I should probably just stop right here, after asking the question in the title!
But I am curious about this matter of ‘The Odyssey’ having been told orally for centuries; if that is wholly true, then the dialect of its final form (which become its written form available as a printed text) must have been the result of changes (dialect, grammar, etc.) over time. And of course students of Attic Greek can read it, with help from supplementary grammatical information, etc.
The entire history of ‘The Odyssey’ is very interesting. What reference works for the layperson might be out there?
You must be aware that this is a very disputed matter, also know as the Homeric question. You’re going to find that there are quite different opinions about this. Currently, many scholars seem to think that the Odyssey existed as a wholly oral poem for a very long time, even centuries, before being committed into writing. I for one don’t think this is true; or at least if it is true, the “Odyssey poems” that were performed before the story was written down must have been very different from story that we now have. Oral poems were improvised, so there must have been notable differences each time the poem was performed, even more so if it was performed by different people.
My personal belief is that although the Odyssey has its roots in an ancient tradition of orally performed epic poetry, the Odyssey as we have it can be dated to the moment it was committed into writing. Here again estimates differ, but something like the 7th century BC.
My opinion is founded on Martin West’s book The Making of the Odyssey. It’s not quite a layperson’s book, but not very difficult either. The most interesting ideas are presented towards the beginning. But I recommend even more strongly The Making of the Iliad by the same author, because I think it’s more meticulously presented. In the main, his approach to the Homeric Question is the same in both books. You should be aware, though, that his opinion differs somewhat from what we might call the current orthodoxy – but this is nothing new, as Homeric scholars have been known to disagree on the Homeric Question for centuries.
Thank you for that informative reply. I will try to get hold of those books by Martin West, although I am very much a beginner in these matters. I did read the section from ‘The Odyssey’ in ‘Reading Greek’ (JACT) and enjoyed that very much. But I am working now on Euripides’ ‘The Bacchae.’
I browsed the descriptions of Martin West’s works and thought of how the story of Nausicaa (Odyssey, Bk. 6) would surely be a motif seen in other narratives. I could think of one other comic episode- the way the Green Knight’s lady seeks to seduce Gawain (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). But the comparison is not necessarily all that solid! But maybe there is a continuity of tradition. And just to add, I recently found quite by accident ‘Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics’ by Rhys Carpenter, which reflects what I see in the description of West’s works. Again, I am just making my way slowly; but this is a good start with ‘The Odyssey.’
Martin West had a bit of a streak of parallelomania (apologies to Sandmel) sometimes with the Odyssey, and had peculiar beliefs about the ages of Orpheus, Hesiod, and Homer. He was also a unitarian with little room for later developments.
But Paul is absolutely right that the matter is highly contentious. The last I checked, some years ago now, Nagy put the final form in the Hellenistic era. Others date it to the Panathenaea festival performance put on by Pisistratus, and Barry Powell (again, referencing older scholarship, not sure if he’s changed his tune) to the early 8th century. It runs the full range of dates.
Personally, I’ve been sympathetic to Janko’s dating from his statistical analysis, but I know even that is contentious, with other analyses shifting dates up and especially down.
There’s a book review of Janko’s book “Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns” in JSTOR. It summarizes Janko’s research and conclusions. JSTOR allows the public to read its articles online. Also very interesting is Janko’s introduction to “The Iliad: A Commentary Vol. IV” where he discusses the origins and evolution of the epic diction.
cmw’s “with little room for later developments” is perhaps a bit unfair about West. Personally I think West fully engaged with important newer discoveries, such as oral poetics. In general, I feel that in the last decades many so called oralists haven’t really engaged with the question of how a phenomenally long oral poem ever became a text, i.e. a physical artifact, long before the tape recorder was invented. Although oral poetics is quintessential for understanding what Homer is about, it doesn’t magically do away with the more traditional methods like textual studies.
With Janko’s glottochronological approach the problem is that you can’t just put poets from different places and with different native dialects on a single one-dimensional timeline according to perceived “early” and “late” linguistic features. In comparison, say, modern Canadian French has some features that are considered archaisms in modern Continental French (and vice versa). Janko’s Iliad commentary is great though.
Nagy’s crystallization hypothesis doesn’t really rest on any evidence (there’s just not enough variability in the early epic corpus to justify his model of rhapsodic multiforms (or whatever you call them)), and besides I find it difficult to understand just what is the exact relationship between manuscripts and performance that he is proposing, like in terms of who wrote and what.
I didn’t mean to imply that West didn’t keep up with developments, but rather that the Homer we inherited is very near what was originally composed, minus textual issues, as in there was an author who created a fixed text. I think he would reject, say, a core story written about Odysseus’ wanderings with the Telemachia and return added onto it. I’m sympathetic to an extent: I find that there’s strong unity in especially the Iliad, but in all the Odyssey, but I’d rather point to Gilgamesh to show how different episodes can come together by a single author and still develop greatly further (with a Middle Babylonian recension, a Neo-Assyrian recension, etc). As far as length, that’s of no concern at all. Lord and Perry definitively showed that length is not an issue for oral bards.
Janko does take into account survivals of archaic language in later works, though you do have a point that there might be idiosyncracies along the way. Other glottochronological approaches factor it in, but it’s not always about what old features survive, but also what new features arise. His 2012 revision to his book I think settles a lot of the problems raised by Brandtly Jones, and while I’m not a Bayesianist, there’s Altschuler et al., though I haven’t actually deeply read that paper. I still think there’s merit to Janko’s approach, it just needs additional analyses with it.