How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics

Rating:
Summary: A stunning achievement
Review: I haven't read this book, not really.. How could I? The author cheerfully quotes about fifty of the major Indo-European languages over an historical span of some 5,000 years. The Greek is in Greek (which I can barely spell) and (if you are like me) your knowledge of Luvian, Old German, and Sanskrit is probably a little bit rusty.

Nevertheless, it is absolutely one of the most fascinating books I have ever had in my hands. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "tour de force."

What Watkins is doing is the same thing J.R.R. Tolkien did for a living: philology. What's that? It's the insistence on studying language AND literature together: the union of the separate departments of linguistics and literature. Tolkien was a genius in this field, and it is awe-inspiring to see how much further Watkins can go.

Here you will learn how to extend the Comparative Method used in linguistics to the field of early poetry, and you will learn of common poetic expressions in use 5,000 years ago: "word-weaver," "immortal fame", "he slew the monster/dragon/worm." You will learn what poets were 5,000 years ago: what they did and how they did it. (They were the most highly-paid profession in ancient times.) It is just plain fascinating to learn that the proto-Indo-European language and people already had well known words for "god" and "Zeus/Jupiter" well before writing was invented, as well as "prayer" and lots of other things.

You will most likely not be able to understand every word in this book, but the messages are very clear, and throw an extremely illuminating light on human prehistory, language, and society. It will also make you realize what the whole point of poetry was in those not-so-far-off times.

Highest recommendation! Unbelievably good!

Rating:
Summary: A stunning achievement
Review: I haven't read this book, not really.. How could I? The author cheerfully quotes about fifty of the major Indo-European languages over an historical span of some 5,000 years. The Greek is in Greek (which I can barely spell) and (if you are like me) your knowledge of Luvian, Old German, and Sanskrit is probably a little bit rusty.

Nevertheless, it is absolutely one of the most fascinating books I have ever had in my hands. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "tour de force."

What Watkins is doing is the same thing J.R.R. Tolkien did for a living: philology. What's that? It's the insistence on studying language AND literature together: the union of the separate departments of linguistics and literature. Tolkien was a genius in this field, and it is awe-inspiring to see how much further Watkins can go.

Here you will learn how to extend the Comparative Method used in linguistics to the field of early poetry, and you will learn of common poetic expressions in use 5,000 years ago: "word-weaver," "immortal fame", "he slew the monster/dragon/worm." You will learn what poets were 5,000 years ago: what they did and how they did it. (They were the most highly-paid profession in ancient times.) It is just plain fascinating to learn that the proto-Indo-European language and people already had well known words for "god" and "Zeus/Jupiter" well before writing was invented, as well as "prayer" and lots of other things.

You will most likely not be able to understand every word in this book, but the messages are very clear, and throw an extremely illuminating light on human prehistory, language, and society. It will also make you realize what the whole point of poetry was in those not-so-far-off times.

Highest recommendation! Unbelievably good!

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME & EXHAUSTIVE MASTERPIECE
Review: This vast tome is a masterpiece of comparative Indo-European poetics. It investigates the nature, form and function of poetic expression and ancient literature among an impressive variety of Indio-European peoples. The author uses the traditional comparative method to identify the genetic intertextuality of particular themes and formulas common to all the daughter languages of ancient Indo-European. The work comprises seven sections and 59 chapters. The first chapters of part 1 explain the comparative method, concepts like synchrony and diachrony and pinpoints the various Indo-European cultures in terms of genre, space and time. The rest of part 1 considers the role of the spoken word in Indo-European society and its preservation across time.

In chapter 3: Poetics as Grammar, Watkins analyses the expression "Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow," demonstrating how the word order, alliteration and assonance form a perfect ring-composition. This formulaic utterance now functions only to amuse children, but in its essential semantics, formulaics and poetics it must have been continuously recreated on the same model over six or seven thousand years. He proves that is the central "merism" of an ancient Indo-European harvest song or agricultural prayer, by quoting from the Hittite, Homeric Greek, the Atharvaveda and the Zend-Avesta!

Selected text analyses an case studies from Anatolian, Celtic, Greek, Indic and Italic are found in chapters 7 - 11 of part 2, followed by the analyses of inherited phrasal formulas, stylistic figures and hidden meaning through chapters 12 to 16.

