Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes.
The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to religious traditions and/or to peoples who have largely “stayed put”; the tendency to reimagine and retell stories in new ways over centuries; and the imbrication of epic storytelling and forms of colonialism and imperialism, especially those perpetuated and glorified by Euro-Americans over the past 500 years, resulting in unspeakable and immeasurable harms to humans, other living beings, and the planet Earth.
The Epic World is a go-to volume for anyone interested in epic literature in a global framework. Engaging with powerful stories and ways of knowing beyond those of the predominantly white Global North, this field-shifting volume exposes the false premises of “Western civilization” and “Classics,” and brings new questions and perspectives to epic studies.
Pamela Lothspeich is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research centers on the Indian epics in modern literature, theatre, and film.
THE ROUTLEDGE WORLDS
THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD
Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim
THE FAIRY TALE WORLD
Edited by Andrew Teverson
THE CELTIC WORLD: THE TOKUGAWA WORLD
Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao
THE INUIT WORLD
Edited by Pamela Stern
THE ARTHURIAN WORLD
Edited by Miriam Edlich-Muth, Renée Ward and Victoria Coldham-Fussell
THE MONGOL WORLD
Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope
THE SÁMI WORLD
Edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga
THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD
Edited by Xinru Liu, with the assistance of Pia Brancaccio
THE WORLD OF THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH
Edited By Robert H. Stockman
THE QUAKER WORLD
Edited by C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon Grant
THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE WORLD
Edited by Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce
THE ANGKORIAN WORLD
Edited by Mitch Hendrickson, Miriam T Stark and Damien Evans
THE SIBERIAN WORLD
Edited by John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson and Vladimir Davydov
THE CENTRAL ASIAN WORLD
Edited by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves
The right of Pamela Lothspeich to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lothspeich, Pamela, editor.
Title: The epic world / edited by Pamela Lothspeich. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023003806 (print) | LCCN 2023003807 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367252366 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032424996 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429286698 (ebook)
8 (Re)Inventing an Epic: Reading the Tamil Cilappatikāram across Time 118
Morgan J Curtis
9 Sri Lanka’s Mahāvaṃsa, the Great Chronicle
Kristin Scheible
10 The “Epic of the Anglo-Saxons”: The Many Cultural Streams of Beowulf
María José Gómez-Calderón
11 Ecological Imperialism in Vergil’s Aeneid
Laura Zientek
PART III: REC ASTINGS AND INNOVATIONS (CIRCA 1000 – 1850 CE)
12 Sunjata Fasa and the Oral Epic Tradition of Mali 175 Kassim Kone
13 Osiris Reborn: The Arabic Epic of Sīrat Sayf Ibn Dhī Yazan and the Prophetic Königsnovelle
Helen Blatherwick
14 From Oghuz Khan to Exodus: Lineage, Heroism, and Migration in Oghuz Turk Tradition 201
Ali Aydin Karamustafa
15 A Battle of Equals: Rustam and Isfandiar in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Shāhnāma
Behrang Nabavi Nejad
16 The “Hindu” Epics? Telling the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Premodern South Asia
Sohini Sarah Pillai
17 Trickster as Epic Narrator in the Malay Hikayat Hang Tuah
Sylvia Tiwon
18 Connecting with Ancestors: “Imported” and Indigenous Epics in Southeast Asia
Adrian Vickers
19 Epic Contestations: What Makes an Epic in Multi-Ethnic China?
Mark Bender
20 Whose Epic Is It, Anyway? Gesar and the Myth of the National Epic
Natasha L. Mikles
21 Ode to Mongolian Heroism: The Oirat Epic Jangar
Chao Gejin
22 Placation, Memorial, and History in Japan’s The Tale of the Heike and Beyond
Elizabeth Oyler
23 Guaman Poma’s Epic Letter: A Complex Salvo against Spanish Colonialism in the Andes
Scotti M. Norman
24 Human Owls and Political Sorcery in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan
Martín Vega
25 An “Epic of Sorts”: Gaspar de Villagrá and His Impossible Epic of the New Mexico
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
26 Gender Performance and Gendered Warriors in Albanian Epic Poetry
Anna Di Lellio and Arbnora Dushi
27 Slavic Oral-Traditional Epic in the Ottoman Ecumene
Robert Romanchuk
28 Empire and Resistance in South Slavic and Romanian Oral Epic Poetry
Margaret Hiebert Beissinger
29 “It Shall Be Ruled by Swallows”: The Epic of the Zulu King Shaka
Phiwokuhle Mnyandu
30 Lithoko: Continuity, Change, and the Future of South Sotho Praise Poetry
David M. M. Riep
31 “Man Is the Center”: Centripetal Power in the Malagasy Epic Tale of Ibonia
Hallie Wells and Vony Ranalarimanana
32 In Service of Authenticity: Epic in Central Africa under Colonialism
Jonathon Repinecz
33 Female Leadership and Nation Building: The West African Epics Yennenga and Sarraounia 471
Mariam Konaté
34 “The Return of Rome”: Empire, Epic, and Twentieth-Century Italian Imperialism in Africa 484
Samuel Agbamu
35 Empire and Resistance in Kazakh Oral Epic: The Case of Sătbek Batyr 498
Gabriel McGuire
36 Tolstoy’s War and Peace: National Novel-Epic on Page, Stage, and Screen 512
Julie A. Buckler
37 Ecocriticism and Indigenous Anti-Epics of China 527
Robin Visser
38 Anti-Epic as National Epic: Uses and Misuses of Epic in Argentina’s Martín Fierro 541
Nicolás Suárez
39 To Keep the Sky from Falling: The Epic of Indigenous Environmentalism in Brazil 556
Tracy Devine Guzmán
40 An Epic Struggle in Mesoamerican Indigenous Literatures: Recovering Written Forms of Expression 573
Arturo Arias
41 The African/American (Heroic) Epic: Lee’s Do the Right Thing as Critique, Comedy, Caution 586
Gregory E. Rutledge
42 Listening for Epic Sound and Seeing White Supremacy in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle 604
Alexander K. Rothe
FIGURES
5.1 An example of a network for distinct nodes, a-h, each connected by edges.
5.2 Degree distributions for two networks with 1,000 nodes and the same average degree. Panel (A) shows the degree distributions for a random network, and Panel (B), for a complex network.
5.3 The social network of the Iliad. The size of each node corresponds to how many connections each character has.
5.4 The degree distributions for networks in the seven epics. Note that the scale on the horizontal axis in Panel (A) is different from the others. In most cases, there are a few characters with very large degrees skewing the distributions to the right.
15.1 Rustam Shoots Isfandiar in the Eyes, from a manuscript of the Great Ilkhanid Shahnama, circa 1335, Tabriz, Iran. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (1958.288).
15.2 Rustam Shoots Isfandiar in the Eyes, from a manuscript of the Shāhnāma produced for Muhammad Juki, 1444–1445, Herat, Afghanistan. The Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK (239, folio 296r).
15.3 Rustam Slays Isfandiar, from the Shāhnāma of Shah Tahmasp, attributed to Qasim ibn ‘Ali, circa 1525–1530, Tabriz, Iran. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (1970.301.55, folio 466r).
18.1 Relief from the Shiva Temple, circa tenth century, in the Prambanan complex, Java, Indonesia. It depicts the Ramayana episode in which Rawana fends off Jatayu after abducting Sita. Photo by Jessica Kerr.
