On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
<snip>
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