The Singer of Tales

 Preface

by Harry Levin

The term "literature," presupposing the use of letters, assumes that verbal works of imagination are transmitted by means of writing and reading. The expression "oral literature" is obviously a contradiction in terms. Yet we live at a time when literacy itself has become so diluted that it can scarcely be invoked as an esthetic criterion. The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through electrical engineering. A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us—along with its immeasurable riches—snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions, but as an organic habit of re-creating what has been received and is handed on. It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality, which is relatively modern as a shibboleth of criticism; there may be other and better ways of being original than that concern for the writer's own individuality which characterizes so much of our self-conscious fiction. We may even come to believe that, great as some authors have been, their greatness is finally surpassed by that of the craft they have served; hence, whenever we reckon their contributions, we should also remember their obligations; no credit need be lost if some of it is shared anonymously with others trained in the same techniques and imparting the same mythology.

The present study sets forth the considered findings from twenty-five years of collection, transcription, and interpretation in the field of oral literature. These years have been strategic for applying scholarly methods to a subject which first developed amid the enthusiasms of the Romantic Movement; a systematic approach has been made feasible by the more recent development of facilities for intensive travel and phonographic reproduction; and literary history has been empowered to draw upon—and, reciprocally, to illustrate—folklore, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, and other related disciplines. The issue upon which such investigations still converge is all too well known, under its classical aspect, as the Homeric Problem. That problem may have remained unsolved for centuries because it was irrelevantly formulated: because, on the one hand, a single literate author was taken for granted and, on the other, the main alternative was a quasi-mystical belief in communal origins. Those presuppositions have been radically challenged by the sharp insight and the rich documentation {xxxi|xxxii} to which this volume offers a key. Its authority rests on a monumental substructure, Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, the series of texts, translations, and commentaries now being published under the joint auspices of Harvard University Press and the Serbian Academy of Sciences. Here, by way of critical prolegomenon and editorial parergon, the editor sums up what he has learned in bringing together that unique body of epic material.

What is more, and what commands a special interest transcending that material, he concretely discerns and lucidly states the principles he has been watching at work. Moreover, in the second part of the book, he extends their application to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and demonstrates their relevance to Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and other epics previously conceived as "literary." Careful stylistic and thematic analysis of such works has raised questions, and stimulated certain conjectures, as to the form and function of heroic poetry. These hypotheses, through a happy conjunction of opportunity and ingenuity, have been fully tested in a "living laboratory": the school of nonliterate bards, surviving yet declining in Yugoslavia and other South Slavic regions, has been caught at perhaps the latest possible moment; and its recorded songs provide both a solid basis for comparative studies and a new comprehension of oral technique. Through a wealth of contextual testimony, we are permitted to witness the act of composition—which, as Professor Lord makes abundantly clear, is at once a transmission and a creation. Vividly he communicates to us his personal sense of contact with the singers, as he and his collaborator sought them out or listened to them in Turkish coffeehouses during the nights of the Ramazan. In the mind's ear, we too are enabled to hear them, improvising out of their fabulous memories, filling in with stock epithets and ornamental formulas, accompanying themselves on their one-stringed fiddle, the gusle. And we are led to realize, more acutely than we could have done before, that the epic is not merely a genre but a way of life.

Formally, it might be described as a dynamic structure. Indeed the whole undertaking might be viewed, from some degree of distance, as an inquiry into the dynamics of poetic construction. The poem is, by this definition, a song; its performer is, at the same time, its composer; whatever he performs, he re-creates; his art of improvisation is firmly grounded upon his control of traditional components; and the tales he tells bear a family resemblance to many sung in other countries under other circumstances. The canons of esthetics, and even those of epistemology, should be at least as well satisfied by that approximation to the artistic event, at the very instant it happens, as they are by the frequent distortions of print or of the personalities behind it. Our conception of Homer, in particular, has not been helped by reinterpretations which cast him in the mold of latter-day authorship. Yet it is greatly enhanced, not undermined, by being approached through a more precise understanding of those patterns which he supremely {xxxii|xxxiii} exemplifies and those standards which he establishes for others working in his medium. Professor Lord appreciates, as perceptively as any critic or commentator, the "subtlety and intricacy" of the Homeric poems. He never loses sight of the qualitative distinction between Homer and Petar Vidić. But since he has heard and talked with Petar Vidić, while Homer himself remains an opaque attribution, the humble guslar has light to throw upon the Ionian epos. More significant than our value-judgments, which we are always free to make as we like, is our knowledge of literature as a process, endlessly multiform and continuous.

