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The rediscovery of the ancient sagas of the Banū Hilāl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

H. T. Norris
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Extract

The last ten years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of published studies about the Sīrat Banī Hilāl, or, to borrow the term used by francophone specialists from the Maghrib as well as from France itself, La Geste hilalienne. The subject matter and the approach of these specialists has been varied. Their interests have focused on the myriad plots of the narrative of the sīra, the imagery employed, the performance of the shā ‘ir and the documenting of the texts, be they oral or written. In aggregate, these studies have done much to clarify the nature of the work itself and its relationship, if any, to the exploits of the real Banū Hilāl during and after the eleventh century within the Maghrib. They have also contributed to a better understanding of the literary value of all the best known Arabic folk epics.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , October 1988 , pp. 462 - 481
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1988

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References

1 Amongst the most recent published books Professor Bridget, Connelly'sArab folk epic and identity, University of California Press, 1986Google Scholar, is by far the most comprehensive and, in sum, is a thought-provoking and informative survey that merits the widest attention. Other recent works include: Ayoub, A. and Galley, M., Images de Djazya (Paris, CNRS, 1977)Google Scholar; Ayoub, A. and Micheline, Galley, Histoire des Beni Hilal, Classiques Africaines, 22 (Paris, Armand Colin, 1983)Google Scholar; Ayoub, A., ‘Sirat Bani Hilal: á propos de quelques manuscrits conservés á Berlin-Ouest: Problématique de l'appartenance religieuse des conteurs populaires, Revue d'Histoire Maghrebine, Nos. 33–34, 1984, Tunis, 19–40Google Scholar; Giovanni, Canova: ‘La funzione del sogno nella poesia epica hilaliana,’ Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 2, 1984, 107–25Google Scholar; Breteau, C.H., Galley, M. and Roth, A., ‘Témoignages de la “longue marche” hilalienne’, Actes du Deuxiéme Congrés International d'Etude des Cultures de la Méditerranée Occidentale, Alger, S.N.E.D., 1978, 329–46Google Scholar; Inventaireprovisoire de la tradition écrite (éditions el manuscrits) et orale (versions enregistrées, publiées et inédites), et des travaux portanl sur la Geste hilalienne. Etablissement d'une carte sur la diffusion de la tradition orale hilalienne à travers I'espace arabo-musulman; Lopez-Morillas, C., ‘Los Beréberes Zanāta en la historia y la leyenda,’ Al-Andalus, 42, 1977, 301–22Google Scholar; Pantůčele, S.: Das Epos über der Westzug der Banū Hilāl, Prague, Academia, 1970)Google Scholar; and Roth, A., ‘Notes sur le fonctionnement du verbe dans un fragment manuscrit de la geste hilalienne’, Littérature orale arabo-berbére, Bulletin No. 11 de I'E.R.A., 357, Paris, 1980, 87–114Google Scholar and ‘Notes sur quelques formes pronominales dans un fragment manuscrit de la geste hilalienne’, ibid., No. 12, 1981, 163–81; and two recent articles by Dr.Slyomovics, Susan, ‘Arabic folk literature and political expression, Arab Studies Quarterly, 8/2, 1986, 178–85 and ‘The Death Song of ‘Āmir Khafajț: puns in an oral and printed episode of Sīrat Banī Hilāl,’ Journal of Arabic Literature, XVIII 1987Google Scholar.

2 Conferences on the subject have also been held in several parts of the Arab world, at which non-Arab participants have delivered papers and chaired discussions. One might mention in particular the first Table Ronde on the Geste hilalienne organized by the Association Internationale d'Étude des Civilisations Méditerrané, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in 1980, and the conference on sīra in general, held in Cairo University in 01 1985Google Scholar.

3 A view powerfully expressed by Tahar, M. Guiga at the Hammamet ConferenceGoogle Scholar.

4 The influence of themes from the sīra on modern art, literature, television and drama in the Arab world today was a topic of discussion, both in Hammamet and in Cairo. The wood engravings of Brahim Dahak illustrate the Histoire des Beni Hilal (1983) by Ayoub, and Galley, Google Scholar.

