Tirunavukkarasar (meaning King of the Tongue or Lord of Language), also known as Appar ("Father") was a seventh century Saivite poet-saint of Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...

, one of the most prominent of the sixty-three Nayanars

Nayanars

The Nayanars or Nayanmars were Shaivite devotional poets of Tamil Nadu, active between the fifth and the tenth centuries CE...

. He was an older contemporary of Sambandar. His birth-name was Marulneekkiyar: he was called "father" by Sambandhar, hence the name Appar.

Sundarar states in his Tiruttondartokai that Appar composed 4900 hymns of ten verses each, this is repeated by Nambiyandar Nambi

Nambiyandar Nambi

Tirunarayur Nambiyandar Nambi was an eleventh-century Shaiva scholar of Tamil Nadu in South India who compiled the hymns of Sampantar, Appar and Sundarar and was himself one of the authors of the eleventh volume of the canon of the Tamil liturgical poetry of Shiva, the Tirumurai.Nambiyandar was...

 and Sekkizhar

Sekkizhar

Sekkizhar was a poet and scholar of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta, a Saiva saint contemporary with the reign of Kulothunga Chola II. He compiled and wrote the Periya Puranam , 4253 verses long,recounting the life stories of the sixty-three Shaiva Nayanars, the poets of Shiva who composed the liturgical...

, but only 3130 are available today.