Remembering ancient heroes: How literary devices InBeowulf and Homer Assist in poetic recollection

Authors

Emily Davey, St. Mary's University

Files

Contributor

Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

Digital Publisher

Digital Commons at St. Mary's University

Publication Date

Spring 2025

Keywords

Ancient Greek ; Old English; language

Description

In both Ancient Greek and Old English traditions of poetry, memory is an essential part in the retention of the language and story in the culture’s history. Beowulf shares some poetic lyrical elements with Homer’s epithets. Though both poems have unique and different poetic meters, they possess similar tactics in the language to move the story along while providing poets “footholds” in the poem to remember the story.To deliver these stories of heroes to the public, the sophists of Greece and the scops of Celtic England had only one tool available for the record of these lengthy poems: their capacity for memorization. In the Odyssey and in Beowulf, the authors use elements of language, such as syntactical choices, phonology, and the repetition of certain epithets or kennings to carry the poem along. These elements also work as memory aids or mnemonics for the oral poet when reciting and performing these works.

Format

pdf

Size

1 page

City

San Antonio, Texas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.