5 Lucienne, Saada, La Geste hilalienne: version de Bou Thadi [Preface by Jean Grosjean] (Paris, Gallimard, 1985), 396 ppGoogle Scholar. A representative portion of Hamilton's translation of ‘Antar is to be read in The past we share, by Ranelagh, E. L. (London; Quartet Books, 1979), 85–159Google Scholar.

6 Paris, Hachette, 1947, 265–6Google Scholar. Interestingly, the Carle de la Barbarie de la Nigrilie et de la Guinée of De Lisle (Elwe, 1792), shows the Western Saharan coast to the east of Cap Bojador, ‘Pays de Ludaya ou des Ludayes de 80 mille combatants’, as the territory of ‘Les Hileles Arabes’, without citing a source for this claim. See Basset, R., Mission au Sénégal (Paris, 1909), 455–6Google Scholar. The story, that Basset cites, he rightly compares with sīra material, either from ‘Antar or the Hilālī tales. However, the characters have been replaced by ancestors of the Ulād Delim and the heroes of sīra are not to be found. John Mercer in his Spanish Sahara (1976), 157, writes, ‘The stories and poems may be devotional, battle-proud, about love, humorous, genealogical. Their legendary subjects include the conquered Bafots (sic), the Hilalian Arabs and the Europeans. In spite of the Maquilancestry claim, the Hilalians are described as heathens with supernatural powers; the size of tombs said to be Hilalian show they were also giants’. Yet, Baroja, J. C., in his masterly Estudios Saharianos (Madrid, 1955)Google Scholar, has almost nothing to say about such tales and points out that the pre-Hilālī hero, Abü Bakr b. ‘Umarò‘Āmir, the Almoravid, has retained his leading position amongst the great heroes of the Sahrawis.

7 Barbara W., Tuchman in her A distant mirror: the calamitous 14th century, (Harmondsworth, 1978)Google Scholar, has skilfully presented and unmasked an account of a period in medieval European history which, at the same time, ‘mirrors’ Ibn Khaldūn's account of the Hilālī invasion of North Africa and its consequences. At the same time, she detects its consequences in the heroic literature it allegedly produced: ‘When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.’ (See her Foreword, pp. xv, xxi, xxii).

8 The flying horse, offspring from a ‘sea horse’, is also found in Turkish folk epic. In the ‘epic’ of Köroghlu, Kirat, the gray horse, a remarkable mount, is sired by a ‘sea stallion’ (deniz kulumi). It was able to understand the speech of its master and was able to warn him. It could fly like a bird and was immortal (I am indebted to Professor Ahmet Edip Uysal of Ankara University for this information). In the Sirat ‘Antar there are several references to the faras bahrī and in recent Egyptian stories of a popular kind, told during Ramadān, in which al-Shātir Hasan and Firdaws appear, the latter is often a horse of this type. See also On the sea horse, n. 10 to ch. xx of E. W. Lane's translation of the Thousand and One Nights, the voyages of Es-Sindibád of the Sea.

9 Kitāb al-Tījān fī mulūk Himyar, San‘ā’ edition, published by the Markaz al-Dirāsāt wa'l-Abhāth, al-Yamaniyya (1979), 176Google Scholar.

10 See in particular parts of Abnoudy, A.La geste hilalienne, French translation by T. Guiga (Cairo, 1978)Google Scholar.

11 Lithographed copies of the Sīrat ‘Antar are also in the Library, Moh330b.51 and Moh 330 d. 36. A manuscript copy of the Sīrat ‘Antar is housed in the library of John's College, Cambridge, K 8 to K 14. It is in clear naskh but I have not seen it. An ex-student of the school, Dr. Khan, G., is working on the text of the Sīrat ‘Antar in Judeo-Arabic which he found among the Geniza documents in the Cambridge University LibraryGoogle Scholar.

12 The Cambridge University Library possesses several books and manuscripts which relate to the Sīrat Banī Hilāl. These are:

Lithographed works

(a) Moh 208 d.l2, Rihlat al-‘Arab min Najd ilā Tūnis (Cairo, 188?)

(b) Moh 208 d.21, Qissat faras al-‘Uqayli Jābir (Cairo, 188?) (16).

(c) Moh 208 d.23, Dīwān al-‘Urbān al-mutasammiya fimā jarā li-Hiraqla ’bn Jawshan ma'a ’l-‘Arab al-Hilāliyya (Cairo 188?)