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18.2 Painting in the wayang style depicting a scene from the Ramayana. Rama, accompanied by his brother Laksamana, fighting off a demon threatening a hermitage (top), and Rama and Laksamana turning the demon upside down (bottom), while turban-wearing hermits and demons look on, circa 1940, Pan Seken, Kamasan, Bali, Indonesia. The Australian Museum (E074171). Photo by Emma Furno. 260
18.3 Painting in the wayang style depicting the heroes of the Mahabharata. The Pandawa brothers stand to the right of the tree (from left to right): Darmawangsa, Arjuna, Bima, Nakula, and Sadewa, with their crouching servants, while Krishna and other allies stand to the left of the tree, circa 1900, Sabug, Kamasan village, Bali, Indonesia. The Australian Museum (074209). Photo by Emma Furno. 263
24.1 Map of the basin of Mexico circa 1519, at the arrival of the Spanish. Wikipedia.
24.2 Horned owl, from The Florentine Codex Book 5, folio 7r, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy (Med. Palat. 218). By permission of the Ministerio della Cultura. Further reproduction by any means is prohibited.
24.3 Horned owls (top left and top right) with death figures in the underworld, from The Codex Borgia, 42. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Italy. By permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
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34.1 The ruins of Carthage on the Byrsa Hill, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Tunis, Tunisia. Getty Images. 487
36.1 Scene from the pop opera Pierre, Natasha & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012) being performed at the Tony Awards in 2017. Getty Images. 521
36.2 Still from Sergei Bondarchuk’s film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–1967), depicting a procession of the Smolensk icon before the Battle of Borodino. 523
37.1 Map of Aba and Huangnan on the Tibetan Plateau. Map courtesy of the author. 530
37.2 Map of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Map courtesy of the author. 534
38.1 The Fight between Martín Fierro and the Indigenous Chief, illustrated by Carlos Clérice (Hernández 1879, 22). Wikipedia. 545
38.2 Still from Fernando Solanas’ Los hijos de Fierro (1978) showing former police officer and Peronist militant Julio Troxler in the role of Fierro’s eldest son. 551
39.1 National Progress for Sale: “The Amazon is a Gold Mine.” 562
41.1 Sal and his sons, Pino and Vito, standing beneath the “HEROES” legend at Sal’s pizzeria in a still from Do the Right Thing (1989). 594
41.2 Ella dropping wisdom on the dead Radio Raheem. 600
41.3 Smiley, the “HEROES”-destroyer. 600
42.1 Nineteenth-century Wotan in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1856). Getty Images. 615
42.2 Jake Angeli, “QAnon Shaman,” in garb reminiscent of costuming in Wagner’s Ring cycle, protesting Donald Trump’s election loss, in Phoenix, AZ (November 3, 2020). Getty Images. 615
5.1 The network properties of seven epics. 81
5.2 Representation of female epic characters in social networks. 84
20.1 Gesar’s birth in the three versions of the epic. 288
CONTRIBUTORS
Samuel Agbamu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK He holds a PhD from King’s College London, with a thesis on ancient Roman and modern Italian imperialism in Africa. He has also worked as a high school Latin and Classics teacher.
Arturo Arias is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Merced, and was a Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) at Princeton University in Fall 2019. He has published Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives, Volumes 1 (2017) and 2 (2018), Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960–1990 (1998).
Chris Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where her research and teaching interests include early modern English literature, especially Spenser and Milton; poetry and poetics; ecocriticism; and geocritical approaches to literature. Her published works include Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as articles and essays on, among other things, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, butterflies, dragons, and ether. Her research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Collection, and the Lilly Library.
Margaret Hiebert Beissinger teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on oral epic, Balkan Romani music-making, folklore, traditional culture, and folktale. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania (1991), and co-edited Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (1999), as well as Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music (2016). She is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore.
Mark Bender is Professor of Chinese literature and folklore at The Ohio State University. Bender’s interests include oral traditions and material culture in multi-ethnic China and poetry of the environment from the borderlands of Asia.
Helen Blatherwick is a research associate and teaching fellow at SOAS University of London, UK. Her publications include Prophets, Gods and Kings in Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan: An Intertextual Reading of an Egyptian Popular Epic (Brill, 2016) and various articles on Arabic popular epic and Islamic legends. She has also co-edited two special issues, on “Arabic Emotions: From the Qur’an to the Popular Epic” (Cultural History, 2019) and “The Qur’an in World Literature” (Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 2014). She is currently working on a project on the representation of emotions in various genres of premodern Arabic literature.
Julie A. Buckler is Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She works on the literature and cultural life of nineteenth-century Russia and on the legacies of the imperial period. Buckler has published two award-winning books: The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2000) and Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityscape (Princeton, 2005). She has co-edited two collections of essays: Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern, 2013) and Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (Wisconsin, 2018), and is currently co-editing the first-ever Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel.
Sarah Cook is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia and a contract instructor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on the source critical study of the Torah, and her dissertation (in progress) is entitled “When Texts Dwell Together: Editing Strategies in the Torah.” Her research interests include translation in the ancient world, ancient Israelite material culture and text production, and gender and identity in the ancient Near East.
Morgan J Curtis is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. They received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School in 2018. Their research focuses on literary culture and production among Jain, Buddhist, Shaiva, and Vaishnava communities in South India, with special attention to questions about the relationship between aesthetics, moral development, and sectarian interactions.
Sílvio R. Dahmen is a professor at the Physics Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2006, he became a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation and has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Würzburg, the Technical University Berlin, Coventry University, and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His main interests are in the application of physics to the humanities, mathematical physics, and history and popularization of physics.
Tracy Devine Guzmán is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami where she founded and co-coordinates the Working Group in Native American and Global Indigenous Studies. She is the author of Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence (UNC Press, 2013);
and is working on a comparative, intellectual history called Transcontinental Indigeneity: Linking the Americas and the Global South.
Anna Di Lellio is an expert on Kosovo, where she has worked as an international administrator, a professor, and a researcher. She currently lectures on international relations with a focus on gender and security in New York City, at New York University and The New School. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and a Master’s in Public Policy from NYU. She is the author of several articles and book chapters, and The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). She is the co-founder of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative.
Shawna Dolansky is an associate professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her current research interests are in gendered historiography and iconography of the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical Israel, as well as the intersections among myth, history, fact, fiction, and imagination, in ancient and contemporary worldviews.
Arbnora Dushi is a research advisor at the Folklore Department of the Institute of Albanology in Pristina, Kosovo. She holds a PhD in Philology from the University of Pristina. She completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Turku, Finland. The oral tradition, memory studies, and oral history are the focus of her research projects. She is the author of several articles and book chapters, and Homo narrans: rrëfimi personal gojor (Homo narrans: oral personal narrative) (Pristina: The Institute of Albanology, 2009). She is the vice-president of the International Ballad Commission and a corresponding member of the Finnish Literature Society.
Chao Gejin is Director of the Institute of Ethnic Literature and Professor of Ethnic Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, PRC. He is Editor-in-Chief of Studies of Ethnic Literature, President of the China Ethnic Literature Society, President of the China Association for Mongol Studies, and Honorary President of the China Folklore Society. As a folklorist and literary critic, he focuses on folkloristics and literature, particularly oral traditions. His publications include Oral Epic Traditions in China and Beyond (Routledge, 2021) and Poetry of the Epic (Aman tuuliin shüleg züi) (Ulanbaatar, 2020).
