ": РУТИННОЕ И ФАНТАСТИЧЕСКОЕ В ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНОМ ФИЛЬМЕ ЙОНА ГУСТАФССОНА (2006 Г.)

The article is aimed at studying the effect of the fantastic in a documentary: if it is possible, and what circumstances can influence its appearance. That issue is investigated in the context of the “fictional world”, the very presence and features of which serve as a sign of belonging to the genre of the fantastic. The article briefly examines the concept of “fictional world” and the specifics of the audience’s interaction with it. The main object of the analysis is the documentary “Wrath of the Gods” by the Icelandic director Jon Gustafsson, which is declared as “a documentary about filmmaking in extreme conditions”. It was edited from fragments of video footage shot during the filming of “Beowulf & Grendel” (2005), directed by Sturla Gunnarsson and based on a medieval epic poem. The filming process in Iceland in the fall of 2004 proved to be extremely difficult, and the article traces how the group members describe what is happening to them in expressions that form the discourse of the “pagan” or the discourse of the “miraculous” in general. In combination with the peculiarities of editing, this gives the film the right to be considered as a narrative, in which the fantastic becomes an integral part of the plot. The imaginary Iceland acquires the features characteristic of the fictional world of a fantastic story

Centuries-old journey of deli through language, literature and history

The paper is on the analyses of the usage of lexemes of Turkish origin deli and delija in Serbian. Aiming to present a complete image of the semantic transformation of these loanwords, the Serbian language, literary and historical material is compared with the relevant Turkish data. In Turkish the lexeme deli represents both an adjective and a noun, while in Serbian, there is the adjective deli and the noun delija. The lexeme deli occurs very often in Serbian folk poems as attribute attached to the name of a brave hero (deli-Radivoje, deli-Marko) and is also an indispensable attribute attached to the names of Oguz heroes in the heroic epic poem The Book of Dede Korkut. In these epic works the adjective deli is used in the same meaning in both languages, meaning brave, fearless. The semes brave, fearless from the semantic content of lexeme delija, meaning a member of a cavalry unit of the Ottoman army, have induced secondary meanings brave man, hero; strong, personable man. The primary meaning (crazy) which the adjective deli has in Turkish is at the periphery of polysemantic structure in Serbian, confirmed just as a regional word. Lexemes deli and delija in Serbian and deli (adjective and noun) in Turkish have been independently semantically developed according to universal process of polysemy in both languages.

Musicality of Klopstock’s poetry

The article analyzes the semantic and structural features of the poetry by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, collectively demonstrating the affinity of the entire work of the outstanding German poet and music. The changing attitude towards symphonic and vocal music from the middle of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century and the spread of musical and aesthetic views in related fields of science had a significant impact on Klopstock’s work. The complex multidimensional musicality of his works was misunderstood by his contemporaries who perceived only the superficial layer of Klopstock’s poetry, the plot. Researchers started studying the compositional affinity of his religious epic poem, the Messias, and the symphony only in the 20th century; they suggested the concept of a plot of feelings as opposed to the usual interpretation of the plot as a chain of events. The structural similarity of Klopstock’s epic to the symphony and the use of dissonance are undoubtedly manifestations of musicality. However, we can point out a deeper sign of musicality which is the German poet’s desire not to portray nature in his odes and hymns, but to convey an attitude towards it. Franz Schubert managed to reflect the rich palette of feelings contained in Klopstock’s poetry; today Schubert’s songs based on Klopstock’s poems are still a part of the vocal repertoire. Schubert succeeded in overcoming the obvious difficulties of Klopstock’s poetry, namely the lack of rhyme and regular syllable stress.

