The early Antātis of the three Āḻvārs known as Poykaiyāḻvār, Pūtattāḻvār and Pēyāḻvār form the earliest layer in the Nālāyira Tivyappirapantam ("Four-thousand Heavenly Compositions"), the devotional corpus of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas, a religious group of devotees of the god Viṣṇu active to this day in Tamilnadu and beyond. Still in the earlier metre Veṇpā and thus part of the Iyaṟpā, 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 Puṟam, 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.

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