European Oral and Epic Traditions

Overview

“Literature,” as the word is most often used, means written works: poetry, fiction, prose. The term itself, derived from the Latin word for “letter of the alphabet,” enshrines a particular notion of what literature involves—namely texts. The concept of a nonwritten, oral “literature,” therefore, might seem a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, before modern literate culture valued one form of language (written) above the other, before there was even any one word such as “literature” to cover the disparate forms of verbal art often tied to social functions, there existed poems, songs, dramas, and narratives. In contemporary nonliterate societies, there are many examples of flourishing “literary” forms, while even in modern Western society, the most popular verbal artistic modes are “oral” in that they are transmitted without the use of writing. How many people, for example, read the text of a popular hit song, a Broadway play, or a television show?

The fundamental orality of all literature, then, can be seen to reassert itself, even in the most literate of all cultures. Indeed, the audiovisual revolution has helped broaden the notion of literature; no longer does one limit it to that which can be printed and cataloged in libraries. Consequently, it has become possible to conceive of a traditional oral literature that lies at the roots of modern written Western literature. This overview surveys monumental works of that tradition in the light of research on all kinds of oral literature, explains how and why these works might be called “oral,” and draws out the implications of their “oral” character. Finally, some aspects of the influence of oral tradition on later written work will be examined.

Definitions

Oral literature comprises a vast range of verbal products, including modern blues lyrics, African drum songs, ancient Greek epic poetry, urban legends, the latest jokes or limericks, ballads, folk songs, folktales, children’s rhymes, and streetcorner games such as the “dozens” (a series of rhyming insult verses that can be extended to any length by improvisation). On one hand, it is quite useful for an investigator to know about all of these genres of oral literature, to take the term at its most inclusive, so that one can learn by comparison exactly what makes each given composition “oral” and therefore different from its written counterpart. On the other hand, some restriction of the term is needed to examine in any detail the workings of such literature. This essay, then, focuses on one narrow area of oral literature that has exerted influence of a disproportionate magnitude. While at times referring to African and Asian literature, most of the essay discusses Western literature. Unfortunately, this means excluding such great compositions as the Babylonian Gilgamesh (c. 2000 b.c.e.) story, the Iranian Shāhnāma (1010 c.e.), and the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa (c. 500 b.c.e.; The Ramayana, 1870-1874) and Mahābhārata (c. 400 b.c.e.-200 c.e.; The Mahabharata, 1834), as well as the hymns of the Rig Veda (c. 2500 b.c.e.), all of which have importance for the student of epic poetry in the Western tradition.

This survey will be further limited to poetry thought to be composed, and not merely transmitted, without the aid of writing. This restriction necessarily raises some questions: What of ballads or songs which change as they are transmitted? Is not this a form of composition without writing, even if the original composition were “written”? Such questions might be answered when discussion turns to longer compositions, such as narrative songs, which at times seem to exhibit the same behavior. It will be seen that the interplay of “oral” and “written” makes up a separate problem within the field of oral poetics, and ballad study requires critical notions different from those applied to other oral genres.

Finally, this article makes a further distinction between freely improvised poetry existing within a literate culture alongside written work—for example, the work songs and insult-contest verses that can be heard today—and preliterate compositions, which necessarily transmit large amounts of traditional language, motifs, and themes, and so cannot be called improvised in the same way. These poems, usually lengthy and narrative in nature, demand trained composers using generations-old techniques; at every turn of the poem, one comes across fusions of the individual’s creative improvisation with traditional material.

The traditional poems to be discussed are the Greek Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) and Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614); the Old English Beowulf (c. 1000); the Icelandic Poetic Edda (ninth to twelfth centuries; English translations 1923, 1928, 1962, 1997); the Nibelungenlied (c. 1200; English translation, 1848), in Middle High German; and the Old French Chanson de Roland (twelfth century; The Song of Roland, 1880).

Greece

Modern Western culture, for which “illiterate” is a pejorative word, takes writing for granted as something both necessary for civilization and good in itself. However, those who set out to read ancient Greek literature must divest themselves of this, among many other modern attitudes, and think themselves back into a culture which, while it valued speech above most things, did not have at all the same regard for the written word. Ancient Greece was an oral culture, and its early literature is oral literature; it is only when one understands the exigencies of oral composition and the expectations of an audience attuned to the oral art that Greek epic and lyric poetry—even history, oratory, and drama—become fully intelligible.

In Plato’s dialogue Phaedros (c. fourth century b.c.e.; Phaedrus, 1804), Socrates relates the story of the invention of writing; his account provides a good starting point from which to examine Greek attitudes to written art. As Socrates tells it, in the Egyptian region of Naucratis lived the god Thoth, inventor of numbers, geometry, astronomy, and writing. Thoth once asked Thamus, king of the land, to pass on these arts to the citizens, for the good of all. “My discovery will enable the Egyptians to become wiser and better at remembering,” said Thoth, when talk came to the new craft of writing. Thamus refused, however, saying, “This will make men forget, seeing that they will neglect memory and remember things not from within themselves but by faith in the exterior signs.” Writing, concluded the king, would give Thoth’s pupils only the appearance of wisdom; they would lack true teaching (the sort Socrates practiced by dialogue).

Plato’s myth of Thoth focuses attention on three important aspects of oral culture: the role of the performer, that of the audience, and the inevitable effects on both brought about by the technological innovation of writing. Even if widespread literacy is not assumed, writing has a powerful impact. In Plato’s time, the art probably belonged strictly to an educated elite. In the period surveyed in this essay, the Archaic Age (750-490 b.c.e.), even fewer Greeks are likely to have known how to use writing in daily life; writing was, after all, a recent invention, having been introduced by Phoenicians in the eighth century b.c.e. The attitude expressed by the Egyptian Thoth is consistent with early Greek notions about the role of writing as an aid rather than an end in itself, and even then, as an aid appropriate only for certain activities. It was certainly useful for inscriptions, to mark tombs or objects to be dedicated at temples, or to record laws—these are, in fact, the first recorded uses of the art of writing in Greece. The two oldest inscriptions, from the eighth century b.c.e., comprise some verses scratched on ceramic ware: “Whoever of all the dancers now sports the most, gets this,” says a line on a jug found at Dipylon. A drinking vessel says, “Nestor’s cup is good to drink from,” then adduces, by means of a favorable contrast, its own capacity for giving wine. Whereas the first mention of a book comes in the late fifth century b.c.e. and the oldest actual surviving manuscript dates to a century later, writing intended to show possession or to memorialize had long been in use. Entertainment and instruction were the province of oral performers, not of written texts.

Thus, Phaedrus reflects the status of writing and oral performance in early Greek society. Thoth’s conception of writing resembles that of Archaic Age Greeks, who thought in terms of one-way communication directed toward an unspecified audience, including future generations. For example, the Dipylon vase could be passed on, like some modern athletic trophies, annually, without change, its general statement always appropriate to the occasion of a dance contest. The attitude of Thamus, on the other hand, would match archaic modes of thinking about poetry as entertainment: It is an oral performer’s attitude.

It is known from twentieth century fieldwork that oral poetry always involves interaction between performer and audience. Even if the audience does not interrupt to make specific requests or suggestions about the poet’s tale, the poem is shaped by the context of the performance: the time available, the occasion (whether ritual or secular), and, especially, the poet’s perception of what the audience wishes to hear. They may want the “good old stories” or, as Telemachus says in the Odyssey, they may desire “the latest song.” “Old” and “new” are relative terms; the poet’s method of composing remains the same. He relies on his store of memorized traditional material, including both verbatim phrases and large plot structures, to create “new” compositions for each new audience. Every poem is both old—in the sense that each poet’s repertoire comes to include only audience-tested material—and new, since the oral poet always competes with others in the craft and with himself as well, attempting to hone and polish his own compositions.

All of these observations are based on scholarship concerning composition techniques of oral poetry as it exists in many parts of the world today (principally Africa, the Balkans, and Asia), but Archaic Greek poetry makes explicit reference to the same techniques. A principal example is the poet’s reliance on memory. Archaic Greek poetry consistently invokes the Muses, mythological daughters of Mnēmosunē (memory, or reminding). In Homer, as well as in lyric poetry, the Muses are viewed as the repository of all traditions, precisely because they are immortal goddesses and therefore were eyewitnesses to past events (as Homer says in calling on them to remind him of the catalog of ships in the Iliad, book 2). From the Greek standpoint, all poetry is therefore impossible without divine aid in the form of a divinized memory; the poet is automatically a religious figure and his art an act of faith, although the Greeks never make this formulation explicit.

