Rhapsodist

Rhapsodies (according to ancient explanations of the term “song stitchers” or “singers with a rod in their hands”) are professional performers of epic , mainly Homeric, poems in classical Greece ; wandering singers reciting poems with a rod in hand (a rod is a symbol of the right to speak at a meeting).

Rhapsodic refers already to the later stage of the development of the epic, to the era of large poems with more or less fixed text; at an earlier stage, the epic song was improvised by Aed , a singer who accompanied his singing with a lyre. At the rhapsodic stage, the performance was already separated from creativity, although individual rhapsods could be poets at the same time ( Hesiod ). In the historical era, great poems were usually performed at festivities in the form of a competition of rhapsods. Homeric poems are already designed for rhapsodic performance, although the poems themselves, the action of which is attributed to the distant past, mention only aids . Rhapsody, sometimes combined into entire schools, apparently played a significant role in collecting the Greek epic at the stage of its decomposition. Antiquity imagined Homer to be a rhapsody, and Homeric criticism attributed to the Rhapsods the creation of Homeric poems, the unification of individual small songs in a big epic.

There were also so-called “Russian rhapsody-tellers”, from which the Russian Slavologist and folklorist Alexander Fedorovich Hilferding (1831–1872) was able to record epics about the heroes Ilya of Murom, Dobrynya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich, about the glorious Prince Vladimir, about Idolische Poganoe and The Nightingale of the Robber, thereby saving them for posterity .