Heroic Poems Research Articles

Walewein en Ysabele in Endi

The Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein is ‘an acknowledged Arthurian masterpiece with few equals in any language’ (Norris Lacy). Striking to the work is that two authors wrote a large romance, in which the nephew of King Arthur is the only protagonist. This choice is something new in comparison with the works of the creator of the genre, Chrétien de Troyes. In his great adventure, that takes place in the Otherworld of Endi, the hero acts in transgression with the rules of the Arthurian romance. The same applies to Ysabele, the princess of Endi, whom Walewein falls in love with. The action of Walewein and Ysabele in Endi shows further a similarity with that of Guillaume and Orable in La Prise d’Orange. The authors of Walewein borrowed from this heroic poem, by which it resounds as a ‘conte en palimpseste’. The deconstruction, which is brought about by this palimpsest, has a poetical meaning. Penninc and Vostaert, the poets of Walewein, put at issue the problem of writing a romance about Arthur’s nephew. Such a project can only succeed, when the creator takes all freedom with regard to the rules of the genre.

<i>Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vol. 6: Heldenlieder</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vol. 6: Heldenlieder Margaret Clunies Ross Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vol. 6: Heldenlieder. By Klaus von See, Beatrice La Farge, Eve Picard, Katja Schulz, Matthias Teichert. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009. Pp. 962. EUR 98. This, the fifth and nearly the largest volume to be published in the most extensive commentary there has yet been on the Old Norse-Icelandic Poetic Edda corpus, is also the third published volume of the Frankfurt commentary series on Norse heroic poetry, Volumes 4 and 5 being the other two, published in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Volumes 2 and 3, dealing with mythological poems, appeared in 1997 and 2000, and the scholarly community now awaits the final volume, which will complete the commentary on the mythological poems. The five volumes of Kommentar to appear so far are the work of a team of scholars from the Frankfurter Institut für Skandinavistik, led by Klaus von See and Beatrice La Farge, and assisted by several other researchers. Like most long-running projects, the Kommentar has required dedication and high levels of expertise from its authors, as well as continuing financial and infrastructural support, in this case from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Goethe University of Frankfurt respectively. It is also of interest that the Kommentar series is now to be complemented by another project, on “Edda-Rezeption,” from the same Institute but under the leadership of Julia Zernack. It will be fascinating to see the extent to which the two research projects are able to interrelate. The enormous body of scholarship that has been generated—and will continue to be generated—by a small anthology of medieval Icelandic poetry speaks to the unique importance of its contents. Most of the Poetic Edda corpus comes down to us in a single late thirteenth-century Icelandic codex, GKS 2365 4°, now in the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík, though some of its texts are also found in other Icelandic manuscripts. The codex divides into two parts, the first eleven poems having subjects relating to the pre-Christian gods of early Scandinavia, the second group of twenty poems dealing with high and low points in the lives of figures of Old Norse heroic legend. Some of the subject-matter of the heroic poems is common to a number of early Germanic legendary traditions, and is therefore of interest to scholars of Old High German and Old English as well as to scholars of Old Norse. It is also of key significance to those interested in oral literature and Germanic myth and religion. The Poetic Edda’s importance to so many areas of study and research readily explains how it is possible to produce a commentary of several thousand pages to a poetic corpus that runs to only a little over three hundred pages of edited text in the standard edition of Hans Kuhn and Gustav Neckel (5th edn 1983). The volume of Kommentar reviewed here deals with a group of poems of the Poetic Edda codex that come immediately after a lacuna in the manuscript between stanzas 1–37 of Sigrdrífumál (The Speech of Sigrdrífa) and what remains of the poem now called by most editors Brot af Sigurðarkviðu (Fragment of a Poem about Sigurðr), which is an overview of the events of the Germanic hero Sigurðr’s adult life leading up to his death. (Volume 5 was devoted to poetry about Sigurðr’s youth.) The group of poems in Volume 6 treats the various legends about the hero’s tragic and tangled relations with his brother-in-law and rival Gunnarr and two women, Brynhildr and Guðrún. The relationships between these four characters are narrated in some detail in Völsunga saga and in part of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, as well as in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Because part of the Poetic [End Page 551] Edda codex is missing at this point (exactly how much continues to be debated), the Kommentar authors add a section at the end of the volume (pp. 943–62) on fragments of poetry recorded in...

Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (review)

Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (review)

Reassessing Ellrodt: Critias and the Fowre Hymnes in The Faerie Queene

AMONG SPENSER'S SURVIVING writings, Fowre Hymnes are his most discursive philosophical and theological reflections. Hence their position his canon is analogous to De Doctrina Christiana's Milton's, and yet they may well have more broad interpretive value for Spenserians than that treatise does for Miltonists. Since Paradise Lost is an explicitly biblical narrative about Fall, topics of its allegories are relatively clear. But romantic epic, even basic access to its allegorism is much more encoded. There, a knight's encounter with an infant whose hands are stained and whose mother has just committed suicide expresses theological implications of concupiscence, and so subtly that first recorded notices of this allegory, though now widely accepted, date from around I960.' Likewise Beige episode's allegorical engagements with Protestant apocalyptic historiography began to receive comment only around 1991.2 relatively explicit writings have great interest for hermeneutics of his Faery, and publication of Hymnes 1596 closely attended that of The Faerie Queene's expansion, as if both may have some correlative significance. Yet relationship of his hymnic and heroic texts remains relatively unexplored.The energetic debates Milton studies about De Doctrina and its relation to Milton's major poems indicate magnitude of this Spenserian lacuna, for relatively few studies of The Faerie Queene mention Hymnes, and fewer still explore their possibilities of interpretive comparison.2 Yet Hymnes could help clarify faery allegorism by indicating potential philosophical and theological subjects and illuminating doctrinal resonances of his diction, tropes, and imagery. They have particular value for study of conceptions of love and beauty, Platonism, and poetic theology.The chief deterrent to such investigation has been Robert Ellrodt's Neoplatonism Poetry of Spenser, for its general argument dissociates Hymnes from The Faerie Queene to advance an interdependent enterprise of belittling . . . Platonic influence on all poetry published before his hymnic tetralogy.4 I am not concerned here with Ellrodt's account of former relations between Christianity and Platonism, nor with his categories for assessing them, nor with his reading of hymns themselves-all of which others have contested.3 Nor do I address his recent essay involving Platonism (2005), for it does not change his book's positions at issue here.1.Whereas Spenser attributes first two hymns to the greener times of my youth his dedicatory epistle, Ellrodt's Neoplatonism claims poet wrote all four in their present shape . . . some time after publication of Colin Clout 1595, and, all likelihood, after The Faerie Queene I-VI had been entered Stationer's Register 1596: hence after 20 January that year.8 Spenser's most distinctly Platonic poems, as Ellrodt considers Hymnes, thus all belong to later years of his life (23). Though conceding that initial pair evince direct knowledge of learned Renaissance Platonists such as Marsilio Ficino (e.g., 23, 118), Ellrodt assumes that is a new acquisition for Spenser, largely gained after completing his heroic poem's second installment.v Until then, that critic's view, poet's notions of Platonism were basically medieval, with vague infusions of Renaissance Platonic esthetics derived from such so-called popularizers as Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, Louis Le Roy, and Pierre de la Primaudaye.1 This theory requires Spenser to have shunned almost all Plato's dialogues, because nearly any direct knowledge of them beyond first third of Timaeus counts as learned Renaissance Platonism. Accordingly, Ellrodt doubts whether [Spenser] had any first hand acquaintance with them, even Latin translation (115; my emphasis).12 From his standpoint, Hymnes' interpretive relevance to previously published poems can only be dubious at best, and so is that of virtually all Plato's dialogues, all ancient Neoplatonic texts, and all their learned Renaissance elaborations. …

Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts. Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 40

Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts. Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 40

Samuel Sheppard’s Faerie King and the Fragmentation of Royalist Epic

This essay offers a reading of Samuel Sheppard’s little-known heroic poem, The Faerie King, as part of the virtual subgenre of unfinished Royalist epic. Begun in 1648 while the author was imprisoned for publishing Royalist propaganda, The Faerie King narrates the fortunes of the invented kingdom of Ruina in an obscure, fragmented allegory of the Civil War. Sheppard brings together conflicting elements of elevated poetic style and vulgar newsbook rhetoric in a volatile generic mix that registers the impact of actual war on the processes of literary creation and forms of authorship available in the Interregnum.

