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The traditional style of thirteenth-century Greek ‘politikos stichos’ poetry and the search for its origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2016

Elizabeth Jeffreys  and
Michael Jeffreys
Elizabeth Jeffreys
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
Michael Jeffreys
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Extract

It is with great pleasure that we join in saluting BMGS on the fortieth anniversary of its inception: it is a stalwart, valued presence in the international academic arena. Long may it continue!

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 69 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 2016 

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References

1 Jeffreys, E. M. and Jeffreys, M. J, ‘The traditional style of early demotic Greek verse’, BMGS 5 (1979) 115–39Google Scholar. We have (as asked) summarized the chief changes occurring in this field since 1975, taking the opportunity offered by the editors to ‘write from a personal point of view rather than produce an objective and systematic ‘literature review’’. The choice of one century and the phrase ‘politikos stichos poetry’ mark the two most significant changes, as will be seen at the end of this piece.

2 It eventually appeared in 1996: Papathomopoulos, M. and Jeffreys, E. (eds), Ο Πόλεμος της Τρωάδος (The War of Troy) (Athens 1996)Google Scholar.

3 Kirk, G. S., The Songs of Homer (Cambridge 1962)Google Scholar. Kirk's book came hard on the heels of Lord's, A. B.Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA 1960)Google Scholar, which formed a breakthrough in the reception of Milman Parry's theories, which were largely published in the late 1920s and 1930s. The parcel of approaches involved became known as the Parry-Lord theory.

4 M. J. Jeffreys, ‘Studies in the language and style of the mediaeval Greek Chronicle of the Morea’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1972.

5 See Reichl, K. (ed.), Medieval Oral Literature (Berlin 2012)Google Scholar, for up-to-date surveys giving a sense of the scope of the field.

6 This method is explicit in the work of Duggan, J. J., especially The Song of Roland: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft (Berkeley 1973)Google Scholar, and The Cantar de mio Cid: Poetic Creation in its Economic and Social Contexts (Cambridge 1989), especially at 108–48.

7 Lord, A. B., ‘Homer's originality: oral dictated texts’, Transactions of the American Philological Society 84 (1983) 124–34Google Scholar.

8 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 124–38, especially 129–30.

9 As discussed in Karl Reichl, ‘Plotting the map of oral literature’, in Reichl, Medieval Oral Literature, 3–70.

10 See e.g. Coleman, J., Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge 1996)Google Scholar.

11 Jeffreys, M., ‘Formulas in the Chronicle of the Morea’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27 (1973) 165–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Jeffreys, M., ‘The nature and origins of the political verse’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 28 (1974) 143–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 MJJ, as lecturer at the University of Sydney, supported Alfred Vincent, founder of Modern Greek there, in meeting as many as possible of the challenges of teaching Greek in Sydney, defying the limitations of our tiny teaching staff. Challenges included a flood of students, the demands of a substantial Greek population, and the need for political action to reorganize the teaching and assessment of the languages of all Southern European migrants. Time and energy for research were very limited until a departmental review almost doubled staff numbers.

14 Including Joseph Duggan, Ruth Finnegan and Jack Goody.

15 Beck, H. G., ‘Die griechische volkstümliche Literatur des 14. Jahrhunderts’, in Berza, B. and Stanescu, E. (eds), Actes du XIVe congrès international des études byzantines I (Bucharest 1974) 125–38Google Scholar.

16 For the complexities surrounding the Greek Language Question, see the excellent discussion in the opening chapters of Mackridge, P., Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford 2010), especially 66–74Google Scholar.

17 The overall effect of Spadaro's many articles is best examined in the attempts of others to sum them up: see Jeffreys, E. M. and Jeffreys, M. J., ‘The style of Byzantine popular poetry: recent work’, in Okeanos (Essays Presented to Ihor Ševčenko on his Sixtieth Birthday) [Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 7], 1983, esp. 319–33Google Scholar; Beaton, R., Medieval Greek Romance (2nd ed., London 1996), 166–76Google Scholar.

18 Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 164–88.

19 Op. cit., 183–4, 187.

20 See MJJ's paper and discussion in Eideneier, H. (ed.), Neograeca Medii Aevi: Text und Ausgabe (Cologne 1987) 139–63Google Scholar. MJJ suggested that, given the dominance of the 15-syllable verse in written texts in the mixed language appearing in the thirteenth century, the structure of the verse might have had some influence over the development of the language. Perhaps this mixed language had a structural similarity to the Homeric mixture of dialects? Nobody agreed.

21 From being a closed shop of academics in post teaching Modern Greek at tertiary level, this has now morphed into a subscription-based society open to all interested in Greek culture: the Society for Modern Greek Studies (www.moderngreek.org.uk).

22 BMGS 14 (1990) 123–239.

23 With a typically Australian reaction to exclusion from metropolitan British structures, we were disappointed that Beaton's was the only article to mention our decade and a half of scholarly endeavour on subjects central to the title of the colloquium. EMJ happened to be in England at the time, with a family-based agenda, but heard too late about the colloquium; fares from Sydney are expensive, but it might have been polite to ask us to submit a paper. Worse still, in the only footnote to Peter Mackridge's introduction to the selected papers (p. 124), MJJ's work was summarily dismissed. The repetitions it found seemed to Mackridge more like clichés than formulas, ‘more characteristic of poorly written verse than of oral poetry’ — a reaction which obliterated three decades of international discussion of the cliché-like formulas of the western Middle Ages.

