Oral Composition

In the 1920's, Milman Parry, a student of Meillet in Paris, analyzed the Homeric epics and concluded that they were the product of "oral formulaic" composition.

What does that mean?

It means that the poet had ready-made pieces that snapped into each line without much thought, because the poet had already trained his mind to know the pieces and how to use them.

The dactylic hexameter is:

DUM dada DUM dada DUM dada DUM dada DUM dada DUM DUM

THIS is the FORest primEVal. The MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks,

BEARded with MOSS, and in GARments GREEN, indistINCT in the TWIlight,

STAND like DRUids of ELD, with VOIces SAD and proPHETic,

STAND like HARpers HOAR, with BEARDS that REST on their BOsoms.

There is a "Shave and a haircut" or a "Strawberry jampot" at the end of every line: DUM dada DUM DUM is the meter of "shave and a haircut" or "strawberry jampot." Well, Homer does allow a few exceptions

But the beginning can change a bit: every one of the first 4 dada's can become a DUM, in Greek at least (Longfellow does other things in English), so you could get:
DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM dada DUM DUM or a version with a few fewer DUMS.

For example, rosy-fingered dawn is da DUM dada DUM dada (eos rhododaktylos) in Greek, which is a short syllable followed by two dactyls. It fits perfectly into the Homeric dactylic hexameter.
DUM dada DUM da eOS RHodoDAKtylos DUM dada DUM DUM

Parry noticed that the dactylic hexameter seemed to have repetition in certain predictable ways: the epithets of the characters (that Achilles is "swift-footed Achilles," that Agamemnon is "Atreus' son, lord of men") fit certain places in the hexameter and are always in that place when the character is mentioned.

He and his student Albert Lord then went on to go to Yugoslavia and record and witness oral composition in action with live oral singers, which supported his hypothesis very well. A whole new area of inquiry opened up, called oral studies, or studies of orality.

What is most interesting is that there is an economy in the system: for example, if you are going to kill someone in a line, there are several verbs which you could use in Greek conversation with your friend, but for each place in the dactylic hexameter, there is usually only one way to say it: only one of the verbs that mean "kill" will work in that position. One verb form has one shape, while the other verb's form has another shape, metrically. Thus you choose which verb to use based on what place in the line needs filling. The same principle applies to other things such as epithets, phrases of various sorts, adjectives, etc.

The idea is that with enough practice, a poet could sort of go on auto-pilot for a good deal of the line. He could innovate, but didn't need to. He could innovate at the beginning and then the rest could snap into place. Or he could prepare for an innovation at the end with stock formulae at the beginning.

It's like building a wall out of Lego: once you start with a 6 pin block, to reach the corner of the next layer of what you are building, you need a certain combination of pinned blocks: each block you choose restricts your choice for the next blocks: if you are good at building, that means you can concentrate on a few choices and just automagically fill in the other blocks.

The more we look into the language of the epics, the more clear this becomes.

But what does it mean for us as students reading in English: it means that "Homer" is not a singular genius writing an original text, rewriting it, and then finally publishing it.

It means that there is a vast system of artfully created metrical bits of language that are used to create each line on the spot for each performance: it's a learned skill that probably took years to master, but surely became second nature to a professional bard.

It means that a translation that makes this seem like "literature" might not be true to the repetitiveness of the Homeric way of saying things. But a translator who slavishly reproduces the formulae somehow might sound stilted, goofy, repetitive, or just not "literary." No one translation can do justice to the original bardic versions.

"Homer," if there even was one particular human named "Homer," was one  of those bards, a member of a large group of bards who performed epic poetry, not an individual genius who produced a truly unique work.

He may have been the best, or the most famous, or somehow particularly influential (just in the write place when the alphabet became available?): if he did exist as an individual, one good hypothesis is that his version was the first to be written down. Perhaps writing it down even propelled him to fame and led him to innovate and expand, as Parry and Lord found it did with the living oral poets they worked with in Yugoslavia. Turns out that if you freeze a work in one form with writing, the next person wants to do something different. "The medium is the message" fits here.

But maybe no such individual existed, and later ages made him up because they simply didn't understand how oral poetry was created: they thought works of literature had individual authors, and so this great work of literature must have one too.

Here's how you should think of Homer: he is at best one particularly influential member of a large guild of oral poets who all sang songs about similar material with similar formulas.

It's like a folk song: Dylan sings it, but before him Guthrie sang it, and before Guthrie someone else sang it: they learn it one from the other, and they change it a bit. Belafonte learned from Sir Lancelot who learned from ... One version becomes the most famous and so most people think of it as a Dylan song or a Belafonte song. But is it?

Homeric epics are like very long folktales that have been handed down over the ages in a culture with no writing. There are many versions, because the tales are spread out over a large geographic area and variation is inevitable. But one version comes to be the one most people think is the version, and so it actually becomes the version. Once writing comes along and records one version completely in a way that can be repeated exactly, the oral culture starts to decline. Writing drives out oral culture by replacing it. It leaves traces, but they require a philologist who can open her mind to a different mindset.

Nothing that relies on writing can happen in quite the same way in an oral culture. History is not frozen in documentation. Generally speaking, in oral cultures, many of our genres of writing and ways o f thinking about the world don't work. And transporting yourself mentally into an "oral" culture involves a lot more than just thinking simply and quickly about what couldn't happen without writing: there are many consequences of writing. Arguably, ownership, philosophy, banking, literature, and history cannot exist without writing.