Application of The Program: Approaches to Reading Five Traditional Texts

It is time now to put the reading program into action, to test its power to elucidate some actual texts. In doing so I am aware of the objection that a

[22] On the "homeostatic" nature of oral tradition, see, variously, Peabody 1975; Turner 1986.

[23] For other examples of diachronic approaches, see Hoekstra, e.g. 1964, 1969; Janko 1982.

poetics is not possible until the structure and dynamics of the texts have been established. What I hope to accomplish here is merely a prolegomenon to a subsequent work that will be based on the structural principles with which this volume is concerned. Nevertheless, I do feel that it is important to know where the entire investigation is headed from the start; the applications made below are thus intended simply to indicate some profitable directions for future criticism, and certainly not to exhaust their possibilities.

What I propose to do, then, before turning to the oral and oral-derived epics that are the real subject of these studies, is to try out the reading program on five traditional texts or groups of texts: (1) a Serbo-Croatian epic; (2) the Homeric Odyssey ; (3) Serbo-Croatian and Old English magical charms; (4) the Old English Beowulf ; and (5) the shorter Old English poem The Seafarer . Our steps may be outlined as follows:

A. Question of "text"

B. Oral or oral-derived

C. Genre-dependence

D. Tradition-dependence

1. Original language and philology

2. Comparison/contrast with other traditions

3. National, local, idiolectal levels

E. Synchronic and diachronic contexts

In this way I hope to present by example the outlines of a traditional poetics in an applied form, a poetics flexible enough both to accommodate the various kinds of texts one can and does encounter and at the same time to allow the necessary focus and refinement that each individual tradition, singer, and text requires and deserves.

1. As my first example, a Serbo-Croatian oral epic, I choose an easily accessible published text, The Captivity of Djulic^[*] Ibrahim (Ropstvo Djulic^[*] Ibrahima ), Parry no. 674 sung by Salih Ugljanin on November 24, 1934, in Novi Pazar and published as no. 4 of the first two volumes of SCHS (original-language text and translation, respectively).^[24] Because the primary form of the song is that of an acoustic recording, a performed text whose sounds are recoverable, the objective and subjective aspects of the work come as dose as possible to superimposition. While we cannot re-create the original setting and audience, we can re-create much of the rest of the performance and, to the extent that we are ourselves acquainted with the tradition, become an audience in an approximate way.^[25] So the question of text proves in this way to be an easy

[24] I use this particular version of a Return Song because of its ready access in both the original and translation; as documented below, virtually all of the material analyzed in these studies also belongs to the epic subgenre of Return. See esp. chapters 5, 8, and 10. On the standard Parry Collection notation, see n. 51 to chapter 2.

[25] Compare the observations on text and audience that are interwoven throughout the essays in Tedlock 1983.

one, as long as we do not confuse the published edition with the performance as preserved on aluminum records; by recognizing the real text as a sung and heard reality informing the edition we read, we can proceed to the next and subsequent steps prepared for comparison. We shall find later that the present working designation of Ugljanin's text—as Ropstvo , version no. 4—will bear emendation to identify its context, but at this point the indication of a unitary document is entirely appropriate.

Nor do we need to pause long over the question of oral versus oral-derived: the Ropstvo text is a known oral epic and is therefore best contextualized by a thorough knowledge of Serbo-Croatian oral epic tradition. In this particular case such an acquaintance can be readily gained by consulting the resources of the Milman Parry Collection and its many hundreds of epic texts, and secondarily by reference to other collections of Serbo-Croatian oral narrative (e.g., Karadzic^[*] , Marjanovic^[*] , and Hörmann). Most immediately, this text was sung to the accompaniment of the gusle (rather than spoken for the records or taken from dictation); it will thus relate in certain formal aspects to other sung texts.^[26] Furthermore, it was composed by Ugljanin, a considerable part of whose repertoire has been recorded and published in the Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs series. This material forms another sort of context, which may be measured comparatively for various stylistic properties—such as formula, theme, frequency and kind of enjambement, and so forth—and so used to deepen our understanding of Ropstvo no. 4. The most obvious analogs in this regard are nos. 5 and 6—recited and dictated versions, respectively, of the Ropstvo .^[27] Widening the textual circle a bit more, we can then proceed from compositional mode and repertoire to an analysis of the local tradition. Here the comparative method extends the field of inquiry to the songs and repertoires of other singers, with comparisons and contrasts including all characteristics of composition and other performance data through the shape and function of large narrative patterns. The known oral text may thus command a host of contexts, all of which are important to reading the text and thus constitute part of its poetics.

