Philippine epic poetry

Centuries before the Spaniards came, the Filipinos already had their own cultural traditions, folklore, mythologies and epics. There were substantial writings by early natives that Jesuit historian Fr. Pedro Chirino noted: "All of the islanders are much given to reading and writing. And there is hardly a man, much less a woman who did not read and write." (Relacion de las isles Filipinas-1604)

Stories about folk heroes of long ago were described as "Old Time History" because; they can be used to study the lifestyle and beliefs of the people who produced them. They were also referred to as "Lost", because they were soon forgotten by natives influenced heavily by Spanish and "western" colonization. The famed orientalist, Chauncey Starkweather , stressed that : "These epic romances are charming poem in the Malayan literature."

Epic poems and songs about the exploits of enchanted folk heroes were performed during festivities and proper occasions. Most often, these epic poems (folk epics or ethno-epics) were titled after the names of the hero involved, except for some which carry traditional titles like the Kalinga Ullalim; the Sulod Hinilawod; the Maranao Darangan; or the Bicol Ibalon.

" The Filipinos have their own traditions of poetry in their folklore, in their language and dialects. This must be recorded and that’s the job of the writers. In doing that, he gives a pattern of hope and aspirations for the people to advance not merely as a nation of people but as a member of a family of nations, the human family."

Billy the Kid

William Henry McCarty (November 23, 1859 – July 14, 1881), better known as Billy the Kid, but also known by the aliases William Antrim and William Harrison Bonney, was a famous 19th century American frontier outlaw and gunman who was a participant in the Lincoln County War. According to legend he killed 21 men, one for each year of his life, but more likely he participated in the killing of less than half that number.

McCarty (or Bonney, the name he used at the height of his notoriety) was 5'8-5'9 with blue eyes, smooth cheeks, and prominent front teeth. He was said to be friendly and personable at times, but he could also be short-tempered and determined. This made him a very dangerous outlaw, when combined with his shooting skills and cunning. He was also famous for (apparently) always wearing a sugarloaf sombrero hat with a wide green decorative band. He was little known in his own lifetime but was catapulted into legend in the year after his death when his killer, Sheriff Patrick Garrett, published a wildly sensationalistic biography of him called The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. Beginning with Garrett's account, Billy the Kid grew into a symbolic figure of the American Old West.

In the autumn of 1877, Bonney (McCarty) moved to Lincoln County, New Mexico, and was hired as a cattle guard by John Tunstall, an English cattle rancher, banker and merchant, and his partner, Alexander McSween, a prominent lawyer. A conflict, known later as the Lincoln County Cattle War, had begun between the established town merchants and the ranchers. Events turned bloody on February 18, 1878, when Tunstall, unarmed, was caught on an open range while herding cattle and murdered. Tunstall's murder enraged Bonney and the other ranch hands.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, first published on 28 January 1813, is the most famous of Jane Austen's novels and one of the first "romantic comedies" in the history of the novel. The book is Jane Austen's second published novel.

Its manuscript was first written between 1796 and 1797, initially called First Impressions, but was never published under that title. Following revisions, it was first published on 28 January 1813. Like both its predecessors, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, it was written in Steventon, Hampshire, where Austen lived in the rectory. The title of the book is taken from a sentence in Fanny Burney's Cecilia; Austen was a reader and admirer of Burney's novels.

In late-18th-century England, women were relegated to secondary roles in society with respect to property and social responsibilities. For example, women were not permitted to visit new arrivals to the neighbourhood (such as Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice) until the male head of their household had first done so. Women were under enormous pressure to marry for the purpose of securing their financial futures and making valuable social connections for their families. Therefore, marriage, though romanticised, was in many ways a financial transaction and social alliance rather than a matter of love. "In 85% of culture, love has not been the basis for marriage during the colonial period. Marriages were arranged based on economic need". Although Jane Austen did not condone loveless marriages (she stayed single all her life), she did approve of matches having equality in various respects, including wealth, social status, love and character. In Pride and Prejudice, wealth, social status, chastity (and the perception of chastity) and physical attractiveness are depicted as factors affecting a woman's chances for a good marriage.

Old Testament

The Old Testament (sometimes abbreviated as OT) is the first section of the two-part Christian Biblical canon.

Most scholars agree that the Old Testament was composed and compiled between the 12th and the 2nd century BC. The books of the Old Testament were therefore completed before Jesus' birth. Jesus and his disciples based their teachings on them, referring to them as "the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms ... the scriptures". (The accounts of Jesus and his disciples are recorded in the Christian New Testament.)

The exact canon of the Old Testament differs between the various branches of Christianity. All include the books of the Hebrew Bible, while many traditions also recognise several deuterocanonical books.

