Glossary Agha – honorary title for a respected male citizen who did not belong to the Ottoman nobility. It was customarily added after the first name. Also used for commanders of the Ottoman-paid military forces. abdest – ritual washing of one’s face, neck, ears, arms up to the elbows, and feet which Muslims are obligated to perform before prayer. alaybey – military governor of a province. This word appears also… Read more
Selected Bibliography Aarne, Antti and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folk-Tale. A Classification and Bibliography. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1928. Reprint in FF Communications no. 74. Andersen, Flemming G. “Technique, Text, and Context: Formulaic Narrative Mode and the Question of Genre.” In The Ballad and Oral Literature, edited by Joseph Harris. Harvard English Studies 17. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Andrić, Nikola, ed. Hrvatske narodne pjesme. Vol. 5, Ženske… Read more
Foreword to the work of Robert T. Teske on Ariadne, 1970 Gregory Nagy, 2018.03.29 As I re-read “Origins of the goddess Ariadne,” written in 1970 by Robert T. Teske and republished forty-eight years later in 2018 by the Center for Hellenic Studies, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_TeskeR.The_Origins_of_the_Goddess_Ariadne.1970, I marvel at the elegant beauty of it all. His bibliography is out of date, but, somehow, the freezing of… Read more
Author’s Preface Late last year, I received an e-mail announcing a symposium celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Folklore and Mythology Program at Harvard University. As a member of the first class to be awarded degrees in the program, and as the only member of that class to have gone on to pursue graduate study and a career in the discipline, I responded to… Read more
I. Introduction The many facets of the Ariadne-figure have long been the subject of classical scholarship. The peculiar cultic customs surrounding the goddess have been assiduously interpreted, in part successfully and in part unsuccessfully. Her relation to the figure of Dionysus has been explored in hopes of proving the Mycenaean origins of the god; as for her own Minoan origins, identification with the early nature goddess of… Read more
II. The Variants of the Myth The variant accounts of the abduction by Theseus of Ariadne, daughter of the Cretan king·Minos, at first appear to be not only numerous but confusing as well. The oral tradition has been in this case most prolific. Indeed, Plutarch was prompted to write: Πολλοὶ δὲ λόγοι καὶ περὶ τούτων ἔτι λέγονται καὶ περὶ τῆς Ἀριάδνης, οὐδὲν ὁμολογούμενον ἔχοντες. There… Read more
5. The Same Event in More Than One Saga The previous chapter looked at how particular characters from the sagas of the east of Iceland are presented in sources that appear unlikely to be directly related to each other on a written level, i.e. through literary relations. It emerged that there is discernable variation in the personal characteristics ascribed to Víga-Bjarni in different sagas, while those of… Read more
6. Conclusions to Part II The sagas of the east of Iceland contain a large number of passages with parallels of subject matter or theme with other sagas within the group or with written works from other parts of the country. Of the examples considered in the previous two chapters, the only cases where it seems, on the grounds of shared diction, that the relationship can be… Read more
7. The Saga Map of Vínland As has become clear in the preceding chapters, the relationship between the written sagas and oral tradition is not simple and uniform. There are no clear-cut answers to the questions facing us. And, as if the part of orality in the composition of the written sagas were not in itself fraught with uncertainties, the position we take on this affects how… Read more
8. Implications for Saga Research The overall conclusion to emerge from this study is that, by assuming the existence of a living oral tradition in Icelandic society in the 12th and 13th centuries, the perspective of our research shifts fundamentally. This change applies equally to how we interpret both the historical facts and the individual texts themselves. For instance, in Part I reasons were given for thinking… Read more