After these determinations we shall want to establish the generic context of Ropstvo no. 4, so that worthwhile comments and comparisons can be promoted and unproductive ones avoided. The Ropstvo is an example of a relatively well known subspecies of South Slavic and Balkan epic, what Lord has called the "Return Song."^[28] To proceed from general to specific, then, the text in question can be classed as "epic," with all the generic connotations that accompany the term in Serbo-Croatian poetic tradition. We may summon for comparison

[26] See Lord 1953, and chapters 5 and 8 below.

[27] See Lord's comparisons in SCHS 1:339-58.

[28] On the pattern of Return, see esp. Lord 1969; Foley 1978c, 1986b. For a full list of relevant scholarship, see chapter 10 below.

all types of oral epics within the tradition and perhaps also from related and unrelated oral traditions, being careful to weigh the worth of each proposed comparand according to the requirements of the reading program, and thus establish for the object text a wide but finely differentiated context. After that initial step, the specific nature of the Return Song and its various avatars in the Yugoslav and other traditions should be addressed. This process will include relating the Ropstvo to the story-pattern of Return, abstracted by Lord (1969) in the form A—D—R—Rt—W, where A = Absence, D = Devastation, R = Return, Rt = Retribution, and W = Wedding. The characteristic form of this kind of epic entails a hero long absent from his homeland (A); while he suffers in captivity, suitors consume his possessions and attempt to marry his fiancée or wife (D); he then returns (R) and takes his revenge (Rt) on all those who have plotted against him; and finally, if he finds her faithful, he remarries or rejoins the wife or fiancée who was left behind (W). This pattern contextualizes many hundreds of Return Songs in the Yugoslav tradition and offers a proven avenue for genre-dependent comparison of a sensitive, exacting kind between Serbo-Croatian and other literatures.^[29]

The principle of tradition-dependence can also open pathways to a better understanding of the poetics of Ropstvo no. 4. A rigorous philological scrutiny of the text will, for example, yield information about typical prosodic, phonological, and dialectal qualities; preparing a trial edition of a sung text like Ropstvo no. 4 is one way to underline those properties. Often something so apparently trivial as the group of sounds that the guslar employs as hiatus bridges or the phonological dynamics of an error in inflection can lead to a larger apprehension of the poem's context. Once this scrutiny has been completed, comparisons with texts from other traditions, admitted as comparands in accordance with the other steps in the reading program, can be productively undertaken. As the second principle associated with tradition-dependence, the crucial point is to give each tradition its due: for instance, one cannot speak simply of some archetypal construct called "the formula"; rather, one must describe each verbal pattern in terms of the prosody in symbiosis with which it is made and remade. Comparatists wishing to evaluate the similarities between formulaic structure in Ropstvo no. 4 and an Old English poem, for example, must acknowledge the differences between the epic deseterac and the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line (see chapter 3). Clomplementarily, the nature of the theme in Ropstvo no. 4 and of that in, for instance, the Odyssey or the Iliad must be studied in the same tradition-dependent manner. Finally, even a comparison at the most abstract level of story-pattern must take note of differences within traditions in order to make a valuable contribution to context. The remaining aspect of tradition-dependence is that of the relationship

[29] See, e.g., Coote's (1981) comparative analysis of Serbo-Croatian, Russian, and Turkish songs of Return.

of a text to its more immediate context, the singer's repertoire and the local tradition, both of which were discussed above.

In applying the last of the principles in our reading program, that of ascertaining both synchronic and diachronic contexts, I would cite first the "historical" demonstration of a cognate for the Return Song in ancient Greek and the deduction that the pattern is thus of Indo-European origin.^[30] In the case of the Ropstvo , clearly a member of the same epic subgenre, then, we must posit a long pre-textual history to complement any synchronic "dialectology" assembled by reference to the recently recorded tradition. Another diachronically based observation would have to do with the relationship between the Serbo-Croatian deseterac and a reconstructed Indo-European verse form.^[31] Scholars seem to agree that the epic decasyllable is extraordinarily archaic in certain basic features, apparently preserving many Indo-European characteristics in nearly Ur-form. This aspect of context presents an opportunity for a comparative evolutionary commentary to correspond with a synchronic portrait of formal metrical features in various epic lines.

2. A second type of text, the ancient Greek Return Song, has only one surviving example, the Homeric Odyssey . Here the question of text is not as simple as in Ropstvo no. 4, for, as we shall see in chapter 2, the manuscript history of the Odyssey is very much a piecemeal record. This uncertainty about the text extends to the second principle of our reading program: a final judgment that this text is taken directly from oral tradition is not defensible on the basis of the present evidence, and so we must settle for the category of "oral-derived" if the integrity of the reading process is to be observed. As I noted above, however, this does not by any means rule out the application of oral traditional theory.^[32] We can and indeed must apply the methods learned from analysis of other oral and oral-derived texts in an effort to recover the traditional character of the Odyssey , that aspect of the great poem which depends for its active appreciation on an understanding of the poetic tradition. Because the Odyssey is (at least) an oral-derived text, we need to discover the nature of its traditional forms, whether they be formulas, themes, story-patterns, or whatever. In myriad ways, the traditional forms that make up the text condition and even generate meaning by establishing a background or context for the nominal, situation-specific actions and realities of the story.