What does the Greek poet remember? The simplest answer is “tradition,” taking that word to mean traditional lore about heroes, ancestors, gods, and events, and also traditional expressions—unusual old words and noncurrent word endings (compare the -th third-person singular verb ending of English “poetic” language), as well as the traditional adjectives attached to certain nouns. These latter adjective-noun combinations preserve a traditional way of looking at reality, and many are extremely old; for example, Homer often describes “fame” (kleos) as “unwithering” (aphthiton). Since the same adjective is frequently used of natural phenomena, a Greek audience would be attuned to think of “fame” as somehow growing like a plant. This perception is not the poet’s invention, but rather an inherited piece of tradition. Sanskrit, a language related to Greek, preserves in its old poetry the exact equivalent of this phrase, in cognate words (sŕavas ạḳsitam). Because Sanskrit and Greek speakers had split from a unified group and taken up residence in their respective lands by 2000 b.c.e. at the latest, this agreement in poetic language must go back to the time when both languages had a common dialect and common art; this is an Indo-European poetic tradition, as modern scholars believe. The idea of “undying fame”—what Achilles in the Iliad seeks and wins—is preserved because this phrase reflects the very ideology of the poetry itself: Personal heroic reputations are undying because they are recalled and renewed through generations of poets and audiences.

To put this in other terms and to return to the example of Plato’s Thoth, one might say that for an oral poet to reject or pit himself against his tradition would be a contradiction in terms. The poet lives by tradition, as it lives through him. The powerful invention of writing, however, begins to erode tradition, offering a competing means of ordering reality, one which purports to be more authoritative. As the work of Albert Lord and others has shown, oral poetic technique begins to die out when a region’s poets begin to accept the idea of writing and of “songbooks.” Plato’s Thamus, then, is absolutely correct in reprimanding the inventor of writing. The unease produced by the introduction of writing into ancient Greece appears in subtle hints near the end of the Archaic Age, when poets such as Xenophanes begin to criticize traditional concepts of the gods and the idea begins to take hold that myth is something subversive, false, or marginal. In contrast, for Homer, at the beginning of the Archaic Age, the word muthos is simply an authoritative speech act: a word, tale, or command.

A word should be added about the oral audience. Far from being primitive consumers of art who merely wished to hear the names of famous ancestors, they were doubtless so familiar with oral art in everyday life that a high standard of criticism could evolve among them. The author of the Hymn to Apollo (third century b.c.e.), one of the so-called Homeric hymns, commends his poem to the audience in the personal note intruded at the end of the composition and bids the audience to compare his work with that of others which they hear, to spread his fame. A group of listeners valued for the potential favor they might do a poet, preserving his reputation, would always be treated to the height of a performer’s art. Such interaction between artist and audience nourished the high art of Homer.

Iliad and Odyssey

Any discussion of traditional Western poetry should begin with Homer, because the study of the monumental poems attributed to him has continued throughout the Western literary tradition and first sparked the rediscovery of oral literature’s distinctive techniques. From antiquity, there have been questions about the date, composition, and authorship of the two epics. In essence, the Homeric Question (as this collection of uncertainties has come to be called) grows from a lack of knowledge concerning a certain period in Greek history, the Dark Age, which extended from the fall of Mycenaean civilization (c. 1600-1100 b.c.e.) to the eighth century b.c.e., when writing in alphabetic form came to Greece from the Phoenicians and when Greek social institutions assumed their classical shapes.

The Homeric poems can be dated to the eighth century b.c.e. through certain indications of language and content (for example, mention of an oracle at Delphi, of iron, of seated statues). Why not assume, then, that a gifted literate poet of the eighth century, perhaps living in a Greek colony of Asia Minor (as tradition maintained), realized the usefulness of the newly imported alphabet for recording poetry and set himself to write one or two lengthy heroic poems about nearly mythical events of four hundred years before, the siege and fall of Troy? More is currently known, however, about the Mycenaean Age than about the Dark Age. The remains of a great city close to the traditional site of Troy were found at the end of the nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann. In 1952, Michael Ventris, a British linguist, finally deciphered the language of the clay tablets found at Mycenaean Age sites on Crete and mainland Greece and discovered that it was an early form of Greek, used to record details of palace administration. These discoveries indicated that Homer’s poems contain exact reminiscences of the heroic age they celebrate: a boar’s tooth helmet in the Iliad, book 10, a body shield in the Iliad, book 6, and many other objects that are known to have gone out of use by 1000 b.c.e. are matched by real objects actually dug from Greek earth. Even the long catalog of ships in the Iliad, book 2, has been found to contain traces of very old authentic information. Words found elsewhere only in the newly deciphered Linear B Greek tablets appear in Homer’s poetry.

Without a written tradition, one might ask how the memory of such words and objects could be preserved in the four-hundred-year gap between the war at Troy and Homer’s own time, if not orally? Linear B writing certainly died out with the downfall of Mycenaean sites around 1100 b.c.e., and, at any rate, it seems never to have been used for literary purposes. On the other hand, if one attempts to explain the Iliad and the Odyssey as memorized poems, recited verbatim for centuries, there remains the obvious objection that the poems do not present a consistently archaic, Mycenaean picture, but rather a cultural mélange. Even the argument that an eighth century b.c.e. poet could have had access to nonpoetic, oral recollections of distant objects and customs, which he then incorporated into a chronologically haphazard poem, fails to explain the uniqueness of Homeric poetry, for such an argument leaves aside the most important obstacle, the peculiarly mixed Homeric dialect, which linguists affirm could never have been the speech of one poet, time, or place. In other words, the very diction, as well as the content, of the Iliad and the Odyssey is the product of a long evolution. What does this make of Homer? A series of poets? An editor?

One tradition of Homeric scholarship maintained that the poems were not both the work of one poet, the shadowy Homer, but showed differences of approach and style, leading critics to postulate several authors. With renewed vigor, the scientific nineteenth century German tradition of scholarship, equipped with more exact observations about inconsistencies of plot and language between and within the poems, began to “analyze” the Iliad and the Odyssey into constituent smaller parts—“lays” or “songs” about separate themes, such as the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus, which had been stitched together to form larger compositions. F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which proposed a sixth century b.c.e. editing of the shorter lays into longer poems, can be seen as the first of such “analyst” attempts at explaining Homer’s legacy. When, however, by the end of the nineteenth century, these critics had still failed to agree on the scheme of subdivision for the poems, the field was left open for fresh interpretations.

In 1928, a young American scholar, Milman Parry, convinced of the essential unity of Homer’s poems, demonstrated in detail how it was possible that Homeric poetry could be traditional—the product of evolution—yet the work of one man. Parry investigated the occurrence of “formulas” in the poems, the recurring groups of words “used under the same metrical conditions to express an essential idea,” as he defined the term. He pointed out that the use of certain adjectives or “epithets” to modify proper names, such as “much-enduring Odysseus” or “swift-footed Achilles,” followed a system that was metrically controlled. Thus, noted Parry, Odysseus would be called “much-enduring, shining Odysseus” (polutlas dios Odusseus) when the hexameter line that the poet was composing required an ending of a certain metrical shape; when the poet needed an adjective to modify the name Odysseus in a line one syllable longer at its break, or caesura, he would invariably use “wily” (polumetis Odusseus).

Two principles governed the system. First, for each commonly used proper name there was, with fractional exception, one and only one epithet to fit each possible metrical position; this tendency Parry referred to as the “thrift” of the system. Second, the system was extensive, applying to some fifty or more figures in the poems and accounting for the epithets used in a variety of metrical conditions. The important conclusion that Parry drew from the existence of such a thorough system was this: No literate, writing poet could or would have wished to develop it. It could have evolved only through some generations of poets who needed a system to enable rapid composition, in which an epithet would be ready at hand whenever they had to mention a proper name. Parry’s investigation of the diction of Vergil and Apollonius Rhodius supported his conclusion. The writing poets used multiple epithets for one and the same metrical position and for proper-name combinations.