(d) Moh 208 d.l1, 22 Kitāb al-Durra al-munīfa Ji harb Diyāb (Cairo 188?).

Manuscripts in the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books

(a) Qq 52: al-Sīra al-‘Ajība: this is a very fragmentary collection of parts of the Sīra in different hands and of different date, all Mashriqī. The first fragment is some 200 ff., another fragment of 60,ff. ends with the colophon, wa kāna ’l-farāgh min hādhihi al-sīra al-‘ajība yawm al-ithnayn al-mubādrak rābi’ ‘ashara min dhī’l-hijja al-harām, khitām sanat ithnay wa ‘ishrīn wa mi’a wa alf ‘alā yad afqar al-‘ibād al-rājī li-lutf al-Mannān, Muhammad b. al-Hājj Ramadān al-‘Attār (Monday 14th Dhū'l-Hijja A.H. 1122/1710 A.D.). (b)Qq 15: Qiṣṣat Abī Zayd al-Hilali: This is a very good copy, consisting of 180 ff., in large, clear naskh, with no colophon. It begins with a poem of AbūZayd, Innā Awwal (mā) nubdī[sic] nuṣallī ‘alā’l-Nabī, nabī ‘arabī lahu nūr min al-qabr nāyir…

(c) Add 27,8: Qiṣṣat faras al-‘Uqaylī wa mā jarā lahā ma‘a ’l-Amīr AbīZayd: This is 74 ff. of poor naskh, barely legible and of doubtful connexion with the text of the lithographed Moh 208, d,2 above.

13 See Plate I.

14 The merchant of art: An Egyptian Hilali oral epic poet in performance, Modern Philology, vol. 120 (Berkeley, , Los Angeles and London, University of California Press), 1987. This work incorporates her Ph.D. thesis (University of California at Berkeley, 1985)Google Scholar. I am most grateful to the author for her permission to consult it prior to its publicationGoogle Scholar. As printed, it falls into three distinct sections, firstly, chs. i and ii, which introduce her Egyptian informant and bard, ‘Awadallah ‘Abd aj-Jalīl‘ Ali, ’the merchant of Art’, chs. iii and iv, which are, in part, historical and which discuss the Hilālīs of history and the adventures of‘Āmir Khafāji in particularGoogle Scholar. It is in this part (pp. 44–54) that Dr. Slyomovics discusses the Hilālī and Himyarite connexions, legendary and genealogical, to which I have drawn attention in this articleGoogle Scholar. There is also a comparison between Egyptian and Tunisian versions of the adventures of ‘Āmir Khafāji. Chapter v, and indeed the whole final part of her study, introduces the art of the sha’ir and her taped text with a facing translationGoogle Scholar. This consists of 1347 verses. The appendices discuss the transliteration of the recorded text and oral and formulaic phrases and epithets. The work is 298 pages in length and it contains a valuable bibliographyGoogle Scholar. The study will be of great interest to dialectologists and, in any event, now qualifies for a place amongst the most important printed works which are now available on the Egyptian versions of the Sīrat Banī HilīlGoogle Scholar.

15 ‘Abd, Muhammad b. al-Rahmān (Abū’l-Hasan) al-Bakrț, Futūh al-Yaman commonly called Ra's al-Ghūl, Egyptian edition, no dateGoogle Scholar. It is probably this work which was allegedly condemned by Ibn Kathīr in his Qur'ān tafsīr, ‘As for what is said by the public about al-Baţţāl from the sīra attributed to Dalhama and al-Baţţāl and prince ‘Abd aj-Wahhāb and the Qādī‘Uqba, it is all false and slanderous. It is cold invention, ignorance and devilishly harmful. Such is only current among the foolish or the vilely ignorant, just as the sīra of ‘Antar b. Shaddād the ‘Absī, falsely fabricated, circulates amongst them. So too the Sīrat al-Bakrī and al-Danaf and others. The falsehood perpetrated in the Sīrat al-Bakrī the most sinful and criminal of all, because its writer, with intent, puts false sayings into the mouth of the Prophet—the blessing and peace of God be upon him—so let him take his place in Hell fire’, cited in Fārūq Khūrshīd, , Sayf b. Dhī Yazan, Riwāyāt al-Hilāl, No. 176, (Cairo, 1963), 9Google Scholar, in his preface to vol. 1.1 have been unable to trace the passage in printed texts of the tafsīr. I would maintain (pace Bridget Connelly and others) that the degree of deprecation and condemnation of popular sīra, and the like, in past times, by Arab littérateurs, by fuqahā and by men of letters generally, has been greatly exaggerated. Most of the most famous attacks on it were made in relatively recent times, commencing in the later medieval period. There is little evidence to show that the ‘Abbāsid age, for example, regarded such compositions as base. The Fihrist is full of such literature. Contempt for such works and popular stories, some heroic, all within this genre, was not the norm. Rather to the contraryGoogle Scholar.

