The late Arpine Khatchadourian taught comparative literature for many years at UW-Milwaukee. Her posthumously published monograph, David of Sassoun, is a close study of an Armenian epic poem, performed orally for a thousand years by troubadours and itinerant taletellers and first written down in the 19th century.
The heroes and villains of David of Sassoun are part of an archetypal web of mythology that spans the globe. Without difficulty one can spot analogies with the Hindu Rig-Veda, the legends of King Arthur and the myths of ancient Greece in its stories of good and bad giants, people of supernatural origin and strength, dragons and dragon slayers.
Not unlike The Iliad—or Mississippi Delta blues and other poetry from oral cultures—David of Sassoun is composed in part from sequences of familiar lines and recurring images. Although Khatchadourian produced only a slender volume, her David of Sassoun is packed with tightly focused scholarship that required knowledge of multiple language as well as access to rare texts. It was a lifetime labor of love.