María José Gómez-Calderón is a lecturer at Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. She specializes in English medieval and renaissance literature, medievalism, and cultural studies. Her research focuses on the reception of the medieval matter in both canonical literature and contemporary popular genres and media. She has published on the representation and adaptation of Beowulf in film and comics, and on the internet.
Ali Aydin Karamustafa is a historian of the Ottoman and Safavid worlds. His research focuses on oral and written traditions concerning origins, conquest, legitimacy, and rebellion, which were produced and circulated by political communities from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He received his PhD from Stanford in 2020 and is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Ralph Kenna is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Coventry University, UK. His research concerns the fundamentals of phase transitions and critical phenomena in statistical physics, as well as applications to socio-physical complex systems, including those embedded in epic and mythological narratives.
Mariam Konaté is Professor of African American and African Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Her work examines the lives of women of African descent in Africa and the African diaspora. Her current research project explores the experiences of Continental African immigrants in the United States. She also studies the relevance of absent fathers to African American women’s heterosexual dating experiences and the issue of skin bleaching among Africans. Her research in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies focuses on the impact of the oral tradition on African, African American, and Caribbean literatures and cinemas.
Kassim Kone is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the State University of New York, Cortland. A specialist in Mande culture and West Africa, his research focuses on African language, history, folklore, religion, ethnomusicology, and art. His many publications include a monolingual Bamana dictionary, More than a Thousand Mande Proverbs in Bambara and English (West Newbury, MA: Mother-Tongue Editions, 1996), and, with Ilyas Ba-Yunus, Muslims in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).
Pamela Lothspeich is Professor of South Asian Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her books include Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia, co-edited with Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). Her current book project is on the Radheshyam Ramayan and the theatre of Rāmlīlā
Máirín MacCarron is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at University College Cork, Ireland. She is a medieval historian, and her research interests include gender history, with particular interests in medieval queens and women in religious life, computus (the medieval science of time reckoning and calendar construction), and social network analysis.
Pádraig MacCarron is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His background is in physics, and his PhD dissertation (Coventry University) analyzes social networks in literary narratives. He is interested in a wide range of applications of complex networks from primate networks to attitude-based networks.
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez has published the books P. Galindo: obras (in)completas de José Díaz; The Textual Outlaw: Reading John Rechy in the 21st Century; Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo: Cinco estudios sobre Gaspar de Villagrá; With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships across the Centuries, a scholarly edition of Gaspar de Villagrá’s Historia de la nveva Mexico; Gaspar de Villagrá: Legista, soldado y poeta; Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature; La voz urgente: antología de literatura Chicana en Español; and Rolando Hinojosa y su “cronicón” Chicano: una novela del lector.
Gabriel McGuire is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Nazarbayev University in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, where he teaches classes on world literature, folktales, and the oral literature of Central Asia. His research focuses on the oral literature of the Kazakhs and on the intellectual history of folklore study in Soviet Kazakhstan.
Natasha L. Mikles is an assistant professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, where she teaches courses on Tibetan and Chinese religion in their newly created Religious Studies major. She has published in several major journals in the fields of Tibetan Studies and Religious Studies, including Material Religion, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, and Culture & Religion. Beyond these articles, Natasha is also developing a monograph based on her original translations and research on King Gesar’s journey to hell and the epic’s participation in Tibetan Buddhist culture. Natasha currently serves as the editor for The Journal of Gods and Monsters.
Phiwokuhle Mnyandu is Lecturer of African Studies and World Languages and Culture at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is interested in the intersection of the Zulu language and technology. He is the author of South AfricaChina Relations: Between Aspiration and Reality in a New Global Order. He is the co-author (with Wilfred David) of African Humanomics: Economics and the Human Good. He co-edited Pan African Spaces: Essays in Black Transnationalism. He is also the author of 502 Zulu Verbs and 251 Zulu Verbs.
Melissa Mueller is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she has taught since 2007. She is the author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (Chicago 2016), co-editor of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Bloomsbury 2018), and series co-editor of Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms for Edinburgh University Press. She is currently finishing a book called Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading.
Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics at SUNY at Buffalo. Her research and publications focus primarily on Hellenistic poetry, race, ethnicity, and racecraft in ancient Greek and Latin literature, and the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. She is co-president of EOS: Africana Receptions of the Classics, and serves on the editorial boards of Classical Philology, Religion Compass, and Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry. Along with Rosa Andujar and Elena Giusti, she is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race (forthcoming).
Behrang Nabavi Nejad holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Victoria (2017) and MAs from the University of Toronto, and Bangalore University, with a focus on Persian art. She has taught courses on Islamic art and architecture, world art history, contemporary Canadian art, and graphic novels at the University of Victoria, Capilano University, and Columbia College, Vancouver (Canada), and has been a research fellow at Simon Fraser University (2019–2020). Her research examines the manuscript illustrations of the Persian national epic, the Shāhnāma through an intertextual analysis of the pre-Islamic written sources and contemporary historiographies.
Scotti M. Norman is Professor of Material Culture and Archaeology at Warren Wilson College. She is an Andeanist archaeologist, whose research focuses on the sixteenth-century revitalization movement known as Taki Onqoy in the Central highlands of Ayacucho, Peru.
Elizabeth Oyler is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on medieval narrative and performing arts, particularly the Tale of the Heike, Japan’s emblematic war tale. Her publications include Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), as well as articles and book chapters about war tales, the noh drama, and related arts.
Sohini Sarah Pillai is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious literature, and her area of specialization is the Mahabharata and Ramayana narrative traditions with a particular focus on retellings created in Hindi and Tamil. Sohini is also the editor, with Nell Shapiro Hawley, of Many Mahābhāratas (State University of New York Press, 2021).
Vony Ranalarimanana is Artistic Director of Nouvelles Scène Madagascar, a multidisciplinary artistic research laboratory. She is a performing artist working in theatre, slam, and dance and holds Master’s degrees in both Communication and Anthropology from the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar, and the University of Reunion Island.
Jonathon Repinecz is Associate Professor of French and Global Affairs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His first book, Subversive Traditions: Reinventing the West African Epic (Michigan State University Press, 2019), won the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award of the American Comparative Literature Association. While remaining committed to West African, especially Senegalese, cultural studies, Repinecz’s research interests have expanded to include Central Africa, with a focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is currently working on projects in that country related to colonial history and to contemporary narratives of genocide.
David M. M. Riep received his PhD in art history at the University of Iowa and conducted field research among South Sotho populations in southern Africa between 2003 and 2010. In addition to his ongoing research on South Sotho art and history, he is interested in exploring the multidisciplinary topics of cultural formation and identity, as well as concepts of continuity and change in global art production. Presently, he serves as Associate Professor of Art History at Colorado State University and Associate Curator of African Art at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art.
Robert Romanchuk is Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic at Florida State University. He has published Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North (2007) and numerous shorter studies. He is preparing a critical edition of the Byzantine written epic Digenis Akritis in its Old Slavic translation for Cambridge University Press.