Professor Lord's exposition speaks for itself, with an expert attention to detail which will meet both Hellenists and Slavicists upon their respective grounds. It is not because I would presume to mediate between specialists that I have set down these preliminary impressions, but because I am glad to attest a fortiori what The Singer of Tales can mean to a lay critic or common reader. It was my privilege to study with Milman Parry during the period, so prematurely cut short, when he was teaching Classics in Harvard College. Thus, by sheer good luck, I have been among those who watched his project from its inception, and who—after having feared that his accidental death would terminate it—have rejoiced to see it carried toward this completion. No one who knew Parry is likely to forget his incisive powers of formulation or to underrate the range and depth of his cosmopolitan mind. He has been appropriately hailed, by an eminent archeologist, as the Darwin of oral literature; for if the évolution des genres has been scientifically corroborated, it is largely owing to his discovery. Yet, as he himself would have been the first to admit, it was only a beginning; and he generously acknowledged the prescient counsel of his own teacher, Antoine Meillet. Albert Lord, in his turn, has become much more than the ablest of Parry's disciples. It should be recognized, in spite of his devoted modesty, that he too has pioneered; he has contributed many ideas and important modifications; his comprehensive mastery of the field has taken him far beyond any of his forerunners; it is he who has turned an exciting aperçu into a convincing argument. The Parry-Lord theory, like the epic itself, is the product of an imaginative collaboration.

Cambridge, Massachusetts 

15 May 1959 {xxxiii|}

Foreword

This book is about Homer. He is our Singer of Tales. Yet, in a larger sense, he represents all singers of tales from time immemorial and unrecorded to the present. Our book is about these other singers as well. Each of them, even the most mediocre, is as much a part of the tradition of oral epic singing as is Homer, its most talented representative. Among the singers of modern times there is none to equal Homer, but he who approaches the master most closely in our experience of epic song is Avdo Međedović of Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia. He is our present-day Balkan Singer of Tales.

We believe that the epic singers from the dawn of human consciousness have been a deeply significant group and have contributed abundantly to the spiritual and intellectual growth of man. Although only two segments of the Indo-European peoples have been treated here in any detail, namely the Greeks and the Slavs (or more truly the speakers of Serbocroatian and of Bulgarian), it is my hope that the book is not parochial. Narrowness has never been excusable, whether it be ethnic, geographic, religious, social, or even academic, least of all in the space age. Of the epic songs of the past (or of the present for that matter) Homer's have always been recognized as supreme. When our collecting began in the nineteen-thirties the Yugoslav oral epic was accessible, alive, and distinguished. Russian and central Asiatic oral traditions might have done as well for purposes of comparative study, but for an American professor at that time they were not within easy reach.

This book concentrates on only one aspect of the singers' art. Our immediate purpose is to comprehend the manner in which they compose, learn, and transmit their epics. It is a study in the processes of composition of oral narrative poetry. Hence the reader must not seek here a survey of oral epics, or a history of oral epic in the Balkans or elsewhere.

Introduction 

In the early thirties of this century, when Milman Parry began to write the book from which this one takes its name, [1] what was needed most in Homeric scholarship was a more exact knowledge of the way in which oral epic poets learn and compose their songs. Now in the late fifties of the same century the need is still great; in spite of the number of books about Homer and his poems, about epic poetry in general, and about specific epic traditions in various parts of the world, the student of epic still lacks a precise idea of the actual technique of poiesis in its literal meaning. Thanks to Parry, however, we have the material for the research necessary to determine what this technique is. He has left us his collection of South Slavic texts, which is the record on phonograph discs and in manuscripts of experiments in the laboratory of the living epic tradition of the Yugoslavs. [2] In 1935 Milman Parry was Assistant Professor of Classics at Harvard University. He had already made a name for himself in classical scholarship by his masterly analysis of the technique of the formulaic epithets in the Iliad and the Odyssey. [3] This work had convinced him that the poems of Homer were traditional epics, and he soon came to realize that they must also be oral compositions. [4] He therefore set himself the task of proving, incontrovertibly if it were possible, the oral character of the poems, and to that end he turned to the study of the Yugoslav epics. In the autumn of 1935, he wrote:

