The most obvious defense of Totta is the fact that Tolkien loved the Old English
heroic verse which the young man represents.
By the time Brunichildis was killed in 613, history had already begun to evolve into legend, though the paucity of surviving German
heroic verse until the Hildebrandslied in the eleventh century has obliged scholars to trace several lost stages of its emergence from Burgundian to Frankish, Bavarian, and Austrian versions.
Heroic verse, he says, is "music / for taxiing to take-off; for cremation," life and death, but his commitment was to
heroic verse from his first great poem, Genesis, so his suffering is great: "How is it tuned, how can it be un- / tuned, with lithium, this harp of nerves?
The measure is English
heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in
11] I believe that Camoes in his Lusiadas had no less lofty an expectation than Sidney of the capabilities of
heroic verse.
Perhaps some of them have been neglected by writers on
heroic verse who may have felt that works of literature have to be similar in some fundamental respects before the analysis of the differences between them is fruitful.
This is not to say that Ferdowsi did not have the "patriotic" motives usually ascribed to him when his relatively un-Arabicized vocabulary is discussed, but any such motives would find natural expression and reinforcement in the legitimately archaic rhetoric of oral, or orally derived,
heroic verse.
Written by Herself illustrates this "concourse" or convergence of traditionally disparate elements by charting the political engagement of such authors with the contemporaneous conventions of both Eurm and African-American writers: Wheatley's poetics, for example, thematically and formally cohere with the conventions of Revolution-era
heroic verse and Biblical and classical subjects, but are, simultaneously, informed by African-American folktale conventions.