Alexander K. Rothe is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Humanities at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in Historical Musicology in 2015. His
research interests are music performance studies, Wagner studies, and new music and diversity. He is currently writing a book on the afterlives of 1968, global politics, and stagings of Wagner’s Ring cycle in divided Germany. Rothe’s research has been published in The Musical Quarterly and Current Musicology, and supported by research grants from the Fulbright Program and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Sneharika Roy is an associate professor at the American University of Paris, France, where she teaches Comparative Literature. Her book The Postcolonial Epic (2018) bridges classical and postcolonial scholarship, tracing the emergence of a new form of postcolonial epic from the classical models of Vergil and Valmiki to the postcolonial texts of Melville, Walcott, and Ghosh. She is also a contributor to the MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh and to Le Dictionnaire des littératures de l’Inde (DELI), an encyclopedic project on Indian literatures.
Gregory E. Rutledge is a former attorney and the author of The Epic Trickster in American Literature: From Sunjata to So(u)l (2013), primarily specializes in African American literature, epic performance and race, critical race theory, and Afro-futurism. His current book projects include a study of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, excavation of Afro-Korean Connections (Fulbright Awardsupported), an anthology of prison writings, and a novel. A publisher of law reviews, literary criticism, fiction, poetry, and visual art, and a community volunteer, he holds a joint appointment in the English Department and Institute of Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Kristin Scheible (PhD, Harvard) is Professor of Religion and Humanities at Reed College and a scholar of South Asian Religions. Her research focuses on rhetorical strategies employed in Pali and Sanskrit texts, especially in Pali historical narrative literature (vaṃsa). She is currently researching the prolific use of agricultural metaphors in premodern Indic literature. Her first book, Reading the Mahāvamsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History (Columbia University Press, 2016), explores the work-like dimension of the fifth-/sixth-century Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa and destabilizes the dominant reading of this text as a political charter.
Karen Sonik is Associate Professor of Art & Art History at Auburn University, specializing in Mesopotamia. Her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the American Philosophical Society; the American Council for Learned Societies; and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East (with Ulrike Steinert, 2023); Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World (2021); Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (with Steve Tinney, 2019); and The Materiality of Divine Agency (with Beate Pongratz-Leisten, 2015).
Nicolás Suárez holds a PhD in Literature from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a former scholarship-recipient of DAAD, CONICET, and the Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre. His book The Work and Life of Sarmiento in Cinema (2016) received an award from the National Contest of Studies on Argentine Cinema. He received the Best Essay Award by a Graduate
Student from the LASA Film Section, and the First Prize in the Domingo Di Núbila Essay Contest. He directed the short film Centauro (Berlinale, 2017) and co-directed the feature film Hijos nuestros (Mar del Plata, 2015).
Sylvia Tiwon is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of literature, gender, and decoloniality. Her work includes Breaking the Spell: Colonialism and Literary Renaissance (Leiden 1999) and Trajectories of Memory: Excavating the Past in Indonesia, co-edited with Melani Budianta (Palgrave, 2023).
Martín Vega is Assistant Professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at Scripps College. He specializes in Nahua literature and culture from the pre-Hispanic period to the colonial period.
Adrian Vickers holds a personal chair in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he leads the Asian Studies Program. He has carried out extensive research in Southeast Asia, particularly Bali, and his best-known works are Bali: A Paradise Created (Penguin, 1989); A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and the award-winning book co-authored with Julia Martínez, The Pearl Frontier (Hawai‘i University Press, 2015).
Robin Visser is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research specialties are modern Chinese and Sinophone literatures, environmental studies, and urban cultural studies. Her book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia University Press, 2023), analyzes modern literature on the environment by Han Chinese and non-Han Indigenous writers in China and Taiwan. Her earlier book, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke University Press, 2010), analyzes Chinese urban planning, architecture, fiction, cinema, art, and cultural studies at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Hallie Wells is an independent scholar and editor whose work addresses intersections of poetics and politics, including conceptions of free expression in Malagasy slam poetry performance. She holds a PhD in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Joseph Yose is an analytics consultant at Minitab Ltd. and a visiting researcher at Coventry University, UK. His main interests are in complex networks, as well as the application of Statistics and Mathematical methodologies in solving real-world problems. He has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Coventry University.
Laura Zientek is Associate Dean of Graduate and Special Programs at Reed College. Her research focuses on Roman epic poetry, natural philosophy, and the environmental humanities. Her most recent publications include an edited volume, Lucan’s Imperial World: The Bellum Civile in Its Contemporary Context (2020), as well as articles on poetic descriptions of gold mining in Latin epic and tragedy, and an analysis of agriculture in Roman poetic cycles of war and peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The editor’s work on this volume was supported by a National Humanities Center Fellowship funded in honor of Robert F. and Margaret S. Goheen in 2019–2020.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
The transliteration of original languages in non-Roman scripts into Roman script varies across chapters, depending on the authors’ preferences and the conventions in their fields. However, the use of diacritics is consistent within individual chapters, and generally minimal, for ease of reading.
INTRODUCTION
Pamela Lothspeich
Some of the world’s oldest and longest stories passed down orally and preserved in writing are epics. Gesar, Manas, La Galigo, the Mahābhārata, and Sīrat al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma are among the longest epics, while Mesopotamia’s Gilgamesh is often considered the oldest, at around 4,000 years old. It is tantalizing to wonder what kinds of stories on grand themes were being told in even earlier periods of human history. Was war a given? Did people of one group hate other “outside” groups? Were victors’ bloody stories of vengeance and retribution commonplace and used to edify and entertain? We cannot be sure, even for much of recorded human history. We struggle to understand historical circumstances and life on the ground, even with reference to old epics that have survived to the present.
The Epic World is about a mode of storytelling known as “epic,” which is to say it is about power, history, genealogy, and mythmaking. This volume approaches the subject of epic as a loose, organizing principle, not as a hard-and-fast category— as one way to think about bold and often lengthy narratives about extraordinary human experiences and struggles, across time and geography. Epic is often typecast as a monument to ancient winners, but it has deep relevance to the present moment, as a record of not only which peoples and stories have survived, but also as a reminder that many have been lost. This point only becomes more palpable in epics of recent centuries, ones that telegraph the devastations of colonial and imperial regimes and economies. Epic stories, like those discussed in this volume, may be in verse, prose, or some combination. They may be written or oral, or both. They may be told, sung, or enacted. They may be in old or new media. They may be signed or unsigned, and the work of a single author, multiple authors, or countless authors. They may have attributed authorship, or be considered the product of an entire culture or nation.
Perhaps more than any other storytelling genre, epic is about power, and not just because many epics tell stories of courageous warriors and massive battles. Epics are cultures’ deeply meaningful “big” stories that tell us who wields power and
why; they justify that power and make it seem normal and right. Like many other interpreters of epic, I suspect that many epic stories have a kernel of historical truth, one that can be remembered if not positively recovered. That is, their truthfulness falls short of “empirical” history. Epics are curated stories of the past. Reflecting the social and political hierarchies of their respective times and places, many epics are male-dominated stories of combat and plunder. Many are also composed, written, and sung by men. Further, epics typically venerate members of one ingroup while masking the inhumanity of their violence and stripping others of their humanity. But is it really possible that one group is inherently good, while another is inherently bad?1
Oftentimes, epics revel in the macabre, while sidestepping the human consequences to those left behind. As an example, in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, surveying the carnage on the battlefield with other grieving women at the end of the war, Queen Gandhari tells Lord Krishna:
The earth, muddy with flesh and blood, is almost impassable with arms still grasping swords and heads still wearing earrings. The blameless ladies, never previously accustomed to misery, miserably force their way through the fallen brothers, fathers and sons who litter the earth.