 

The aim of the study was to fix with exactness the form of oral story poetry, to see wherein it differs from the form of written story poetry. Its method was to observe singers working in a thriving tradition of unlettered song and see how the form of their songs hangs upon their having to learn and practice their art without reading and writing. The principles of oral form thus gotten would be useful in two ways. They would be a starting point for a comparative study of oral poetry which sought to see how the way of life of a people gives rise to a poetry of a given kind and a given degree of excellence. Secondly, they would be useful in the study of the great poems which have come down to us as lonely relics of a dim past: we would know how to work backwards from their form so as to learn how they must have been made. [5] In Part I of this book I shall attempt to fulfill Parry's purpose of setting forth with exactness the form of oral narrative poetry, drawing my illustrative {3|4} material from this collection; in Part II I shall use the principles presented in Part I in studying the form of some of the great epic poems from the past. Because I intend to limit the scope of this book to a consideration of oral form and manner of composition, a discussion of a broader sort which would aim at seeing "how the way of life of a people gives rise to a poetry of a given kind and a given degree of excellence" will not be fully entered upon. Yet considerations of this kind will inevitably occupy us to some extent in this book. It is hoped that what is said here will be of use for future comparative study of oral poetry.

***

The burden of the first few chapters of Part I will be to work out in fullness of detail a definition of oral epic song. Stated briefly, oral epic song is narrative poetry composed in a manner evolved over many generations by singers of tales who did not know how to write; it consists of the building of metrical lines and half lines by means of formulas and formulaic expressions and of the building of songs by the use of themes. This is the technical sense in which I shall use the word "oral" and "oral epic" in this book. By formula I mean "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea." This definition is Parry's. [6] By formulaic expression I denote a line or half line constructed on the pattern of the formulas. By theme I refer to the repeated incidents and descriptive passages in the songs.

These definitions are but the bare bones of the living organism which is oral epic. We shall peer into the structural heart of the formulas to discern the various patterns which merge to give them form. We shall see that the formulas are not the ossified clichés which they have the reputation of being, but that they are capable of change and are indeed frequently highly productive of other and new formulas. We shall come to realize the way in which themes can be expanded and contracted, and the manner in which they are joined together to form the final product which is the song. We shall note the difference both in the internal structure and in the external connection of themes as they are used by different singers.

Finally we shall turn our attention to the song itself. We shall see that in a very real sense every performance is a separate song; for every performance is unique, and every performance bears the signature of its poet singer. He may have learned his song and the technique of its construction from others, but good or bad, the song produced in performance is his own. The audience knows it as his because he is before them. The singer of tales is at once the tradition and an individual creator. [7] His manner of composition differs from that used by a writer in that the oral poet makes no conscious effort to break the traditional phrases and incidents; he is forced by the rapidity of composition in performance to use these traditional elements. [8] To him they are not merely necessary, however; they are also right. He {4|5} seeks no others, and yet he practices great freedom in his use of them because they are themselves flexible. His art consists not so much in learning through repetition the time-worn formulas as in the ability to compose and recompose the phrases for the idea of the moment on the pattern established by the basic formulas. He is not a conscious iconoclast, but a traditional creative artist. His traditional style also has individuality, and it is possible to distinguish the songs of one singer from those of another, even when we have only the bare text without music and vocal nuance.

