The Poetics of Distress, the Rape of the Heavenly Maiden, and the Most Ancient Sleeping Beauty: Oralistic, Linguistic, and Comparative Perspectives on the (Pre-)Historical Development of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Often compared with West Asian and Egyptian texts, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (hereafter Hymn) and the other variants of the myth of Demeter and Persephone-Kore have a number of onomastic, phraseological, and thematic parallels in texts composed in other Indo-European languages. By means of an oralistic, linguistic, and comparative approach, my research aims to, firstly, reconstruct the common background of the Hymn and its Indo-European counterparts on the strength of a systematical study of their correspondences and, secondly, analyse the interplay between Indo-European poetic-mythological heritage and other components of different origin (e.g., motifs of West Asian infuence or international folktale patterns) within the compositional devices of Greek oral-traditional poetry. CONTENTS: §1. Introduction: the “Withdrawal and Return” theme and the West Asian component of the Hymn §2. Findings: the Hymn’s Indo-European background §2.1 The Indo-European “Poetics of Distress” §2.2. The Indo-European myth of the “Rape of the Maiden who is the Daughter of the Sky” §2.3 The most ancient “Sleeping Beauty” §3. Impact of the research §3.1 The (pre-)historical development of the Hymn §3.2 The Hymn’s “monumental composition” and its relevance to the Humanities