The Erotics of War in German Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Erotics of War in German Romanticism Adrian Daub Patricia Anne Simpson, The Erotics of War in German Romanticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. 293 pp. In The Erotics of War in German Romanticism, Patricia Anne Simpson convincingly locates a strand of “romantic” literature and thought in dialogue both with the Napoleonic Wars and the new soldier-culture they brought into existence. The nature of soldierly activity, the construal of a community’s relationship to those soldiers, and the perceived relationship between war and sexual difference, Simpson points out, were subject to a radical shift between Lenz’s Die Soldaten (or Lessing’s Minna) and the “romantic” period under consideration in this study. Of course, the subsumption of authors so diverse as Hegel (including the Hegel of the Encyclopedia), Kleist, Hölderlin, Goethe, Schinkel, and even Hotho under the label “romanticism” is somewhat problematic—but the author offsets this potential liability quite skillfully by grounding these authors’ exceedingly varied responses to war in the way such war was in fact conducted and thought about. This allows this study to strike a breathtaking arc from von Clausewitz and Schinkel, via Hölderlin and Kleist, to the famous Iron Cross medal, [End Page 264] eventually winding its way to the painting of a parade “Unter den Linden” that graces the book’s cover. The first chapter traces a trajectory from Kant’s implicit gendering of war through the category of the sublime, via Fichte’s explicit gendering of the (German) nation in his Reden an die deutsche Nation to Hegel’s discussions of femininity, desire, and the sittlich community in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. Chapter Two treads perhaps the most familiar ground, exploring the conjunction of (homo)erotic community, war, and aesthetic beauty in Hölderlin’s Hyperion. Chapter Three, by contrast, offers up a highly unusual, though extremely productive pairing: Karoline von Günderrode and Carl von Clausewitz. The link Simpson establishes here revolves around the figure of the duel, a frequent motif in Günderrode’s heroic poems and stories and, according to Clausewitz, the paradigmatic constellation of war. It is precisely through the duel that Günderrode is able to subvert the static gender binarisms that emerged from (and tacitly subtended) the rhetoric of national liberation. Chapter Four turns to what is perhaps the most central intersection of the warrior figure and questions of gender in the period in question: Kleist’s Penthesilea. Simpson demonstrates that the play clearly unsettles the consignment of feminine desire to the domestic, private sphere by essentially “collaps[ing] into identity” (129) the erotic and war. Of course, Simpson argues, Kleist’s play ultimately comes to negate that unsettling, reinstating a stable gender binary. In particular, she points out how, through the categories of individuality and universality, Hegelian critiques of Kleist tend to recuperate the association of nation and masculinity. The same critiques turn crucially on the relationship between history and (classical) allegory, a question that comes to the forefront in Simpson’s masterful fifth chapter. Drawing on a whole range of objects, from Ernst Moritz Arndt patriotic lyric poetry, Goethe’s 1814 play Des Epimenides Erwachen, Schinkel’s paintings and architecture, to the iron jewelry of the “Berliner Königliche Eisengießerei,” Simpson shows how questions of gender and nationality came to be aligned in the Wars of Liberation and their immediate aftermath—an alignment that Goethe viewed with skepticism. In her final chapter, Simpson explores Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Dies Buch gehört dem König in order to show how a specifically feminine agency could be asserted in public discourse. The wide range of texts and the thorough analyses make this book an important addition to the field of romanticism and gender. But while the wealth of detail and the sheer brilliance of the individual readings could have easily proved exhilarating, the extreme terseness, even dryness, of Simpson’s prose tends to throw a blanket over any burgeoning excitement. The book is well copy-edited and thoughtfully put together, but there is something almost forbidding about its style and the presentation of its objects. A reader (this reader, for certain) might expect more of...

Beowulf & other stories: a new introduction to old English, old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman literatures

