Puṟanāṉūṟu

Critical Edition and Annotated Translation with Glossary of the Puṟanāṉūṟu

Dr. G. Vijayavenugopal & Prof. Dr. Eva Wilden

The Puṟanāṉūṟu is the oldest of the anthologies on war, matters of state and life at large. Since it comes with an old commentary for the first 266 poems, it is an extremely important lexicographical source, also with respect to the commentarial glosses. This commentary contains perhaps the earliest (almost) full paraphrase for a Tamil poetic text – the majority of the older commentaries are “only” arumpatavurai, commenting on selected rare or complicated words. For the Puṟanāṉūṟu, 15 manuscripts survive, all but one on palm leaf, which have already been collated by G. Vijayavenugopal. The biggest challenge here is that for the part without commentary (267-400), only two manuscripts are extant, and there is no reason to believe that the first editor, U. Vē. Cāminātaiyār, had more at his disposal. To make matters even more difficult, the two manuscripts that contain the full text contain many blank spaces – a testimony to the honesty of earlier copyists who left gaps in places where the text they copied from was damaged, as seen in the image below. Luckily, to some extent the quotations help here —many poems are quoted in the commentaries on other texts, in particular on the Tolkāppiyam Puṟattiṇaiyiyal, and in one of the later anthologies, the Puṟattiraṭṭu.