conceits. The Three Hundred in the gold torques will be esteemed hyd orffen
byd, ‘till the end of the world’ (Y Gododdin 1129). Cethern, if he only had
his own weapons, would do such deeds as would be ‘a subject of story till
Doomsday’ (Táin (I) 3306). The praise of heroes mun æ lifa, nema öld farisk
... eða bili heimar, ‘will live for ever, unless mankind passes away or the
worlds crack up’ (Háttatal v. 96).
The evidence is perhaps too thinly scattered to warrant the conclusion that
this was an Indo-European trope, especially as parallels can be found in the
Near East.^110 But we have seen enough to establish beyond any reasonable
doubt that the idea of posthumous fame was a pervasive theme of Indo-
European poetry. Its predicates –– good (or bad), great, wide, high, unfailing ––
may almost be said to form a formulaic system, not in the Parryist sense of
being metrically complementary, but in the sense of being semantically com-
plementary. The hero whose feats achieved acclaim and renown in his lifetime
could hope that after the death of his body his name would remain: not
perhaps explicitly ‘to the end of the world’, but indefinitely.
(^110) See West (1997), 514 f.
410 10. Mortality and Fame