List of plates and maps. Preface to the second edition. Acknowledgements. Publisher's Acknowledgements. 1. Why read Old English Literature? An introduction to this book. Richard North, David Crystal and Joe Allard. Names to Look Out For. Joe Allard and Richard North. 2. Is it relevant? Old English influence on The Lord of the Rings. Clive Tolley. 3. Is violence what Old English literature is about? Beowulf and other battlers: an introduction to Beowulf. Andy Orchard. 4. Is there more like Beowulf? Old English minor heroic poems. Richard North. 5. What else is there?. Joyous Play and Bitter Tears: the Riddles and the Elegies. Jennifer Neville. 6. How Christian is OE literature? The Dream of the Rood and Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Eamonn O Carragain and Richard North. 7. How did OE literature start? Caedmon the cowherd and Old English biblical verse. Bryan Weston Wyly. 8. Were all the poets monks? Monasteries and courts: Alcuin and Offa. Andy Orchard. 9. What was it like to be in the Anglo-Saxon or Viking World? Material culture: archaeology and text. Michael Bintley. 10. Did the Anglo-Saxons write fiction? Old English prose: King Alfred and his books. Susan Irvine. 11. How difficult is the Old English language? The Old English language. Peter S. Baker. 12. When were the Vikings in England? Viking wars and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Jayne Carroll. Notes on the Old Norse language. Richard North. 13. What gods did the Vikings worship? Viking religion: Old Norse mythology. Terry Gunnell. 14. Just who were the Vikings anyway? Sagas of Icelanders. Joe Allard. 15. Were there stories in late OE literature? Prose writers of the English Benedictine Reform. Stewart Brookes. 16. What happened when the Normans arrived?. Anglo-Norman literature: the road to Middle English. Patricia Gillies. Epilogue. The end of Old English? David Crystal. The editors and the contributors. Index

Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts by John D. Niles (review)

1?8ARTHURIANA JOHN D. NiLES, OldEnglish Heroic Poems and the Social Life ofTexts. Studies in the EarlyMiddleAges. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. xiii, 372. isbn: 978-2-503-52080-3. €80. Like its recently released companion volume, OldEnglish Enigmatic Poems andthe PUy ofthe Texts, this volume brings together a number ofJohn Niles's innovative articles, supplements them, and in the process offers a stimulating and original contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Here, in an Introduction that identifies various critical schools as 'flights from meaning,' Niles lays out the critical procedure that has been the hallmark of his career: a close attention to philology of the most traditional kind joined to a larger critical eye towards not simply the artistry of a poem but also the cultural work that it performs—the qualities that would have given it historical meaning and impact. Describing OldEnglish Enigmatic Poems as being 'in conversation' with the various critical movements he surveys (11), Niles manages, as only a very few critics do today, to appreciate a poem's artistry even as he describes its cultural embeddedness and the tensions that affect its critics as well as the poem itself. The initial essay, 'Locating Beowulfin Literary History,' thus takes on the issue of the poem's meanings in connection with its date. While acknowledging that earlier, short lays may have circulated orally—must, in fact, have done so—Niles persuasively argues that this particular poem with its particular thematic concerns and narrative twists is most likely to date from the tenth century. The argument rests on the historical situation ofpost-Alfredian England as well as on the poem's presentation of characters like Scyld and Wiglaf, but what gives it force is the way Niles ties in historical examples of the recording of oral works. 'Beowulf Niles suggests, 'is the projection of two great desires: first, for a distinguished ethnic origin that would serve to merge Angles, Saxons, and Danes into a single more-or-less united people, and second, for an ethical origin that would ally this unified race with Christian spiritual values' (56). Niles's historicism, then, approaches Old English poetry not simply from the view of what a particular word or reference meant but from that of how a poem in its entirety would have functioned within Anglo-Saxon culture, particularly that ofthe tenth century. Widsith, he suggests, 'is ofinterest for the ways in which it synthesizes historical and geographical knowledge so as tojustifyan emergentAnglo-Saxon social order, lending that order the patina ofantiquity while wrapping irs controlling ethos in an aura of Tightness or inevitability that derives from its articulation through the formal speech of the imagined poet-sage, Widsith himself, the celebrant of ancient kings' (84). History is very much what we make of it, and this was as true for the Anglo-Saxons as it is today. One of the essays first published here, 'Anglo-Saxon Heroic Geography,' delivers this point with particular force. This kind ofgeography designates 'geographical ideas that, whatever theirbasis, are subsumed into a mode of seeing that has a validity independent ofthe actual features ofthe physical world' (123). So, the issue isn't who really lived where but who was understood to live where—or, perhaps, who had to live where—as part of a larger nexus of cultural, political, and traditional concepts. And in this vein, in light oftenth-century desires to validate an REVIEWS109 Anglo-Danish past, it made good sense for Anglo-Saxons to understand the Geats, who figure so prominently in Beowulf, as synonymous with Bede's Jutes. The volume's final essay, also original, is 'Heaney's Beowulf Six Years Later.' Taking on a host ofAnglo-Saxonists who have criticized the translation for one reason or another, Niles suggests that it is in fact 'the most successful presentation thathas yet been made ofan Old English poem in the form ofa modern English verse translation' (326—27). Noting both Heaney's academic credentials and his long-standing interest in the Middle Ages and earlier, Niles sees the poem as a purposeful appropriation of a literary monument: 'When Heaney uses an archaic dialect word such as "wargraith " instead ofa more transparent term such as "war...

