Neṭunalvāṭai

Synopsis

Neṭunalvāṭai (Tamil: நெடுநல்வாடை, (pronounced as ˈnedʊ' nəl' vədaɪ) lit. "good long north wind", metonymically "cold season") is an ancient Tamil poetry belonging to the Sangam literature era. Also referred to as Nedunalvadai, it is a blend of a love and war story, highlighting the pains of separation of a woman i.e., A queen waiting for her beloved Protagonist i.e., The king to return from the distant war. Authored by Nakkeerar, it is the seventh poem in the Pattuppāṭṭu anthology. The poem is generally dated to the late classical period (2nd to 4th century CE). Nedunalvadai contains 188 lines of poetry in the akaval metre. It is a poem of complex and subtle artistic composition, its vividness and language has won it many superlatives, including one by the Tamil literature scholar Kamil Zvelebil, as "the best or one of the best of the lays of the [Sangam] bardic corpus". According to G. John Samuel, the "Netunalvatai belongs to the great corpus of ancient classical erotic poems of the world which include the beautiful love poems of the Grecian world, the Song of Songs of the Hebraic world, the ancient pastoral poems of the Latin literature and the Muktaka poems of the Sanskrit tradition".

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