The fact there are no surviving manuscripts doesn’t mean that they never existed; what further proof is there that they were passed only orally? Were the relevant parts of India completely illiterate at the time? The fact that some or even most singers are illiterate and yet know their songs word for word isn’t a proof to my mind that a parallel written tradition doesn’t have stabilising effect on the oral one, so that in the end the written tradition is responsible for the apparent stability of the oral one. This is just a thought, I haven’t studied the question of Vedic transmission.
Again, I don’t think there are that many problems when you look at the poems as a whole. Its like people taking vast linguistic divergences as evidence for different bards of a lengthy period of time. I do think such things can occur in textual transmission. Look at Ovid’s Heroides. This sort of stuff happens when you have lots and lots of texts flying around, language change etc. There are problems, many problems, in assuming that these errors were assumed in an autograph. Obviously the poet could have re-read, or the recipient of the text, or anything. Its easier to just assume that regardless of origin, when the poem was rendered into text it was subject to the same problems as every other text.
Latin poetry and Ovid is totally alien to me, so I can’t compare to that.
I’ve been reading pretty recently some seriously analytic stuff like Denys Page’s Homeric Odyssey and Dawe’s Odyssey commentary; I must say that there’s much of it that I find exaggerated. But beside the sort of grammatical problems mentioned before, there’s also the question plot inconsistensies/discontinuities. Like the 11th song of the Odyssey. Basically, what starts there as a summoning of the dead suddenly changes into descent to Hades. I find it really hard to explain problems of this kind as some kind of natural inconsistensies of oral poetry. On the other hand, if you assume they are problems of textual transmission, the textual problems you’re assuming are so big that basically you’re adapting an analytic position.
I’m much more in line with Burgess’ work than Griffins or even Aristotle’s in this regard. Homer appears to be innovative, but we ought not to assume that innovation here = quality. But, not just the length, his vision over the past, his treatment of the Trojans etc is almost certainly markedly different.
In this we seem to agree, but I have only just begun my study of cyclic poetry…
Well as for length inhibiting performance, this goes back to what I said above about us needing to know more about the context. Taplin’s Homeric Surroundings show how this might have happened. I’m unsure. For me I foresee something like an exemplary poet being invited to sing at longer and longer festivals, working on his song until eventually it is taken down. In expanded form like most dictations. Perhaps at the behest of a sponsor, or his students or whoever.
I got Taplin’s book from the university library. I’ll see… I agree that we don’t really know enough about the original context.
Your idea of the poet isn’t very different from West’s, only he seems to think the writing of the poem happened parallely with traveling around and singing at festivals. He has written a short, kind of funny “Life of Homer” of his own. It’s in German in a book called “Lag Troia in Kilikien?” It’s really pretty funny and just a few pages, so you might want to check it…
No, you do get quite a few good ones that seem natural. I chose India and Crete since you do get lengthy songs.
How long is this stuff? Is this modern stuff, i.e. from tape recorder times? Can you give a reference?
Yeah Janko is good in general. Actually, there’s a series of papers in the journal S. Osoloensis where Skafte-Jensen debates with others (including West, Janko, Nagy) about the book divisions in the Iliad which are well worth a read on all this stuff if you can access it.
Do you know whether this is the same stuff that was published in a book called “Relative chronology in Early Greek Epic Poetry”?
I find Janko’s glottochronological dating of the different epics very unconvincing, however… I did even before I read that West and others agree with me.
