Hour 2. Achilles as epic hero and the idea of total recall in song The meaning of memnēmai 2§1. The key word for this hour is memnēmai, which means ‘I have total recall’ in special contexts and ‘I remember’ in ordinary contexts. The special contexts involve memory by way of song. I will get to the specifics later. Hour 2 Text A |527 I totally recall [ me-mnē-mai ]… Read more
Hour 3. Achilles and the poetics of lament The meaning of akhos and penthos 3§1. There are two key words for this hour, akhos and penthos, and the meaning of both words is ‘grief, sorrow; public expression of grief, sorrow, by way of lamentation or keening’. A man of constant sorrow 3§2. The word akhos is connected with the name of Achilles in the Iliad. And the meaning of the… Read more
3. Homeric Echoes in Bihać* In the Milman Parry Collection of Oral-Traditional Literature in the Harvard University Library are a number of texts that tell of the return of a hero after a long captivity to find his wife about to marry again. [1] This basic Odyssean tale attracted Parry because of its similarity to the Homeric… Read more
4. Avdo Međedović, Guslar* Demodocus, I praise you beyond all mortal men, whether your teacher was the muse, the child of Zeus, or was Apollo. —Homer, Odyssey 8.487-488 Avdo Međedović of the village of Obrov, a half-hour’s walk from Bijelo Polje in eastern Montenegro, died sometime during 1955 at the approximate age of eighty-five. It may well be… Read more
5. Homer as an Oral-Traditional Poet* Some misconceptions have arisen about the “oral theory” and about the quality of the Serbo-Croatian oral-traditional epic and its possible relevance to an understanding of the Homeric poems. They are the subject of this paper. Much of its burden is to demonstrate to the Homerist how the superb singer in the South Slavic tradition can make… Read more
6. The Kalevala, the South Slavic Epics, and Homer* The differences among the three epic traditions represented in this chapter are great. The Kalevala is the last of a series of compilations made by Elias Lönnrot of shorter songs collected by himself and others from epic singers in various parts of Finland. The oral-traditional epics of the South Slavs are independent, individual… Read more
7. Beowulf and Odysseus* Oral tradition leaves its mark not only in the formulaic style of verse making and in the presence of repeated themes but also in the persistence of certain basic narrative patterns, in spite of sea-changes and reinterpretations. There seems to be evidence that one of the patterns found in the story of Odysseus also underlies a section of… Read more
8. Interlocking Mythic Patterns in Beowulf* There are two discrete narrative patterns that are found fairly widely disseminated in epic or story tradition, the possible presence of which I should like to explore in Beowulf. The first of these involves three stages, (1) A powerful figure is not present or, for various reasons, is powerless in a situation of danger to his… Read more
9. The Formulaic Structure of Introductions to Direct Discourse in Beowulf and Elene* This paper is an attempt, after a long silence, to continue work along lines suggested by my distinguished colleague Larry Benson, in an article published in 1966. [1] In it he indicated that a number of the Anglo-Saxon poems that are clearly products of… Read more
10. The Influence of a Fixed Text* In The Singer of Tales I attempted primarily to describe the workings of a pure oral tradition of narrative song, one in which written texts had no influence, or were nonexistent. [1] A knowledge of the processes of oral composition and transmission in their pure form was necessary for an… Read more
