“As Your Name Indicates”: Philological Arguments in Akkadian Disputations

Contenders in Akkadian disputation poems make use of a large array of arguments to build their cases. The most common ones are material arguments, which rely on the benefits that they offer to humans. A second type of argument, termed here philological, is predicated on the alleged superiority of a litigant’s name or title over its rival’s. This superiority is demonstrated by means of the same set of hermeneutical techniques that are found in Mesopotamian exegesis and Mesopotamian literature at large. The present paper collects the philological arguments that can be found in debate poetry, discusses their discursive role and studies their parallels in Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Particular attention is given to the phrase mu-ni|bi-gin₇ || kīma šumīšū-ma, “like its name,” which is argued to be a technical term for introducing such philological discussions. Akkadian debate poems are lighthearted texts, but elucubrations of this type are common in serious texts as well. This fact suggests we should take these arguments seriously, however unpalatable from a modern etymological point of view they might be, just like the fanciful etymologies of Plato’s Cratylus.

Polarized Debates, Ambivalent Judgments

This chapter aims to illustrate three simple points: first, that medieval love-debate poetry is centrally concerned with a conflict between idealism and pragmatism; second, that Machaut’s Jugement du roy de Behaigne foregrounds this aspect of the love-debate genre and explores its implications; and third, that Gower’s Confessio Amantis is also structured around the juxtaposition of idealistic and pragmatic views of love. While the two narrative poems may seem to distinguish themselves from earlier love-debates by “settling” the conflict presented with a conclusive judgment, they also retain the fundamental ambivalence of the un-concluded jeux-partis. Machaut and Gower invest sympathetically in the idea that worldly pleasures, and specifically the pleasures of love, can be idealized and given enduring value, and the energy and persistence of this fantasy constitute a significant part of these poems’ appeal. It is a fantasy nonetheless, because both poets also figure the attempt to align love with virtue as essentially futile.

The Owl, the Nightingale and the Jew in the Thorn-bush: Relocating Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger

For the past twenty-five years a key piece of evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has been identified in the Grimm Brothers’ anti-Semitic tale ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ and a possible allusion to this in the text of Walther’s Act I ‘trial song’. This article argues that the passages in question are better explained with reference to a medieval poetic tradition still prevalent in nineteenth-century German culture involving the vocal contest between birds, paradigmatically the owl and the nightingale. Since the twelfth century, the owl and the nightingale have debated the merits of high and low art, religious themes, social forms, poetic diction and more. The associations of pedantry and harsh, coarse vocal character with the figure of the owl maps readily onto the negative traits of Beckmesser, just as the contrasting associations of the melodious nightingale with springtime, courtship and ‘natural’ musicality align with traits of Wagner’s artist-hero, Walther von Stolzing. Rather than displacing the possible anti-Semitic reading of Beckmesser, however, this alternative reading of the Beckmesser–Walther antagonism through the lens of avian conflict or debate poetry relocates that reading within a broader discursive and figurative context, one that is more commensurate with the possible role of anti-Semitic subtexts within Wagner’s music dramas in general.