In his 1928 work on the traditional epithet, Parry hinted at his next ground-breaking hypothesis but did not make it explicit. Only after an initial trip in 1933 to Yugoslavia, where he studied the singing of contemporary nonliterate epic poets, did Parry suggest that Homer resembled modern “singers of tales,” the Yugoslavian guslars. Homer was an oral poet, and the formulaic nature of his language confirmed this, for the Serbo-Croatian songs that Parry collected between 1933 and 1935, with the help of his student and coworker Albert B. Lord, were highly formulaic in precisely the same ways. After Parry’s accidental death in 1935, Lord continued his teacher’s brilliant work, extending his investigations into such matters as traditional motifs and themes in the epic poetry of Greece, Yugoslavia, and medieval England, France, and Germany.

Lord’s book The Singer of Tales (1960) contains valuable observations from his field experience that can be applied to all oral traditional poems. First, Lord pointed out that the performance of poems using the traditional style of formulaic composition differed from singer to singer, from region to region, and even from performance to performance of the same poem by the same singer. It is consequently not possible to speak of any fixed text for any given song in the tradition; put another way, the Iliad or the Odyssey that is available to the modern reader is only one performance of a long line of poems on the same subject. This fluidity of tradition explains why inconsistencies of plot may occur: not because a poet cannot keep details straight, but because there are “formulaic” themes and motifs, offering at each turn various possibilities for elaboration or condensation of traditional material.

A modern oral poet, such as Lord studied, might sing a version of a Serbo-Croatian epic at a coffeehouse during the Muslim Ramadan festival; when asked to sing for a collector of poems, the same poet could expand his version, add other plot details, yet still claim to be telling the same story. Lord found that for these singers and thus, by extension, for other oral poets, “the same poem” usually meant the same basic theme, not word-for-word correspondence. From their boyhood apprenticeships, the guslars had soaked up thematic variations, which they developed in a style of semi-improvisation, always with a view toward their audience and its knowledge of hundreds of other performances. One master singer, Avdo Medjedović (whose poems are in the Parry collection), knew fifty-eight epics in 1935. Medjedović dictated to Lord at least two poems that were more than twelve thousand lines in length, thus providing evidence that the Iliad and the Odyssey—sixteen thousand and twelve thousand lines, respectively—could have been the result of actual performances. In addition, Lord’s observation that the songs that Medjedović sang were “finer,” in the singer’s opinion, when sung to the attentive individual audience that had requested the performance led him to postulate that the same dictation situation was the origin of the Homeric poems.

Lord’s hypothesis would account for the perplexing question of the manner in which oral compositions, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, finally were handed down as texts. Such a scenario also avoids the pitfalls of postulating an oral poet who becomes a literate poet. As Lord found, such poets gradually lost their ability, and within a generation or two of the introduction of songbooks, the oral art of the singers tended to die out. A true oral poet would, in fact, have no desire to use writing—certainly not as an aid to memory, for which he already possessed an economical nonliterate system; and, in the traditional mode of performance before an audience, there would be no reason to switch modes, to write for an unseen audience. There remains the possibility that Homer, coming at the end of an oral tradition already threatened by literacy in nonpoetic spheres, foresaw the usefulness of the new medium and found a scribe to record his masterpieces. In this way, the poems would be at once “oral” and “written.” Lord later noted that, for a literate person living in an area where oral poetry is performed, the traditional oral style is easy to imitate, and thus, there can be “transitional” poetry of a mixed character. Lord was willing to view much of Old English religious poetry, which appears to be formulaic to a degree, as transitional.

The Parry-Lord theory, as it is called, is not the only way to examine oral literature, but it is the most useful for traditional narrative poetry. Lyric, ballads, praise poems, and other genres may require different methodology, as Ruth Finnegan pointed out in Oral Poetry (1977). Aside from this, there have been misunderstandings and overextensions of the Parry-Lord type of analysis. The classicist H. T. Wade-Gery said in The Poet of the Iliad (1952) of the opposition to the theory of Parry and Lord, “As Darwin seemed to many to have removed the finger of God from the creation of the world and of man, so Milman Parry has seemed to some to have removed the creative poet from the Iliad and the Odyssey.” Lord was the first to admit that his studies of Serbo-Croatian poems were valid only as outlines of broad principles, not as normative models for oral poetry, but sometimes his strictures went unheeded. Perhaps the most concerted reaction to the theory came immediately after the widespread dissemination of its principles in the 1960’s, following the publication of The Singer of Tales.

Later, however, such concern with “creativity” was seen for what it is: a remnant of the Romantic conception of the poet. Neither Homer nor the Beowulf poet nor the countless anonymous singers of oral poems were concerned with being “creative” in the modern sense; instead, the oral poet sought fresh variation within a traditional structure of themes and diction. To use the Greek poet Pindar’s metaphor (a very old one), “there are many roads of song.”

The seminal work of Parry and Lord, then, taught literary critics to view poetry from traditional oral cultures in a new way. Rather than misapplying standards based on written texts to the repetitive elements of oral poetry—whether of word, phrase, scene, or theme—one must focus on just such formulaic elements to see how the individual singer has modified and rearranged the tradition in order to make meaning.

The Iliad and the Odyssey provide countless examples of such repetition. One does not have to insist on the noun-epithet as the basis of the formulaic analysis of these poems. In fact, the term “formula” and its definition are in dispute, especially in Homeric studies. There is much to be learned from the poet’s manipulation of higher-level formulaic elements of a poem: the motif and the theme. The motif, or type-scene, is the recurring use of many of the same details—but not necessarily in the same words—to tell about arming for battle, sending off messengers or a ship, feasting, getting up, going to bed, dueling, and a number of other actions that give weight and texture to long poems.

One such type-scene depicting the sacrifice and consumption of cattle, builds in the Odyssey to a central theme. The suitors’ continual sacrifice of Odysseus’s cattle is both the generating circumstance for Telemachus’s decision to rescue his father’s house and the reason Odysseus, on returning to the island of Ithaca, must slaughter the suitors. The seemingly inconsequential sacrifice scenes at other points in the poem gain resonance from the centrality of these first and final cattle-kills.

As an example, when Telemachus arrives at Nestor’s city of Pylos in book 3, he encounters the old Trojan War veteran performing a huge sacrifice of cattle on the shore; there follows the most detailed use of the type-scene, describing in each particular the gilding of the beasts’ horns, the ritual cutting, the cooking, and the feast. Homer expands here on the capsule motif of sacrifice, it seems, precisely because Pylos is meant to form a contrast to the situation on Telemachus’s Ithaca, where (with fatal consequences) sacrifice and feasting are conducted in an incorrect manner. Again, sacrifice becomes all-important during the wanderings of Odysseus. The episode of the Cyclop’s cave in book 9 presents another “improper” sacrifice which, by repetition of certain key phrases, hauntingly recalls the real purpose of sacrifice—nourishment of men and honor of gods—but refers to the eating of men, raw, by the monster. Finally, the same double allegiance, of reference and resonance, gives added meaning to the sacrifice of the Sun’s cattle by Odysseus’s disobedient crew, described in book 12: Here, the type-scene of sacrifice once more applies to a wrong sacrifice but foreshadows the “right” (in Greek terms) killing of the suitors, who, like Odysseus’s crew, ate what was not theirs.

The type-scene is similar to a musical refrain, except that it never has to be repeated exactly to be effective. The theme, on the other hand, is more like the key signature of a musical piece: It establishes the limits within which the piece is to be “played” against the possible range of all themes. The theme is not bound to any one situation in the plot but, rather, underlies many plot events and can surface in the form of imagery or action or speech. The Iliad and the Odyssey illustrate the tendency of themes to combine, contract, or expand in narration. In this way, long narratives approach both myth and ritual (sharing common narrative progressions, such as the “return from the dead” theme) as well as the folktale. The latter can be analyzed in terms of “multiforms”—that is, variant tellings of the same essential action, with changes of detail in each version. The theme, too, is multiform—the return of Odysseus from Troy is simply another form of the theme (also narrated in the Odyssey, in book 11) of the return from Hades. In the Odyssey, this theme is combined with two others, also familiar from folktales: the initiation of a youth and the waiting of a wife (in this case, further combined with a wooing theme, which is found by itself in other Greek poems, such as the “Suitors of Helen” attributed to Hesiod).