24 We had heard some of this when EMJ invited Finnegan to the Canberra conference of 1981 (see note 14 above); there she made similar points to a sadly jet-lagged Jack Goody. On that occasion, we had the impression that Finnegan classed our own early work in the positive category of the first half of her paper rather than in the second. However she had already lost interest in formulaic analysis, which in most European medieval traditions (though not Greek) was a project already completed.

25 Beaton, R., Kelly, J. and Lendari, T., Concordance to Digenes Akrites, Version E (Iraklio 1995)Google Scholar.

26 G. Sifakis, ‘Το πρόβλημα της προφορικότητας στη μεσαιωνική δημώδη γραμματεία: προβλήματα και προτάσεις’, in N. M. Panayotakis (ed.), Origini della letteratura neogreca, I (Venice 1993) 267–84.

27 Fenik, B., Digenis: Epic and Popular Style in the Escorial Version (Iraklio 1991).Google Scholar

28 The long surveys of Reichl, Medieval Oral Literature, include contrasting studies of epic and ballad in general and studies of individual language traditions which stress the existence of the two (or more) forms and their complex relationships. The chapters on German (pp. 295–334) and Hispanic (pp. 411–28) are particularly useful in this regard.

29 ‘Early Modern Greek verse: parallels and frameworks’, Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand) 1 (1993) 49–78, and ‘Proposals for the debate on the question of oral influence in early Modern Greek Poetry’, in Panayotakis (ed.), Origini della letteratura neogreca, I, 251–66. These articles both contain firm methodological challenges to those who deny the relevance of formulaic repetitions to explanations of the genesis of poems they contain.

30 Moennig, U., Die Erzählung von Alexander und Semiramis: kritische Ausgabe mit einer Einleitung, Übersetzung un einer Wörterverzeichnis (Berlin 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Mavromatis, G. K. and Agiotis, N. (eds), Πρώιμη νεοελληνική δημώδης γραμματεία: Γλώσσα, παράδοση και ποιητική (Iralklio 2012)Google Scholar.

32 The conclusions appeared as Shawcross, T., The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece (Oxford 2009Google Scholar). EMJ supervised the theses in the first five years of this century.

33 See Jeffreys, E., ‘Byzantine romances: eastern or western?’, in Brownlee, M. and Gondicas, D. (eds), Renaissance Encounters: Greek East and Latin West (Leiden, 2013Google Scholar) 221–37.

34 See, e.g., Thomas, H. M., The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford 2005)Google Scholar and Albu, E., The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion (Woodbrige 2001) 215–39Google Scholar.

35 The earliest manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 1610, has a date of 1264. See Dedeman, A. D., ‘Gothic manuscript illustrations’, in Rudolph, C. (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Oxford 2006) 423–42Google Scholar.

36 Hedeman, A. D., The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes chroniques de France, 1274–1433 (Berkeley 1991), 12–13Google Scholar; Stahl, H., Picturing Kingship: A Study of the Psalter of Saint Louis (University Park 2008)Google Scholar.

37 Jung, M.-R., La légende de Troie en France au Moyen Âge: analyse des versions françaises et bibliographie raisonée des manuscrits (Basel 1996) 440–562Google Scholar.

38 On Leonardo and his intellectual interests, see Dunbabin, J., Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe (London 1998Google Scholar), passim.

39 The ramifications of this legendary background are well discussed in Shawcross, T., ‘Re-inventing the homeland in the historiography of Frankish Greece: the Fourth Crusade and the legend of the Trojan War’, BMGS 27 (2003) 129–52Google Scholar.

40 As argued in Shawcross, Chronicle of Morea, 82–111; see also Gerstel, S. (ed.), Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese (Cambridge, MA 2013Google Scholar), and in particular J. Haines, ‘The Songbook for William of Villehardouin, Prince of Morea (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844): a crucial case in the history of vernacular song collections’, op.cit., 57–109.

41 E. Jeffreys, ‘Byzantine romances’, 237.

42 Sifakis, G., Γιa μιa ποιητική του ελληνικού δημοτικού τραγουδιού (Irakleio 1988)Google Scholar.

43 Some first steps are in Jeffreys, M., ‘Written dekapendasyllables and their oral provenance: a skeleton history’, in Roilos, P. (ed.), Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionaility and Narrative in Byzantium (Wiesdbaden 2014) 203–30Google Scholar.

44 ‘Looking for the tracks of oral tradition in medieval and early modern Greek poetic works’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 27 (2001) 61–86.

45 See J. Soltic, ‘The Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry: language, metre and discourse’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Ghent, 2015. The bibliography includes several articles by the same author, divided between journals relating to linguistics and Byzantine studies.

46 This point is frequently made or implied in her work, most explicitly in ‘The late medieval Greek vernacular πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry: a modern linguistic analysis into intonation units’, Journal of Greek Linguistics 14 (2014) 84–116, esp. 86–91. Paradoxically, despite this agreement with our views, MJJ is criticized in the thesis more than anyone else. The criticism concentrates on experimental linguistic theories presented at the first meeting of Neograeca Medii Aevi (see n. 20 above), especially the use of the word Kunstsprache (following Homeric terminology) for the mixed language of our texts (esp. pp. 20–7, 36–7). Maybe the first syllable of the German noun suggests artificiality, threatening Soltic's basic proposal that this is a real language? We used it (with no certainty that native Germans would sympathize) to refer to the language's effective but rather eccentric functionality in making politikos stichos verses. Since the word aroused opposition, we have largely withdrawn it.