The Protestant Old Testament is, for the most part, identical with the Hebrew Bible; the differences are minor, dealing only with the arrangement and number of the books. For example, while the Hebrew Bible considers Kings to be a unified text, and Ezra and Nehemiah as a single book, the Protestant Old Testament divides each of these into two books.

The differences between the Hebrew Bible and other versions of the Old Testament such as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac, Latin, Greek and other canons, are greater. Many of these canons include whole books and additional sections of books that the others do not. The translations of various words from the original Hebrew may also give rise to significant differences of interpretation.

Masoretic Text

The Masoretic Text (MT) is the Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible (Tanakh). It defines not just the books of the Jewish canon, but also the precise letter-text of the biblical books in Judaism, as well as their vocalization and accentuation for both public reading and private study. The MT is also widely used as the basis for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles, and in recent decades also for Catholic Bibles.

The MT was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the seventh and tenth centuries CE. Though the consonants differ little from the text generally accepted in the early second century (and also differ little from some Qumran texts that are even older), it has numerous differences of both greater and lesser significance when compared to (extant 4th century) manuscripts of the Septuagint, a Greek translation (made in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE) of the Hebrew Scriptures that was in popular use in Egypt and Palestine and that is often quoted in the Christian New Testament.

The Hebrew word mesorah (מסורה, alt. מסורת) refers to the transmission of a tradition. In a very broad sense it can refer to the entire chain of Jewish tradition (see Oral law), but in reference to the masoretic text the word mesorah has a very specific meaning: the diacritic markings of the text of the Hebrew Bible and concise marginal notes in manuscripts (and later printings) of the Hebrew Bible which note textual details, usually about the precise spelling of words.

The Talmud (and also Karaite mss.) states that a standard copy of the Hebrew Bible was kept in the court of the Temple in Jerusalem for the benefit of copyists; there were paid correctors of Biblical books among the officers of the Temple (Talmud, tractate Ketubot 106a). This copy is mentioned in the Aristeas Letter (§ 30; comp. Blau, Studien zum Althebr. Buchwesen, p. 100); in the statements of Philo (preamble to his "Analysis of the Political Constitution of the Jews") and in Josephus (Contra Ap. i. 8).

Books of Chronicles

The Books of Chronicles (Hebrew Divrei Hayyamim, דברי הימים, Greek Paraleipomêna) are part of the Hebrew Bible (Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old Testament). In the masoretic text, it appears as the first or last book of the Ketuvim (the latter arrangement also making it the final book of the Jewish bible). Chronicles largely parallels the Davidic narratives in the books of Samuel and the Books of Kings. For this reason it was called "Supplements" in the Septuagint, where it appears in two parts (I & II Chronicles), immediately following 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings as a supplement to them. The division of Chronicles and its place in the Christian canon of the Old Testament are based upon the Septuagint.

The author of Chronicles, termed "the Chronicler," may also have written Ezra-Nehemiah. His work is an important source of information about Israel after the Babylonian exile.

In Hebrew the book is called Divrei Hayyamim, (i.e. "matters [of] the days") based on the phrase sefer divrei ha-yamim le-malkhei Yehudah ("book of the days of the kings of Judah"), which appears several times in Kings.

In the Greek Septuagint (LXX), Chronicles bears the title Paraleipomêna, i.e., "things omitted," or "supplements," because it contains details not found in the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings. Thus in the Douai Bible translation the books are accordingly styled the "Books of Paralipomenon."

Jerome, in his Latin translation of the Bible (Vulgate), titled the book Chronicon ("Chronicles" in English), since he believed it to represent the "chronicle of the whole of sacred history."

Ketuvim

Ketuvim is the third and final section of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), after Torah and Nevi'im.

The Hebrew word כתובים (ketuvim) means "writings." In English translations of the Hebrew Bible, this section is usually entitled "Writings" or "Hagiographa."

In the Jewish textual tradition, Chronicles is counted as one book. Ezra and Nehemiah are also counted together as a single book called "Ezra." Thus, there is a total of eleven books in the section called Ketuvim.

In masoretic manuscripts, Psalms, Proverbs and Job are presented in a special two-column form emphasizing the parallel stiches in the verses, which are a function of their poetry. Collectively, these three books are known as Sifrei Emet (an acronym of the titles in Hebrew, איוב, משלי, תהלים yields Emet אמ"ת).

These three books are also the only ones in Tanakh with a special system of cantillation notes that are designed to emphasize parallel stiches within verses. The notes in this cantillation system are called Ta`amei Emet.