The Iliad offers an even clearer example of the combination and reduplication of traditional themes. The main plot is centered on the narrative theme of the “withdrawal in anger” of the hero Achilles from battle. Introduced in the first book of the poem, the theme does not find its conclusion until the return of Achilles and the death of Hector. Along the way, it engenders another traditional theme, the “death of a substitute”—clearly a ritual theme as well—in this case, the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ alter ego. Important as it is in connection with Achilles, the theme is not confined to him within the poem. Instead, like the type-scene, it is employed to counterpoint Achilles and other characters in the epic.

The theme of withdrawal exists as a narrative possibility whenever a hero retires from the fighting. A striking example occurs when Hector, returning during a lull in the fighting to his home in Troy, encounters Paris, who has been dallying with his abducted bride, the Greek Helen. “It is not good to put anger in your spirit like this,” Hector tells Paris on their meeting, as he berates him for leaving the fight. In reality, anger has nothing to do with the withdrawal of Paris; he had been snatched magically back to Troy by Aphrodite when he was about to lose a duel with Menelaus on the plain. Why does Hector mention anger? An earlier generation of critics maintained that Homer here bungled his plot. Now, however, one can explain such words on Hector’s part as the working of thematic intrusion: Withdrawal in the tradition, as a theme, usually implies the anger of the hero. Here, the lesser figure Paris only becomes more distinct from the heroic Achilles by the poet’s mention of this theme, tied as it is in the main narrative to the anger of Achilles. It is an artful use of traditional material.

Similarly, Homer uses the withdrawal theme to structure another tale-within-a-tale, the story of Meleager, told by Phoenix in book 9 to induce Achilles, his ward, to go back to the fight. The Meleager story mirrors Achilles’ own situation: He has retired in anger from a war and cannot be made to return until it is too late. Again, the smaller narrative (like the type-scene of sacrifice in the Odyssey) is used to foretell part of the larger story; indeed, Achilles will return to battle too late to save his dearest companion, Patroclus. In this example, one sees the essence not only of narrative themes but also of the importance in an oral culture of the narrative itself: Oral culture needs oral poetry to enforce its morality. The story becomes an exemplum, indicating the best heroic behavior for the young Achilles by reminding him of past heroic deeds and their consequences. Action as well as story is governed by tradition.

Homeric poetry is worth dwelling on because it is preeminently aware of its heritage as oral poetry. In invoking the Muse, the source of all traditional lore concerning the past, the poet acknowledges that what he hears from the goddess is more important than anything he himself might invent. In celebrating Achilles and Odysseus, the Iliad and the Odyssey make the same acknowledgment: Both heroes are also poets, Achilles singing the deeds of the ancestors as he sits in his hut, Odysseus telling his own adventures to the Phaeacian court.

Non-Homeric oral poetry

Although the earliest extant Greek lyric poetry postdates Homer, one cannot assume that epic poetry was “invented” before lyric; indeed, it is clear from the Iliad and the Odyssey that Homer knew other genres of poetry. He pictures the social use of genres which were to become familiar from later poets. Wedding songs can be paralleled in the work of Sappho in the late seventh and early sixth century b.c.e.; laments are the first songs in a long oral tradition that is alive today in rural Greece; choral maiden songs were composed later by Alcman and Pindar; and hymns to the gods were later elaborated as long narrative poems such as the Homeric hymns. It must be assumed that these later poems simply continued a tradition of oral poetry as old, if not older, than that of Homeric epic. It may even be that epic verse developed from the simpler meters of lyric poetry, as some scholars suggest (see G. Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter, 1974). This would explain some of the richness of Homer’s poems: They incorporate the varied themes and emotions of the range of concurrent lyric poetry known to the poet Homer, that poetry that closely preserves the folk traditions of the Greek people.

Early Greek lyric poetry shows its oral heritage in several important ways: first, by its directness of style, simple syntax, and use of concrete, often stunning, images (qualities much admired by Ezra Pound and the Imagists in the early twentieth century); second, by its use of formulaic expressions, many of which are also found in Homer (“golden Aphrodite”; “shining children”; “blazing fire”). These devices were meant to be appreciated by an audience of listeners rather than by page-turning readers; therefore, clarity and immediate effect were crucial for the oral composer. Another consequence of this poetry’s constant attention to the presence of an audience is its “social” quality. There is no such thing as “confessional” poetry in early Greece. Instead, there are a number of personas, or masks, for the poetic performer, which can also be found to be traditional. A good example occurs in the work of the Boeotian composer, Hesiod.

Hesiod

Hesiodic poetry seems to be contemporary with Homeric epic, with which it shares dactylic hexameter meter and traditional formulaic style, but the two major works attributed to Hesiod are markedly unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly in that Hesiod’s poetry refers to its own maker. In the opening section of Theogonia (c. 700 b.c.e.; Theogony, 1728), Hesiod describes his encounter on Mount Helicon with the Muses, while he was pasturing sheep, and he tells of how he received a scepter, a symbol of power, along with the gift of singing about the origins of the gods. This “song” which the Muses taught him (note the oral figure) is then resung by the poet as the substance of the remaining Theogony. The origin of all from Chaos and Night, the overthrow of Uranus by Cronus and of Cronus by Zeus, who then orders the cosmos—all of these remind one of portions in the Iliad in which a wisdom figure (Nestor, for example, or Phoenix) refers to semidivinized abstract notions in order to explain the workings of the world. Clearly, the Theogony is in an old genre; similar explanatory cosmologies are known to have been recited at kingship rituals in the ancient Near East, whence some of Hesiod’s own tales also seem to have originated. The innovation in Hesiod’s own treatment appears to be his singing of the song in the role of a shepherd (a motif remarkably similar to that in the story of Caedmon, the Old English poet). That this shepherd is a persona, and not necessarily the “real” poet, becomes clear from Hesiod’s Erga kai Emerai (c. 700 b.c.e.; Works and Days, 1618), in which the poet is at one time a farmer and is also a cunning “adviser” to his brother Perses, as well as to local princes. The brother, says Hesiod, wronged him over a dispute about their patrimony. Zeus is also counseled, along with the princes (his earthly representatives), as Hesiod employs the traditional and widespread “Instruction of Princes” genre. An intriguing poem, the Works and Days uses the myth of the Five Ages of Man, as well as the stories of Prometheus’s invention of fire and of Pandora’s box, to point its instruction. Ethics for Hesiod includes “works” as well as a kind of faith, so that the detailed agricultural and ritual admonishments that conclude the poem are organically related to the myth section. Furthermore, it is the persona of the farmer/adviser that unites the two seemingly disparate parts.

Like that of Hesiod, all Greek poetry in the early period instructs and addresses its audience, at times explicitly, at other times by implication, through the exteriorizing of inner emotions. The startling variety of meters and dialects in which Greek lyric is composed cannot conceal the basic similarity in function: The poetry is targeted for limited, local, chosen groups but uses a common Greek store of images and formulas to underline its poetic messages. Inevitably, the poet is viewed as a craftsperson—for example, as a maker (poiētēs in Greek) of words; his craft is a social institution. The following survey of lyric poetry centers on the ways in which the poets’ view of their craft, as reflected in their verses, and their acknowledgment of an audience, point to the oral origins of such poetry.

Archilochus

For the soldier-poet Archilochus of Paros (c. 680-c. 640 b.c.e.), poetry is clearly delineated as a craft, one on a level with his other trade: “The servant of Ares I am, and I understand the Muses’ lovely gift as well,” he writes in one elegiac couplet. Some of Archilochus’s poems are set immediately before or after battles—the poet warns about the tactics of an enemy or talks of his bread “won by the spear and eaten while I lean on the spear”—but Archilochus was most noteworthy in the eyes of later antiquity for the attitude he takes toward military life. His persona is that of the dissident warrior; perhaps the audience was meant to think of Achilles. In one poem, Archilochus bids farewell to the shield that he has thrown away in flight from battle; in other verses, he encourages a watch party to get drunk and pours scorn on a dandified general. Allegiance to the Muse overrules that to the god of war. Archilochus’s own martial career as an early colonizer of the northern Aegean island Thasos may have inspired the poems; more likely, this “warrior” is another persona. The poet has a second mask, like Hesiod: He is a dangerous satirist, a practitioner of the art known as iambus (from which the term “iambic” derives, although the word originally designated a genre). Iambus is the art of blame-poetry, venomous attacks of which are said to have led Archilochus’s victims to suicide. Scholars know from other oral cultures that such beliefs in the power of destroying reputation are taken seriously and have real effect. Archilochus practices his invective artfully, attacking in the voice of another, for example, a woman who spurned him, when he makes a character in a dialogue poem say “her bloom has withered” and insinuates that she is less than chaste.