L’Épopée perdue de l’occitan (1983) by Jean-Claude Dinguirard

Reviewed by: L’Épopée perdue de l’occitan (1983) by Jean-Claude Dinguirard Alice M. Colby-Hall Dinguirard, Jean-Claude. L’Épopée perdue de l’occitan (1983). Textes réunis et édités par Pierre Escudé. Préface de Joël H. Grisward. Limoges: Lambert-Lucas, 2020. 248 pp. ISBN 978-2-35935-309-9. €25 L’Épopée perdue de l’occitan was first published in 1983 in the journal Via Domitia, not long after the untimely death of the author, Jean-Claude Dinguirard, the editor-in-chief of the journal. Seeking a wider audience for this book, Pierre Escudé has edited Dinguirard’s text, taking advantage of the original manuscript on which the journal version was based, notes found among Dinguirard’s papers, and an annotated typescript sent to the journal Romania in 1982 (16). The seven appendices contain a note submitted to Romania in 1982 (237), Escudé’s explanation of Dinguirard’s approach to research (163–194) and reprints of the following: articles by Gaston Paris (195–202), Antoine Thomas (203–205), and Rita Lejeune (207–231), Blandine Longhi’s summary of the Chanson de Guillaume (233–234), and Dinguirard’s review of Joël Grisward’s Archéologie de l’épopée médiévale (235–236). In addition, Escudé has completed the bibliography supplied by Dinguirard (149–156). The appendices and Escudé’s footnotes all serve to help us understand Dinguirard’s text. Dinguirard does not claim to have given us a definitive study of the relationship between the lost Occitan epics and their French counterparts. Instead, in his Conclusion, he proposes for discussion the hypothesis that “le cycle de Guillaume d’Orange, dans sa totalité ou seulement en partie, mais à coup sûr dans ce qui touche à l’épisode d’Aliscans-Larchant, fut à l’origine écrit en occitan, et de là mis en français” (144). In the preceding chapters, Dinguirard presents the relevant arguments made by other scholars and his own additions to these. The following points had already been made: the presence of olive trees in northern France (Claude Fauriel, 3: 84), Naimeri for Aimeri and similar cases of the Occitan honorific particle attached to a personal name beginning with a vowel (Gaston Paris, 349–357), the reference to Ghigelmo Alcorbitunas (or Alcorbitanas) in the Nota Emilianense, which dates from 1050 to 1075 (Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 384–447), [End Page 135] the use of the Occitan verb descunorted in vv. 15, 41, and 963 of the Chanson de Guillaume (Rita Lejeune, 49–50), and, in the Prise de Cordres et de Sebille, balais in the sense of ‘delay’ (v. 1153) and clardor for clarté (vv. 9, 834) according to the editor, Ovide Densusianu (CXXXIX, n. 2). Dinguirard’s own claims of Occitan origin are thought-provoking but not always well-founded. In his view, jovens has the same meaning as vasselage ‘valor’ in Old French (109) and is rendered by juventus in the Hague Fragment (112), transcribed between 980 and 1030. This prose version of a Latin epic poem that deals with various members of William’s fictitious Narbonnese family tells how the juventus of William’s brother Bernard bears great fruit in the battle. Since Bernard’s son Bertram is also one of the combatants, the term simply refers to the vigor that characterizes youthfulness, and Hermann Suchier, the text’s editor, chose ‘virility’ to translate the word (2: 172). It is, therefore, possible that this use of juventus corresponds to jovens in a lost Occitan epic belonging to the William Cycle. However, the word jovens represents a cluster of virtues that includes courtliness, kindness, generosity, and prowess, and proeza may mean ‘excellence’ rather than ‘valor.’ Dinguirard was familiar with Moshé Lazar’s lengthy analysis of jovens (33–46) but rejects it out of hand. According to Dinguirard, the portrayal of Guibourc in the Old French epics could only have been conceived of by an Occitan poet from western Occitania where women were held in much higher esteem and given more power than east of the Rhône in Provence (61–62, 65), and Dinguirard also calls attention to the fact that Guibourc gives all her possessions...

Svetislаv Vulovic’s Notebook

The National Library of Serbia holds numerous collections of manuscripts. Among them is a notebook attributed to Bozidar Knezevic (1862-1905), philosopher, historian and translator from English, French, German and Russian into the Serbian language. After thorough analysis of the manuscript, chronology, and published papers the author of the Notebook referred to, we could conclude that Notebook did not belong to Bozidar Knezevic, but Svetislav Vulovic (1847-1898), literary critic and literary historian, professor of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, member of the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences. The paper deals with the composition and dating of the Notebook (1894, 1896, 1897). It considers Vulovic?s diary notes, reconstruction of his travels in Southern Serbia and Austria-Hungary (Abbazzia respectively), the identity of the people he met and spoke to. He recorded the versions of Serbian national epic poems he heard sung to the gusle, and published them.