16 Ibn, Khaldūn, The Muqaddima, transl. F., Rosenthal, vol. 3 (London, 1958), 418Google Scholar

17 Travels in Arabia Deserta (London, Jonathan, Cape and the Medici Society, 1924), vol. 1, 305, 306Google Scholar. See extract from Documents épigraphiques recueillis dans le nord de l'Arabie, 1888, fig. 1Google Scholar.

18 ibid., vol.2, 528, 529.

19 The celebrated romance of the stealing of the mare. Translated from the original Arabic by Lady Anne, Blunt. Done into verse by Wilfred Scawen Blunt (London, Reeves and Turner), 1892, p. viGoogle Scholar.

20 ibid., p. 126, note to p. 61, and passim.

21 See drawing fig. 1, above.

22 Galley, Micheline, ‘Manuscripts et documents relatifs a la Geste hilalienne dans les Bibliotheques anglaises, Bulletin LOAB, No. 12, 1981, Paris, C.N.R.S., 185–6 and 188–9, n.9Google Scholar. The information in her article has been of great help to me.

23 See Lady Blunt, op. cit, pp. viii-xi.

24 H. St. Philby, J. B., Sheba's daughters (London, Methuen), 1939, 4, plus drawing p. 27, allegedly of Abū Zayd?Google Scholar

25 ibid., 333. Alois Musil reports the same in the North of Arabia amongst the Rwala bedouinsGoogle Scholar. See his Manners and customs of the Rwala Bedouins (New York, 1928)Google Scholar, 12, ‘O wolf! O thou who strugglest with the hot south wind! Drive away the cold breeze of the north windGoogle Scholar. Thou hast surely seen ‘Alja and Abu Zejd, Who used to dwell in manors high‘. He adds (p. 13)Google Scholar, ‘Abu Zejd and his sweetheart ‘Alja are the heroes of stories that are told among the settlers. They are supposed to have owned the towns now lying in ruins and to have lived in manors, the crumbling walls of which rise high above the horizon on the borders of the desert’. See also pp. 291, 292Google Scholar.

26 See Bertram, Thomas, Arabia Felix (London, Jonathan Cape), 1932, esp. 208–22, 276–92Google Scholar. Large parts of the narrative are included although little information is furnished about the recitation of these stories or how they have survived in the region of the Empty Quarter.

Thesiger makes the interesting observation in Arabian sands (Harlow, Longman), 1959, 78, that it was the men of the Hijāz ‘sitting full-fed round the coffee hearths’ who spoke disparagingly of the bedouin. ‘Then inevitably they had spoken of the Bedu's courage and their unbelievable generosity, and they had told stories, many of them fantastically improbable, which they vowed were true, and had recited long passages of verse about the Bani Hilal. Listening to them I realized that the hungry ragged men whom they had just been reviling had been transmuted into the legendary heroes of the past.’

27 By the ‘romance of Bilqīs’ I mean those sections of the Kitāb al-TTjān (San–ā—), which tell of the history of Hudhād and his daughter, Bilqīs. One such story is in my book, The adventures of Antar (Warminster, Aris and Phillips), 1980, 13–16Google Scholar.

