Epithets of Gods and Heroes in Old Germanic and beyond
The postdoc research project Epithets of Gods and Heroes in Old Germanic and beyond – A Comparative Study on their Conceptualization, Memorization and Tradition is conducted by Corinna Scheungraber and is funded by the EU Skłodowska-Curie programme.
With the research project, Corinna intends to close a long-standing research gap on heroic and divine epithets in Old Germanic poetic texts. Due to its interdisciplinary orientation, the project aims at a better integration of Germanic studies, Indo-European comparative poetics, classical philology and comparative literature.
The project combines two fields of research:
- the comparative study of epithets in Old Germanic poetic literature and
- the investigation of the semantics and functions of epithets in a cross-lingual and cross-cultural perspective.
The objectives will be reached through the systematic collection of heroic and divine epithets in Old Germanic poetic texts, the creation of a typology of epithets valid for the ancient Germanic culture, the comparison of the Germanic data with the well-studied Vedic, Greek, and Latin epic texts, and their epithets will pave the way for the overall aim of the project, which is to determine whether the epithets in the Germanic heroic poetry continue traits inherited from the Proto-IE age or even reveal more universal naming conventions.