The criterion of genre-dependence limits the potential comparands for the Odyssey to epic songs, and in particular epic songs of Return, for the ancient

[30] This is Lord's hypothesis (1969, 19), confirmed by evidence presented by others (e.g., Coote 1981).

[31] See esp. Jakobson 1952; also chapter 3 below.

[32] Nor, in fact, does it rule out the possibility that the Odyssey text is truly oral traditional. In setting the calibration of our reading program, however, we should make only the minimal, ascertainable assumption, thus avoiding an unnecessary and finally unprovable assertion that would weaken the whole process of interpretation.

Greek work also follows the five-part pattern of absence, devastation, return, retribution, and wedding located first in Ropstvo no. 4. Within the Homeric tradition the only other fully preserved epic is the Iliad , but it is of course quite differently structured from the Odyssey . The epic tale of the Trojan adventure has its own story-pattern, a Withdrawal-Devastation-Return sequence, and thus operates on different principles at the level of overall narrative movement.^[33] This means in turn that the thematic contents of the Iliad and Odyssey must vary correspondingly.^[34] Formulaic inventories of the two poems will compare more closely, since traditional patterning at the level of the line is not as attached to story-pattern as are larger units, although some scholars feel that poetic diction, in addition to being partially determined by its function in a given storytelling situation, is also conditioned by the dramatis personae themselves.^[35] And philologists have long been aware of linguistic differences between the two epics (see Janko 1982). What genre-dependence prescribes, then, is a comparison of the Odyssey and the Iliad that is carefully weighted to include the discrepancies cited, and also a cross-traditional comparison with Return Songs from another Balkan area.

Our fourth principle, tradition-dependence, helps to insure the validity of the cross-traditional process by leavening the obvious similarities between works with a respect for tradition-dependent characteristics. As remarked above, we shall need in such cases to take a hard look at all comparands in the original languages from an exacting philological perspective. Many of the other problems attendant on consideration of Serbo-Croatian epic are, however, not applicable to the Odyssey : we have no firm knowledge of national, local, or idiolectal traditions with which to rationalize the dialect mixture, simply because of the paucity of surviving texts. Accordingly, the synchronic context is limited to the 28,000-line corpus of Homeric epic, with the qualifications already discussed. Diachronically, we may investigate many of the same structures mentioned before in reference to Ropstvo no. 4. The evolutionary identity of the Homeric hexameter and its historical relationship to phraseology, for example, have been subjects of fruitful debate (see further chapter 3). The field of comparative Indo-European mythology, at the other end of the spectrum, may eventually offer another aspect of diachronic context.

3. In moving from the Homeric Odyssey to the relatively minor poetic genre of the magical charm or spell in Serbo-Croatian and Old English, I take

[33] On this pattern see Lord 1960, 186-97; Nagler 1974, 131-66.

[34] For excellent studies of typical scenes and other structures in the Iliad and Odyssey , see Fenik 1968, 1974.

[35] Thus the long battle over the language of Achilles and the question of whether there is in general the possibility for "literary" manipulation of phraseology to reflect specific characters. See the opening salvo by Adam Parry (1956); contributions to the ensuing discussion include Donlan 1971; Reeve 1973; Claus 1975; Hogan 1976; Friedrich and Redfield 1978, 1981; Duban 1981; Messing 1981; Nimis 1986.

advantage of a chance to demonstrate the range and sensitivity of the reading program. For here the question of text conditions the proceedings in very definite ways from the start. The Old English magical charms, to take the more straightforward case first, are found in various medieval "leechdom" manuscripts of uncertain provenance,^[36] and their structure and content are unusual enough to cause a great variety of textual problems for prospective editors and commentators. In addition to what may seem an erratic prosody, scholars have also to deal with charm texts whose diachronic identity stems from an apparent overlay of Christian elements on an earlier Germanic base. Though much of the overlay characteristically takes a prose form, the layers are not always separable, and one can be uncertain of the proper context for explication. The Serbo-Croatian spells, in contrast, generically and collectively known as bajanje by those who practice and make use of them, have been sparingly collected by native investigators and then published only in fragments. In 1975, however, a research team of which I was a member made a reasonably extensive recording of magical charms in and around the Serbian village of Orašac in the region of Šumadija south of Belgrade.^[37] This collection of texts, which includes many alternate versions of the same spell by the same and different informants, provides an opportunity to study multiformity in a non-narrative genre. In comparing these Yugoslav texts with those drawn from the Anglo-Saxon leechdoms, we must be careful to allow for the inherent variance between recorded oral texts (complete with the expected "blemishes" in syntax and morphology typical of unedited material) and those edited from manuscripts of uncertain provenance.

