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
Riccardo Ginevra

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CITATION: Ginevra, Riccardo. "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." CHS Research Bulletin 8
(2020).
§0. Abstract
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, rstly,
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 di erent origin (e.g., motifs of West Asian
in uence or international folktale patterns) within the compositional devices of
Greek oral-traditional poetry.

§1. Introduction: the “Withdrawal

and Return” theme and the West
Asian component of the Hymn
A product of Greek oral poetics (Cantilena 1982:26 ; 175 ), the Hymn is
signi cantly shaped by the traditional theme “Withdrawal and Return” (Lord 1967;
Sowa 1984:95-120). Its plot relies on a typologically quite common mythical
theme, whose two main elements are:

(a) some sort of distress, in which one or more main characters nd themselves;

(b) some sort of cosmic disorder, which is somehow linked to (and usually caused
by) the distress of the protagonist(s), and which prompts other characters to try
and restore cosmic order by eliminating the distress of the main character(s).
Accordingly, the Hymn has long been argued to show correspondences in West
Asian and Egyptian myths about the withdrawal and return of a deity (Richardson
1974:258-259), cf., e.g., the motif of the seasonal journey of the deity into the
Netherworld attested in the Sumerian/Akkadian myths of Inanna/Ishtar. These
parallels, however, are not nearly exact (nor numerous) enough to allow for the
assumption of a non-Greek background for the Hymn (compared to, e.g., the
well-known parallels between Hesiod’s Theogony and the West Asian “Kingship
in Heaven” mythical theme): they seem to re ect “not a case of textual in uence,
because the literary works are quite di erent from the Greek hymn and its
versions”, but rather “a creative process of combining presumably native Greek
material with the Mesopotamian journey ideas” (Penglase 1997:121).

The two main goals of my research have thus been to uncover the sources of this
“native Greek material” and to explore how it was combined with other
components, including the West Asian one.

§2. Findings: the Hymn’s Indo-

European background
Close parallels have long been noted between the Hymn and other Indo-European
mythological traditions which follow the same basic plot, such as the Hittite myth
of Telipinu’s rage and disappearance and the Norse myth of Baldr’s death (cf., e.g.,
Burkert 1979:126 and Bugge 1889:244-248, respectively), similarities that have
often been interpreted as the result of either cultural contact or universal
tendencies.

The research ndings presented below (§2.1-3) rather lead us to the conclusion
that (at least some of) these correspondences may re ect a common poetic and
religious heritage, also attested by other Indo-European traditions, such as the
Indic mythical narratives about the seer Cyavana’s old age and rage (whose
evolution has been studied by West 2017), as well as those about the dawn
goddess’s rape and the sky or sun god’s wounding ( rst reconstructed by Jamison
1991; cf. Jackson 2006:63-93).

§2.1 The Indo-European “Poetics of Distress”

Several parallels involve poetic devices which are independently attested in various
Indo-European traditions and which may thus be analysed as re exes of inherited
poetic phraseology: an Indo-European “Poetics of Distress”, according to which a
person’s well-being was metonymically associated with every-day actions like
standing, eating, speaking, and seeing, while cosmic disorder was associated with a
speci c set of catastrophic events such as plants not growing and disruption of
sacri ces (Ginevra 2020).

Research carried out at the CHS has enabled me to explore the inner workings of
this inherited poetics and to investigate how it came to be all-pervading in the
Hymn, heavily shaping, inter alia, the repeated descriptions of Demeter
sorrowfully sitting in the dark and refusing to eat and speak (e.g., lines 197-201), as
well as the account of the cosmic disorder caused by the goddess keeping plants
from growing, destroying humanity and ultimately depriving the Olympians of
their sacri ces (lines 305-312).

