Epic Verse Research Articles

The Diction of Beowulf

Anglo-Saxon and Greek epic each provide k. on two occasions a seemingly authentic account of the narration of verse in the heroic age. Hrothgar's court bard sings of the encounters at Finnsburg (lines 1068–1159), and improvises the tale of Beowulf's exploits in a complimentary comparison of the Geatish visitor with Sigemund (lines 871–892); Alcinous' court bard sings of the discovered adultery of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey vin.266–366), and takes up a tale of Odysseus while the Ithacan wanderer listens on (Odyssey vin.499–520). Nothing in all this is autobiographical : unlike the poets of Deor and Widsith, the poet of Beowulf is not concerned with his own identity; the poet of the Odyssey, reputed blind, reveals himself not at all in singing of the blind minstrel Demodocus. Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition. That such a tradition lies behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny. Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived; he further reasoned that frequent formulas in epic verse indicate oral composition, and assumed the slightly less likely corollary that oral epic is inclined towards the use of formulas. Proceeding from Parry's conclusions and adopting one of his schemata, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., argues that Beowulf likewise was created from a legacy of oral formulas inherited and extended by bards of successive generations, and the thesis is striking and compelling. Yet a fresh inspection will indicate one crucial amendment: Beowulf and the Homeric poems are not at all formulaic to the same extent.

Oral-Formulaic Technique and Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Previous articleNext article No AccessOral-Formulaic Technique and Middle English Alliterative PoetryRonald A. WaldronRonald A. Waldron Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 32, Number 4Oct., 1957 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2850297 Views: 14Total views on this site Citations: 12Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1958 The Mediaeval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:David Wallace The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, 34 (Mar 2008).https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200Ralph Hanna Alliterative poetry, (Jan 1999): 488–512.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.023 Richard H. Osberg Alliterative Technique in the Lyrics of MS Harley 2253, Modern Philology 82, no.22 (Oct 2015): 125–155.https://doi.org/10.1086/391361 Valerie Krishna Parataxis, Formulaic Density, and Thrift in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Speculum 57, no.11 (Oct 2015): 63–83.https://doi.org/10.2307/2847562Michael J. Bennett Sir Gawain and the green knight and the literary achievement of the north-west Midlands: the historical background, Journal of Medieval History 5, no.11 (Jan 2012): 63–88.https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-4181(79)90018-6Vaira Vikis-Freibergs, Imants Freibergs Formulaic analysis of the computer-accessible corpus of Latvian sun-songs, Computers and the Humanities 12, no.44 (Dec 1978): 329–339.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02400105Edward R. Haymes Die Anwendung der Parry-Lord Theorie auf Einzeltraditionen, (Jan 1977): 27–42.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-03860-9_4 William E. Holland Formulaic Diction and the Descent of a Middle English Romance, Speculum 48, no.11 (Oct 2015): 89–109.https://doi.org/10.2307/2856272 Nicolas Jacobs Alliterative Storms: A Topos in Middle English, Speculum 47, no.44 (Oct 2015): 695–719.https://doi.org/10.2307/2856635H.L. Rogers The crypto‐psychological character of the oral formula, English Studies 47, no.1-61-6 (Jan 1966): 89–102.https://doi.org/10.1080/00138386608597254 Wayne A. O'Neil Another Look at Oral Poetry in the Seafarer, Speculum 35, no.44 (Oct 2015): 596–600.https://doi.org/10.2307/2846557 James Ross Formulaic Composition in Gaelic Oral Literature, Modern Philology 57, no.11 (Oct 2015): 1–12.https://doi.org/10.1086/389289