The five relatively short books of Song of Songs, Book of Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Book of Esther are collectively known as the Hamesh Megillot (The Five Scrolls). These scrolls are traditionally read over the course of the year in many Jewish communities. The list below presents them in the order they are read in the synagogue on holidays, beginning with the Song of Solomon on Passover.

Aphorism

Care should be taken not to confound aphorisms with axioms. Aphorisms come into being as the result of experience. This is also often the case with axioms (see axiomatization; Euclidean geometry), but due to their apparent certainty, axioms are then regarded as assertions not requiring proof, and used as the starting point for further deductive reasoning. Aphorisms have been especially used in dealing with subjects such as art, agriculture, medicine, jurisprudence, psychology, and politics, to which little methodical or scientific treatment was applied at the time.

Aphoristic collections, sometimes known as wisdom literature, have a prominent place in the canons of several ancient societies: E.g. the Biblical Book of Proverbs, Islamic Hadith, Hesiod's Works and Days, or Epictetus' Handbook. Aphoristic collections also make up an important part of the work of some modern authors, such as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, La Rouchefoucauld, Thomas Szasz, Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Mikhail Turovsky, Celia Green, Robert A. Heinlein, Gay Walley, E.M.Cioran, and Leonard Wisdon. A 1559 oil-on-oak-panel painting, Netherlandish Proverbs (also called The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, artfully depicts a land populated with literal renditions of Flemish aphorisms (proverbs) of the day.

Proverb

A proverb (from the Latin proverbium) is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim. If a proverb is distinguished by particularly good phrasing, it may be known as an aphorism.

Proverbs are often borrowed from similar languages and cultures, and sometimes come down to the present through more than one language. Both the Bible (Book of Proverbs) and medieval Latin have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs across Western Europe and even further.

For those interested in further study of proverbs, a number of sources are available. A seminal work in the field is Archer Taylor's The Proverb, later republished together with an index, by Wolfgang Mieder. A good introduction to the study of proverbs is Mieder's 2004 volume, Proverbs: A Handbook. Mieder has also published a series of bibliography volumes on proverb research, as well as a large number of articles and other books in the field. For those interested in proverbs of Africa, Stan Nussbaum has edited a large collection on proverbs of Africa, published on a CD, including reprints of out-of-print collections, original collections, and works on analysis, bibliography, and appplication of proverbs to Christian ministry. For those interested in comparing proverbs across Europe, Paczolay has published a collection of similar proverbs in 55 languages.

Folklore

The word folklore was first used by the English antiquarian William Thoms in a letter published by the London Journal Athenaeum in 1846. Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The academic and usually ethnographic study of folklore is sometimes called folkloristics.

Folklorist William Bascom states that folklore has many cultural aspects, such as allowing for escape from societal consequences. In addition, folklore can also serve to validate a culture (romantic nationalism), as well as transmit a culture's morals and values. Folklore can also be used to assert social pressures, or relive them, in the case of humor and carnival.
In addition, folklorists study medical, supernatural, religious, and political belief systems as an essential, often unspoken, part of expressive culture.

Many rituals can be considered folklore, whether formalized in a cultural or religious system (e.g. weddings, baptisms, harvest festivals) or practiced within a family or secular context. For example, in certain parts of the United States (as well as other countries) one places a knife, or a pair of scissors, under the mattress to "cut the birth pains" after giving birth. Additionally, children's counting-out games can be defined as behavioral folklore.

Fable

A fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.

A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humankind.

The descriptive definition of "fable" given above has not always been closely adhered to. In the King James Version of the New Testament, "μύθος" ("mythos") was rendered by the translators as "fable" in First and Second Timothy, in Titus and in First Peter.

The word "fable" comes from the Latin "fabula" (a "story"), itself derived from "fari" ("to speak").

In a pejorative sense, a "fable" may be a deliberately invented or falsified account of an event or circumstance. Similarly, a non-authorial person who, wittingly or not, tells "tall tales," may be termed a "confabulator." In its original sense, however, "fable" denotes a brief, succinct story that is meant to impart a moral lesson.

An author of fables is termed a "fabulist," and the word "fabulous," strictly speaking, "pertains to a fable or fables." In recent decades, however, "fabulous" has come frequently to be used in the quite different meaning of "excellent" or "outstanding" (which, to be sure, some fables may be).

Parable

A parable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors while parables generally are stories featuring human actors or agents.

Some scholars of the New Testament use the term "parable" only to refer to the parables of Jesus, although that is not a common restriction of the term.

The word "parable" comes from the Greek "παραβολή" (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed.

Examples of parable are Jesus of Nazareth's "Parable of the Prodigal Son" and Ignacy Krasicki's "The Blind Man and the Lame."