ABOUT THE EPIC SUBJECT: HEROES, HEROINES AND ANACHRONISM

Considerations about a special subject, the epic, or, in other words, the hero and/or the heroine who are the protagonists of some long poems which talk about history and myth in a literary way, with or without traces of anachronism. We will consider the evolution of concepts of subject as a fundamental category for literary studies, the evolution of the epic genre itself, the epic representation of women and the anachronism as a possible presence in epic poems. Illustrating our reflection we will comment some epic poems which integrate the epic expression in English: The faerie queene, by Edmund Spenser; Paradise regained, by John Milton; The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope; The Fall of Hyperion, by Keats; Christ, by Gavin Bantock; and South America. Mi hija, by Sharon Doubiago.

“Moderou-se o desejo, mas ficaram lembranças”: diálogos entre Os Lusíadas (1572) e a Malaca Conquistada (1658)

In 1658, in Lisbon, Francisco de Sá de Meneses, in this period known as brother Francisco de Jesus, published his epic poem The Conquest of Malacca for the second time (the first edition had been published in 1634). Poem praised by José Maria da Costa e Silva in the 19th century, translated into English in the 20th century by Edgar C. Knowlton Jr., had an unhappy fate as most of the epic poems in Portuguese Literature, with one known exception, The Lusiads, because this poem is conceived to occupy and fill the whole literary space, as well as time, perhaps, as wrote Hélio J. S. Alves, in O Cânone, “Luís de Camões 2” (2020). In this essay, in dialogue with the researchers that preceded us, we will try to demonstrate how the Sá de Meneses’ poem revises the Camões’ poem. So, it will be The Lusiads that will lead us to another text, in this case The Conquest of Malacca.

On the Character of Georgian Verse

Research on the character of Georgian verse started in 1731. Since that time, some researchers have described Georgian verse as syllabic, while others have said that it is syllabotonic. The dispute about the character of Georgian verse became particularly acute in the 20th century. The main text the participants in the dispute analysed was a prominent piece of Georgian poetry of the 12th century – The Knight in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli. It consists of 16-syllable monorhymical quatrains that have a special name in Georgian – shairi. There are two varieties of shairi – the so-called high shairi (4 4 4 4) and low shairi (5 3 5 3). The high shairi was the main issue of the dispute. The researchers who regarded Georgian verse as belonging to the syllabotonic system divided high shairi into trochaic feet, while the supporters of the syllabic theory denied the presence of metric trochaic stress in high shairi, believing that the penultimate syllables can be stressed only in two-syllable words but not in words with multiple syllables (due to the dactylic accentuation typical in the modern Georgian language).
 Since natural dactylic stress (found in low shairi) reflects the accentuation norms of the language of the later period (including those of modern Georgian), we assume that metric stress in high shairi, which is no longer found in modern Georgian speech, could be a reflection of the natural accentuation of the comparatively earlier period in the development of the Georgian language. Checking this hypothesis by relying on relevant linguistic literature, we reconstructed the archaic movable and phonologically relevant stress in the rhymed words in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. We found that metric stresses of both high and low shairi in this epic poem are actually archaic linguistic stresses. This conclusion differs from the views expressed in concepts developed earlier. It enables us to take a fresh look at the metrics and rhymes of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin as well as the main principles and specific features of Georgian verse in general.

Matthew Arnold s Balder Dead: Unraveling His Deployment of Balder, Odin, and Lok

This article examines how Matthew Arnold embodies diverse figures in his epic narrative poem Balder Dead (1855). It argues that Arnold’s awareness of Norse mythology plays a key part in characterizing the protagonist Balder, along with Odin and Lok, who reveal allegorical significances amidst Victorian contexts of religious chaos and dilemmas. Arnold s chief characters implicate man’s irresistible realm of death, the problem of faith in confronting this aspect, and questions about immortality of spirit and divine justice. The paper explores the writer s dynamic construction of characters in its link with plot development and his religious and ethical issues prevalent during the Victorian era. It suggests that Balder Dead foreshadows Arnold’s further elaborations on the aforementioned subjects, which he embeds in his later oeuvre of poetry and prose, composed from the late 1850s to 80s.

LA SEMAINE, O ÉPICO BÍBLICO SOBRE A CRIAÇÃO

The epic Renaissance La semaine (1578), by writer Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, was published during the French religious wars. In his long poem, the poet addressed the creation of the world, paraphrasing the book of Genesis. In this article, we explore, through Epic Semiotization of Discourse (SILVA) and Epic Poems: Reading Strategies (RAMALHO), analytical elements that contribute to the study of the genre.