The Drama in Rags: Shakespeare Reception in Eighteenth-Century Germany

For the early eighteenth century, Shakespeare stood as the token figure for a liberal departure from normative poetics. Imperious advocates of a restrained, rule-governed poetics such as Voltaire or Gottsched thundered against the irregularity of Shakespearean drama, decrying its monstrous hybridization of the tragic, the comic and the lyrical, railing at the complete lack of dramatic unity and the lamentable violation of decorum and poetic taste. Seventeenth-century poetics, namely Boileau's L'Art Poetique (1674), had reinterpreted Aristotle's differentiation of genres according to the motif, means, and kind of mimesis, and instituted them as rigid generic boundaries. For Aristotle, persons either above or below the standard norm constitute the motif or theme of poetic representation-a distinction that comes to account for the difference between tragedy and comedy. The different means of representation, dramatic dialogue or narration, indicated the differentiation between drama and epic. In his Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624), Opitz relies on Aristotle's thematic differentiation to outline further classifications: the heroic poem has to represent gods, heroes, and wars; tragedy is to show royal will, murder, and despair; comedy has to present bad characters and lowly persons; and lyrics or songs at weddings or births are to depict courting, dance, banquets, gardens, and vineyards. The themes and motifs of literature, and the respective delineation of genre borders, were thus still modeled on social hierarchies and ranks. Gottsched systematized the earlier, often

Novgorodian birchbark mail 2005

We continue acquainting our readers with the correspondence of the people of medieval Novgorod. In the 2005 field season, the Novgorodian Expedition discovered three more birchbark messages in layers dated from the first quarter and the middle of the 12th century. Two have reached us in full, and the third is a short fragment. For the first time, one of them describes events reflected not only in chronicles but also in bylinas (traditional Old Russian heroic poems).

Renaissance de l’épopée: la poésie épique en France de 1572 à 1623 by Bruno Méniel