A parable is one of the simplest of narratives. It sketches a setting, describes an action, and shows the results. It often involves a character facing a moral dilemma, or making a questionable decision and then suffering the consequences of that choice. As with a fable, a parable generally relates a single, simple, consistent action, without extraneous detail or distracting circumstances. Many folktales could be viewed as extended parables.

The prototypical parable differs from the apologue in that it is a realistic story that seems inherently probable and takes place in a familiar setting of life.

Many fairy tales could be viewed as extended parables, except for their magical settings.

A parable is like a metaphor that has been extended to form a brief, coherent fiction. Unlike the situation with a simile, a parable's parallel meaning is unspoken and implicit, though not ordinarily secret.

Metaphor

More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first. This device is known for usage in literature, especially in poetry, where with few words, emotions and associations from one context are associated with objects and entities in a different context.

Within the non rhetorical theory a metaphor is generally considered to be a concluded equation of terms that is more forceful and active than an analogy, although the two types of tropes are highly similar and often confused. One distinguishing characteristic is that the assertiveness of a metaphor calls into question the underlying category structure, whereas in a rhetorical analogy the comparative differences between the categories remain salient and acknowledged. Similarly, metaphors can be distinguished from other closely related rhetorical concepts such as metonymy, synecdoche, simile, allegory and parable.

The metaphor, according to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), consists of two parts: the tenor and vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the subject from which the attributes are borrowed. Other writers employ the terms ground and figure to denote what Richards identifies as the tenor and vehicle. Consider:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances; — (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7)
This well-known quotation is a good example of a metaphor. In this example, "the world" is compared to a stage, the aim being to describe the world by taking well-known attributes from the stage. In this case, the world is the tenor and the stage is the vehicle. "Men and women" are a secondary tenor and "players" is the vehicle for this secondary tenor.

Allegory

An allegory (from Greek αλλος, allos, "other", and αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal.

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of mimetic, or representative art.

The etymological meaning of the word is broader than the common use of the word. Though it is similar to other rhetorical comparisons, an allegory is sustained longer and more fully in its details than a metaphor, and appeals to imagination, while an analogy appeals to reason or logic. The fable or parable is a short allegory with one definite moral.

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars, while in fact it was written well before the outbreak of World War II, and J.R.R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the American edition "It is neither allegorical nor topical....I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory", ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.

Romance

As a literary genre, romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative current in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

The term was coined to distinguish popular material in the vernacular (at first the Romance languages French, Portuguese and Spanish, later German, English and others) from scholarly and ecclesiastical literature in Latin.

The boundaries between the romance and the chansons de geste of the troubadours were somewhat fluid. In general, the strophic heroic chansons ("ballads") were the property of professional performers, while the romance was associated more with aristocratic amateurs and private readers. Nevertheless, a professional poet-performer like Chrétien de Troyes could turn his hand to composing romances. The distinction between an early verse romance and a chanson de geste is often difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to make.

Unlike the later form of the novel— nouvelle romaine or "new romance"— and like the chansons de geste, the genre of romance dealt with traditional themes, above all linked in some way, perhaps only in an opening frame story, with three thematic cycles of tales: these were assembled in imagination at a late date as the "Matter of Rome" (actually centered on the life and deeds of Alexander the Great), the "Matter of France" (Charlemagne and Roland, his principal paladin) and the "Matter of Britain" (the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, within which was incorporated the quest for the Holy Grail).

Prose

Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to everyday speech. The word prose comes from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward, hence the term "prosaic," which is often seen as pejorative. Prose describes the type of writing that prose embodies, unadorned with obvious stylistic devices. Prose writing is usually adopted for the description of facts or the discussion of whatever one's thoughts are, incorporated in free flowing speech. Thus, it may be used for newspapers, capers, magazines, encyclopedias, broadcast media, films, letters, debtor's notes, famous quotes, murder mystery, history, philosophy, biography, linguistic geography and many other forms of media.

Prose generally lacks the formal structure of meter or rhyme that is often found in poetry. Although some works of prose may happen to contain traces of metrical structure or versification, a conscious blend of the two forms of literature is known as a prose poem. Similarly, poetry with less of the common rules and limitations of verse is known as free verse. Poetry is considered to be artificially developed ("The best words in the best order"), whereas prose is thought to be less constructed and more reflective of ordinary speech. Pierre de Ronsard, the French poet, said that his training as a poet had proved to him that prose and poetry were mortal enemies. In Molière's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain asks something to be written in neither verse nor prose. A philosophy master says to him, "Sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse". Jourdain replies, "By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you for having taught me that."