***

The need for a clarification of the oral process of composition is reflected in the many terms which are used for oral narrative poetry. To no small degree difficulties have arisen because of the ambiguity of terminology and because each school has chosen a different facet of this poetry as distinctive. The term "oral" emphasizes, I believe, the basic distinction between oral narrative poetry and that which we term literary epic. But it too carries some ambiguity. Certain of the misunderstandings of Parry's oral theory arise from the failure to recognize his special use of the word "oral." For example, one often hears that oral poetry is poetry that was written to be recited. Oral, however, does not mean merely oral presentation. Oral epics are performed orally, it is true, but so can any other poem be performed orally. What is important is not the oral performance but rather the composition during oral performance. [9] There may be ambiguity also when we say that the oral poet learns his songs orally, composes them orally, and transmits them orally to others. Like so many statements made in the debate on the oral theory, this one too is perfectly true if the word "oral" is understood in the technical sense in which it will be presented in this book. But if the reader interprets oral learning as listening to something repeated in exactly the same form many times, if he equates it with oral memorization by rote, then he will fail to grasp the peculiar process involved in learning oral epic. The same may be said for oral composition. If we equate it with improvisation in a broad sense, we are again in error. Improvisation is not a bad term for the process, but it too must be modified by the restrictions of the particular style. The exact way in which oral composition differs from free improvisation will, I hope, emerge from the following chapters. It is true also that oral epic is transmitted by word of mouth from one singer to another, but if we understand thereby the transmission of a fixed text or the kind of transmission involved when A tells В what happened and В tells С and so on with all natural errors of lapse of memory and exaggeration and distortion, then we do not fully comprehend what oral transmission of oral epic is. With oral poetry we are dealing with a particular and distinctive process in which oral learning, oral composition, and oral transmission almost merge; they seem to be different facets of the same process. {5|6}

The word "epic," itself, indeed, has come in time to have many meanings. Epic sometimes is taken to mean simply a long poem in "high style." Yet a very great number of the poems which interest us in this book are comparatively short; length, in fact, is not a criterion of epic poetry. Other definitions of epic equate it with heroic poetry. Indeed the term "heroic poetry" is sometimes used (by Sir Cecil M. Bowra, for example) to avoid the very ambiguity in the word epic which troubles us. Yet purists might very well point out that many of the songs which we include in oral narrative poetry are romantic or historical and not heroic, no matter what definition of the hero one may choose. In oral narrative poetry, as a matter of fact, I wish to include all story poetry, the romantic or historical as well as the heroic; otherwise I would have to exclude a considerable body of medieval metrical narrative.

That whole body of verse that we have now agreed to designate as oral has been called by many names; the terminological battle is a serious one. Those who call it "folk epic" are carrying on a nineteenth century concept of composition by the "folk" which has long since been proved invalid. At one time when "folk epic" referred to a theory of composition, it was a justifiable term. It pointed to a method of composition as the distinction between oral narrative poetry and "written" poetry. It was looking in the right direction. But when its theory of composition was invalidated, because no one could show how the people as a whole could compose a poem, then the technical meaning of the term was lost and it came to be equated in a derogatory sense with "peasant." The attention was then shifted from the way in which the poetry was made, first to the social status of those who practiced it, and then to the content and quality of the poetry itself. Although it may be true that this kind of poetry has survived longest among peasant populations, it has done so not because it is essentially "peasant" poetry, but rather because the peasant society has remained illiterate longer than urban society. [10] Indeed this poetry has more often been aristocratic and courtly than of the folk. It would seem even from its origins to have belonged to serious ceremonial occasions, to ritual, to celebration. The term "folk poetry" becomes more and more inadequate, more and more restricted in time and place. To apply the term to the medieval epics or to the Homeric poems is ever more inadmissible.

Another reason why this poetry should cease to be denominated as "folk epic" is that outside the circle of folklore enthusiasts the connotations of "folk" in many countries tend to be derogatory. One thinks of the simple peasant with his "quaint" ideas, his fairy stories, and children's tales. The use of folk stories as entertainment for young children has its ironic aspects; we are beginning to realize the serious symbolism and meaning of folk tales, which, if rightly understood, would be far from proper fare for children. Moreover, if we mean by "folk epic" to indicate that oral epic shares some of its subject matter with folk tale and all that is seriously {6|7} implied in that term, we are ignoring or underestimating all the other subjects of oral epic, historical, legendary, and heroic: we have outgrown the appellation "folk epic." It is no longer exact, and in time it has come to misrepresent oral epic poetry rather than to describe it.