MLR, 101.2, 2006 535 of Lucretius, whom Montaigne studied carefully. He detects Lucretian influence in Montaigne's views on 'fortune' and highlights Epicurean and Lucretian strands in Montaigne's thought. Ann Hartle provides a survey of ancient scepticism and ofMontaigne's 'Apology' that would be useful for beginners. She defines Montaigne's transformed scepticism as 'an openness towhat is possible and an overcoming of presumption at the deepest level' (p. I93). She finds thatMontaigne makes definitive moral judgements and shows some openness to change. He does not share the sceptical aim of imperturbability; he cultivates self-knowledge, amore Socratic than a sceptic goal. His Catholic faith is another non-sceptical aspect of the Essais. J. B. Schneewind also looks at the 'Apology', while examining Montaigne's rela tionship tomoral philosophy. Sebond believes that experience gives us information necessary to infer with certainty what our good is.Montaigne argues that natural reason alone will not supply us with practical knowledge. He thinks that no ancient convincingly defined the highest good. Rather like St Paul, he believes we have our own court within us (III. 2). Schneewind places Montaigne in a philosophical context and shows that he was admired by Kant. There is inevitably some repetition in this volume. The 'Apology' is looked at from various angles. Two contributors quote Montaigne's declaration that he likes moderating words such as 'perhaps' (pp. 63, I85). But the philosophical complexities of Montaigne's text, and of its context, are thoroughly surveyed. Ample footnotes refer to important critical works, and there is a good index. BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITYOFLONDON JEANBRAYBROOK Renaissance de lV'popee: lapoesie epique en France de I 572 a I623. By BRUNOMfENIEL. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 389) Geneva: Droz. 2004. 555 pp. SwF 202. ISBN 2-600-oo877-2. This revised doctoral thesis, prepared under the direction of Daniel Menager, is a vast survey of the abundant production of epic poetry in France between the year that saw the publication of Ronsard's Franciade-also the year of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre and two years before the first attested use of the adjective epique inFrench and that inwhich the noun epopee itself was coined. The first of the three canonical sections, 'Theorie et pratique de l'epos', begins by examining the reception of earlier epic models: from antiquity (Homer, Vergil, Lucretius, Ovid, and Lucan), theMiddle Ages (chansons de geste and romans de chevalerie), and Italy (Ariosto and Tasso). It subsequently discusses theoretical definitions of the heroic poem and a number of examples of 'poemes a dimension epique', selected from a corpus of some eighty works. In addition to well-known texts such as the Tragiques or the Sepmaine, the reader encounters many an -ide (e.g. La Stuartide), -iade (La Savoysiade, Guisiade, Lydiade, Christiade, Mariade, etc.), and -ee (La Loyssee), of which s/he may well have been unaware. Bruno Meniel concludes that while Renaissance theoreticians developed their reflection on the heroic poem, theory none the less lagged behind the practice of poets, which was considerably more innovative and varied. In the absence of a satisfactory contemporary theory, the second part of the study proposes a typology of the works surveyed. These are classified as poemesfabuleux or veridiques, the former including heroic and romance-type poems, the latter, poemes de combat and works of biblical or encyclopaedic inspiration. The characteristics and theoretical issues raised by each are discussed, as are their use of versification, rhetoric, narrative techniques and motifs, and, finally, the vision of the world (God, man, society, and nature) that they convey. The section ends with the important insight 536 Reviews that the epic poem in the Renaissance represents 'un effort pour penser, a partir de situations concretes, qu'elles soient historiques ou fictives, l'action divine sur la destin&ehumaine et sur lavie de lanature' (p.425). Such an ambitious project explains in large part why the epic was so popular during the period of social and intellectual upheaval represented by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and theWars of Religion. It also accounts for the great variety of epic endeavours (characterized by Meniel as 'l'eclatement de l'epos'), which represent not shared but divided and even opposed...

Milton in America: The case of Jackson County, Florida

Milton in America: The case of Jackson County, Florida

The Germanic Heldenlied and the Poetic Edda : Speculations on Preliterary History

One of the proudest inventions of German scholarship in the nineteenth century was the Heldenlied, the heroic song, which was seen by scholars as the main conduit of Germanic heroic legend from the Period of Migrations to the time of their being written down in the Middle Ages. The concept stems indirectly from the suggestions of several eighteenth-century Homeric scholars that since the Homeric poems were much too long to have been memorized and performed in oral tradition, they must have existed as shorter, episodic songs. Friedrich August Wolf's well-known Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) collected evidence for the idea that writing was not used for poetry until long after Homer's time. He argued for a thorough recension of the poem under (or perhaps by) Pisistratus in the sixth century BCE as the first comprehensive written Homer. These ideas were almost immediately applied to the Middle High German Nibelungenlied by Karl Lachmann (1816), who was trained as a classical philologist and indeed continued to contribute in that area at the same time that he was one of the most influential members of the generation that founded the new discipline of Germanistik. On the basis of rough spots and contradictions (not only Homer nods!) Lachmann thought he could recognize twenty separate Lieder in the Middle High German epic. At the same time that Lachmann was deconstructing the German medieval epic, Elias Lönnrot was assembling the Finnish epic he called Kalevala from shorter songs in conscious imitation of the Homer (or Pisistratus) described by Wolf. The Liedertheorie advanced by Wolf and Lachmann was revised by Andreas Heusler in the early years of the twentieth century. Heusler (1905) used the songs of the Poetic Edda as his models and decided that the way from song to epic was not by stringing the songs together with clumsily [End Page 43] composed bridge passages, but by a process of expansion (Aufschwellung).1 The individual song contained within it the entire story (Fabel) and the epic poet simply expanded material contained within the song to produce his work. The relationship between Lied and Epos was, Heusler argued, like that between an acorn and a tree, not the relationship between individual pearls and a necklace. A by-product of these theoretical musings is the concept of the Germanic Heldenlied, which was essentially a product of cogitation at the writing desk. Few of its spiritual fathers ever heard an oral heroic song or epic of any kind, and they worked out the form mainly from a conviction of what the transmission of heroic legend would have had to be, rather than from a consideration of the surviving evidence. Preliterate poetry, they argued, must have been composed just like literate poetry, that is, by a poet who composed by "writing" on the tablet of his memory, very much as the literate poets of the nineteenth century wrote on paper. The theory came first and the evidence was adjusted to fit. The fact that there is not a single Germanic Heldenlied of the type described by Lachmann or Heusler surviving from anywhere outside of Iceland never seems to have bothered them.2 Heusler used the heroic poems of the Icelandic Poetic Edda as his models for the Heldenlied, the assumption being that the Icelanders had maintained the form and content of Old Germanic heroic poetry until they were written down in the late thirteenth century. In the summation of his theory in Die altgermanische Dichtung Heusler characterizes the genre in his typical style (1923:147): Auch das Heldenlied ist ein größeres Werk, etwa zwischen 80 und einigen 200 Langzeilen; vorbedacht und auswendig gelernt, für Einzelvortrag bestimmt. Es gehört zu den objektiven Gattungen, ohne ausgesprochene Beziehung auf die Gegenwart. Sein Inhalt ist eine heroische Fabel aus zeitlosem Einst; eine einkreisige Geschichte von straffem Umriß, sparsam mit Auftritten und Menschen. Die Darstellung ist episch-dramatisch zu nennen: Erzählung...

