The World of Homer

About the book

Andrew Lang examines Homer through the customs, objects, beliefs, and social arrangements represented in the poems. Archaeology and comparisons with other traditions enter an argument against readings that divide the epics too readily into inconsistent layers. The book is therefore a contribution to a scholarly controversy, not a neutral modern reconstruction of Bronze Age life. Lang explains his position in relation to earlier work, and readers can watch literary interpretation and material evidence being used to support one another. Its historical value includes the questions it asks, even where later discoveries or methods require different answers. Reading it beside an epic can sharpen attention to details of armour, burial, authority, and ritual that might otherwise pass as background to the action.

• Epic and society
• Archaeology
• Evidence and interpretation

Why read it

For a historically situated argument that makes the ordinary material details of epic newly noticeable.

English Homeric study by Andrew Lang · 1910