Similar objections can be brought against the term "popular," the Latin derivative equivalent to "folk." While this term avoids the "simple peasant" connotations of "folk," its literal meaning has been overlaid with another set of unfortunate implications from its use in English to denote "popular music" and "popular songs."

The fever of nationalism in the nineteenth century led to the use of oral epics for nationalist propaganda. The poems glorified the heroes of the nation's past; they depicted the struggles of the nation against outside foes. Hence the hero emerged as a "national" hero, and the poems themselves were labeled "national" epics. In some of the Slavic countries the word narodni has a useful ambiguity, since it means both "folk" and "national." As a term to designate oral epic "national" is woefully inadequate and an insidious imposter.

Some scholars have sought to avoid the pitfalls of the three terms already discussed, folk, popular, and national, by recourse to the word "primitive." It sounds somehow more "scientific" because it has been borrowed from the social science of anthropology. But here too the ambiguity is great and the connotations hardly less flattering than those of "folk" in some countries. If the idea behind the use of "primitive" for this poetry is that oral epic poetry precedes written poetry in time in the cultural growth of a society, then its use would be legitimate, because as a rule oral poetry does precede written poetry, but it would, like the other terms, still miss the fundamental difference in form between the two.

In summary, any term that is used to designate oral narrative poetry in an attempt to distinguish it from written narrative poetry must contain some indication of the difference in form. It is because the terms which we have discussed above failed to comprehend this distinction that they have proved themselves to be inadequate. Any terms, also, carrying implications derogatory to either oral narrative poetry or written poetry (as, for example, such terms as "authentic" and "artificial"; "primary" and "secondary") must be abandoned, for they represent an attitude that is neither scholarly nor critical. Both these forms are artistic expressions, each with its own legitimacy. We should not seek to judge but to understand.

If the need for a clarification of the process which produces oral narrative poetry is reflected in the confusion of terms which have been used to designate that poetry, this need is even more apparent, of course, in the variety of theories put forth in the last two centuries (and which still survive in one form or another today) to explain the peculiar phenomenon of oral epic. On the one hand there has been a solid block of loyalists to the literary tradition who have maintained through thick and thin that the {7|8} Homeric poems, as well as the great epics from medieval times, are written literary productions by a single author.

These loyalists have found themselves defending their position from attacks by those who from time to time raised annoying questions. One of the earliest questions posed was whether writing existed in the ninth century B.C., the traditional date of Homer. This was first raised by Josephus; [11] it came to the fore again in D'Aubignac [12] in the early eighteenth century and reached its classic expression in Friedrich August Wolf's famed Prolegomena (1795). A second problem was formulated during the seventeenth century and played a great role in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes; this was the problem of the "errors" or inconsistencies in the Homeric poems. D'Aubignac, Perrault, Giambattista Vico, Robert Wood, and others led once again to Wolf and the later Separatists. A third question concerned the unusual length of the Homeric poems. If there was no writing in Homer's time, how could such long poems be preserved until the time of writing? In fact, how could poems of such length come into being at all without the aid of writing? Clearly this was a corollary of the first question raised. Among the earlier scholars who attempted to answer this question the name of Robert Wood stands out. A fourth problem arose from the increased knowledge of and interest in medieval minstrelsy and contemporary oral poetry during the eighteenth century and later. Here again we may begin with D’Aubignac and continue with Thomas Blackwell, Percy, Macpherson, Herder, Goethe, and a host of others. There was, fifthly, also the problem, inherited from ancient times, of the meaning of the Peisistratean legend about the recension of the Homeric poems. And finally with the development of linguistic studies in the nineteenth century the question was raised about the possibility of one man using dialect forms from several regions and archaisms from different periods.

These were the chief questions that were current in Homeric scholarship and still are. In answering them some scholars have gone so far as to deny even the existence of Homer, but the usual answer has been some form of multiple authorship for the poems with Homer at one end or the other of a series of poets. Sometimes he was the originator whose poems were carried through oral tradition or whose works were modified by later poets; more often he was the last of the redactors or compilers or, in an attempt to bridge the gap between Unitarians and Separatists, he was the great poet who reworked oral tradition into a "literary" poem. The concept of multiple authorship led scholars naturally to the dissection of the Homeric poems in an attempt to see what parts were done by different authors. They were thus led also to seek the "original" or archetype of the poems.

