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Casual judgements on Homer, and even those less casual, are often in a sense comparative, because the mind is illumined, or fogged, by contemporary prejudices. Blind ourselves, we laugh at Xenophanes who denounced the theologian Homer, and Plato who found fault with the moralist. The disease was diagnosed and the cure prescribed over 80 years ago by the Russian, A. N. Veselovsky: ‘The scholars of the West, who know very little about modern epic poetry, involuntarily transfer problems of purely literary criticism to the folk-poetry of the ancients. This is the usual fault of all the criticism of the Nibelungenlied and part of that of Homer. ... It is absolutely necessary to take as a starting-point the living epos, whose structure and stages of development must be carefully investigated.’ The comparison of one literature with another sheds light on both in various ways. It may be simply a matter of bringing a better balance to the judgement. Thus the long tradition of Homeric scholarship has made us well aware of the flaws in the Homeric plots. A whole school of criticism has rested on the assumption that the construction is incompetent. For such an attitude I know no better remedy than a reading of the paratactic, anticlimactic Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Both Homeric epics are intensely dramatic and very cunningly put together.
Kirk, Songs, 83 ff.; Lord, Companion, 179 ff.
page no 13 note 2 Quoted by Zhirmunsky, V., Oral Epics of Central Asia (with Chadwick, N.K., Cambridge, 1969), 319 Google Scholar.
page no 14 note 1 Cf. Propp, V., ‘Morphology of the Folktale’, International Journal of American Linguistics 24 (1958), 103 Google Scholar.
page no 14 note 2 Zhirmunsky, , ‘The Epic of “Alpamysh” and the Return of Odysseus’, Proc. Brit. Acad. 52, 267-86Google Scholar, boldly applies this sort of comparison to the whole Odyssean story but admits the hazards which arise from the absence of clear cultural continuity.
page no 14 note 3 Chadwick, H.M., The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912)Google Scholar.
page no 14 note 4 H.M., and Chadwick, N.K., The Growth of Literature (Cambridge, 1932-40)Google Scholar.
page no 14 note 5 Bowra, C.M., The Meaning of a Heroic Age (Earl Grey Lecture, Newcastle, 1957 = Language and Background, 22–47 Google Scholar), and, of course, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952), 1 ff.
page no 15 note 1 Heroic Poetry, 3 ff., but adds, ‘such study must take as much notice of variations as of underlying principles’.
page no 15 note 2 See the list of common features given in AJA 54 (1950), 184-92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page no 15 note 3 For possible lines of argument in dealing with saga see Finley, M.I., Caskey, J.L., Kirk, G.S., Page, D.L., ‘The Trojan War’, JHS 84 (1964), 1-20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a type-case.
page no 16 note 1 See Woodhouse, W.J., Composition of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford, 1930)Google Scholar, and the valuable earlier chapters of Carpenter, Rhys, Folktale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946)Google Scholar, before that excellent book began to ‘suffer from a preoccupation with bears’ (E. R. Dodds).
page no 16 note 2 Homeric Odyssey, 1 ff.
page no 16 note 3 Lord, , The Singer of Tales (Oxford, 1960)Google Scholar replaces earlier papers. See also the articles cited above, p. 9. General criticism by Dimock, G.E., ‘From Homer to Novi Pazar and Back’, Arion 2 (1963), 40–57 Google Scholar.
page no 17 note 1 Page, Homeric Odyssey, 154ff., anticipated this as part of his separatist argument, but did not relate the words and expressions he quoted to the formular technique, thus exposing himself to a comparison with the inconsistent practice of literate poets; cf. Young, D.C., ‘Miltonie Light on Page’s Homeric Theory’, Greece & Rome 6 (1959), 96-108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page no 17 note 2 ‘Homer as Oral Poet’, HSCP 72 (1968), 1-46 (see 19 ff.), in reply to Kirk, , ‘Formular Language and Oral Quality’, YCS 20 (1966), 155-74Google Scholar. Lord’s figures (‘so far, I believe, we can conclude that a pattern 50 to 60 per cent formula or formulaic, with 10 to perhaps 25 per cent straight formula, indicates clearly literary or written composition’) are surprisingly high, but the true oral poem is even more formulaic.
page no 17 note 3 As used, for example, by Notopoulos, J.A., ‘Homer, Hesiod, and the Achaean Heritage of Oral Poetry’, Hesperia 29 (1960), 177-97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Homeric Hymns as Oral Poetry’, AJP 83 (1962), 337-68; ‘Studies in Early Greek Oral Poetry, II’, HSCP 68 (1964), 18-45: McLeod, W.E., ‘Oral Bards at Delphi’, TAPA 92 (1961), 317-25Google Scholar; ‘Studies on Panyassis’, Phoenix 20 (1966), 95-110.
page no 18 note 1 On early descriptions of poetry see now Rosemary, Harriott, Poetry and Criticism before Plato (London, 1969)Google Scholar.