The Trojan ass : Asinarius as mock epic

The medieval narrative poem Asinarius (late 12th early 13th c.) has commonly been considered a fairy tale ante litteram, predating the self-conscious development of the literary genre from early modem times onward. Under influence of the deeply rooted notion that fairy tales have their origins in oral-folkloric traditions, scholars who have studied this text have tended to do so in terms of its supposed indebtedness to folktales, possibly even derived from Indian mythology. Meanwhile, its essential nature as a piece of Latin literature has been largely neglected. This article proposes a literary contextualizing of the text, situating it within the broader field of Latin literature. More specifically, it argues that the Asinarius poet playfully engages with epic texts, both ancient and contemporary, dealing with the matter of Troy. Thus, the reader is invited to a mock-epic reading of the poem, all too easily obfuscated today by an anachronistic "Grimmian" perspective.

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