О сюжетосложении «Песни о том, как богдо Джангар мангаса Уту Цагана покорил» и «Песни о том, как богдо Джангар хана мангасов Кюрюл Эрдени покорил» Малодербетовского цикла эпоса «Джангар»

Introduction. The article studies plot formation patterns in The Song of How Bogdo Jangar Defeated Mangas Utu Tsagan and The Song of How Bogdo Jangar Defeated the Mangas Khan Kürül Erdeni included in the Baga Dorbet cycle of the Jangar (early narratives recorded in 1862). Materials. The work explores original Clear Script texts of the songs kept at the Manuscript Department of St. Petersburg University Library under the title ‘(Handwritten Records of) the Jangar (Made in B[aga] Dorbet District)’. Goals. The paper aims at examining the plot formation patterns in early songs of the Jangar through the use of descriptive and comparative research methods. Results. The analysis of plots shows the epic poems are interrelated and arranged in special sequence. The set of intertwined motifs serves to shape a plot based on some conflict (song one — an ultimatum of the enemy, song two — a horse raid) determining and determined by exposition, climax, and denouement. Plots of combats involving Bumba’s heroes are successive chains of separate episodes aimed at revealing the key idea of the epic — glorification of heroic exploits undertaken by Bogdo Jangar and his warriors for the sake of Motherland’s liberation from hostile invaders.

Legend of Garshasp in the Garshasp-nama and its comparison with Rostam in the Shahnameh

Garshasp Sam Nariman is one of the Indo-Iranian heroes and legends whose names and stories are mentioned in Avesta, and Asadi wrote this epic poem about his bravery. This epic and legendary figure seemed feeble and pallid in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. The Heroic acts of Garshasp have typically been assigned to Sam and Rostam throughout the history of the growth and change of Iranian national epics. In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, with the arrival of Rostam, Garshasp has been forgotten, and Rostamhas become the sole Iranian epic and national hero. This paper will compare the characters, morality, and heroic features and acts of the two heroes in the Garshasp-nama and the Shahnameh.

Some peculiarities of the linguistic representation of time and space in Kazakh fairy tales and epic poems

It comes as no surprise that study of folklore language is regarded as arelevant issue.As the phenomenon of national cognition is revealed by identifying the semantics of the language. And in the linguistic study, researching the genre features of folklore has the results similar to interdisciplinary research. Folklore genres are studied sufficientlyin the literary and folkloric studies, in both domestic philology and foreign philology. The linguistic representation of time and space in Kazakh fairy tales and epic poems are considered in the given article. The characteristic features of the linguistic representation of time and space in Kazakh fairy tales and epic poems are analyzed.Moreover, relevant examples are offered as evidence. The relevance of the study is determined by great interest of linguistic science to the issues of national and cultural specificity of folk texts, which is caused by peculiarities of historical development, beliefs, traditions and customs of native people.

Epic Portrayal of the Scottish Icon: Margaret Holford’s Wallace; or, The Fight of Falkirk

Margaret Holford (1778-1852) was an English poet, translator, and novelist who continuously published her works between the years 1809 and 1838. Although Holford can be considered as a prolific writer in the early nineteenth century, her works do not find a place in today’s canon and she has become one of the forgotten women poets of the Pre-Victorian period. In The Wallace; or, the Fight of Falkirk, she recounted the last days of William Wallace who was a Scottish patriot and a Guardian of Scotland. This article aims to analyze Holford’s poem as an example of an epic poem since she employs the characteristics of the epic genre in her work. The analysis of Holford’s work provides an important insight into the issue of women’s participation in the male-dominated epic genre. Although it was believed that women were not capable of writing epic poems in terms of their lack of formal education and intellectual capacity, there was a small group of women poets who produced long heroic poems in the early nineteenth century and Holford was one of them. From this vantage point, the fundamental purpose of this study is to show to what extent Margaret Holford’s poem epitomizes the epic genre. In a broader perspective, the paper aims to underline the contributions of Holford, who has been pushed to the margins for more than two centuries, to women’s writing.

The Image of Muslims in Torquato Tasso’s <i>Le Gerusalemme liberata</i>


 
 
 
 This paper examines Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso’s epic poem titled Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered [1581]). Tasso imaginatively narrates events and details from the siege of Antioch and Jerusalem in the First Crusade and compares historical Muslim characters with their Christian counterparts. Like other Orientalists, Tasso in his epic adopts a stereotypical image of Muslims and portrays them as savages and worshipers of idols. This paper explains these images, their sources, and the effects of representations by way of applying analytical and critical descriptive method. It will address Tasso’s epic style, blending specific titles of history and magic with his fantasy in his portrayal of Muslim characters as compared to their Christian counterparts. It concludes with a critique of the Orientalist practice of associating the Muslims with terrorism, violence, and inhumanity in contemporary Western culture.
 
