A review by oisin175
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics by Calvert Watkins

challenging informative slow-paced

3.0

Informative but very dense and academic. I don't have any real base in linguistics or poetry and I don't read Greek or have much experience with the Vedas or Iranian texts, so much of this book was, at least for now, impenetrable for me. I still learned things and it puts forward interesting ideas. It seems to make decent headway towards its thesis but I can't really judge how well. I wouldn't recommend this for anyone who isn't at least doing advanced undergraduate linguistics and poetics. It would also probably be helpful to have a passing knowledge of several languages since he quotes a number of passages in both French and German without translation. Being able to read Greek (even without comprehension) would also be highly useful here. I wouldn't say don't read it if you're new or unversed, but be prepared for a difficult time unless you have the background.