The Epic Cycle and oral tradition

Abstract

This chapter offers an alternative to textualist models and the assumptions that underlie them by weighing other ways in which epic stories can relate to one another and by querying the very notion of an organized, integral cycle as customarily construed. Briefly stated, we advocate the concept of a ‘constellation’ rather than an anthology, basing our model on the real-life ecology of living, observable oral epic traditions. That is, we interpret the remnants of the ancient Greek Epic Cycle as reflecting a loosely related consortium of flexible narratives rather than a sequenced, textually interactive collection of artifacts. Scholars may of course choose to impose a latter-day order upon the materials at hand, an order based on sequence, influence, and other mainstay textual features, but that does not necessarily mean that those materials were in fact composed (or received) according to such an externally imposed framework. We contend that the surviving texts – Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and all of the Cycle fragments and summaries – represent possible instances of the epic stories surrounding the Trojan War and related events, instances that at some point took shape as fixed and stable (even if partial) entities, but which once existed as malleable story-patterns that featured and fostered variation within limits. With this kind of pre-textual history behind them, overlap and even contradiction would have been natural and expectable, since the narratives were not reacting primarily to one another but were instead emerging from a multiform tradition. We ballast this proposal about the ancient Greek Epic Cycle by surveying several oral epic traditions from around the world that behave similarly, that is, which operate by generating instances that show primary allegiance to their tradition as a whole rather than to any other single story-performance in particular. Toward the close of the chapter we offer some observations on the joint model of neoanalysis and oral traditional poetics that has been gaining momentum in Cycle scholarship.