28 See Kitāb al-Tijān. 74–8.

29 I have in mind the accounts of the giant Africans armed with chains in the popular romance Futūh al-Bahnasā,

There is a distinctly non-Maghribī character about the weaponry of ‘Allām. In all of Thomas's material, likewise in Professor Johnstone's, T. article in Arabian Studies, iv, 1978, 59–65Google Scholar, one is aware of a whole cycle of Hilālī stories which are detached from any formal corpus of sīra, simple raw material in many instances, out of which the sīra could have emerged. Such stories are very close to those about Luqmān and Luqaym and other pre-Islamic South Arabian heroes, see René, Basset'sLoqman Berbère (Paris, 1890)Google Scholar.

All the South Arabian sources (including the Hilālī examples cited in Dr. Ingham's, BruceNorth East Arabian dialects (London-Boston, Routledge, Kegan Paul International), 1982)Google Scholar together with new texts collected on the spot, are surveyed and assessed in Canova's, G. article, ‘Testimonianze hilaliane nello Yemen Oriental’, Studia Yemeniti, I, Quaderni Di Semtistica, 14, Instituto di Linguistics e di Lingue Orientali Universita di Firenze, 1985, 161–85Google Scholar. This is the first field-work of importance to be made in recent years on the South Arabian Hilālī material, as it still survives. In regard to this Arabian material Canova remarks (p. 179), ‘Jacques Berque ha osservato alcuni epopea in Egitto e storia nel Maghreb. Abbiamo l'impressione che in Yemen (e forse in tutta l'Arabia meridionale) esse si presentino un terzo aspetto: quello della favola. Parafrasando le parole di al-Hamdānī sulla gente del deserto, citate in precedenza, sembra che anche i personaggi dei loro racconti tradizionali tendano ad assumere le sembianze degli eroi della tribii piu illustre. E in ogni caso necessario raccogliere un corpus di narrazioni hilaliane piu consistente, allargando la ricerca ad aree diverse, per accertare la fondatezza di queste considerazioni.’

30 Bulletin L.O.A.B., no. 12, 1981, (Paris, CNRS), 185–6Google Scholar.

31 See Lady Blunt, op. cit., p. vii. I had hoped to find, in Cambridge University Library, some conclusive indication that the lithographed text of Qiṣṣat faras al-‘Uqaylī Jābir (Moh 208 d.21) was the source for Lady Blunt's translation. Within the cover of the copy of the book there is a Latin inscription which indicates that it was left to the Library by Professor Edward Granville Brown (1862–1926), and above it ‘From the library of Lady Anne Blunt, Baroness Wentworth (died in Cairo, Dec. 15, 1917) left by Wilfred Scawen Blunt (died at Newbuildings Place, Southwater, Sussex, Sept. 10,1922) to Edward G. Browne of Pembroke College, Cambridge’. From information furnished by Bridget Connelly in her Arab folk epic and identity, op. cit., p. 282, n. 29, it would now appear that she has been able to find the written and printed source of Lady Blunt in an 1865 Cairo lithograph edition, with a similar title, which is kept in the British Library, Oriental Collection, No. 14570.a.6. The translation of the Blunts appears also to have been a rendering of an Arabic version, partly oral, heard in Cairo. There is far more verse in Moh 208 D.21 than in their translation. The Arabic verse is characteristic of the Hilālī poetry of the sīra (e.g. the bard's laudatory praise of the Prophet) and this is not in any way reproduced in their English. Compare the terse opening of Lady Blunt, ‘In the name of God … etc’ to the original text, where the whole style is far more elaborate, eloquent and poetic: ‘Praise be to Allāh, who has made the siyar of the ancients a lesson and an admonition for those of latter times, and who has appointed them to be a sermon and a homily for every man who is intelligent and who is possessed of understanding…’. Even so, I do think that they used this lithographed version as well; compare the Arabic qāla‘l-rāwī wa-huwa Abū ‘Ubayda (confirming my suspicions that this is a pseudo-Abū ‘Ubayda, the grammarian (d. circa 825), with Blunt,‘ Abū Obeyd … is said to have lived in the third century of Islam, say the tenth of our era’. He was certainly not a native of Cairo as they suggest, although it is just possible that he was a rāwī who bore the nickname of the grammarian.

