We were delighted to welcome Olga M. Davidson for an Open House discussion when she talked about why she began studying Homeric epic but went on to study the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsi and its poetic world. About her book Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings: Olga M. Davidson argues that….whenever the Shāhnāma was performed by the poet or by later practitioners of his poetry, the performer could… Read more
Inspired by Joel Christensen’s CHS Open House on ‘Eris and Epos: Composition, Competition and the ‘Domestication’ of Strife’ which concentrated on Homeric and Hesiodic examples (passages which are available through the linked post), I thought it might be interesting to look at other texts and to compare uses of the word eris for this month’s Core Vocab discussion. The definition from Professor Nagy is ‘strife, conflict’[1]. The word appears in… Read more
Our next Book Club selection features two selections from Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales: Chapter 2 ‘Singers: Performance and Training’, and Chapter 5 ‘Songs and the Song’. This book, originally published in 1960, is based on research carried out in the former Yugoslavia by Milman Parry in the 1930s, which focused on how singers who learn songs in an oral tradition compose in performance. This provides valuable evidence for… Read more
We are excited to share the upcoming Hour 25 Book Club selections. Look out for further announcements and forum threads nearer the time! November 17, 2015 at 11:00 a.m EST—Chapter 2 ‘Singers: Performance and Training’ and Chapter 5 ‘Songs and the Song’> of Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord December 15, 2015 at 11:00 a.m EST—Book 1 and Book 2 of Aeneid by Virgil January 26, 2016 at 11:00… Read more
We were pleased to welcome back Joel Christensen (University of Texas, San Antonio) for our Open House discussion, when we were talking about ‘Epos and Eris: Composition, Competition and the ‘Domestication’ of Strife’, which was originally given as a keynote talk at the 2015 Heartland Graduate Workshop in Ancient Studies. To prepare for the discussion, participants might like to read the paper, which is available at Acadameia.edu, here. The abstract introduces the… Read more