 
 

Some Thoughts About Genre in Old Javanese Literature

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.

The role of title and epigraph in the essay “The Vision of Mirza” by Joseph Addison

The object of this research is the essay “The Vision of Mirza” by Joseph Addison. The relevance of studying J. Addison's essay is substantiated by undue attention to his works in the Russian literary studies, as well as the need for tracing the dynamics in the genre of vision in the Age of Enlightenment. The subject of this research is the title and epigraph as parts of the work that determine its structure and artistic distinctness. Analysis is conducted on the images of the viewer, visionary hero, and his guide, chronotope of the essay and allusive links. The essay is based on the combination of systemic-structural, comparative-historical, and hermeneutic methods. The novelty consists in the fact that the comprehensive examination of the role of the title ensemble within the structure of the essay allows reconstructing the link of the essay with the traditions of the medieval genre of vision manifested in the traditional topic and consistent motifs, imagery system, space and time arrangement, and dialogical structure of the text. The author provides interpretation to the allusive links between J. Addison's essay and Greco-Roman mythology, epic poem “The Aeneid” by Virgil, and psalms from the New Testament, and “The Voyage of St. Brendan”. It is established that the dialogue set by the epigraph passes through the entire plotline of the essay and reveal the characters of its participants. The extensively presented Christian theme alongside the images from ancient mythology and Virgil’s texts are essential for the author to express the enlightening program.

The Polonaise in Frédéric Chopin’s Works. Andante spianato and the Grande Polonaise Brillante Op.22

"The present study is focused on the musical genre of the polonaise and its particularities in Chopin’s creation, with precise reference to Andante Spianato and The Grande Polonaise Brillante, Op. 22. Chopin’s substantial contribution to the genre consists of the transformation of a gallant dance of conventional harmony into a veritable heroic chant of prodigious harmonies. Due to a proficient transformation of a folk motif, Chopin is able to introduce folklore in his major works, according to the larger trend of national awareness that required the artists’ return to the folklore sources of inspiration that were able to express the national yearning for freedom. Far from the solemnity of the courteous dance, these pieces become programmatic musical poems, sprung from the most noble of emotions, the love for one’s country. The nostalgic chromatics, diffused throughout Chopin’s entire creation, is augmented by the call for resistance in front of the historical events (Poland’s loss of political independence). The polonaises Chopin composed at maturity had a new form, transforming into veritable epic poems which depicted images of Poland’s heroic past as visions impregnated by lyric pathos and pain for the country’s troubled history. Although their common feature is the epic and grandiose tone, Chopin’s polonaises are extremely varied and versatile, characterized by grandeur and dramatism. The work proposed for analysis – Andante spianato in G Flat – is based on the principles of stanzas and variation and has the structure of two stanzas of A B type, followed by a Coda. Chopin added the coda as an introduction (only around 1843-1835, in Paris) to The Grande Polonaise Brillante, Op. 22 (composed in 1831). Although intensely contrasting, the two parts seem to be connected exactly by this difference. This is the process that describes the genesis of The Grande Polonaise Brillante prédécès d'un Andante Spianato Op 22. Keywords: polonaise, folklore, ornamentation, chromaticism, variation, rubato. "

“The Universal Harmony: The Logic of Dharma in Mahābhārata (II)”

Abstract When the human, social, and the universal order is in distress, injustice rules. Finding themselves at the end of a cosmic cycle, individuals are being trapped in to destiny's straight net, with the help of their karma. As shown by the final war of the epic poem Mahābhārata, no one can stand against destiny. What one is required to do is to fulfill his dharma, hoping for a smooth decline of the world and the beginning of a new prosperous era. But when injustice is too deeply entrenched, there is no other issue. The avatar of the Great Lord Vishnu makes all it is required for restoring dharma, even if the price for all warriors to pay is their own full destruction. Engaged in a fiercely combat, they destroy each other as a destiny plan to destroy the evil and renew the world. This is the sacrifice they have to honor in order to fulfill the destiny of all mankind.