Archilochus’s poetry often resembles a conversation that the audience is invited to overhear. Perhaps the best example is his address to his own soul: “Spirit, boiling with incurable woes, get up. Defend yourself, hurl your chest against the foes.” It is preeminently Archilochean in combining war images (soul as fighter) with advice (“Do not boast when you win or weep in your house when you lose”) and ending with a pragmatic command (“Know what sort of rhythm moves men”). All of his verse convinces and holds an audience through such devices, but rather than being deceived into identifying Archilochus as the first genuinely individual voice in the European lyric tradition (a claim that is often made), one should recognize that his art was the product of a long oral tradition of personal poetry, as conventional as epic poetry in its use of framing techniques, imagery, and personas.

Archilochus, both personal and public composer, warrior as well as poet of the drinking party, provides a good starting point from which to approach two poles of the later Greek tradition, which may be termed the “personal”—represented by Alcaeus and Sappho—and the “social”—as seen here in the Athenian lawgiver Solon’s poems and those of the sixth century Theognis of Megara.

Alcaeus and Sappho

Alcaeus and Sappho both lived on the island of Lesbos in the late seventh and early sixth century. They enormously influenced later European poetry, but because later poets, in their imitations, popularized the images of a jovial, bibulous party poet (Alcaeus) and an intensely personal bluestocking poetess (Sappho), modern critics find it difficult to hear the authentic voices of these consummate lyricists. This is particularly true because later written poetry, as often happens, also adapted Sappho’s and Alcaeus’s oral-oriented devices and settings, the immediate addresses and allusions to ongoing festivities or rituals among a small circle of friends. Consequently, one comes to their poetry with a false sense of familiarity. What is conventional in the written poems of Horace, for example, should very often be treated as actual utterance in poems by Sappho and Alcaeus: Horace, in Rome of the first century b.c.e., could not have known firsthand the sort of social occasions about which he writes, whereas Sappho and Alcaeus could not have avoided participating in such local institutions as the kōmos (festival with procession), the wedding feast, maidens’ festivals, or the symposium (men’s drinking party). In an oral culture, it makes no sense to compose poems “as if” one were attending such occasions, because the actual occasions demanded poetic accompaniment to be performed on the spot.

Alcaeus explicitly acknowledges an audience at such occasions, while Sappho hints at one, keeping in the foreground her own persona. Still, the assumption that both poets are composing for a present audience must guide interpretation. For Alcaeus and Sappho, the audience can include ancestors; as in Homer, the notion of fame through poetry alone is the overriding incitement to correct behavior. Thus, Alcaeus, in one of his many poems dealing with the local politics of Lesbos, uses an enduring image as he calls on his companions to “bail out” the ship of state, lest it sink, and tells them to “run to harbor” lest they “shame by cowardice the good forebears beneath the ground.” Sappho similarly speaks of memory in an address to an unnamed woman, implying that only poetry can give true immortality—a persistent theme of Archaic poems, one easily understood in a culture where even the word for fame (kleos) means, literally, “that which is heard”: “Dead, you will lie, neither memory nor desire of you will there be,” says Sappho, “for you do not have any of the roses of Pieria [the home of the Muses].” To exercise memory, in composing poetry, is to ensure that one is remembered.

In their use of the hymn genre, Alcaeus and Sappho illustrate the ways in which traditional public poetic forms can have personal reference. Alcaeus, who wrote hymns to Apollo, Dionysos, and the Dioscuri, among other deities, calls on the gods to aid in defeating his enemies in the city-state and to bring him back from exile. He combines hymns with symposium poems—the sort of verses designed to muster his group of friends by self-reference, similar to his “ship of state” poems. Sappho, on the other hand, uses the hymn form several times in calling for rescue from love affairs. Her most famous and only completely intact poem beseeches Aphrodite to withdraw her forces; Sappho fills the hymnic framework of the poem with an exquisite flashback description of Aphrodite’s previous aid—how she came in a sparrow-drawn chariot and promised to make Sappho’s lover reciprocate. Aphrodite is doubly praised in the poem, which attests that her promise was so great in the past as to involve the poet in new love difficulties, prompting the new cry for help.

Aside from their use of traditional, socially fixed oral forms, and their nod to the role of memory in poetry, Sappho and Alcaeus alike compose poetry to consolidate their audiences—that is, their “friend groups” (the philoi, or “beloved,” a concept strange to English). In this, they show the tight bond that oral poetry enforces between performer and audience: Sappho’s laments for young women who are growing up, moving away, or marrying can be understood as addressed to the remaining group of girls (in a culture where gender segregation was the norm). This applies even to her famous ode that seems to detail with clinical precision the physical effects of jealousy that Sappho feels on seeing a girl she knows next to a man. In reality, this was probably an elaborate praise poem for the girl, using traditional metaphors and the device of a “foil,” or fictitious rival figure. Alcaeus’s most apparently “personal” poems—for example, his exhortations to come drink with him—are also public in that the drinking is understood to take place at a symposium, where serious political talk mixes with philosophical meditation and relaxation.

Solon

In an oral culture such as that of Archaic Greece, the role of poetry in politics cannot be underestimated; even in the “enlightened” fifth century, rhetoric and poetry swayed Athens to a disproportionate and dangerous degree. Solon (639-559 b.c.e.), the Athenian lawgiver, exemplifies the alloy of poetic and political craft. In one poem, he admits to using the “arrangement of words” (kosmos), rather than political speeches, to persuade Athens. This is a sort of sympathetic verbal magic: ordering words begets order in the state. In other poems, he urged the Athenians to remember his reforms. As does Hesiod, Solon frames his poetry as “instruction” to the audience—in this case, the entire city. The instructions often take the mythic form of Hesiodic discourses on abstract concepts which are half divine, such as Justice (Dikē). Solon’s long poem addressed to the Muses, daughters of memory, for example, describes in parts the way in which Zeus pursues wrongdoers through their descendants: Like the poet, dependent on memory, Zeus, too, “does not forget,” and it is essential that the audience, also, remember this. Memory, therefore, works on three levels, making this poem a paradigm for the role of poetry in oral society.

Theognis

How do audiences remember? In an oral culture, they must be constantly reminded, and this is where oral art comes to the fore. With the increasing use of writing, such functional poetry as Solon’s, meant for performance, was soon being memorialized for future generations. A valuable hint of the procedure survives in the traditional lore about another “political” poet, Theognis of Megara (sixth century b.c.e.), a city near Athens. His poetry, in elegiac couplets, about fourteen hundred lines of which survive, may have been put on deposit in a local temple. An allusion to a “seal” on the poems preventing theft may mean that Theognis actually sealed the verses up with wax on the papyrus roll; it has been suggested that the “seal” may also have a metaphorical significance, indicating that the specific performer-audience relationship which this instructional poetry illustrates between an adviser (Theognis) and his young friend (Kyrnos) will never be duplicated. Because the poet has given Kyrnos immortality (“I have given you wings with which to fly over the sea,” as the poet says), the bond will never slip. As it appears, Theognis uses Kyrnos as a foil in order to counsel his city, Megara, and the poetry, like Solon’s, thus embodies the reciprocal relationship characteristic of oral culture: Performers need audiences; Greece remembered Theognis.