(Vyasa 2009, 590)
This excerpt, from Book 11, “The Women,” details the sorrowful aftermath of the war. But like many epics, the Mahābhārata gives more space to exalting war heroes than giving vent to the grief of their mothers, wives, and children. Epics generally have relatively little to say about the anguish of women who, for the most part, do not start wars but nonetheless suffer their consequences.
Epic is a genre that has, to some extent, fallen out of favor in the Anglophone academy and in the Euro-American world.2 Recent scholarly neglect of epic is ironic, given that so many humanities and social science disciplines today are thoroughly grounded in critiques of power, many of them drawing deeply from the well of ideas of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, despite their insular focus on the histories and circumstances of Europe and North America. At the same time, many ordinary citizens of the world have “forgotten” the epic roots of their own cultures. Why? Epic storytelling is slow. It is repetitive. It is didactic. It is not familiar and immediate like that of novels and films, although novels and films can themselves be epic, but these are often not taken as seriously as more conventional epics, especially written ones.
Epics not only tell us about structures of power in the past; the way we read epics today tells us much about power in the present, and this alone is a compelling reason to study epics and rethink the epic genre. What brings the works discussed in The Epic World together is their similar narrative scaffolding (structures), shared thematic concerns, connections to oral storytelling, and broad scope, if not lengthiness. But these are not absolute criteria; what brings them together most importantly and urgently is their statements on power.
What are the stakes of The Epic World? Boiled down, epics present us with a choice between massive geopolitical domination and more peaceful alternatives. There is no reason we must accept the heroic epic’s path of subordination and combat as normative, and respond to it with ever-escalating militarization. We need not accept
the hegemonic and often toxic masculinities enshrined in many epics as normative. (Occasionally, epics do feature female heroes and often have strong female characters. See, for example, Chapter 26 on Albanian epic poetry by Anna Di Lellio and Arbnora Dushi, and Chapter 33 on West African epics by Mariam Konaté.)
There is an ongoing need to broaden our definition of what we mean by epic so that it equitably includes all literatures and cultures of the world. Moreover, the long entanglement of “Classics,” a field invented in the eighteenth century, with white supremacy (Poser 2021), and the primacy of the epic genre in that field, speaks to the need and urgency of the matter. Many chapters in this volume are concerned with the materiality of epic conquest, not just its literary metaphor, in that they cite historical events and precedents that have directly led to gross, inhuman inequities and harms in our contemporary world, or point to mythological ones to justify the same. Some chapters are about the modern reception of epics, and how they have been used to justify imperialist conquest. What The Epic World is not about: the study of words, or rather, philology for philology’s sake, as a self-reflexive, text-facing exercise for a small group of experts and their fields.
My hope is that The Epic World will work to expose structures of power and destabilize the false premises of “Western civilization” and “Classics,” by bringing new questions and perspectives to epic studies. With the rise of authoritarianism, nativism, and ethno nationalism in many parts of the world, self-serving cohorts are refashioning ancient stories and glorifying select cultures to serve hateful, exclusionary political ends. In the United States, we can plainly see this with the nativist, white Christian nationalists who appropriate the monikers, symbols, and trappings of medieval Europe and ardently glorify the ancient Greeks and Romans, thinking of them as the purportedly natural white ancestors of all European and Europeandescended peoples. In fact, in Chapter 1, Jackie Murray expands on the construction of whiteness and how the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as “white.” Yet, this tendency—to revere the ancient Greeks and Romans and ascribe whiteness to them—is hardwired into the educational system in the US, and circulates freely in its popular culture. All of its greatest ideas and arts—philosophy, medicine, mathematics, music, drama, and on and on—we are falsely led to believe—have derived from a blip on the map of Europe, a tired myth that has long been used to prop up white supremacy.
THE POWER TO THEORIZE EPIC
Etymologically, the word “epic” is derived from Greek epikos, itself derived from epos, meaning “word” or “song,” and Latin epicus, and it has deep roots in those oral and written literary cultures. The word in English (formerly, “epick/epik/epike/ epique”) dates to at least the sixteenth century (Oxford English Dictionary 2023). Since then, the word has been applied to other oral and written forms around the globe, and many people do associate epics with very old stories about male heroics that come to define nations, cultures, and civilizations, enshrining their most cherished values and ways of knowing.
As a literary category, however, “epic” has its own history, one ensconced in discourses emerging from Euro-American cultures about what constitutes “great” literature. In the Anglophone academy, there is the usual obsession with classical
Greek and Roman epics and reverence for later European ones. Additionally, there is also scholarly attention to a gamut of subvarieties of epics: national epics, epic romances, epic novels, epic film, epic theatre, epic melodrama, and so on. However, much of the scholarship on epic in English is grounded in white Euro-American literary forms and theoretical frameworks. The irony of my stating this is not lost on me, a white scholar-editor based in the United States. The title of The Epic World, so named to be searchable and made legible to consumers in the global publishing economy, also participates in this history of an idea grounded in European soil. Yet it is hoped that readers will be sympathetic to the manner in which the word is used in this volume—as a matter of convenience first, but also strategically, in an effort to redefine what the genre means and to make it more inclusive of all literary cultures globally.
Of critical importance, the term “epic” gained saliency in the period of white colonial expansion and exploitative, extractive capitalism, when other ancient stories of heroic, truth-telling deeds presented a challenge to the primacy of European ones. Thus, it became common for white colonists/imperialists/capitalists/Orientalists to discredit these stories by associating them with mythology, and stories about “our less civilized selves” in the case of Indo-European epics, and “less civilized others” in the case of the rest. It is “our” (white, European-descended) stories and “our” interpretations of stories that have been the most institutionalized, disseminated, and heralded. Even in the field of “Classics,” Euro-American scholars have long ignored works whose authors they deemed to be not sufficiently “white,” such as Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, a Greek epic from the third century BCE, the subject of Chapter 1 (Jackie Murray, personal communication).
A long list of white, mostly male scholars of the Global North have theorized epic, drawing primarily on European examples. Some, such as Georges Dumézil, a French scholar of comparative Indo-European linguistics and mythology, saw a kinship between epic and mythology, positing that epic was an intermediary form between myth and history. Also drawing on European examples, others have contrasted long epics with shorter ballads and romances. Still others have thought of the epic as the novel’s ancient Other. The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1999) and the Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), each in his own dialectical way, took that tack, postulating that the generic successor and even antithesis to the premodern epic was the modern novel. Indeed, the novel has come to be associated with the material conditions of modernity—print technology and print culture, universal education, nation formation, global capitalism, and so forth. This view purports to leave the epic in the generic dust, relegating it to a meandering, massive tale of the ancients. But as I have suggested, epics are not dead, and they still have relevance even as they continually reappear in ever new guises and forms.
THE “PROBLEM” OF ORALITY
For the vast majority of human history, knowledge has been conveyed orally, yet we in predominantly white institutional spaces are conditioned to be suspect of oral knowledge. We are led to believe it is slippery, error-riddled, and impermanent— the preserve of less-educated peoples and less-developed cultures. Thus, despite the
relatively recent scholarly interest in oral epics and theorizing about oral literature, the Anglophone academic world has tended to define and silo the epic genre in ways that downgrade oral epics, which are foundational and central in many parts of the world. Of course, many epics were originally oral and only later written down; some have endured in both written form and in performance (theatre, music, film, etc.). Some epics have been subject to vigorous debate as to whether they began as oral or written literature, and the extent to which they were “edited” and amplified over time. This is the case, for example, with the Mahābhārata (Fitzgerald 2003; Hiltebeitel 2005; Brodbeck 2011; Adluri and Bagchee 2014), although most scholars subscribe to the diachronic or “oral-to-written” theory, and accept the text’s gradual expansion.