Christian influence on OE dream: Pre-Christian and Christian meanings

One of the key words in Anglo-Saxon heroic and elegiac poems, dream, carries quite a strong connotation inherited from the pre-Christian era. It is based on a view of the world as a complex consisting of two alien areas: on the one hand, populated, civilized, secure, and glorious areas (often represented by a feast in the lord's hall), whose existence is heavily dependent on an ideal lord-retainer relationship, and on the other hand, uncivilized, insecure, inglorious ones often inhabited by exiles, outlaws, animals, and monsters. Dream retained this basic idea as well as its place as a key word even after it began to be used to represent supreme joy in heaven. But at the same time, it sometimes began to represent a concept alien to its basic, pre-Christian idea under the influence of the Christian dichotomous view of heaven and earth, the degraded counterpart of heaven. What I examine here is the process through which dream acquired a new meaning based on the new, Christian worldview.

Towards a Thematic Analysis of the Homeric Poems

The aim of this research is to produce a complete thematic analysis of the heroic poems (Bias, Odyssea, Scutum and the fragments of the other poems). We must identify, classify and describe exhaustively the themes and the motives, i.e. the semantic and structural elements of the epic narration. The identification of the single themes and motives is based on these textual principles : a) the narrative structures, b) the repetition and the variation, c) the relationship between the thematic structures and the use of the formular language. Then, we can index all the themes and the motives together with the greek texts, and we can produce a vertical thematic decription of the poems and the complete catalogues of themes and motives.

Death and Dying in the Middle Ages by Edelgard E. Dubrick , Barbara I. Gusick (review)

