On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
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An interesting review. The book that led me to look into this was Thomas Cahill's "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea", a book in his excellent "Hinges of History" series. A helpful report is at http://www.indepthinfo.com/articles/wine-dark-sea.shtml . His attribution of the English rendering to Andrew Lang in turn led me to http://pages.towson.edu/colson/default_files/wine.htm.
Thanks for those two links. Very interesting.
Epithets may indeed be important to the development of epics, but those epithets are sterile when the cultural allusions are lost.
Half (all?) the fun is reading up about them and learning what the context was and is now.
Carcharoth