Foreword Gregory Nagy Epic Singers and Oral Tradition, by Albert B. Lord, is a particularly distinguished entry in the Myth and Poetics series. My goal, as series editor, has been to encourage work that helps to integrate literary criticism with the approaches of anthropology and pays special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth. A model of such integration and emphasis is Lord’s… Read more
Acknowledgments I thank the good friends and colleagues who urged me to publish a selection of my papers, especially most recently James Hankins, Richard Janko, and Jan Ziolkowski. I am also grateful to Gregory Nagy for encouragement and for accepting the volume into the series Myth and Poetics of which he is editor. I deeply appreciate his gracious foreword, and thank him for many other kindnesses over… Read more
Introduction [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] It is of the nature of things that Homer and… Read more
1. Words Heard and Words Seen* It seems superfluous to remark that in the history of mankind words were heard before they were seen. For the majority of people, as a matter of fact, words still are heard rather than seen, and even those who have learned to visualize words as containing particular letters in a particular sequence continue to operate much… Read more
2. Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts* In his impressive book Heroic Poetry, Sir Cecil M. Bowra places Homer “in the middle of an important change produced by the introduction of writing. ” “Behind him [Homer] lie centuries of oral performance, largely improvised, with all its wealth of formulae adapted to an exacting metre; these he knows and uses fully. But if he… Read more
5. The Mênis of Achilles and Its Iliadic Teleology This book began with an assumption that terms for emotions such as anger have meanings and resonance that are specific to their culture, so that it could be informative to reconstruct the sense of an epic word such as mênis within its own poetic context. By now it is clear that this highly specialized social term denoting the… Read more
Appendix. The Etymology of Mênis After the in-depth contextual analysis of mênis provided above, it should be possible to resolve some of the lingering questions about its etymology. In this appendix, I propose to (1) point out the existence of a word ultimately related to mênis that is attested in the oldest surviving texts from ancient Iran, the Avestan Gāthās , and from ancient India, the hymns… Read more
Bibliography Alexiou, Margaret. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge. Ameis, Carl, and Carl Hentze. 1906, repr. 1965. Iias für den Schuldebrauch. II Bd. 4 Hft. Gesang XXII-XXIV. Leipzig. Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ. Austin, Norman. 1966. The Function of Digressions in the Iliad. Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies… Read more
Foreword [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] Gregory Nagy The Singer Resumes the Tale, by Albert… Read more
Preface* This is Albert B. Lord’s book. It is not quite the same book that would have resulted had he lived to crown it with his finishing touches, but it comes as close to that book as I could help to make it. He had completed almost all the chapters, to which I have added two, “Beowulf and Oral Epic Tradition” and “Rebuttal,”… Read more
