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Yep, all of the "wine-dark sea"s and "rosy-fingered dawn"s might have worked as filler while the poet was queueing up the next part of the narrative.
by hnaa 7y ago
Yep, all of the "wine-dark sea"s and "rosy-fingered dawn"s might have worked as filler while the poet was queueing up the next part of the narrative.
- hprotagonist 7y agokennings, as this game is called in anglo-saxon, aren’t filler per se. Though they are also a memory aide (for the poet and the audience), they are primarily part of the way the skill of a scop (bard/epic poet) was judged was by how cleverly he could choose the right kenning for the mood and meter of where in the poem he was. A saxon kenning for poet is “story-weaver”, and that’s actually very apt.
- pjc50 7y agoYes, it reminds me of the "memory palace" trick that's taught for remembering e.g. numbers by associating them with a series of images. And similar tricks with "themes", audible or visual, are still used for particular characters in some modern media.
- hprotagonist 7y agoyes. and for long works like Beowulf that were told episodically, the repetition of events serves the same purpose as the 90-second “last time on dragon ball Z...” recaps of fight hilights.
- hnaa 7y agoThat's interesting, where can I read more about this?
- hprotagonist 7y agoThere's probably a lot of literature out there. I like the scholarly essays that accompany Chickering's translation of Beowulf -- maybe start there and follow the reference trail if you get sucked in. ISBN-13: 978-1400096220
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoWine-colored sea is a different story, I think. I've seen other languages also describe the sea as red, orange, etc. This is more of a situation with color naming: cultures separate colors on the spectrum into named categories in a more or less consistent way (e.g. blue and green come apart towards the end, and some languages still have the two merged). Red is one of the first colors to be named. Apparently there is still scholarly debate around this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
- arbitrage 7y agoyes, that could be true. but the point still stands, that the repetition of certain phrases, even if they understood colours differently than modern audiences, still served the purpose of aideing memory and familiarity among the storyteller and the audience.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoThe "bard" usually also had an instrument, so it's highly likely that if he was having trouble composing/recalling the next few stanzas, he may have stalled for time by performing an interlude on his lute.