Living in Iron, Dressed in Bronze: Metal Formulas and the Chronology of the Ages Françoise Letoublon To cite this version: Françoise Letoublon. Living in Iron, Dressed in Bronze: Metal Formulas and the Chronology of the Ages. Brolly. Journal of Social Sciences, London Academic Publishing„ 2018, 1 (2), pp.7-39. hal-01919866 HAL Id: hal-01919866 https://hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-01919866 Submitted on 5 Dec 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Brolly. Journal of Social Sciences 1 (2) 2018 LIVING IN IRON, DRESSED IN BRONZE: METAL FORMULAS AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE AGES1 Françoise Létoublon Université Grenoble Alpes, France
[email protected] Abstract. Names of important metals such as gold, silver, iron, and bronze occur many times in the Homeric Epics. We intend to look at them within the framework of oral poetry, with the purpose to determine if they form a more or less coherent set of “formulas”, in the sense defined by Milman Parry and the Oral Poetry Theory2, and to test a possible link with the stages in the evolution of humankind. Though several specialists criticized some excess in Parry’s and Lord’s definitions of the formula, we deem the theory still valuable in its great lines, and feel no need to discuss it for the present study3.