§2.2. The Indo-European myth of the “Rape of

the Maiden who is the Daughter of the Sky”
As is well known, the narrative of the Hymn combines “Withdrawal and Return”
with a further oral-traditional theme, “Rape” (Sowa 1984:121-144), an aspect of
this text that may re ect Indo-European heritage as well. A linguistic and
comparative analysis (Ginevra submitted, building on, inter alia, Janda 2000:153-7;
174-6) allows for the identi cation of Kórē ‘Maiden’, daughter of Zéus (whose
name is a re ex of the Proto-Indo-European word *di̯ éu̯– ‘sky’), as a Greek re ex
of the “Maiden who is the Daughter of the Sky” (a by-name of the dawn goddess,
at least originally) attested in various Indo-European mythological traditions, e.g.:

in Vedic Sanskrit texts, in which the goddess Uṣas ‘Dawn’ is referred to as

‘maiden’ (several synonyms) and as “sky’s daughter” (divó duhitár-; divó ‘sky’s’ is
another re ex of the same word *di̯ éu̯-);
in Old Norse texts, in which the goddess Nanna ‘Maiden’ has an exclusive
patronymic Neps-dóttir ‘daughter of Nefr’ (a re ex of *nébhes-, another ancient
word for ‘sky’, cf. Greek néphos ‘clouds, mass of clouds’).

Just like Kore, the Vedic dawn goddess is the protagonist of a myth of her rape at
the hands of a male god, allowing for the reconstruction of an Indo-European
mythical theme of the “Rape of the Heavenly Maiden who is the Daughter of the
Sky”, traces of which may also occur in a Medieval Latin version of the Norse
myth of Baldr (where the god aggressively desires Nanna).

§2.3 The most ancient “Sleeping Beauty”

One further component was essential in the development of the Hymn and of its
Indo-European counterparts: international folktale patterns and motifs. As argued
in Ginevra 2019, the so-called “Demophon episode” which comprises the central
part of the Hymn – an account of Demeter’s unsuccessful attempt to make the
Eleusinian prince Dēmo-phō̂n (‘he who shines on the dē̂mos’), “born late and
beyond expectation”, invulnerable – has a series of close matches not only in other
ancient Indo-European traditions such as the Norse myth of Baldr, but also in the
well-known folktales of the type ATU 410 “Sleeping Beauty”, stories of failed
attempts to ensure the safety of a doomed character who often has a non-ordinary
birth and/or a (direct or indirect) connection with light.

Further research conducted at CHS has led to the addition of a number of such
correspondences to the list; cf., e.g., the events which follow Demophon’s loss of
invulnerability in the Hymn (lines 284-295) and those which follow the princess’s
misfortune in Charles Perrault’s (1697) fairy tale La Belle au bois dormant: both
narratives attest a type scene (of the kind originally discussed by Arend 1933)
which involves, in immediate succession, (1) a helpless character screaming, (2)
other characters hearing the screams and coming to help, (3) the same characters
unsuccessfully trying to x the problem, (4) the king learning about the misfortune
and (5) taking action to counteract it.

The Hymn thus seems to attest, beside the other components discussed in the
previous sections, features of an ancient Greek version of the “Sleeping Beauty”
folktale type (which would be its most ancient attested version by far); the fact that
these parallels are sometimes shared by its Indo-European counterparts, however,
points to even greater antiquity for this combination of myth and folktale.

§3. Impact of the research

The ndings set forth above, together with a number of further correspondences
in texts belonging to several di erent traditions, will hopefully, on the one hand,
contribute to establishing the Hymn as an Eldorado for scholars of comparative
poetics and mythology (and of historical and comparative linguistics in general), a
true textbook example of the “Hellenization of Indo-European poetics, myth and
ritual” (Nagy 1990:2).

On the other hand, from an oralistic perspective, the greatest contribution of this
comparative research is to provide evidence that several peculiar features of the
Hymn are not the invention of a single poet, but rather ancient and traditional
devices born from the interplay of Indo-European heritage, West Asian in uence,
and international folktale patterns and motifs.
§3.1 The (pre-)historical development of the
Hymn
The development of the Hymn may thus be envisaged in the framework of Nagy’s
(1996:29 ) evolutionary model for the development of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
namely as the gradual xation by means of recomposition-in-performance –
“which turns each new performance of the poem into a conscious quote of the
previous one” (Bakker 2013:169) – of an originally uid tradition which comprised
a number of oral texts of di erent origin about Demeter and Kore.

During this multiform stage, poets would have been able to consciously quote
multiple distinct traditions within single oral performances (“interformularity”, as
per Bakker 2013:157-169; cf. Currie 2016:79-104 for a slightly di erent,
neoanalytical perspective), each time unifying them into new, complex versions
which established logical and causal relationships between them, e.g., by
identifying the rape of Kore (a re ex of the Indo-European myth of the “Rape of
the Heavenly Maiden”) as the cause of Demeter’s sorrowful wanderings (a
combination of Indo-European “Poetics of Distress” and West Asian journey
myths), which, in turn, came to include the “Demophon episode” (a Greek version
of the folktale type ATU 410 “Sleeping Beauty”).