Choral poetry

A discussion of the unique combination of public and personal which defines early Greek poetry would not be complete without mention of choral poetry, that elaborate art form that used words, music, and dance to celebrate important community rites. The earliest representative of the form, Alcman, active in Sparta in the seventh century b.c.e., displays the characteristics marking this increasingly important poetry. In his parthenion (maiden song), for example, the local mythology of Sparta combines with gnomic utterances (“Do not try to fly to heaven; no one should try to wed Aphrodite”) and details of the immediate occasion, such as the praise of the local maidens through extensive comparisons to traditional beauties: stars, sun, moon, horses, and goddesses. Only the introduction of strophic structure (the format in which two identical verse units are capped by a third, differing in meter), which might have occurred in the sixth century b.c.e., differentiates Alcman’s choral song from those composed in the fifth century flowering of the genre, both in the choruses of Athenian tragedy and in the works of Bacchylides and Pindar.

Beowulf

“One might say that each song in oral tradition has its original within it and even reflects the origin of the very genre to which it belongs.” This observation by Albert Lord, though meant to be general, might apply specifically to Beowulf (c. 1000), the earliest full-length Germanic language epic that has survived. Although this poem was probably composed in the eighth century, its historical context is that of the early sixth century on the Continent and in Scandinavia; the story was likely brought to England by the migrating Angles and Saxons. This is prima facie evidence for the conservative nature of the poem, a trait often noticed in other oral compositions: The Serbo-Croatian songs that Lord and Parry found were often about battles fought five hundred years previously, such as that at Kosovo Polje in the fourteenth century. The Nibelungenlied (c. 1200; English translation, 1848), Cantar de mío Cid (early thirteenth century; Chronicle of the Cid, 1846; better known as Poem of the Cid), and The Song of Roland all share this characteristic.

In the case of Beowulf, as clearly as in the Greek epics, the oral origin of the poem is made explicit by the poet’s own references to oral poems in the narrative, so that Beowulf is conservative in its view of poetry as well as in its historical outlook. As in the Iliad and the Odyssey, when bards are presented composing poetry, one should not expect exact depiction of the process by which the narrative itself was composed: There is always the possibility that the poet is archaizing, recalling the more glorious poetic as well as heroic past, when oral composers held a higher place in society. The very existence of this “backward look” is important; it is the seal of a poem’s traditional content.

The origin of a poem such as Beowulf can be viewed within the Old English epic in the important scene starting at line 867. As the Danes return on horseback from the site of Grendel’s plunge, a retainer of their king recites the exploit,

A man proved of old, evoker of stories,Who held in his memory multitude on multitudeOf the sagas of the dead, found now a new songIn words well-linked: the man began againTo weave in his subtlety the exploit of Beowulf.

This sort of instant praise poetry is not, however, simply a direct restatement of the hero’s deed. The “evoker of stories” instead praises Beowulf by beginning with the story of Sigemund, who had a similar exploit (killing a dragon), and he ends with a mention of the blameworthy Heremod, an early Danish king, the complete opposite of Beowulf. There is no mention of the way in which he actually praised the maiming of Grendel by the contemporary hero; it could well be that what the old retainer composed in fact made little or no reference to Beowulf. Surprising as this might seem, it would fit with what can be seen in the Iliad, in the episode just mentioned above: The present is continually set into its past heroic context in this oral traditional material.

That something like the horseback poem of the retainer could have occurred in early times is suggested by the Roman historian Tacitus’s account of Germanic tribesmen, who, he reported, sang the histories of their ancestors before battles and at night in their camps. This urge to turn the past into incentive for the present lies at the root of heroic poetry as well as praise poetry, the kernel form of the epic. In the song of the retainer, which resembles Greek praise poetry in its use of a “negative foil” figure (the blamed character), one can see the kernel blossoming into a full-fledged narrative.

As in the analysis of the Greek epics, the notion of type-scene and theme proves useful in establishing connections between Beowulf and oral composition. The analysis of the low-level formula—the repeated phrase or word—is less conclusive; Beowulf appears to be oral because it appears to have a high percentage of formulas or formula-types (repeated syntactical groupings such as epithet and noun), but the statistical method should not be relied on completely. It has recently been shown that poems known to have been written and signed by Cynewulf, probably in the ninth century, would have to be classified as “oral” if the same counting methods were applied. It could be that both Cynewulf’s poems and the epic Beowulf are transitional products of the meeting of an oral tradition with a learned, Christianized, literate society. This would explain the seemingly incongruous elements of Christian faith in the heroic poem. Whatever the results of the diction-oriented analysis, the occurrence of traditional type-scenes and themes in Beowulf is important in itself and may be taken to show the poem’s oral heritage.

Beowulf has its start in an arrangement of type-scenes remarkably like that of the Odyssey: A hero sets out by boat, is met on landing, is greeted and entertained, finds important information, and acts on it to the advancement of his own heroic career. In the Odyssey, the sequence is repeated, once for Telemachus (like Beowulf, a young hero accompanied by a small group) and once for Odysseus (books 5 through 13). Beowulf, however, acts immediately; the poem is consequently much shorter. Odysseus and Telemachus, on the other hand, act only on return to Ithaca, where their reunion and slaying of the suitors forms the grand finale. In this development, conditions of performance must dictate which themes will be doubled and which contracted, how many type-scenes will be inserted, and how large they will be allowed to grow.

The Beowulf-poet handles themes with as much dexterity as Homer, although his stock of type-scenes seems smaller. An example is the “taunt of Unferth” scene. The taunt is itself a genre in oral society, as the Homeric epics and modern African examples make clear. Here, the taunt is expanded to contain a thematic narrative remarkably like the theme of the surrounding poem: the underwater exploits of Beowulf. Unferth, a retainer of the Danish king Hrothgar, asks Beowulf on arrival whether he is the man who lost a swimming-match against Breca. Beowulf’s reply is an elaborate, suspenseful narrative of a fight with sea-demons—the “correct” version of the story, unlike Unferth’s, and a foreshadowing of his defeat of Grendel’s mother beneath the lake. Beowulf (like Odysseus) acts the part of the oral poet. Is it not significant, then, that he wins over the final monster, not with Unferth’s donated sword Hrunting, but with the “blade of old-time” found in the den of Grendel, which only Beowulf among heroes can lift? His personal weapon, like his personal story, is the one to surpass the competing stories of heroic action; fame, in an oral culture, tunes out the noise of rumor.

As well as containing hints of its own origin, Beowulf has one scene that might point to the kind of poetry that ultimately replaced it. The introduction of Grendel into the narrative describes his approach to the hall of the Danes where he had daily heard singing—and the song consists of nothing less than the creation of the world by God. As such, this singing strongly resembles the compositions attributed to Caedmon in a well-known section of Bede’s history of the English Church. Caedmon was in the habit of leaving the nightly entertainments at Whitby Abbey because he had never learned songs, Bede reports. One night, guarding the stables, Caedmon dreamed that he was asked to sing the creation of the world; he did so, and the next morning recited the poem to his superiors, who from that time on used him to put stories from religious works into verse. Caedmon clearly was an oral composer; from Bede’s viewpoint, his gift was “divine,” since he knew no literature. However, it was through such recruits to Christian tradition that the oral art of the older native singers eventually was lost—the beginning of the end can be seen in the Beowulf-poet’s knowledge of this theological genre.

Poetic Edda

The Icelandic compositions known as the Poetic Edda or the Edda (ninth to twelfth centuries; English translations 1923, 1928, 1962, 1997) provide more valuable evidence for a quite ancient traditional diction and meter in Germanic poetry. Phrases composed of the same words (with slight sound changes) can be found in the Poetic Edda and in Old High German and Old English poetry, and must therefore be considered common Germanic. This means that the art of composing such poetry came about before the Germanic dialects had split into separate languages. Furthermore, the preservation in both Old English and Icelandic verse of the same four-stress, alliterative metrical line, composed of two clearly distinguished half lines, argues for a common metrical heritage—this would explain, in part, why similar phrases are preserved in different languages.

What are the implications of these discoveries for the criticism of the poetry? Given that the form of Eddic and other Germanic verse is very old, one is encouraged to look for signs of antiquity both in content and in structural elements—the type-scenes and themes.