Clio's New Overalls

The general idea of my title was hatched some years ago for an after-dinner speech at the annual meeting of the Midwest Economic Association. It proved to have been hatched from a double-yoked egg. In the first place some of the younger members, nurtured in the New Deal and the labour developments of the late thirties, said there was a printer's error on the programme. My title should be, not CLIO, but CIO. In the second place, the toastmaster primed himself for introducing me by looking Clio up in the Encyclopædia. He was baffled to learn that it is “a shell-less pelagic mollusc in the class Pteropod. A small spindle-shanked animal with six tentacles on its head. It forms the principal part of the food of some species of whales.” Being brought up on short-run phenomena, he read no further. Had he persisted he would, of course, have discovered that another Clio was one of the nine Greek muses; that she got her Ph.D. for a thesis on epic verse, then settled down to that other branch of poetic licence, history; and that she was thus an eternally young lady who never forgot a date.From the evidence of sculpture and pottery it seems clear that Clio, unlike Venus, always wore clothes, choosing her apparel to fit the story she was writing. When dealing with military history she dressed like an Amazon, spear and shield and all; for political and constitutional history she had a whole clothes-closet—a crown and a purple coronation robe, a black gown which made her look like Portia, a knee-length coat copied later by southern senators, also miscellaneous wigs, cloaks, and daggers; the history of art and literature called for a corduroy tunic and flat-heeled buskins; for religious history she was garbed like a priestess; and when psychiatry was invented she experimented at length to see what went best with a couch. When, having passed through the drum and trumpet stage of history writing, she got round to economic history, she donned overalls: blue jeans, with copper rivets, pockets everywhere, white stitching, and union-made label. The get-up did not look divine, or even muse-like, especially from the back. But for the job in hand it has proved functionally well suited, and Clio at work has chalked up a creditable record of achievement during three quarters of a century's full employment of all her resources. It is about that record that I want to talk this afternoon.

A New Fragment of Epic Verse

The following fragment of papyrus, written in a late but careful hand, was recently acquired by Dr. Ibn Abig-sel of Plasmopolis, who has with singular generosity granted us permission to publish the text. As it may be of some general interest, it is presented here with a brief commentary based on his transcript and notes; a more detailed study will, it is hoped, appear in a papyrological journal later.

TheArgonautica of Valerius Flaccus.

The Flavian writers of epic verse took their business seriously enough and seldom permitted themselves anything that might pass for an allusion to contemporary events: so much so that only an ingenuity that runs a risk of being perverse can wrest from them much more than what they have themselves chosen to say in their dedications or invocations. Where the man survived to complete and edit his work, such a dedication, the last thing to be written, more or less bears on its face the date of publication. The proem of the Thebaïs of Statius and the ‘Flavian Panegyric,’ which Silius Italicus inserted in the third book of his Punica thus reveal, to within a year, when the whole of the one and a portion of the other were given to the world, viz. in 91–2 and in 92–3 respectively. With an unfinished work the case is different; indeed, the very presence of that panegyric might sufficeto prove that though Silius had reached the end, in a fashion, when he finished his seventeenth book, he did not truly complete his poem or himself publish it as a whole. In order to determine at what date he got as far with his poem as he ever did, some other source of information is therefore desirable. Similarly with the Argonautica. Valerius Flaccus does not appear to have composed any more than the eight books that have come down to us, nor is he known to have published any part of them save, if at all, by recitation. It is for this reason that the proem, with its invocation of Vespasian, to all appearance as still living, has always been taken to be, not a later insertion, but an integral part of the first book, and thus a clear indication of the date at which Valerius began his task.

The Position of "Deferred" Nouns and Adjectives in Epic and Dramatic Verse

-Our appreciation of classical verse is seriously affected by the difficulty of estimating certain factors in ancient verse that are alien to most modern poetry. The editor of Horace's Odes notes the artistic interlocking of words; the student of Propertius discovers a high degree of conscious art in the rhymed endings of words at the ends of metrical phrases; the student of epic observes the emphasis produced by position at the beginning of the hexameter, or the artificial bracketing of a verse by words at the beginning and end which are in sound or sense, or both, closely related. Such observations are often quite true from a descriptive standpoint; but after these features have been described there remains a more difficult problem: Just what degree of conscious art is represented by such features of ancient verse? To what extent are they due to conditions of verse composition beyond the poet's control? To what extent do they reveal a happy compromise between mechanical necessity and the artist's natural desire to enforce the thought and embellish the form ? The final appreciation of the poet's art must carry us beyond mere description, which is seldom altogether free from the influence of the critic's sympathy with modern poetry, and lead us to an understanding of the peculiar problems of the ancient poet, of the necessary adjustment of conflicting factors, many of which are foreign to modern verse. A feature of epic verse that has escaped general recognition but has been incidentally noted by one or two special students of Homer and Vergil is the somewhat monotonous regularity with which words and phrases that escape into the second verse of a sequence of two verses stand at the beginning of the second verse rather than elsewhere. Such words are closely connected in thought with the first verse and might reasonably be expected to stand somewhere near the beginning rather than the end of the second verse in response to the natural requirements of collocation. But there is a stereotyped