literature: Greece customs, heritage, and language, including reliance upon ancient stories and songs to recall past heroes and heroic deeds The Anglo-Saxon bards were called scops, and the poems they recited were lays As in other cultures relying heavily upon oral tradition, the scop performed before warriors, lords, and ladies banqueting in great halls The performance took place nightly for successive days, as the scop sang songs of the past, changing and adapting them as warranted by circumstances and the audience The theme of the lay was the heroic code of valor and brave deeds An example is Widsith, which in its current literary form dates from the seventh century, but which is mentioned here because it includes structure and verse that dates from an earlier ancient time The poem is an account of the journey of the poet Widsith and a recollection of all the places he has visited and all the kings and warriors he has known from earlier times in Europe, before the AngloSaxon invasion of England Another example of a lay recited by a scop is Beowulf, the eighth-century literary version of which, like Widsith, was based on earlier oral traditions and stories Indeed Beowulf, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was meant to be sung by a bard rather than read The story is based on a heroic code of the Germanic past, where the worth of a person is based on great deeds and courage Beowulf, a king of the Geats, is a hero who fights monsters such as Grendel without flinching, emerging victorious in the end Even when he dies of wounds suffered from fighting the Dragon that threatens his kingdom and people, it is an honorable death, made memorable by his courage, the stuff of which bards will sing for years to come RUNES The Germanic tribes of Europe and their descendants, the Saxons and the Norse, devised a script that was native to their lands and peoples and not significantly influenced by Latin or Greek The runic script, called the futhark, developed during the third century c.e., was based on 24 characters The runic script was a simple form of inscribing a single word or short phrase of identification or indication, which was done by cutting letters into wood or stone with a blade or chisel Runic letters were composed of single-stroke lines that were vertical or diagonal but never circular or horizontal A straight vertical line | was the letter i The symbol < was the letter k The symbol ↑ was the letter t The symbol ◊ was the letter n, pronounced as an ng sound The Germanic peoples developed and used the runes at the close of the ancient world to identify personal ownership of property or to indicate the name of the rune master who carved the letters Some ancient Germans believed that the runic letters and words themselves were magical Runes were carved into battle implements, such as shields or swords, as a means of magic for protection or to help wage battle The owner of a sword that had been named Márr inscribed on it the magic words: “May Márr spare nobody.” The ancient runic script was not a literary device, though some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon poems used runes as abbreviations for phrases 655 GREECE BY DAVID K UNDERWOOD AND MICHAEL J O’NEAL The literature of the ancient Greek world spans more than a thousand years, from the epic poetry of Homer in the late eighth century b.c.e to the first century of the Common Era Turning their oral traditions and legends into written form, the Greeks created the first great body of Western literature: a vast corpus of poetry, prose, dramatic art, philosophy, history, biography, and criticism, which, through its availability to a large literate public, preserved and passed down a tradition of canonical works that defined the identity of their civilization, its ideals, and its standards The earliest works of Greek literature reflect the impact and creativity of the roving bards, who retold the heroic stories, myths, and legends of the world of ancient Mycenae and the Heroic Age THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY Foremost among these heroic tales is the story of the Greek expedition that conquered the wealthy trading city of Troy, also known as Ilium, on the Ionian or western coast of Asia Minor, in modern-day Turkey The oral tradition recounting this episode of Greek history served as the raw material from which a great poet, whom the Greeks called Homer, composed the two epic masterpieces in hexameter verse (consisting of six metrical feet) that became the classic texts of Greek literature: the Iliad and the Odyssey Dating to the end of the eighth century b.c.e., Homer’s works were probably among the first to make use of a new alphabetic script that developed in the Greek world at that time These two texts were more than literature: They represented the ethical standards by which Greek men and women were to lead their lives in relation to each other and to the gods Like the Bible, Homer’s works set a standard and established a foundational tradition for subsequent Western literature The Iliad deals with the Trojan War, the wrath of the proud Greek hero Achilles, and the eventual demise of his Trojan enemy, Hector; the Odyssey concentrates on the character Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his long and arduous voyage home after the end of the war A major theme of the Iliad, announced in the very first line, is the destructive effects of the anger of Achilles, which is brought on initially by the loss of his slave girl to a fellow Greek and then by the death of his friend Patroclus Achilles’ prideful anger further intensifies when he temporarily withdraws from the battle against Troy, brooding in resentment because the Greeks believe they can succeed militarily without him Restored to the battlefield, Achilles slays Hector and drags his body in front of the city gates for all to see This brash violation of the body and honor of a great hero foreshadows the demise of Achilles himself Homer’s point seems clear: Uncontrolled rage and unbridled hubris can have only one result—the death of the hero The opening lines of the Iliad announce a second major theme, one that is explored in the Odyssey as well: that this “sovereign doom” of human war and strife is the will of the