The doubt as to the existence of writing in Homer's time has given Homerists three choices: to seek proof that the doubt was ill founded and that there was writing as early as the traditional date of Homer; to change Homer's date, bringing it down to a period when writing was possible; to {8|9} leave Homer's date where it was and to cover the intervening years to the age of writing by oral transmission of Homer's poems.

The most significant step in proving that writing was possible and indeed existed not only in the ninth century but earlier has been made only recently in the discovery that Linear В is Greek. Although none of the texts yet deciphered is literary, [13] the old argument of Josephus and Wolf has had the ground cut from under it. Ironically enough, however, the proof has come at a time when many scholars realize that the existence of writing or even of a literary tradition does not necessarily mean that Homer's poems belong in the category of "written" literature; and many realize, and have realized for some time, that obviously our Homeric texts could not have been preserved had there not been writing in Homer's day. Valuable as the decipherment of Linear В is, it is no longer relevant to the Homeric problem.

Unless not only literary texts are discovered in Linear В but also some evidence can be unearthed to prove that epic poetry was being written down during the period of Linear B, its decipherment cannot help us much in determining Homer's date. Some Homeric names seem to have been deciphered, Hector and Achilles, for example, but this might indicate no more than that these were common names or that songs about these heroes existed; it tells us nothing about our poems. There is no evidence at all at this point that Homer was written down in Linear В and later copied in the Greek alphabet that we know. Were there such evidence, we would be justified in moving Homer's date back. So the problem of the date of Homer still remains with us.

Wolf and some of his predecessors turned to the Peisistratean legend to answer the question of date, as has Carpenter in our own century, although the latter's reasons are different from those of Wolf. Carpenter reflects our growing knowledge of oral literature and seeks a time when the writing down of the poems would make sense in the context of this knowledge. To him Peisistratus seems the most likely person to sponsor this. Certainly he is right that the Peisistratean legend is an invaluable clue, one that cannot be ignored but which demands explanation and interpretation. But Carpenter has been little heeded, and the date accepted now by most scholars is the second half of the eighth century.

Those scholars who made the third choice were moving in the right direction, namely towards oral tradition, but in putting the poet of our Homeric texts before the period of writing, they were unwittingly creating more problems than they were as yet equipped to handle. Their choice was a compromise. Oral tradition was a fickle mistress with whom to flirt. But scholars could call in to their help the "fantastic memories" so "well attested" of illiterate people. They felt that a text could remain from one generation to another unaltered, or altered only by inconsequential lapses of memory. This myth has remained strong even to the present day. The main points of confusion in the theory of those scholars who made the third {9|10} choice arose from the belief that in oral tradition there is a fixed text which is transmitted unchanged from one generation to another.

The quarrel about the errors and inconsistencies in the Homeric poems, inherited from the seventeenth century, has continued steadily until our own times. In its narrower aspects the strife has resulted in a stalemate; the real inconsistencies still remain unexplained in spite of the ingenuity of the Unitarians, who have to their credit the checking of the excesses of the Separatists. [14] The picture of the great Homer nodding has looked more like an excuse than an explanation. Bowra's remark in Tradition and Design in the Iliad that the oral poet concentrates on one passage at a time is closer to the truth. We have been gaining much perspective on the inconsistencies, despite the hard core of apologist opinion. Of far greater importance than the labeling of the inconsistencies themselves has been the theory of multiple authorship which emerged when the quarrel over the "errors" began to find added fuel from the attention paid to still living bards and bardic traditions and to medieval minstrelsy. The many theories of multiple authorship of the Homeric poems have contributed more to Homeric scholarship than any other single concept. Not that they were right. But they led in productive directions. They were honest attempts to meet the challenge offered by the growing body of oral ballads and epics as well as of medieval epic.