In many academic circles, written epics are still generally considered more prestigious than oral epics, sometimes referred to as “folk epics,” implying their popular/popularist status. There is also a gendered hierarchy within the academic study of languages and literatures. Women are often expected and encouraged to study modern and perhaps early-modern languages and literatures, while men, the “serious” scholars, are left to study classical works in the more difficult ancient languages. Then too academic culture, in which white cishet male scholars still predominate in the ancient literatures, often dismisses and second guesses the ideas of those who do not fit the normative mold.
The association of oral epics with “low” culture operates through the same entrenched bias that led white interpreters to conclude that cultures that preserved their knowledge and histories through oral communication lacked an understanding of history, if not a history itself. As the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel notoriously wrote of Africa, “it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it — that is in its northern part — belong to the Asiatic or European World” (2001, 117). The racist, colonial idea that Africans lacked a “historical sense” and were in capable of producing epics on par with those of Europe has of course been roundly refuted by African and other scholars, many of whom are discussed or cited in the chapters on African epics in the present volume. Incidentally, a lack of historical writing (and consciousness) was also a charge Orientalists leveled against India—a charge that has also been thoroughly discredited (Thapar 2013).3
Even among the oral epics of the world, there is the imposed logic of a cultural/ racial hierarchy, with much more attention and resources being paid to the study of white and perceived-as-white oral epics in comparison with all other oral epics. For instance, the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University contains thousands of hours of audio recordings and many transcriptions of South Slavic oral poetry and song from the Balkans, collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and his student Albert Lord in the 1930s and early 1950s. (The collection also includes materials relating to “women’s songs,” Albanian and Greek oral works, and Greek shadow puppet theatre, among other items.)
A generative outcome of Parry and Lord’s work is that it has inspired much new research into oral epics elsewhere, to some extent challenging the primacy of written epics (Jensen 2017), yet nothing remotely comparable to this spectacular archive exists for the oral heroic poetry and song in other parts of the world, in Africa and Asia, for example. The Balkans are only about 257,400 square miles or
around the size of South Sudan, while Africa is about 11,724,000 million square miles (Britannica 2023), although as contributor Kassim Kone notes in Chapter 12, is home to countless oral epics. Even so, relatively few of Africa and Asia’s oral epics have been studied by scholars outside of those regions. Significantly, Parry and Lord theorized that the oral epics of the Balkans were as though modern equivalents of the Iliad and Odyssey, and could help us understand the oral roots of Homer’s epics, pointing us back to the presumed primacy of the latter.
Parry and Lord also greatly contributed to the field of epic studies by developing the oral-formulaic theory based on their fieldwork in southeastern Europe. This influential (though not universal or uncontested) theory, elaborated upon by John Miles Foley and others, holds that oral epic poetry follows its own internal logics and entails its own special language. It is the patterning of words, phrases (including an array of epithets), verses and passages—the formulas and formulaic expressions that Lord examines in The Singer of Tales (1960) and the use of conventional metrical frameworks that enables oral poets to spontaneously compose and sing or recite for extended periods of time. It also allows for personal flourishes and improvisation based on the audience’s reception and the poet’s whims.
Many parts of the world have old oral epics or both written and oral ones, and they may be intertwined, as in India, for example, but again, it is the written forms that have drawn the most scholarly attention. Working with texts—handwritten manuscripts and printed books—grants a certain status to philologist-scholars. They can “own” the texts and interpret them unimpeded, whereas they cannot do this in the same way with oral epics because they are always subordinate to the living storytellers/experts who preserve, transmit, and explicate them. This is perhaps one reason philologist-scholars are more inclined to study “dead” written texts than living oral ones. But also, oral epics are in some ways more difficult to study than texts due to their temporality and mutability; they require live attendance and must be electronically captured (recorded) for further reflection and study. We in the elitist, hierarchical, and predominantly white Anglophone academy tend to see power, authority, and brilliance in single minds and single-authored written treatises. Yet with much epic literature, as with many forms of cultural and scientific production, knowledge is the collective product of innumerable people, created collaboratively through dialogue, toil, and contestation, and passed down intergenerationally.
OPENING UP EPIC; BREAKING DOWN THE CANON
Given the birth of the English term “epic” in the era of white colonial/imperialist cartographies and ecologies, and the xenophobic bent of much epic literature, there is an opportunity to consider old and new epics from the standpoint of liberatory analytic frameworks. Beyond the obvious need to open up the canon in the field of epic studies, or better, break down the exclusionary notion of canon altogether, there is also the need to utilize the theoretical tools of disciplines that confront and contest hegemonic power structures through social-justice frameworks—postcolonial studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, transnational feminisms, queer studies, disability studies, etc. Scholars and activists in these disciplines, in a multitude of ways, have worked to disrupt monolithic
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editors, likewise, indicate gaps and omissions, but it seems doubtful whether the extant Hamthesmol ever had a really consecutive quality, its component fragments having apparently been strung together with little regard for continuity. The notes indicate some of the more important editorial suggestions, but make no attempt to cover all of them, and the metrical form of the translation is often based on mere guesswork as to the character of the original lines and stanzas. Despite the chaotic state of the text, however, the underlying narrative is reasonably clear, and the story can be followed with no great difficulty.
[Contents]
[546]
1. Great the evils | once that grew, With the dawning sad | of the sorrow of elves; In early morn | awake for men The evils that grief | to each shall bring.
2. Not now, nor yet | of yesterday was it, Long the time | that since hath lapsed, So that little there is | that is half as old, Since Guthrun, daughter | of Gjuki, whetted Her sons so young | to Svanhild’s vengeance.
3. “The sister ye had | was Svanhild called,
And her did Jormunrek | trample with horses, White and black | on the battle-way, Gray, road-wonted, | the steeds of the Goths.
4. “Little the kings | of the folk are ye like, For now ye are living | alone of my race.
[547]
5. “Lonely am I | as the forest aspen, Of kindred bare | as the fir of its boughs, My joys are all lost | as the leaves of the tree When the scather of twigs | from the warm day turns.”
6. Then Hamther spake forth, | the high of heart: “Small praise didst thou, Guthrun, | to Hogni’s deed give When they wakened thy Sigurth | from out of his sleep, Thou didst sit on the bed | while his slayers laughed.
7. “Thy bed-covers white | with blood were red From his wounds, and with gore | of thy husband were wet; [548] So Sigurth was slain, | by his corpse didst thou sit,
And of gladness didst think not: | ’twas Gunnar’s doing.
8. “Thou wouldst strike at Atli | by the slaying of Erp
And the killing of Eitil; | thine own grief was worse; So should each one wield | the wound-biting sword That another it slays | but smites not himself.”
9. Then did Sorli speak out, | for wise was he ever: “With my mother I never | a quarrel will make; Full little in speaking | methinks ye both lack; What askest thou, Guthrun, | that will give thee no tears?