that anxiety over basic food production and transport, virtually unknown in the modern West, underlies some of the disparitybetween heroic literature (in which food is abundant)and historicalsources(inwhich faminesarefrequent).Magennis's discussion of the power of hunger, anthropomorphized and even bestialized with such verbs as slitan('cut,tear'),ahy6an ('plunder,destroy'),bindan ('bind'),and hienan ('fell,bringlow') drivesthe point home vividly(p. 44). The sections of the book on ecclesiasticalantagonismtowardssatingthe material body, while hardly innovative, are capably presented. More could be pulled from the intriguing texts and passages he brings to the discussion, perhaps. Magennis paints a picture of heroic society as one in which meat is a prestige item, and in which a carnivorousdietisvalorizedasprovidingstrengthand courage (pp. 60-6 ), but does not sufficientlyreconcile this with the abstention from meat valorized by the Benedictine Rule, for instance. These heroic poems are being copied, after all, by monksforwhom eating meat is a signof infirmity,not power. Any discussion of food imagery in Old English poetry is bound to come around to Andreas, and here again Magennis's discussion is fresh and informative. Critics such as Robert Boenig andJohn Hermann have elucidatedthe eucharisticimagery in the poem (readinto the cannibalismof the Mermedonians), an approachwhich Magennis rejects as overstated (pp. i66-69). Instead he offers a reading of the poem's internallogic, supportedwith anthropologicalaccounts of cannibalism.He notes that the Mermedonian guardsareperverseeven by theirown standards,since they flouttheirpracticeof eating only strangersby eating theirown guards(p. 148). Even the unfortunateDonners refusedto breakthe double taboo of eating members of their own family, as the high-ranking Mermedonian chief proposes when he volunteershis own son forthe cannibalisticfeast. Magennis's wide-ranging overview of an important element of Anglo-Saxon literatureis sensitivelyattuned to what is missingfrom it. Thus he notes that sweet drinks,an importantcomponent of the Latinexegetical tradition,arenot developed in Old English poetry (p. I35), while metaphorical 'bitter drinks' are common enough. Also, the vernacular tradition does not take advantage of the spiritual interpretation of alcoholic drinks (e.g., the 'intoxication with Christ' common in Latin works such as Augustine's Ennarationes). While earlier Latin writers such as Bede and Alcuin are both comfortablewith the metaphor of spiritualintoxication, later vernacular writers such as AElfricrefrain from developing such imagery (perhaps because 'he was too concerned about inebriation in its immediate, literal sense to wish to explore the fine points of its spiritualmeaning' (p.140)). Magennis has successfullyexposed one of the greatdouble standardsof Old Englishliterature. The idea and the ritual of eating are noble, while the act of eating is cruel and inhuman;the idea and the ritualof drinkingare heroic, while the act of drinkingis gruesome. PENNSYLVANIASTATE UNIVERSITY, MONT ALTO PETER DENDLE Death and Dying in theMiddle Ages. Ed. by EDELGARD E. DUBRICKand BARBARA I. GUSICK. (Studies in the Humanities: Literature, Politics, Society, 45) New York,Bern, and Frankfurta.M.: Lang. 1999. Xi + 5I5 PP. [44. This is an ambitious and fascinatingbook that bringstogether essays on death and dying in the Middle Ages. It comprises a series of essays ranging from the practicalitiesof death (therole of doctors;the Beguines;the ritualimportanceof the Altarof the Holy Cross)to the theologicaldebatesof the age (The FourLastThings; St Thomas Aquinas; the tortuousjourney of the soul to heaven; the role of saints that anxiety over basic food production and transport, virtually unknown in the modern West, underlies some of the disparitybetween heroic literature (in which food is abundant)and historicalsources(inwhich faminesarefrequent).Magennis's discussion of the power of hunger, anthropomorphized and even bestialized with such verbs as slitan('cut,tear'),ahy6an ('plunder,destroy'),bindan ('bind'),and hienan ('fell,bringlow') drivesthe point home vividly(p. 44). The sections of the book on ecclesiasticalantagonismtowardssatingthe material body, while hardly innovative, are capably presented. More could be pulled from the intriguing texts and passages he brings to the discussion, perhaps. Magennis paints a picture of heroic society as one in which meat is a prestige item, and in which a carnivorousdietisvalorizedasprovidingstrengthand courage (pp. 60-6 ), but does not sufficientlyreconcile this with the abstention from meat valorized by the Benedictine Rule, for instance. These heroic poems are being copied, after all, by monksforwhom eating meat is a signof infirmity,not power. Any discussion of food imagery in...

Celebrating National Holidays in Turkey: History and Memory

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having “an accumulative effect upon successive generations” (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Party's assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republic's reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

War and Peace in "The Lepanto" of James VI and I

Previous articleNext article No AccessWar and Peace in "The Lepanto" of James VI and IRobert AppelbaumRobert Appelbaum Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 97, Number 3Feb., 2000 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/492865 Views: 5Total views on this site Copyright 2000 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Tasso's God: Narrative Authority in the "Gerusalemme Liberata"

Beginning with the fifteenth-century Neoplatonists, Renaissance poets and critics often defended poetry by drawing attention to the parallels between God's creation of the world and the poet's act of creation.1 Philip Sidney's assertion that the poet's creative powers surpass Nature's, so that the poet delivers a golden world in place of Nature's brazen one, only the best known of such attempts to exalt the creative powers of the poetic maker. Robert Durling has argued that Ludovico Ariosto consistently makes such claims in the Orlando Furioso (1532) through his insistence that he controls the poem's seemingly unwieldy multiple plots.2 But it the later epic poet Torquato Tasso who, in his Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Discorsi delpoema eroico) , much more clearly states the Neoplatonic idea: the truly excellent poet is called divine for no other reason than that as he resembles the supreme Artificer in his workings,