The theories of multiple authorship can be divided into two general classes. The first, and the earliest, saw the Homeric poems as compilations of shorter songs, stitched together by their compiler. D'Aubignac presented this in his Conjectures in 1715, but it was Lachmann and his followers in the nineteenth century who made serious attempts to dissect the poems according to this lieder theorie. The attempts were unsuccessful and unconvincing; for the dissectors could not agree on where to use the scalpel. The theory was discredited.

A second general approach moved in vertical rather than horizontal lines. The scholars who used this approach abandoned the idea of a compilation, even of poems of different times and places, and conceived of an original kernel which was modified by a succession of later authors. Usually to them Homer was not a compiler but the last and greatest of the redactors. They too whisked out the scalpel and began to peel off the layers in the Homeric poems. Linguistic and dialect evidence came to their assistance. But they were equally unsuccessful and their theories too have been discarded, although with considerably less finality than those of the first group.

The work of the first group of dissectors led to several valuable compilations. Lönnrot put together the Finnish Kalevala, the Estonians entered the competition with the Kalevipoeg, and the Serbs attempted a number of "national" epics on the Kosovo theme. But nothing comparable to the Homeric poems was produced. The problem of the way in which the {10|11} Homeric poems had attained their length, if they were not literary productions of a single author, remained unsolved.

So also did the problem of the variety of dialect and archaic forms in the poems. One of the attempts to solve this problem was the theory of a special poetic language, a kind of artificial dialect which was the property of epic poets. This of course did not solve anything. It merely put a label on the diction as found in the poems and pushed into the background the question of how such a diction could have been formed.

Hand in hand with the theory of multiple authorship went the emphasis on a search for the archetype. Leaf's work is typical of this trend. His five strata began with an original and then discerned expansions and interpolations of later periods. One still hears echoes of this kind of dissection, for example, in MacKay's The Wrath of Homer.

The work of all these theorists should not be dismissed as without avail, certainly not with the tired yet vituperative cynicism of Allen in his Origins and Transmissions. The service of these scholars has been in essence to point out the peculiarities of language and structure of the Homeric poems, peculiarities that we now recognize to be those of oral poetry. The inconsistencies, the mixture of dialects, the archaisms, the repetitions and epic "tags," and even the manner of composition by addition and expansion of themes have been noted and catalogued by these scholars. The questioned existence of writing led them to use the word "oral" and their experience of folk epic seemed further to justify this term. The elements that were needed to crystallize the answers to their questions were there. It is a strange phenomenon in intellectual history as well as in scholarship that the great minds herein represented, minds which could formulate the most ingenious speculation, failed to realize that there might be some other way of composing a poem than that known to their own experience. They knew and spoke often of folk ballad and epic, they were aware of variants in these genres, yet they could see only two ways in which those variants could come into being: by lapse of memory or by willful change. This seemed so obvious, so much an unquestioned basic assumption, that they never thought to investigate exactly how a traditional poetry operated. They always thought in terms of a fixed text or a fixed group of texts to which a poet did something for a reason within his own artistic or intellectual self. They could not conceive of a poet composing a line in a certain way because of necessity or because of the demands of his traditional art.

I believe that the greatest moment in recent Homeric scholarship was expressed by Milman Parry when he wrote his field notes for his collection of South Slavic texts and spoke of his growing realization that what he had been calling traditional was in fact oral:

 

My first studies were on the style of the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to understand {11|12} as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due to the remarks of my teacher M. Antoine Meillet that I came to see, dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. [15] The real impact of this revelation of Milman Parry has not yet been fully felt in Homeric scholarship, which has chosen to disdain oral epic and to move into the more abstruse kinds of literary criticism. [16] Although often referred to, the oral theory of Milman Parry is at best but vaguely understood. It is the purpose of this book to present that theory as fully and yet as simply as possible. Parry himself did not live long enough after making his monumental collection to think out his theory in detail, let alone to develop it and present it to the learned world in completeness. Working from the clues that he left, I have tried to build an edifice of which he might approve. {12|}

Footnotes

  1. In 1935, when Parry returned from Yugoslavia, he began a book entitled The Singer of Tales. This was to contain the results of his study of the problems of oral form. He had written only a few pages before his death. These pages have been published in my article, "Homer, Parry, and Huso," AJA, 52:34–44 (Jan.–March 1948). 