The most obvious common inheritances on these higher levels are those of subject matter. Both Eddic poems and the Nibelungenlied, for example, focus on historical events of the fifth and sixth centuries c.e.: the deaths of Gunther and Hagen, and the revenge on Attila the Hun. Other Eddic poems (no one composition consists of more than one hundred or so lines) treat episodic, mythological incidents—encounters between Odin or Thor and giants or dwarfs, for example. Here, too, one can see resemblances to other Germanic poems: Beowulf is just such an encounter theme, extended to epic proportions in 3,182 lines. It has even been proposed that later, epic-length poems such as the Nibelungenlied are no more than collections of short plays that would resemble Eddic poems. The theory, attributed to Karl Lachmann, a nineteenth century German scholar, runs up against the same problems that plague the analysts’ division of Homer into separate songs: Where does one make the divisions? Of more importance is the Eddic poems’ distinctive viewpoint. Rather than simply narrating an incident from myth or history, the fornskáld (Eddic poet) most often used dialogue and allusive speeches in rhetorical settings: arguments, riddle contests, or flyting (mutual abuse matches). From such poetry, then, one gets a picture of actual heroic age genres of discourse in a preliterate society. The genre of flyting, in fact, helps one to understand the occurrence of episodes, such as Unferth’s abuse of Beowulf, in longer compositions. A few examples in this vein will illustrate the ways in which Eddic poetry is conscious of its own role as the repository of the collective memory of the Icelandic people.

First, it is clear from a poem such as “The Words of the All-Wise” that knowledge, in such a preliterate culture, is knowledge of tradition, especially of the traditional formulas—legal, religious, or poetic. The same message is transmitted (subliminally, perhaps) by Homer, who makes his heroes into traditional singers. In the Eddic poem, Alvis (“all-wise”), a dwarf, is questioned by Thor about the names of various things—clouds, sea, wind, and so on. Alvis must answer with the learned lore of poetry; for example, the heavens are called “Heaven by men, The Arch by gods,/ Wind-weaver by vanes,/ by giants High-earth, by elves Fair-roof,/ By dwarves The Dripping-Hall.” Thor eventually wins this contest, not by any deficiency in Alvis’s answers, but because dawn arrives and Alvis turns to stone. That Alvis’s feat was expected of every learned poet in the tradition is evidenced by the so-called Prose Edda (c. 1220), a later work by the thirteenth century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, who wrote the Skáldskaparmál or “Poetic Diction” portion specifically for the instruction of a generation of poets whose grasp of the traditional lore was slipping.

The Eddic poems, preserving large amounts of traditional material, including mythological as well as practical advice in the form of gnomic utterances, might be compared with the work of Hesiod. As Hesiod in the Works and Days offers gnomic advice for every phase of social life, so the Hávamál (ninth and tenth century; The Sayings of the High One, 1923) provides guidelines for behavior, stressing (as does Hesiod) reciprocity in friendships, moderation in eating and drinking, and distrust of women. As Hesiod’s Theogony traces the genesis of gods and men, so the Words of Vafthrudnir (ninth and tenth century), another Eddic poem, recounts the origin of the world, of seasons and giants, and even the fate of the gods. This apocalyptic strain in Icelandic poetry takes over completely the Völuspá (c. 1000; Völuspá: The Song of Sibyl, 1968), serving as a reminder to comparatists that poetry and seer craft in traditional preliterate societies are closely related activities: Knowing past lore is the key to the future.

Where words themselves are so important, their bestowal or refusal is crucial if one’s heroic deeds are to be considered heroic; the Poetic Edda is conscious of this fact, as the Hávamál proclaims: “Cattle die, kindred die/ Every man is mortal;/ But I know one thing that never dies:/ The glory of the great dead.” Not only is word-craft the mark of the wise and the guarantee of heroism, but it also brings about social integration, being the means by which an audience is united in pleasure and therefore bonded together in understanding. Again, the Hávamál realizes this, in concluding with an audience statement in the form of a wish: “Joy to him who has understood,/ Delight to him who has listened.”

Nibelungenlied

It is a long distance, chronologically and generically, from the archaic lore of the Edda to the courtly life depicted in the Nibelungenlied, or “song of the Nibelungs,” a nine-thousand-line composition dating from around 1200. While the Eddic poems exhibit concise diction (sometimes obscure) and dramatic organization, the Nibelungenlied has often been criticized for being threadbare, disorganized, and padded in its verse. This may be the effect, partly, of adapting older material to a more modern meter (a longer, three-stress-per-half-line, rhymed verse) and changed social situation, which demanded longer and more “courtly” poetry. Whatever the cause, these surface differences should not stand in the way of an appreciation of the similarities between the Icelandic, Old English, and Middle High German poems. All are rooted primarily in the past.

The Nibelungenlied announces itself as an “old story” of heroic action, feasts, and laments; from the first, one perceives its relationship, thematically, to the “wail after wassail” outlook of Beowulf, the Seafarer (one of a collection of poems found in the Exeter Book, copied about 975 c.e.), and other Old English poems. At least figuratively, the poem characterizes itself as oral by promising that all who wish can hear the story of Kriemhild, Gunther, Siegfried, and Etzel. Other marks of its actual oral heritage are visible in the presence of formulaic language (speech introductions, epithets, and repeated lines) and the picture of a society it presents—one in which traveling entertainers can be given gold for singing praise.

Although often compared to the Iliad as a story of heroes resigned to destruction, the Nibelungenlied might better be thought of as the thematic equivalent of the Odyssey: Both are revenge poems. In this case, it is the revenge of the woman Kriemhild for the murder of her husband Siegfried by Hagen, a vassal of Gunther, Kriemhild’s brother. Siegfried’s alleged insult to Brunhild, Gunther’s wife, brings about a quarrel between sisters-in-law, and Hagen takes it on himself to save the honor of his mistress. Hagen pays for the murder of Siegfried when Kriemhild, later married to a Hun and living far away, invites her relatives to visit her, where she then has them killed by loyal troops of her husband, Etzel: The woman-in-waiting theme of the Odyssey is melded with the revenge-of-the-returning-hero theme.

On the level of type-scene, as well, the Nibelungenlied resembles the Odyssey. Here, oral theory might answer the objections of critics who find the continual references to clothes—the wearing and giving of them—to be a flaw in the poem. First, consideration of the heroic status symbolism involved in clothing would lessen such criticism: The Odyssey offers the examples of clothes as proper gifts and concerns of heroes. The bestowing of expensive woven goods is a mark of hospitality in epic; in the Greek as well as in the German poem, it marks high points in the action—the solution of conflict, the happy return or arrival of heroes. Thus, this particular custom behind the type-scene has roots in heroic society.

It has been shown above that the sacrifice type-scene became important for Homer’s Odyssey. In the same way, the refrainlike recurrence of the clothing scenes in the Nibelungenlied prepares the way for a reversal of rhythms. The rules of hospitality, always adhered to in the first half of the poem (and marked by the clothing type-scenes), are subverted after the marriage of Kriemhild to the Hun, Etzel. It is not surprising that the poet made use of this repeating device to mark a change in mood; the audience would have been alert to any variations in such traditional scenes. The change is most marked when Hagen crosses the Danube with Gunther and the rest. The crossing itself, which makes clear Hagen’s tragic recognition of certain death when he shatters his boat to prevent return, is curiously signaled beforehand by some water sprites whom Hagen encounters. He steals the sprites’ clothing: the exact opposite of type-scene behavior up to this point. By so doing, Hagen learns his future—as in the Odyssey, the abnormal occurrence of the type-scene involves foreshadowing of plot events.

At the Huns’ city, the growing gulf between traditional significations of clothing and the new, more menacing meanings is underscored by Hagen again. Seeing his companions dressed in their new clothes (the normal type-scene before a courtly event), Hagen reprimands them: “You want breast-plates, not silken shirts.” In the remainder of the poem, the type-scenes of hospitality (of which the clothes scenes are most important) are used with ironic bitterness as negative metaphors for the entire action. “This hospitality to the guests leaves much to be desired,” says Hagen as he surveys the slaughter wreaked by his hosts. Even the fiddler, the stock accompanist of hospitable entertainments, is presented here in a negative way: Volker, Hagen’s companion, is both musician and warrior, and, in a horrific metaphor, he is said to have “red rosin on his bow.” Once again, the metaphors find their fullest resonance precisely because the normal repetitive devices of an oral poem—here, the type-scene—have been subverted in an artful and meaningful manner.