§3.2 The Hymn’s “monumental composition”

and its relevance to the Humanities
Ultimately, the composition of the Hymn to Demeter may have resembled what
Richard Martin (1989) has proposed in regard to the Iliad’s “monumental
composition”: starting “from the need to outdistance previous epics” (ibid.:227) –
i.e., in our case, previous oral texts based on single particular versions of the myth
of Demeter and Persephone –, the poet created a (relatively, of course)
monumental Hymn “expanded out of smaller parts” (ibid.:230), whose complexity
arose out of its author’s desire to “obliterate [the other poets’] performances by
speaking in more detail, about more topics – in short, in a more monumental
fashion than any other epic performer” (ibid.:248) – i.e., in our case, by consciously
quoting as many oral-traditional versions of Demeter and Kore’s myths as possible
and combining them into a single, greater, “monumental” Hymn. This long
process may possibly account (in part, at least) for the remarkable way in which the
Hymn carefully deals with a number of extremely complex topics, such as
motherhood, emotional distress, loss, and rape – displaying a depth of insight
which is likely to be the nal product of a long tradition. An improved
understanding of the layers of composition of this incredible text and of its parallels
in other cultures will hopefully have an impact not only on the elds of Classics
and Linguistics, but also on other elds of Humanities in general, possibly serving
as the foundation for further comparative and interdisciplinary research –
uncovering the ways in which even the most distressful and traumatic experiences
can be conceptualized in language and transposed in narrative form.

§4. Select bibliography

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Bakker, E. 2013. The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey. New
York.

Bugge, S. 1889. Studien über die Entstehung der nordischen Götter- und
Heldensagen. München.

Burkert, W. 1979. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual.

Berkeley/Los Angeles/London.
Cantilena, M. 1982. Ricerche sulla dizione epica. I. Per uno studio della formularità
degli Inni Omerici. Roma.

Currie, B. 2016. Homer’s Allusive Art. Oxford.

Ginevra, R. 2019. Indo-European poetics, mythology, and folktale in the Homeric

Hymn to Demeter. Ὑλοτόμος, ὑποτάμνον, and a new interpretation for lines
227-230 and the Demophon episode. In Δόσις δ’ὀλίγη τε φίλη τε. Studi o erti a
Mario Cantilena per i suoi settant’anni, ed. A. Porro and S. Barbantani, 27-46.
Milano.

———. 2020. Myths of Non-Functioning Fertility Deities in Hittite and Core

Indo-European. In Dispersals and Diversi cation. Linguistic and Archaeological
Perspectives on the Early Stages of Indo-European, ed. M. Serangeli and T.
Olander, 106-129. Leiden and Boston.

———. Submitted. The Myth of Baldr’s Death and the Vedic Wounded Sun: the
Old Norse theonyms Nanna Neps-dóttir (‘Maiden Sky’s-daughter’) and Hǫðr
(‘Darkness’) in Germanic and Indo-European perspective.

Jackson, P. 2006. The Transformations of Helen: Indo-European Myth and the

Roots of the Trojan Cycle. Dettelbach.

Jamison, S. W. 1991. The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and
Ritual in Ancient India. Ithaca, NY.

Janda, M. 2000. Eleusis. Das indogermanische Erbe der Mysterien. Innsbruck.

Lord, M. L. 1967. Withdrawal and Return: An Epic Story Pattern in the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter and in the Homeric Poems. The Classical Journal 62.6.241-8.
Martin, R. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad.
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Nagy, G. 1990. Greek Mythology and Poetics. New York.

———. 1996. Homeric Questions. Austin.

Penglase, C. 1997. Greek myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and In uence in the
Homeric hymns and Hesiod. London/New York.

Richardson, N. J. 1974. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Oxford.

Sowa, C. A. 1984. Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns. Chicago.

West, E. 2017. The Transformation of Cyavana: A Case Study in Narrative

Evolution. Oral Tradition 31.1.77-122.

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Volume 8