The Thre Early Tiruvantatis of the Tivyappirapantam

The early Antatis of the three Alvars known as Poykaiyalvar, Putattalvar and Peyalvar form the earliest layer in the Nalayira Tivyappirapantam ("Four-thousand Heavenly Compositions"), the devotional corpus of the Srivaisnavas, a religious group of devotees of the god Visnu active to this day in Tamilnadu and beyond. Still in the earlier metre Venpa and thus part of the Iyarpa, the portion of the canon to be recited and not sung, they stand at the transition from Old to Middle Tamil and contain on the one hand many interesting transitional forms, on the other hand experiments with the young genre of devotional poetry, looking back to the earlier conventions of Akam and Pu?am, playing with them and partly going beyond them.
This volume offers a metrical Tamil text with print variants and a first glance into a few manuscripts, a word-split transliterated version and an annotated English translation. It includes, along with an introduction and an epilogue on theology, an analytical glossary-concordance and three appendices concerned with names and epithets of the deities, with incarnations and mythic episodes, and with temples and toponyms.