The Tirumurai is a canon assembled with intent. The Chola-era compilation gathered Tamil hymns from the sixth to the twelfth centuries into twelve books and gave them liturgical status, which is why hereditary odhuvars still sing Tevaram before the deity in Tamil Shiva temples and why the recovery of the palm-leaf manuscripts is itself a legendary story. The eleventh book collects miscellaneous hymns including Karaikkal Ammaiyar, a woman who asked Shiva for a demon's body so she would no longer be beautiful and could sing at his feet in the cremation ground. The twelfth, Sekkilar's Periya Puranam, tells the lives of the sixty-three Nayanars, and it is not a sanitised collection: one saint kills his own son to feed a guest, another cuts off his father's legs for interfering with worship, and Kannappa the hunter offers meat and his own eyes. The Tamil Shaiva claim that these hymns are equal in authority to the Sanskrit Veda is a genuine doctrinal position and a linguistic-political one, and it has been both since the tenth century.