Opening of the book
Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet
Archive. See https://archive.org/details/
worldofhomer00languoft
THE WORLD OF HOMER
BY
ANDREW LANG
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1910
Contents
PREFACE
In 1895 I published Homer and the Epic (pp. 424), containing a criticism of Wolf's theory, if theory it can be called, which is the mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book, the
Iliad and the Odyssey, observing on the modern ideas of interpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passages which, as a rule, I defended from charges of "lateness" and inconsistency.
I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on the early Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies, more or less imperfect, with Homer.
On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of Signor
Comparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the Finnish
Kalewala. He says:
"The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied so often and so long ... to the Homeric poems and other national epics, proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, and from a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary and groundless."
The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century, separates the "personal" and learned Art Epics, like the Æneid and the
Gerusalemme Liberata, from those which belong to the period of spontaneous epic production, "when Folk-singers fashioned many epic lays of small or moderate compass." (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly the right term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers "made
Keep listening free
Readnara
