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Edizioni
Parnaso
Collane
(dei volumi recensiti in SPOLIA)
Hesperides
Eleazar M.
Meletinsky, The Elder Edda and early forms of the epic, translated by
Kenneth H. Ober (with Russian summary), 1998
This study of
Germanic early epic formulaic style as reflected in the Elder Edda, by
the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Russian State
University for the Humanities (Moscow) and member of the Russian Academy
for the Humanities, Professor Eleazar M. Meletinsky, appeared in Russian
as early as 1968 (»Edda« i rannie formy eposa) and is now made available
to the Western scholarly world in Kenneth H. Ober's masterly English translation.
It will make imperative reading for any student of the Edda as well as
of Germanic poetry and early European epic in general. Professor Meletinsky
provides a close typological analysis of the entire corpus of the Old
Norse Poetic Edda in comparison with the epic works of other peoples,
which reveals the folkloric basis of the Eddic Poems and their profound
connections with the archaic forms of myth and epos of the Eurasian »Kulturkreis«,
and, indeed, beyond, including even Oceania and the aboriginal songs of
Australia. In method, scope and masterful command of a geographically
and historically nearly unmeasurable vastness of evidence, professor Meletinsky's
approach remains entirely independent from the so-called oral-formulaic
school of the Parry-Lord type.
This adds to his results - the
major of which being a revision of the old Heuslerian positivistic concept
of epic poetry as the straightforward result of individual authorship
(much indebted to Heusler's own individualistic aestheticism and that
of his day) - much more momentum and bases the argument for the folkloric
origins of epic style on safe statistical evidence, which one will find
it hard to refute. - Some other books by Professor Meletinsky are: Geroy
volshebnoy skazki (The Hero of the Magic Tale, 1958), Poetika mifa (The
Poetics of the Myth, 1976; translated into eleven languages), Srednevekovyj
roman ( The Medieval Romance, 1983), Istoricheskaja poetika novelly (
Historical Poetics of the Short Story, 1990), O literaturnykh arkhetipakh
(On Literary Archetypes, 1994), and Dostoevskij v svete istoricheskoj
poetiki (Dostoevsky in the Light of Historical Poetics, 1996). In addition,
he has published many articles on comparative folklore and historical
poetics. In 1972 he was awarded the International Prize Pitre, and in
1990 the State Prize of the USSR.
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