Discovering the Homer Poems - Essay Example

Consider the Iliad by Homer as an oral work. Explain some of its oral characteristics and consider how they work for an audience and/or the role theyplay in the book as a whole.   The study of Homer is one of the very oldest topics in all scholarship or science, and goes back to antiquity. The aims and achievements of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia; in the last few centuries they have revolved around the process by which the Homeric poems came into existence and were transmitted down to us, first orally, and later in writing. Some of the main trends in modern Homeric scholarship have been, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Analysis and Unitarianism were schools of thought that emphasized on the one hand the inconsistencies, on the other the artistic unity, in Homer; and in the 20th century and later Oral Theory, which is the study of the mechanisms and effects of oral transmission, and Neoanalysis, which is the study of the relationship between Homer and other early epic material. Though the first who started the scientific discovering the Homer’s poems was Fridrich August Wolf who published his book “Prolegomena ad Homerum” in 1795. It is a fact that the interest to the folk poetry appeared in England and Germany while the period of Enlightenment. At that time the three oral characteristics of the Homer’s worked were defined: comparatively late development of Greek writing (VII – VI BC); the late antique messages about the poems; the separate injections and contradictions in the poems. People of the ancient time knew nothing about writing and they did not need such long and great poem as Iliad. They just needed the songs to entertain. That is why we have the reason to consider Iliad as an oral work which was combined by the author with the help of some injections. Though there are some ideas that prove that Iliad is the oral work it is characterized by the peculiar style. The cardinal qualities of the style of Homer have been well articulated by Mathew Arnold who said that the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of the four qualities of his author: that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and finally, that he is eminently noble (Edwards,1987). The peculiar rapidity of Homer is due in great measure to his use of the hexameter verse. It is characteristic of early literature that the evolution of the thought, or the grammatical form of the sentence, is guided by the structure of the verse; and the correspondence which consequently obtains between the rhythm and the syntax, the thought being given out in lengths, as it were, and these again divided by tolerably uniform pauses produces a swift flowing movement, such as is rarely found when the periods have been constructed without direct reference to the metre. Homer possesses this rapidity without falling into the corresponding faults, that is, without becoming either fluctuant or monotonous, is perhaps the best proof of his unequalled poetical skill. The plainness and directness, both of thought and of expression, which characterize Homer were doubtless qualities of his age. Speaking about the oral traditions in Iliad we should mention the oral tradition itself. Oral tradition or oral culture is a way of transmitting history and literature from one generation to the next in a civilization without a writing system. An example that combined aspects of oral literature and oral history, before eventually being set down in writing, is the Homeric epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the transmission of cultural material through vocal utterance, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore (a criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists). The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, and one of the major forms of narrative literature. It retells in a continuous narrative the life and works of a heroic or mythological person or group of persons. The composition of epic poetry, or of long poems in general, has become uncommon in the Western world since the early 20th century. The term "epic" however has been recycled to refer to prose works, films, and similar works which are characterized by great length, multiple settings, large numbers of characters, or long span of time involved. As a result of this change in the use of the word, many prose works of the past may be called "epics" which were not composed or originally understood as such. The first epics are associated strongly with preliterate societies and oral poetic traditions. In these traditions, poetry is transmitted to the audience and from performer to performer by purely oral means. World folk epics are those epics which are not just literary masterpieces but also an integral part of the world view of a people. They were originally oral literatures, which were later written down by either single author or several writers. Studies of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems. What they demonstrated was that oral epics tend to be constructed in short episodes, each of equal status, interest and importance. This facilitates memorization, as the poet is recalling each episode and using them to recreate the entire epic as they perform it. Parry and Lord also showed that the most likely source for written texts of the epics of Homer was dictation from an oral performance. Homer was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsody traditionally credited with the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey, commonly assumed to have lived in the 8th century BC. However, exact placement of these dates is unsure. There is considerable scholarly debate about whether Homer was a real person, or the name given to one or more oral poets who sang traditional epic material (sparknotes.com.). It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey. While many find it unlikely that the Odyssey was written by one person, others find that the epic is generally in the same writing style, and is too consistent to support the theory of multiple authors. Though most accounts of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are generally accepted to be written by Homer. Most Classicists would agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as "Homer," the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets. An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. Milman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to todays literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. They considered that the repetitive chunks of language were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. They called these chunks of repetitive language "formulas." To conclude everything that was mentioned above we should name the following features that characterize the Iliad as the oral work: without any doubts there are some extraneous feature of different ages. There are a lot of elements of the Mycenaean epoch which were enriched by some episodes injected by the author and audience, with time these elements were interconnected; there are some elements of unity. It is possible to see the unity in the plot and in the describing the main characters; there are some contradictions and lack of coincidence in the motifs. This is caused by the attempt to unite the heterogeneous facts. Reference List Edwards M.W. 1987, Homer, Poet of the Iliad, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-3329-9 sparknotes.com. Read More