The Song of Roland

Nearly one hundred French chansons de geste (songs of heroic action) survive; the earliest among them, the twelfth century The Song of Roland, is also that with the most-sung theme: the defeat, through treachery, of Count Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees on August 15, 778, by a Saracen army. The poem is in four thousand ten-syllable lines, arranged in assonating groups of varying length, called laisses. Metrically, it is distinct, as are the other chansons, from the romance form that was composed contemporaneously. In content and viewpoint, the chanson is also distinct: While the romance tries to analyze emotions and offers fictional episodes, the chanson commemorates historical actions, from a neutral (or, at least, a third-person omniscient) point of view. As Joseph Duggan has shown, the degree of formulism in the language of The Song of Roland marks it as orally composed. The poem perhaps signals the end of a tradition, which must have been flourishing three hundred years before, when the events described by the poem occurred. The new type of poetry—romance—was a literary, written phenomenon, soon to become widespread, and evolving in several centuries into the modern novel. Meanwhile, the older, oral tradition must have been equally widespread in its day. There is evidence of a Spanish equivalent to The Song of Roland, the thirteenth century Cantar de Roncesvalles. Cantar de mío Cid (early thirteenth century; Chronicle of the Cid, 1846; better known as Poem of the Cid), the great Castilian epic, must have grown out of a deep tradition like that behind the French poem. The transmission from performance by a jongleur to written text is still problematic, as is the case with other compositions of the oral style, but once again, the recognition that these poems arise from an oral heritage tends to focus attention away from criticism of the poems as allegory or psychological studies and toward the proper study of oral technique: diction, type-scene, theme, and repetition in all its forms.

The structure of The Song of Roland recalls once more the revenge poems. Here the revenge is dual: Charlemagne’s punishment of the Saracens who have attacked the rear guard of his army on its return to France, and the later revenge of Ganelon, a Frankish peer who conspired with the Saracens to prompt the attack, in which his enemy Roland was killed. Within the framework of revenge is the description of the battle itself. In turn, this rhythmic unit is structured by smaller units—not the type-scene, but repeated triplets sharing similar diction. As in the Odyssey and the Nibelungenlied, the repeated units gain resonance as the poem progresses. Thus, in The Song of Roland, the use of triplets is common early in the poem for emphasis on any scenes that the poet considers to have important impact, or to be emotionally dense: The agreement between Ganelon and the Saracens, for example, is marked by a triple presentation of gifts to the Frank by the pagans’ peers.

The poet can expand the use of triplets to cover wider areas in the poem; one such expansion verbally frames the kernel scene of the composition—that is, the sounding of Roland’s ivory horn to summon help from the distant Charlemagne. Three times Oliver asks Roland to sound the horn, and each time Roland, in a slightly varied form, replies that the act would shame him. The hero of an oral poem, it should be noted, is more often than not bound by the very tradition that immortalizes him. Roland cites “what people will say” if he sounds the horn because of the Saracens—like Achilles or Beowulf, he must think of the fame or blame accorded him by later tradition. When the Franks fare badly in the battle, and Roland decides to sound the horn after all, the poet marks the event with a reversal of the triplet structure. This time, Roland speaks first of his resolve, then Oliver answers. Ideological positions are also reversed: Now it is Oliver who cites shame as reason for silence, Roland who seeks help. The device of repetition increases the drama of this tragic reversal; it is clear that Roland’s rash arrogance has caused the defeat. When Roland finally sounds the horn, a final triplet echoes the call, describing the repeated, agonized attempt to make the sound, on Roland’s part, and the repeated, disbelieving hearing on Charlemagne’s. It is a stroke of poetic genius to duplicate the aural image of Roland’s despair—the horn call—in an aural device, repetition; this is oral poetry using its traditional techniques to full advantage.

Other issues

Although not discussed here, other oral traditions are rich, if not as thoroughly documented in Western literature. A fuller account of the sources and methods of oral traditional narrative poetry is needed. Even if it were to be restricted to Europe, such an account would have to examine Russian poems such as Slovo o polku Igoreve (c. 1187; The Tale of the Armament of Igor, 1915), the large field of Romance poetry other than The Song of Roland and the Poem of the Cid; and nonepic genres such as Greek and Irish praise poetry (Pindar and Bacchylides, bardic verse) and Icelandic skaldic compositions.

Of interest too is the relation between written and oral forms: It is clear that the two modes interact; it is equally certain that there is no one sure marker of oral or written style, since copying goes on from one sort to the other. However, while there has been much work done to “prove” that certain works have roots in oral traditionals, the student of modern literature would benefit most from the study of the figure of “speech” in known written literature. Repetition of words, motifs, themes—all of these in written works, such as the novel, are in fact the heritage of a “literature” that was not written but spoken to an audience that responded to such symmetries. What is the true written work—the epistolary novel? How deeply is the idea of speech and hearing ingrained in all literature? These are questions that an interplay of oralist and modern critical methods might have a better chance to solve.

Bibliography

Acker, Paul. Revising Oral Theory: Formulaic Composition in Old English and Old Icelandic Verse. New York: Garland, 1998. Places oral-formulaic analysis within the larger context of folklore and mythology theory, concentrating on Eddic poetry, Beowulf, and Old Norse rune poetry.

DuBois, Thomas A. Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. By looking at the ways lyric songs are interpreted by various Northern European cultures, the author points out significant differences between audiences and notes the characteristics they have in common. Includes comments on lyrics within epics, religious lyrics, and the songs of Shakespeare. A unique and valuable work.

Foley, John Miles. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Addresses the question of how an understanding of oral tradition can illuminate the understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey and other ancient poetry.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Singer of Tales in Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Covers the theory of oral-formulaic composition and offers specific analyses of Serbian charms, Homeric hymns, and Old English poetry using the theory.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Traditional Oral Epic: The “Odyssey,” “Beowulf,” and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. A comparative study of oral techniques in Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and Yugoslavian epics.

Haymes, Edward R., and Susann T. Samples. Heroic Legends of the North: An Introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich Cycles. New York: Garland, 1996. Covers the two major cycles of medieval Germanic epic poetry, with special attention to theories of oral composition.

Lönnrot, Elias. The Kalevala: An Epic Poem After Oral Tradition by Elias Lonnrot. Translated by Keith Bosley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. A new translation of the great Finnish epic. The translator, an English poet as well as a prize-winning translator, has provided a lengthy and informative introduction.

Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. The classic work on Serbo-Croatian guslars, first published in 1960 and based on fieldwork carried out by Lord and Milman Parry, showing what illumination their techniques of oral composition can throw on the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Singer Resumes the Tale. Edited by Mary Louise Lord. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. A collection of Lord’s essays, published after his death.

Palmer, R. Barton, ed. and trans. Medieval Epic and Romance: An Anthology of English and French Narrative. Glen Allen, Va.: College Publishing, 2007. Included in this collection are Modern English versions of the epics Beowulf and The Song of Roland, as well as a selection from Guillaume de Machaut’s epic The Taking of Alexandria. The romances in the anthology are Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain: Ou, Le Chevalier au lion (c. 1170; Yvain: Or, the Knight with the Lion, c. 1300), translated by William W. Kibler; Havelok; The Chatelaine of Ve; and the complete Lais (c. 1167; Lays of Marie de France, 1911; better known as The Lais of Marie de France, 1978). Historical introduction by the author, as well as introductions to each genre. Chronology.

Parry, Adam, ed. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. All of Milman Parry’s important works, collected, edited, and in some cases translated by his son.

Reichl, Karl, ed. The Oral Epic: Performance and Music. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000. Papers presented at an international colloquium at the University of Bonn, dealing with such subjects as the words and music of Balkan and old French epics, south Slavic epics, and old Norse Eddic poetry. Bibliographical references.

Zatti, Sergio. The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso. Translated by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney. Edited by Looney. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Essays by a major Italian critic, translated for the first time into English, dealing with the development of narrative from the chivalric romance to the epic. An introduction by Albert Russell Ascoli highlights Zappi’s contributions to literary criticism.

Zumthor, Paul. Oral Poetry: An Introduction. Translated by Kathy Murphy-Judy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. A comprehensive introduction to oral poetry, its performance contexts, composition, and evolution.