However, it is important to emphasize the varying degree of historicity of the Sumerian
Laments.
As an example of this, she hints at a set of similarities between Ezekiel and the weeping goddess in the Mesopotamian City
Laments.
During this time, I was able to ascertain that the socially sanctioned modes for the expression of grief was the singing of funerary
laments known as cidid (a word derived from the verb cidd (meaning to "enumerate" or "repeat").
Although the modern common-sense view tends to conceive of death as the end of existence, a mutual typological similarity of liminal rites can be brought out in traditional cultures, which on the textual plane is expressed in an archetypical identity--going even as far as similar usage of words and images--of
laments used in different kinds of rites.
Toswell investigates the use of
lament psalms in medieval England and their relationship with Old English poetry in the context of 'grief work' because
laments 'provide a way to perform that grief, to provide words for the work of mourning' (p.
In Joseph Harris's intelligent and thought-provoking analysis " 'Myth to Live By' in Sonatorrek," which is an updated version of a 1999 paper, (1) Harris convincingly argues that real
laments in Old Norse culture were modeled on mythic ones, using the archetypal
lament of Odin for Baldr as a case study.
Fritschel, "The Psalms: Individual
Laments as Communal Hymns," in The Difficult Bur Indispensable Church, ed.
Certainly Shakespeare has varied the social function of
lament, given that the Virgin's
laments (as Goodland argues) served a communal, representational function, whereas the contest in King John is "between Constance and everyone else in the world of play, even her son Arthur" (126).
The
Laments by George Hagen (Sceptre paperback, pounds 7.
She centres her focus on secular
laments made by Casiiian women, suggesting a classification of their components.
Charmingly funny, The
Laments follows a family from the days following their first son's birth, and death, to their adoption of another baby, the birth of their twin sons and their many travels through most of the English-speaking countries of the world.
The public nature of this confrontation--in the open, at the gravesite--implies that the sisters'
laments have a rhetorical appeal that the consolers find threatening to their position as the self-appointed spokesmen of 'godys myght'.
