The Heroic Epic, a Case of Literary Inheritance. (Inter)cultural Intermediation and Eurasian Continuity
The Heroic Epic, a Case of Literary Inheritance. (Inter)cultural Intermediation and Eurasian Continuity

Summary/Abstract: There are certain invariants of heroic poetry, elements that define it essentially: the theme – a narrative about “extraordinary deeds”, famous, adventurous topics, in the style of “traditional heroic mythology” (Marino) – and the idealized typology so that the epic hero usually occurs like a sum of the virtues appreciated by the community which assumes him. Very likely influenced by the Mesopotamian one from the beginning of the second millennia B.C., the Homeric epic exerts its influence further in time and cultural geography, over the Latin one from the end of the 1st century B.C. and, via the Aeneid, over the Germanic epic from the Middle Ages. Through Virgil, Homer’s self-confessed competitor, there could be clarified an issue of the European literary history: how did the transition from the “heroic song” of the Germanic tribes – “lost, as long as it was not recorded in writing” (Curtius) –, to the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic or the Medieval German one (mittelhochdeutsch) occur? The Aeneid appears to be, according to Heusler and Curtius, the missing link between the epic tradition of Mediterranean Antiquity and the Germanic Medieval heroic epic. (The latter, the product of a culture that, by its “barbarian” roots, had the inspiration of and ability to assimilate, from the defeated Rome, the classic inheritance of Greek-Latin humanism). The literary heredity that unites Homer, Virgil and the Germanic epic on the background of Mesopotamian loans, provides yet another very interesting example of (inter)cultural intermediation and continuity in the Eurasian space, within a historical interval of almost four millennia – from Gilgamesh’s legendary rule in Uruk and its literary echoes to the Germanic heroic epic from the Middle Ages.

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