Students of Homeric epic start from the fact that the extant Iliad and Odyssey emerged out of a tradition of oral poetry focused on the Trojan War saga. When speaking of this “tradition of oral poetry,” we envision illiterate poets composing as they perform before an audience. We then ask after the relationship between this centuries-old oral tradition and our Iliad and Odyssey. To do so, we break that question down into several more manageable queries. Minna Skafte Jensen sets aside one of those questions--“no attempt will be made to prove that the Iliad and Odyssey were orally composed” (19)--and instead focuses on another: “if as our point of departure we take the two poems to be oral, what can we then learn from oral traditions in our own world as to how they can have been recorded in writing?” (19). Essentially, Jensen returns to one of the major concerns of her 1980 book but brings more comparative research to bear on the topic as well as another thirty years of scholarly practice. This informative and adventurous study will be of great value to all scholars of oral epic, above all Homerists.
The first four chapters look at modern-day traditions of oral epic. Chapter 1 handles a range of preliminaries, including a “working definition of ‘epic’” (23) and brief introductions to six traditions that serve as the primary comparanda throughout the book. Chapter 2 reviews the three concepts integral to Milman Parry’s model of oral poetic composition—formula, theme, and adding style—and considers how they fare when applied to modern-day traditions. Chapter 3 synthesizes a mass of scholarship on modern-day poets of oral epic, charting their repertoires, their interactions with audiences, their training, and their presentation of both “unified” epics (“they tell a linear story of events” [107]) and “cyclic” epics (“consisting of independent episodes” [107]). Chapter 4 reports on the matter of stability and change in several traditions. Especially intriguing is the idea that scholars’ specific interests prompt them to describe a tradition as either stable or in flux. Homerists who have yet to explore modern-day oral epics will benefit from these first four chapters.
Jensen then shifts to Homeric poetry and begins to offer her solutions to some long-standing problems. Chapter 5 starts with an investigation into the term “rhapsode,” arguing for its synonymity with aoidos (usually translated by classicists as “singer”) and positioning Homer as himself a rhapsode who composed “in the way traditional singers of oral epic do” (160). The chapter next turns to Plato’s Ion. The eponymous rhapsode Ion, Jensen maintains, composed in performance like modern-day poets of oral epic; he did not recite memorized texts. There follows a reexamination of the so-called “Panathenaic rule” that governed the performance of Homeric poetry at Athens’ Great Panathenaia festival. Here we meet with the first application of an axiom presented in the book’s preface (and emphasized again in the book’s brief conclusion): Homer means “all Homeric poetry, transmitted or lost”; “‘Homer’ means the Homeric langue, of which individual manifestations such as the Iliad and Odyssey are considered paroles” (13). As for the Panathenaia, then, Jensen rejects the proposition that rhapsodes recited the Iliad and Odyssey and contends that they had to perform something from the larger Homeric tradition related to the Trojan saga and “between them tell a continued story” (172). Finally, backed by references to modern-day oral traditions, Jensen dismisses the notion that rhapsodes relied on written texts. Building on that last point, chapter 6 establishes what the phrase “transitional text” means and denies the concept’s relevance to the performance of Homeric poetry.
Chapter 7 takes on Gregory Nagy’s “evolutionary model” of the gradual fixation of the Homeric poems. I reduce Nagy’s influential and multi-faceted proposal to two inadequate sentences: over several centuries of oral performance, the Homeric epics became ever more set because, one, poets performed the stories in more and more places and, two, poets gathered at festivals like the Panathenaia and left with increasingly similar versions of the stories. This gradual “crystallization” does not depend on writing. To challenge Nagy’s model, Jensen argues above all for the relative uniformity of the Homeric textual tradition, finding instructive similarities and differences in the textual histories of medieval French poems and the Epic of Gilgamesh. If the witnesses editors use to reconstruct the Homeric epics (primarily medieval manuscripts but also ancient papyrus fragments and quotations from the Iliad and Odyssey in other ancient authors) did not all descend from the same text, they would show much greater variation than they do, especially in the form of “content differences resulting in different passages” (224). Put another way, if Nagy’s model were correct, these witnesses would differ from one another in far more significant ways than they do. Jensen, then, imagines “one original for each text and scribal milieus as the home of the variants found in manuscripts” (229); each original was “the first common ancestor of the medieval transmission” (228-229). She also finds fault with Nagy’s idea that the Iliad and Odyssey overshadowed other examples of Homeric poetry and with his theory that the Iliad and Odyssey became ever more set as they were performed in more and more places. To round out the chapter, Jensen turns to vase paintings and contends that “[m]otifs from the Iliad and Odyssey were never privileged over other scenes from the Trojan War but occurred with more or less the same frequency” (243). With that point in mind, Jensen goes on to suggest that, after the poems were dictated in Athens in 522 BCE, they “had no further life in oral tradition” (i.e., they were not reperformed), “were only brought back to life when someone consulted them, as it is reported that Athenian state authorities did on a few occasions,” and “belonged to the educated élite” (246).