The remainder of the book presents the evidence for a common Indo-European formula in the expression of the dragon - or serpent-slaying myth. Over thousands of years this formula occurs in the same linguistic form as it existed in the original mother tongue. This formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text that has endured for millennia, a precise and precious tool for typological and genetic investigation in the study of literature and literary theory. It is thus of immense value to literary historians, literary critics and philologists.

I found chapters 50 - 59 of particular interest, as it deals with the application of the formula to the medicine of incantation in a variety of Indo-European traditions, and includes a discussion of the poet as healer.

This work is an opus magnum, and it took me months to read it. Even so, I cannot claim to have grasped all the complexities of the fascinating text in which more than 30 familiar and obscure languages are quoted. I strongly recommend this masterpiece to those interested in ancient history, language and its structure, and to literary critics.

The book concludes with 27 pages of references, an index of names and subjects, an index of passages, and an index of words quoted from the various Indo-European languages.

Rating:
Summary: this book is astonishing
Review: With enormous learning, grace, and brilliant insight into the arts of anicent poetry, Calvert Watkins illuminates whole areas of human linguistic experience. Time and again a small detail in an ancient text, under his patient eye, will open itself to reveal the roots of poetry in the oldest strata of human experience left to us. What Watkins can do with a simple children's poem or an old Russian nursery rhyme puts most contemporary "language" criticism to shame.

Rating:
Summary: Prodigiously learned; but does he make his case?
Review: Your first impression will involve picking your jaw up off the floor. Here we have examples from Vedic Sanskrit, Old Irish, Greek, Latin, Old English, Hittite, and dozens more obscure, ancient, or dead languages like Umbrian and South Picene, all marshalled in support of the argument that it is possible, not only to reconstruct the language spoken by the ancient Indo-Europeans, but also to reconstruct some of their oral literature, and the cultural role of ancient bards in the courts of nameless chieftains.

The marshalled evidence of the rhetoric of these ancient literatures is indeed impressive. Many parts of it --- specifically, the parts that discuss the various metres of the ancient poems, and suggest ways in which the sound changes of which we have evidence may suggest that these verse forms stemmed from common ancestors --- are convincing.

But the difficulty in parts of the book's argument is its failure to exclude other possibilities --- such as borrowing, loan-translations, or simple independent invention --- of the phrases and images it argues are inherited. Some of them, like the inherited phrase meaning "everlasting fame," are more convincing than others, if only because not only the idea, but the root words themselves, are inherited. We know from comparing Classical, Hindu, and Germanic mythologies that some god-names were inherited.

But when the book argues in favour of an inherited myth that says "a hero kills a dragon (or some other foe)," we're dealing with subject matters that are known to exist in literatures other than Indo-European ones. After all, this is what heroes do. It is unclear even whether these motifs are commoner in Indo-European literatures than elsewhere. Some attention needs to be paid to the possibility of other explanations, and why the hypothesis of inheritance is the likeliest among them.

Rating:
Summary: Prodigiously learned; but does he make his case?
Review: Your first impression will involve picking your jaw up off the floor. Here we have examples from Vedic Sanskrit, Old Irish, Greek, Latin, Old English, Hittite, and dozens more obscure, ancient, or dead languages like Umbrian and South Picene, all marshalled in support of the argument that it is possible, not only to reconstruct the language spoken by the ancient Indo-Europeans, but also to reconstruct some of their oral literature, and the cultural role of ancient bards in the courts of nameless chieftains.

The marshalled evidence of the rhetoric of these ancient literatures is indeed impressive. Many parts of it --- specifically, the parts that discuss the various metres of the ancient poems, and suggest ways in which the sound changes of which we have evidence may suggest that these verse forms stemmed from common ancestors --- are convincing.

But the difficulty in parts of the book's argument is its failure to exclude other possibilities --- such as borrowing, loan-translations, or simple independent invention --- of the phrases and images it argues are inherited. Some of them, like the inherited phrase meaning "everlasting fame," are more convincing than others, if only because not only the idea, but the root words themselves, are inherited. We know from comparing Classical, Hindu, and Germanic mythologies that some god-names were inherited.

But when the book argues in favour of an inherited myth that says "a hero kills a dragon (or some other foe)," we're dealing with subject matters that are known to exist in literatures other than Indo-European ones. After all, this is what heroes do. It is unclear even whether these motifs are commoner in Indo-European literatures than elsewhere. Some attention needs to be paid to the possibility of other explanations, and why the hypothesis of inheritance is the likeliest among them.