 2. The Milman Parry Collection is now housed in the Harvard University Library. It contains over 3500 twelve-inch aluminum phonograph discs recorded in various parts of Yugoslavia in 1934 and 1935. There are both epic and lyric songs in the collection as well as recorded conversations with the singers about their lives and their art. There are over 12,500 texts in the collection, some of which are on the phonograph records; the remainder are songs taken down by dictation. Fuller accounts of the Parry Collection may be found in "Homer, Parry, and Huso," AJA, 52:34–44, in Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, by Béla Bartók and Albert B. Lord (New York, 1951), and in the introduction to Volume I of Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord (Cambridge, Mass., and Belgrade, 1954), which is the first volume of translations of Parry Collection texts to appear. Volume II containing Serbocroatian texts translated in Volume I has also been published. Volumes III and IV of the series, which it is expected will contain over twenty volumes, are in preparation. 

3. L'Epithète traditionnelle dans Homère (Paris, 1928). 

4. See his "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I: Homer and Homeric Style," HSCP, 41:73–147 (1930), and "II: The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry," HSCP, 43:1–50 (1932). 

5. See Note 1 above. 

 6. "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I: Homer and Homeric Style," HSCP, 41:80. 

 7. I emphasize the creative or dynamic role of the individual performer throughout this book in order to counteract the impression in some quarters that the oral poet is merely a transmitter; that all originality is closed to him. Perhaps the words "create" and "originality" are too strong; they may lead to misunderstanding. Yet I believe that the evidence of the actual texts, both as studied from the Parry Collection, and as reported in studies by other scholars who have worked with an abundance of texts and variants, indicates that at the moment of performance the singer, or narrator, produces something unique. The degree of uniqueness varies with the particular circumstances and with the individual performer, provided, of course, that one is dealing with a true oral poet and not with a mere reciter to begin with. It would, however, be a mistake to equate the creative process and function of the oral poet with those of the literary poet, as I attempt to show later in the book. A somewhat different point of view is presented in an important paper, published in 1929, "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens," Donum Natalicium Schrijnen (Nijmegen-Utrecht, 1929), pp. 900–913, by P. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson. They apply very interestingly on a theoretical level Saussure's distinction between langue and parole to folklore. It might be worth suggesting that we have in the case of oral epic performance something that is neither langue nor parole, but some third form; as Lévi-Strauss has intimated in the case of myths (see his paper, "The Structural Study of Myth," Journal of American Folklore, 68 (1955):430. Or again with Lévi-Strauss we might question whether we have something that is both langue and parole at the same time under different aspects, thus making a third form of communication, or of relationship, peculiar to oral verbal art. 

8. See Marcel Jousse, Etudes de psychologie linguistique. Le style orale rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs (Paris, 1925). 

9. It should be clear from this and from what follows that sacred texts which must be preserved word for word, if there be such, could not be oral in any except the most literal sense. Bogatyrev and Jakobson (p. 912) mention the Vedic hymns and say: "Dort, wo die Rolle der Gemeinschaft allein in der Aufbewahrung eines zu einem unantastbaren Kanon erhobenen dichterischen Werkes besteht, gibt es keine schöpferische Zensur, keine Improvisation, kein kollektives Schaffen mehr." 

10. Or perhaps in some cases because what was in writing belonged to the ecclesiastical and not to the popular milieu. See, in the case of Russia, Jakobson's "Commentary" to the English translation of A. N. Afanas'ev, Russian Fairy Tales (New York, 1945), pp. 632 ff. 

11. Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem, i, 2. [ back ] 12. François Hédelin, Abbé d'Aubignac, Conjectures académiques ou Dissertation sur l'Iliade (Paris, 1715). [ back ] 13. See Joshua Whatmough, Poetic, Scientific, and Other Forms of Discourse (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956), p. 86. [ back ] 14. See F. M. Combellack, "Contemporary Unitarians and Homeric Originality," AJP, 71:337–364 (1950). [ back ] 15. Parry and Lord, I, 3. [ back ] 16. The recent book of Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and the work of several years ago of Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946) are important exceptions.

Albert Bates Lord The Singer of Tales