Epic stories - Topics

Icelandic sagas were family lawsuits before they were literature Oral formula: why epic poetry keeps repeating swift-footed and wine-dark How many nights does it take to sing the whole Mahabharata Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving epic and also the most modern What formulaic epithets like swift footed Achilles are doing in the metre Flood narrative parallels between Mesopotamian and biblical texts How Hesiod's Theogony organizes the Greek gods into a family narrative Homer was performed rather than read — what that does to the Iliad The descent to the underworld shows up in almost every epic The Homeric question and why some scholars think the poems were written Stock scenes like the feast or the arming of a hero and why they recur National epics were reinvented for nation-building in the nineteenth century Why epics begin in the middle of things What a translator has to invent when a myth survives only in fragments The difference between an epic and a very long poem about a war Who fixed the version of the oral epic that we now read Epic similes slow the action down on purpose How Parry and Lord showed that oral epic is composed in performance Where the narrator of an epic poem stands relative to the events How editors turn a recorded oral poem into a single authoritative text Beowulf and the problem of a hero with no interest in women Epic heroes weep openly and nobody in the audience finds it strange Catalogues of ships and warriors: the passages translators want to cut Stories about power where nobody is purely evil