Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Gelges laments her husband Cael, and in the Táin bó Cúailnge, where Cú Chulainn produces a series of laments for his foster-brot ...

by their praises they send down the ages the brave souls of those killed in war; Aelian, that they take as the subject of their ...

men’ both phrasally and as a compound noun (nára ̄s ́ám ̇ sa, ‘praise-song’) or adjective.^110 It is a reasonable supposition th ...

hymns are in dialogue form, and there are elements of dialogue in some of the Ga ̄tha ̄s. Most of these early Indo-Iranian examp ...

to injurious spells and incantations of all kinds, obtainable from mounte- banks and unsavoury old women. But there may have bee ...

Agathyrsi of Transylvania, perhaps a Dacian people, sang or chanted their laws ‘so as not to forget them’. In Gaul the administr ...

I counsel thee, Loddfáfnir, and take thou my counsel: profit shalt thou, if thou takest it, good thy gain, if thou learnest. The ...

Zeus Homarios and for the designation of epic poets as Homeridai.^126 Certainly Greek poets competed at festivals. Hesiod won a ...

Alcidamas.^128 In Irish saga too we find the motif of the contest in which one poet sets a half-quatrain and another completes i ...

2 Phrase and Figure ‘So with the Soma-offering I bring to birth for you, Indra and Agni, a new praise-poem’ (RV 1. 109. 2). This ...

more recent and by present ones’ (3. 32. 13); (Indra) ‘who has been fortified by former and present songs of the praise-singing ...

verse), Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus.^7 But they can be found in many other poetic traditions: in the Rigveda, as 5. 33. 8 P ...

poet Eumolpus in Petronius, saepius poetice quam humane locutus es. Watkins cites a Middle Irish treatise on grammar and poetics ...

Pura ̄n ̇ as, and in the expanded phrase uruga ̄yám s ́rávah ̇ ‘wide-going glory’ (RV 6. 65. 6); but the old word urú- was givin ...

most numerous class of these in the Indo-European traditions consists of compound adjectives and nouns. Nominal composition was ...

have ∆3σπαρι‘Ill-Paris’, in the OdysseyΚακοRλιο‘evil Troy’, in Alcman Α!νο ́ παρι, in Euripides (Or. 1387, Iph. Aul. 1316) ∆υ ...

‘the grandson of Neithon’= Domnall Brecc.^21 One such circumlocution, ‘Grandson of the Waters’, became at least for Indo-Iranian ...

poetry.^25 Stephanie West in her note on the Homeric passage says that ‘here πποι is almost equivalent to “chariots” (Homeric he ...

the thing. A number are shared by different branches of the tradition and may represent a common inheritance. Several of them wi ...

abandoned mead for the Mediterranean intoxicant, wine, and μθυ had undergone a corresponding change of meaning. The sea is ‘bro ...