10. “For thy brothers dost weep, | and thy boys so sweet, Thy kinsmen in birth | on the battlefield slain; Now, Guthrun, as well | for us both shalt thou weep, We sit doomed on our steeds, | and far hence shall we die.” [549]
11. Then the fame-glad one— | on the steps she was—
The slender-fingered, | spake with her son:
“Ye shall danger have | if counsel ye heed not;
By two heroes alone | shall two hundred of Goths Be bound or be slain | in the lofty-walled burg.”
12. From the courtyard they fared, | and fury they breathed;
The youths swiftly went | o’er the mountain wet, On their Hunnish steeds, | death’s vengeance to have.
13. On the way they found | the man so wise; [550]
“What help from the weakling | brown may we have?”
14. So answered them | their half-brother then:
“So well may I | my kinsmen aid As help one foot | from the other has.”
15. “How may a foot | its fellow aid, Or a flesh-grown hand | another help?”
16. Then Erp spake forth, | his words were few, As haughty he sat | on his horse’s back: [551]
“To the timid ’tis ill | the way to tell.” A bastard they | the bold one called.
17. From their sheaths they drew | their shining swords, Their blades, to the giantess | joy to give; By a third they lessened | the might that was theirs, The fighter young | to earth they felled.
18. Their cloaks they shook, | their swords they sheathed,
The high-born men | wrapped their mantles close.
19. On their road they fared | and an ill way found, And their sister’s son | on a tree they saw, On the wind-cold wolf-tree | west of the hall, And cranes’-bait crawled; | none would care to linger.
[552]
20. In the hall was din, | the men drank deep, And the horses’ hoofs | could no one hear, Till the warrior hardy | sounded his horn.
21. Men came and the tale | to Jormunrek told How warriors helmed | without they beheld: “Take counsel wise, | for brave ones are come, Of mighty men | thou the sister didst murder.”
22. Then Jormunrek laughed, | his hand laid on his beard, His arms, for with wine | he was warlike, he called for; He shook his brown locks, | on his white shield he looked, And raised high the cup | of gold in his hand.
23. “Happy, methinks, | were I to behold Hamther and Sorli | here in my hall; [553] The men would I bind | with strings of bows, And Gjuki’s heirs | on the gallows hang.”
24. In the hall was clamor, | the cups were shattered, Men stood in blood | from the breasts of the Goths.
25. Then did Hamther speak forth, | the haughty of heart:
“Thou soughtest, Jormunrek, | us to see, Sons of one mother | seeking thy dwelling; Thou seest thy hands, | thy feet thou beholdest, Jormunrek, flung | in the fire so hot.”
26. Then roared the king, | of the race of the gods, Bold in his armor, | as roars a bear:
“Stone ye the men | that steel will bite not, Sword nor spear, | the sons of Jonak.”
[554]
Sorli spake:
27. “Ill didst win, brother, | when the bag thou didst open,
Oft from that bag | came baleful counsel; Heart hast thou, Hamther, | if knowledge thou hadst!
A man without wisdom | is lacking in much.”
Hamther spake:
28. “His head were now off | if Erp were living, The brother so keen | whom we killed on our road, The warrior noble,— | ’twas the Norns that drove me
The hero to slay | who in fight should be holy.
29. “In fashion of wolves | it befits us not Amongst ourselves to strive, [555]
Like the hounds of the Norns, | that nourished were In greed mid wastes so grim.
30. “We have greatly fought, | o’er the Goths do we stand By our blades laid low, | like eagles on branches;
Great our fame though we die | today or tomorrow; None outlives the night | when the Norns have spoken.”
31. Then Sorli beside | the gable sank, And Hamther fell | at the back of the house. This is called the old ballad of Hamther. [545]
[Contents]
NOTES
[546]
1. This stanza looks like a later interpolation from a totally unrelated source. Sorrow of elves: the sun; cf. Alvissmol, 16 and note.
2. Some editors regard lines 1–2 as interpolated, while others question line 3 Guthrun, etc : regarding the marriage of Jonak and Guthrun (daughter of Gjuki, sister of Gunnar and Hogni, and widow first of Sigurth and then of Atli), and the sons of this marriage, Hamther and Sorli (but not Erp), cf. Guthrunarhvot, introductory prose and note.
3. Svanhild and Jormunrek: regarding the manner in which Jormunrek (Ermanarich) married Svanhild, daughter of Sigurth and Guthrun, and afterwards had her trodden to death by horses, cf Guthrunarhvot, introductory note. Lines 3–4 are identical with lines 5–6 of Guthrunarhvot, 2.
4. These two lines may be all that is left of a four-line stanza [547]The manuscript and many editions combine them with stanza 5, while a few place them after stanza 5 as a separate stanza, reversing the order of the two lines. Kings of the folk: Guthrun’s brothers, Gunnar and Hogni, slain by Atli.
5. Cf. note on stanza 4; the manuscript does not indicate line 1 as beginning a stanza. Scather of twigs: poetic circumlocution for the wind (cf Skaldskaparmal, chapter 27), though some editors think the phrase here means the sun. Some editors assume a more or less extensive gap between stanzas 5 and 6.
6. Lines 1–3 are nearly identical with lines 1–3 of Guthrunarhvot, 4. On the death of Sigurth cf. Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, 21–24, and Brot, concluding prose. The word thy in line 3 is omitted in the original.
7. Lines 1–2 are nearly identical with lines 4–5 of Guthrunarhvot, 4 The manuscript, followed by many editions, indicates line 3 and not line 1 as beginning a stanza. [548]
8. Some editors regard this stanza as interpolated. Erp and Eitil: regarding Guthrun’s slaying of her sons by Atli, cf. Atlamol, 72–75. The Erp here referred to is not to be confused with the Erp, son of Jonak, who appears in stanza 13. The whole of stanza 8 is in doubtful shape, and many emendations have been suggested.
10. Some editors assign this speech to Hamther. Brothers: Gunnar and Hogni. Boys: Erp and Eitil. [549]
11. In the manuscript this stanza follows stanza 21, and some editors take the word here rendered “fame-glad one” (hróþrglǫþ) to be a proper name (Jormunrek’s mother or his concubine). The Volsungasaga, however, indicates that Guthrun at this point “had so fashioned their war-gear that iron would not bite into it, and she bade them to have nought to do with stones or other heavy things, and told them that it would be ill for them if they did not do as she said.”
The substance of this counsel may well have been conveyed in a passage lost after line 3, though the manuscript indicates no gap. It is by being stoned that Hamther and Sorli are killed (stanza 26). On the other hand, the second part of line 3 may possibly mean “if silent ye are not,” in which case the advice relates to Hamther’s speech to Jormunrek and Sorli’s reproach to him thereupon (stanzas 25 and 27). Steps: the word in the original is doubtful. Line 3 is thoroughly obscure. Some editors make a separate stanza of lines 3–5, while others question line 5.
12. Many editors assume the loss of a line after line 1. In several editions lines 2–3 are placed after line 2 of stanza 18. Hunnish: the word meant little more than “German”; cf. Guthrunarhvot, 3 and note. [550]
13. In the manuscript these two lines follow stanza 16; some editors insert them in place of lines 2–3 of stanza 11. The manuscript indicates no gap. The man so wise: Erp, here represented as a son of Jonak but not of Guthrun, and hence a half-brother of Hamther and Sorli. There is nothing further to indicate whether or not he was born out of wedlock, as intimated in stanza 16 Some editors assign line 3 to Hamther, and some to Sorli.