Chapter 8’s first sections apply Lauri Honko’s concepts of “pools of tradition” and “mental texts” to Homeric poetry and consider the relationship between the poems of the Epic Cycle and the two epics. The later sections explore in more detail what happened after the dictation of the Iliad and Odyssey: “the scrolls of the written texts were deposited in the Acropolis” (264); “Herodotus is likely to have known them as well as various other epic poems in written form” (270); and “Thucydides took care to get a copy of Book ii” (271). Teachers integrated portions of the two poems into school curricula, and educated individuals came to think of Homer as the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, whereas the general public continued to use the name in reference to “a whole spectrum of epics, at least all those concerned with the Trojan War” (275).
Chapter 9 begins with a survey of some twentieth-century collectors’ efforts to record and publish translations of oral epics. (Honko’s work with the Siri Epic deservedly receives its own section.) Next, Jensen reconstructs the dictation of the Iliad and Odyssey. I note the two main conclusions. First, each poem “must be the result of dictation in an induced setting” (296); “Such sources as there are point at a certain Cynaethus as the rhapsode who dictated the Iliad>, whereas no name can be given the poet of the Odyssey. The scribe in charge of the undertaking may perhaps be identified as Onomacritus, known from Herodotus” (327-28). Second, the tyrant Hipparchus was the motivated patron: “the project would have been propagated as a task undertaken to promote the greater glory of Athens, and the written scrolls would probably have been offered to the goddess [i.e., Athena] as an ex voto” (296). Jensen addresses head-on the question that her model provokes: “the scribes seem to have interfered very little [with the dictated texts]. This is actually strange when we compare with how freely pre-Parry editors used to tamper with oral epic on its way from performance to printed text” (301). In fact, “[c]ompared with [these] modern editors…the editor of the Iliad and Odyssey must have felt more respectful towards the singer and less tempted to tamper with their texts” (301-302). The chapter closes with an investigation of three passages in which the poet makes a mistake and seeks to correct his error in subsequent verses, just the sort of thing that a dictating poet would do. (I feel silly pointing to a bibliographical omission when Jensen has read as much as is humanly possible, but Steve Reece’s illuminating defense of the dictation theory does not appear in the lengthy Works Cited and, as far as I can tell, is not referenced in the book.)
Chapter 10 rejects the view that Hellenistic-era scholars divided each poem into twenty-four books. Dissecting the breaks taken by ‘Awadallah ‘Abd aj-Jalil ‘Ali and Gopala Naika when performing the Story of ‘Amir and the Siri Epic, respectively, and noting that the Homeric poets use only a handful of different strategies to end or begin a book, Jensen posits that the segmentation of the Iliad and Odyssey stems from “the rhythm of the dictation process, each book being the portion dictated in one day” (362). Chapter 11 surmises that three statues of scribes dedicated to Athena on the Acropolis commemorated “the great writing projects of the Pisistratids, among which were the recording of the Iliad and the Odyssey” (393).
This book elegantly demonstrates how research on modern-day oral epics can inspire productive thinking about Homeric epic. I have sought to bring out the breadth of Jensen’s discussion, but the book comes in at 440 pages on account of the depth of its analyses as well.
Works Cited
Jensen, M. S. 1980. The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
Reece, Steve. 2005. “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: From Oral Performance to Written Text.” In New Directions in Oral Theory, edited by Marc C. Amodio, 43-89. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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[Review length: 1638 words • Review posted on September 12, 2012]