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Updated: May 14, 2025
Dedicated, like the "Norse," to Grieg. It was a fortunate, if not an inevitable, event, in view of his temperamental affiliations with the Celtic genius, that MacDowell should have been made aware of the suitability for musical treatment of the ancient heroic chronicles of the Gaels, and that he should have gone for his inspiration, in particular, to the legends comprised in the famous Cycle of the Red Branch: that wonderful group of epics which comprises, among other tales, the story of the matchless Deirdré, whose loveliness was such, so say the chroniclers, that "not upon the ridge of earth was there a woman so beautiful," and the life and adventures and glorious death of the incomparable Cuchullin.
But the inevitable fate of all mediæval epics awaited this triumphant Arthurian cycle: the fate of being obliterated by passing from one nation and civilization to another, long before the existence of any poetic art adequate to its treatment.
Who this poet was we do not know, but we do know that he was perfectly familiar with all the details of courtly etiquette. He seems also to have been acquainted with the courtly epics of Heinrich von Veldeke and Hartman von Ouwe, but his poem is free from the tedious and often exaggerated descriptions of pomp, dress, and court ceremonies, that mar the beauty of even the best of the courtly epics.
"I shan't ask her here again.... But tell me, do you think he'll marry?" "It would be very hard to say what will become of him. He may suddenly weary of women and become a woman-hater, or perhaps he may develop into a sort of Baron Hulot. He spoke about his writings he may become ambitious, and spend his life writing epics.... He may go mad!
The poet's response to personal experience reveals itself nowhere more than in the political aspect of the Aeneid a fact that is the more remarkable because Vergil lived so long in Epicurean circles where an interest in politics was studiously suppressed. What makes the poem the first of national epics is, however, not a devotion to Rome's historical claims to primacy in Italy.
The little that leaks slowly out regarding that simply makes one's heart ache with the pain of it, only to rebound with the glory. Human nature is a wonderful thing, and the locking of the gate to Calais, by the English, will, I imagine, be, to the end of time, one of the epics, not of this war alone, but of all war. Talk about the "thin red line."
It has sometimes been said by those who only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the romance, but this is a mistake.
Then, uniting further the mutually exclusive castes, many are the common heritages, actual or adopted, of traditions and sacred books, and the common national epics of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. The cause of the solidarity is not a common creed, as we shall see when we reach the consideration of new religious ideas, ideas.
Not only for delight, but for inspiration, warning and example, they were steeped from childhood onwards in an ocean of melodious discourse; their national epics were to them what the Bible was to the Puritans; and for every conjunction of fortune, for every issue of home or state, they found therein a text to prompt or reinforce their decision.
In this passage Horace employs the categories of the standard text-books of rhetoric of that day which were accustomed to classify styles into four types: Grand and ornate, grand but austere, plain and austere, plain but graceful. The first two styles might obviously be used in forensic prose or in ambitious poetic work like epics and tragedies.
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