32 Blunt, ibid., 107Google Scholar.

33 Lucienne Saada, 171.

34 Nabih Amin, Fans, The Books of Idols (Hishām b. al-Kalbī), (Princeton, 1952), 49Google Scholar. The story of Isāf and Nā'ila (p. 8) both Jurhumites, may have been part of some ancient cycle. See my article, ‘Fables and legends’, in The Cambridge history of Arabic literature, i, 1983, 382Google Scholar.

35 Fā'iq Amīn, Mukhlis, Studies and comparison of the cycles of the Banu Hilal Romance, Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, 1964Google Scholar.

36 Al-Idrīsī, , Opus Geographicum, ed. Cerulli, E. et al. , Fasciculus Secundus, Neapoli-Romae (Leiden, Brill, 1971), 121Google Scholar. A ruin in North Africa, which would seem to be associated with the Hilālīs, is one in the region of Mizda, in Tripolitania, which was seen by the explorer, Henry, Barth, and mentioned in his Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa, (London, 1857), I, 107–9Google Scholar. This ‘castle of Khafāji ‘Aāmer’ seems to have associations with the Hilālī character of that name, though Barth was of the opinion that his name was connected with the Tripoli dynasty of the Banī ‘Āmir, which, he says, ruled Tripoli and beyond between 724/1323 and 802/1379.

37 p.71,n.6.

38 Alfred von, Kremer, Über die süidarabische Sage (Leipzig, 1866), 64Google Scholar.

39 Cambridge history of Arabic literature, I, 1983, 385Google Scholar.

40 Kilāb al-Tījān (Akhbār ‘Ubayd), op. cit., 335.

41 Bridget Connelly in her book, Arab folk epic and identity, op. cit., argues strongly in favour of the ‘epic nature’ of sīra, especially in her first two chapters, and she takes issue with Von Grunebaum on this point (p. 3). However, she does not discuss the case against pseudo-Maghāzī literature a s ‘epic’—both genres being interrelated—made by Rudi Paret when the subject came up for discussion at the International Conference on ‘La Poesia Epica e la sua Formazione’ held in the spring of 1969, in Rome. In the Atti (Quaderno No. 139) published by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1970, 746 and 747, Paret made his views clear and in the subsequent discussion it was recorded that ‘Die Futūh-Literatur steht zwischen Geschichte und Epos’. There is also extensive insertion of material borrowed from literary works (al-Mas‘ūdī etc.), and especially in the Sīrat ‘Antar and Slrat Sayf (as I plan to show), in both oral performance and written text. The case made by Bridget Connelly was well worth making, yet, finally, one is drawn to the views of Bausani and Canova cited by her (ibid., p. 11), ‘What might have provided the material of myth, epic, and story, thus became, as the Italian scholars Bausani and Canova argue, history and legend written down in the official literary language of the new empire. Islam converted that which might have become epic into either history or legend, either preempting as its own truth any potential epic material or dismissing it as lies.’

42 Oriente Moderno, Anno LVII. Nr. 5–6, 1977, 211–26Google Scholar.

43 This view is highlighted by the title of the interesting book, Épica árabe y èpica castellana, by Ālvaro, Galmès de Fuentes, Editorial Ariel, Barcelona, 1978. See esp. pp. 17–19Google Scholar.

44 Reynold A., Nicholson, A literary history of the Arabs (Cambridge, 1969), 459Google Scholar.

45 Kalevala, the land of the heroes, transl. W. F., Kirby (Dent's Everymans Library), vol. II 230Google Scholar. A view, not dissimilar to this, was expressed by Professor Hatto, A. T. in his paper on ‘Tradition and Change in the Kirghiz Manas’Google Scholar, presented at the Second European Seminar on Central Asian Studies, convened in the School by the Centre for Near and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, 7–10 April, 1987. In regard to the hero Manas and the transformation of his exploits at a later date, Hatto, on page 4 remarked:

‘Coupled with this new stage of self-identification through epic poetry, in which the great Heroes were now Kirghiz, went a vast inflation of casual detail in the narration of episodes both traditional and invented, with much repetition above all in Sagymbay's and Sayakbay's variants, and not only in Manas but also in the voluminous accounts of Manas's son and grandson in Semetey and Seytek, making a work not of “epics”, which properly require epic structure, but an “epopee”—if I may revive an obsolete English term—that is, a loose, amorphous compilation like the Shanameh—and unlike the Iliad.’