14. The stanza is obviously defective. Many editors add Erp’s name in line 1, and insert between lines 2 and 3 a line based on stanza 15 and the Volsungasaga paraphrase: “As a flesh-grown hand | another helps.” In the Volsungasaga, after Erp’s death, Hamther stumbles and saves himself from falling with his hand, whereupon he says: “Erp spake truly; I had fallen had I not braced myself with my hand.” Soon thereafter Sorli has a like experience, one foot slipping but the other saving him from a fall. “Then they said that they had done ill to Erp, their brother.”
15. Many editions attach these two lines to stanza 14, while a few assume the loss of two lines.
16. In the manuscript this stanza stands between stanzas 12 and 13 Some editors make line 4 a part of Erp’s speech. [551]
17. The manuscript does not indicate line 1 as beginning a stanza. The giantess: presumably the reference is to Hel, goddess of the dead, but the phrase is doubtful.
18. In the manuscript these two lines are followed by stanza 19 with no indication of a break. Some editions insert here lines 2–3 of stanza 12, while others assume the loss of two or more lines
19. Cf. note on stanza 18. Ill way: very likely the road leading through the gate of Jormunrek’s town at which Svanhild was trampled to death. Sister’s son: many editors change the text to read “stepson,” for the reference is certainly to Randver, son of Jormunrek, hanged by his father on Bikki’s advice (cf. Guthrunarhvot, introductory note). Wolf-tree: the gallows, the wolf being symbolical of outlaws Cranes’-bait: presumably either snakes or worms, but the passage is doubtful. [552]
20. Many editors assume the loss of a line after line 3. The warrior: presumably a warder or watchman, but the reference may be to Hamther himself.
21. The word here rendered men (line 1) is missing in the original, involving a metrical error, and various words have been suggested.
22. Line 2 in the original is thoroughly obscure; some editors directly reverse the meaning here indicated by giving the line a negative force, while others completely alter the phrase rendered “his arms he called for” into one meaning “he stroked his cheeks.”
23. Gjuki’s heirs: the original has “the well-born of Gjuki,” and some editors have changed the proper name to Guthrun, but the phrase apparently refers to Hamther and Sorli as Gjuki’s grandsons. In the manuscript this stanza is followed by stanza 11, [553]and such editors
as have retained this arrangement have had to resort to varied and complex explanations to account for it.
24. Editors have made various efforts to reconstruct a four-line stanza out of these two lines, in some cases with the help of lines borrowed from the puzzling stanza 11 (cf. note on stanza 23). Line 2 in the original is doubtful.
25. Some editors mark line 1 as an interpolation. The manuscript marks line 4 as beginning a new stanza As in the story told by Jordanes, Hamther and Sorli succeed in wounding Jormunrek (here they cut off his hands and feet), but do not kill him.
26. The manuscript marks line 3, and not line 1, as beginning a stanza. Of the race of the gods: the reference here is apparently to Jormunrek, but in the Volsungasaga the advice to kill Hamther and Sorli with stones, since iron will not wound them (cf. note on stanza 11), comes from Othin, who enters the hall as an old man with one eye. [554]
27. In the manuscript this stanza is introduced by the same line as stanza 25: “Then did Hamther speak forth, | the haughty of heart,” but the speaker in this case must be Sorli and not Hamther. Some editors, however, give lines 1–2 to Hamther and lines 3–4 to Sorli. Bag: i.e., Hamther’s mouth; cf. note on stanza 11. The manuscript indicates line 3 as beginning a new stanza.
28. Most editors regard stanzas 28–30 as a speech by Hamther, but the manuscript does not indicate the speaker, and some editors assign one or two of the stanzas to Sorli. Lines 1–2 are quoted in the Volsungasaga. The manuscript does not indicate line 1 as beginning a stanza. Erp: Hamther means that while the two brothers had succeeded only in wounding Jormunrek, Erp, if he had been with them, would have killed him. Lines 3–4 may be a later interpolation. Norns: the fates; the word used in the original means the goddesses of ill fortune. [555]
29. This is almost certainly an interpolated Ljothahattr stanza, though some editors have tried to expand it into the Fornyrthislag form. Hounds of the Norns: wolves.
30. Some editors assume a gap after this stanza.
31. Apparently a fragment of a stanza from the “old” Hamthesmol to which the annotator’s concluding prose note refers. Some editors assume the loss of two lines after line 2.
Prose. Regarding the “old” Hamthesmol, cf. Guthrunarhvot, introductory note. [557]
[Contents]
PRONOUNCING INDEX OF PROPER NAMES
Introductory Note
The pronunciations indicated in the following index are in many cases, at best, mere approximations, and in some cases the pronunciation of the Old Norse is itself more or less conjectural. For the sake of clarity it has seemed advisable to keep the number of phonetic symbols as small as possible, even though the result is occasional failure to distinguish between closely related sounds. In every instance the object has been to provide the reader with a clearly comprehensible and approximately correct pronunciation, for which reason, particularly in such matters as division of syllables, etymology has frequently been disregarded for the sake of phonetic clearness. For example, when a root syllable ends in a long (double) consonant, the division has arbitrarily been made so as to indicate the sounding of both elements (e.g., Am-ma, not Amm-a).
As many proper names occur in the notes but not in the text, and as frequently the more important
incidents connected with the names are outlined in notes which would not be indicated by textual references alone, the page numbers include all appearances of proper names in the notes as well as in the text.
The following general rules govern the application of the phonetic symbols used in the index, and also indicate the approximate pronunciation of the unmarked vowels and consonants.
V . The vowels are pronounced approximately as follows:
a as in “alone”
ā as in “father”
e —as in “men”
ē —as a in “fate”
i —as in “is”
ī —as in “machine”
o —as in “on”
ō as in “old”
ö as in German “öffnen”
ȫ —as in German “schön”
ǭ —as aw in “law”
u —as ou in “would”[558]
ū —as ou in “wound”
y —as i in “is”
ȳ —as ee in “free”
æ as e in “men”
ǣ —as a in “fate”
ei —as ey in “they”
ey —as in “they”
au —as ou in “out”
ai —as i in “fine”
Both with a slight sound of German ü
No attempt has been made to differentiate between the short open “o” and the short closed “o,” which for speakers of English closely resemble one another.
C . The consonants are pronounced approximately as in English, with the following special points to be noted:
G is always hard, as in “get,” never soft, as in “gem;” following “n” it has the same sound as in “sing.”
J is pronounced as y in “young.”
Th following a vowel is soft, as in “with;” at the beginning of a word or following a consonant it is hard, as in “thin.”
The long (doubled) consonants should be pronounced as in Italian, both elements being distinctly sounded; e.g., “Am-ma.”
S is always hard, as in “so,” “this,” never soft, as in “as.”
H enters into combinations with various following consonants; with “v” the sound is approximately that of wh in “what”; with “l,” “r” and “n” it produces sounds which have no exact English equivalents, but which can be approximated by pronouncing the consonants with a marked initial breathing.
A . The accented syllable in each name is indicated by the acute accent (′). In many names, however, and particularly in compounds, there is both a primary and a secondary accent, and where this is the case the primary stress is indicated by a double acute accent (″) and the secondary one by a single acute accent (′). To avoid possible confusion with the long vowel marks used in Old Norse texts, the accents are placed, not over the vowels, but after the accented syllables. [559]
