The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, University of Iceland More than fifty years after the publication of The Singer of Tales the book and the ideas therein still serve as a fresh wind in the textually-oriented field of Old Norse Studies where very few have taken up the issue… Read more
Introduction The purpose of this paper is to give a first attempt at exploring the connections of Sappho with Egyptian love poetry. The reasons for this are that there seems to be a similarity in form with the way in which desire is expressed in the feminine voice, and it… Read more
Introduction Sapphic imagery is abundant in the novel Daphnis and Chloe written by Longus in the second century CE. When Gregory of Corinth refers to the following images used by Sappho and Anacreon, we recognize the same imagery in Longus as well: “οἷον τὰ Ἀνακρέοντος, τὰ Σαπφοῦς, οἷον γάλακτος λευκοτέρα,… Read more
About halfway through Aristophanes’ Knights, the play’s two main characters, the Paphlagonian and the Sausage-seller, call out to Demos, who emerges from his door: [1] ΔΗΜΟΣ τίνες οἱ βοῶντες; οὐκ ἄπιτ᾽ ἀπὸ τῆς θύρας; τὴν εἰρεσιώνην μου κατεσπαράξατε. 730 τίς, ὦ Παφλαγὼν, ἀδικεῖ σε;… Read more
Glory in ancient Greek epic was often reserved for two groups: warriors who earned their kleos through heroic feats on the battlefield and bards who increased their own renown by recounting fighters’ daring exploits. Warriors and performers tended to be men so kleos was typically denied to women. To be… Read more
Anne Carson and Ellen Greene offer disparate theories of the erotics at work in Sappho’s surviving corpus. Carson maintains that Sappho’s erotics are in line with those of the dominant culture that frames lovers and beloveds as occupying two drastically different roles in a pederastic, homosexual relationship, viz. as active… Read more
As Wilamowitz set out to write about the hymns of the late antique neoplatonic philosophers Proclus and Synesius of Cyrene, he began by remarking on why the texts may have been overlooked in scholarship, “High poetics especially, or even simple verbal artistry are not expected from babbling philosophers, and a… Read more
Introduction The epiphany of the goddess Aphrodite in Song 1 of Sappho may seem, from a modern perspective, paradoxical. On the one hand, if one considers epiphany to mean simply the appearance of a divinity, it is not difficult to identify the exact moment in which the song’s epiphany occurs;… Read more
University of California, Santa Barbara For researchers who conduct ethnographic fieldwork on oral traditions, one of the most exciting aspects of The Singer of Tales is Albert Lord’s accounts of experimentation in the field, the various ways in which he and Milman Parry interrogated living traditions by comparing performances, setting… Read more
When Albert Lord published his ground-breaking study of South Slavic oral epic poetry in 1960, he entitled his book The Singer of Tales: the singer of tales, not the narrator of tales. With this title Lord acknowledged the fact that the South Slavic pjevač is literally a singer, who accompanies… Read more
