Method

An interpretive essay on comparative prosody in these three epic poetries would, if exhaustively done, constitute a sizable project in itself. A great deal has been written on the hexameter, alliterative line, and decasyllable, and simple review of that scholarship would demand an expenditure of space unwarranted in these studies as a whole. As a methodological premise, then, I concede from the start that my goal is certainly not a full and exhaustive treatment of the subject per se, but rather an examination of those aspects of the subject most crucial to an understanding of oral traditional structure. In other words, I will be concerned primarily with those prosodic factors which determine the shape and texture of formulaic diction and therefore of the more extensive narrative units that also rely, in the last analysis, on structure at the level of the individual line or even line-part. This is not to say that I intend to ignore or intentionally shortchange any particular areas; I wish merely to indicate from the outset that the emphasis is on the comparison of prosodies, and especially on their role in oral traditional structure .

I advocate three principles of evaluation as an attempt at a single, unified methodology. First, what follows in this chapter will straddle the gap between an exacting description of each epic line in and of itself and an approach that permits productive comparisons in the directions indicated. Second, uniform and consistent recourse to prevailing scholarly opinion on individual prosodies will give way to consideration of minority views only when no clear consensus

on a given point can be identified or when we pass beyond the present state of knowledge. Third, I offer the entire exposition as a useful explicative tool, without proclaiming its necessary "rectitude" and without pronouncing it ex cathedra .^[4] In this manner the available data on the three individual epic lines can be gathered, collated, and presented in a suitable format. In the subsequent process of comparison for the purpose of understanding the traditional verbal structures based on these lines, I hope to return to each prosody as much new comparative knowledge as was taken from each for the preliminary descriptions.