Circe’s Wedding: Cyclical Structures in Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and Homeric Poetry

Cyclical structures are common in epic narratives. Many epics that have no direct relation to one another, springing from different periods and cultures, use the form of a cycle—mirroring lines or events from their beginning at their end—to bring the story to a close. But what do cycles signify? In this paper, I compare narrative cycles from the epic poetry of the Old English Beowulf, the Babylonian Gilgamesh, and the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle, including the Iliad and the Telegony, to argue that cyclical structures carry a double force: they mark both the closing and the continuation of the story. Cycles end and begin anew, yielding a temporal tension between finality and endurance that, I will argue, characterizes the epic tradition in general.