Ettuthokai (the Eight Anthologies)
Ettuttokai
Love and war are the two great subjects of a fully lived life, and this corpus of hundreds of poems by many poets codifies each into precise, conventionalized landscapes and moods rather than leaving them to open improvisation.
- a corpus of eight anthologies by hundreds of named and anonymous poets
- akam (love) and puram (war and public life) as the two great themes
- five conventional landscapes mapped to emotional register
- a largely secular counterpart to the Sanskrit religious corpus
A corpus of eight separate anthologies of classical Tamil Sangam poetry, including Purananuru, Akananuru, and Kuruntokai among others, composed by several hundred named and anonymous poets over roughly two centuries and later grouped as one of the two great divisions of Sangam literature. Poems are sorted by theme into akam (love) and puram (war and public life), each mapped onto five stock landscapes tied to a particular emotional register, forming a largely secular counterpart to the Sanskrit religious and philosophical corpus further north.
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