These observations lead directly to the question of oral versus oral-derived. Only the Yugoslav charms are known oral material; the Anglo-Saxon spells must be placed in the oral-derived category, and the comparison must admit the possible discrepancies. As far as genre-dependence is concerned, we may feel confident that the comparison and contextualization are as exact and fair as possible in the present state of knowledge, especially since certain charms, like the Old English "Nine Herbs" remedy and a Serbo-Croatian spell against the incursion of nine windborne diseases, show marked similarities beyond the formal equivalence of genre.

Tradition-dependence manifests itself most immediately in the prosody that informs each body of material. The Yugoslav poems tend toward a symmetrical octosyllable, as do the lyric or "women's" songs (zenske pjesme ) also performed

[36] For a convenient edition, see Grendon 1909.

[37] This research was undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists and specialists in oral tradition (Robert P. Creed, Barbara Kerewsky Halpern, Joel M. Halpern, and myself) with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For accounts of the fieldwork and analyses to date, see Kerewsky Halpern and Foley 1978; Foley 1977a, 1980b, 1981c, 1982.

almost exclusively by women,^[38] and they demonstrate a bewildering array of sound-patterns, including full- and near-rhyme, assonance, consonance, and phonetic series, as well as formulaic and syntactic frames. The Old English magic tends in its verse component toward the standard alliterative line of Old English poetry, but in this case as well a great many sound-patterns stretch the charm line out of its conventional metric: single half-lines, hypermetric verses, and seemingly faulty units of all kinds are the result.^[39] The last step in our reading program, that of formulating a diachronic description to complement synchronic analysis, awaits fulfillment.

4. With the Old English epic Beowulf we enter a complex and much-discussed area. The question of text is apparently simple enough: the poem exists uniquely in the Cotton Vitellius A. xv. manuscript. But we do not know how that probably tenth-century copy (most scholars consider it a copy of an earlier text) came to be—either how the poem was originally created and recorded or how it might have been edited or recopied. Because of this lacuna in our knowledge of manuscript history (to be considered in detail in the next chapter), we cannot confidently and justly claim certain orality for Beowulf . Nevertheless, more than enough work has been done since Francis P. Magoun's pioneering article of 1953 to certify that we are dealing with at least an oral-derived text.^[40] Traditional features of formula, theme, and so forth abound, and the heroic magnitude of the epic depends intimately upon their resonance.

To be sure, Beowulf meets most criteria for the epic genre as commonly cited in comparative literature studies. But, this much said, we must look long and carefully for real analogs. Some of the Old Norse material has a closely related mythic content, as do poems from other Germanic language traditions, notably the Middle High German Nibelungenlied and the Old High German Hildebrandslied ; but these works do not match Beowulf in genre. Within the Old English poetic canon only the fragmentary Waldere and perhaps a verse hagiography like Andreas can provide possible comparands, but there arc serious problems with text and genre, respectively, even in these instances. Epics in other, unrelated poetic traditions, where we find a match in story pattern and thus in epic subspecies, may hold out another alternative. Whatever the case, it is important to remember the generic singularity of Beowulf when comparing it to other works in the same tradition or in closely related Germanic traditions.

Tradition-dependent characteristics abound in the Old English epic. Its prosody and narrative structure bear some resemblance to counterparts in

[38] As compared to the epic songs (epske pjesme ), usually performed by men only and in the decasyllabic meter (epski deseterac ). For exceptions to this differentiation by sex, see Murko 1951, 189-205. For more on the epic meter, see chapter 3 below.

[39] For a discussion of these phenomena, see Foley 1980b.

[40] For a history of formulaic and thematic studies on Old English poetry, see Foley 1981b, 60-91 107-22; Olsen 1986, 1988.

ancient Greek and Serbo-Croatian, particularly in the recurrence of core ideas that underlie repetitive phrasing and narrative structures—but even that resemblance has been much overestimated. As we shall see in later chapters, the "formula" in Beowulf is much more a process than a fact, much more a continuum that extends from the level of favored metrical patterns up through their reflection in phraseology than a system of diction alone. From a synchronic point of view, the recurrent kernel of Beowulfian diction will seem to be the root morpheme, a still point surrounded by a looser aggregation of relatively less important words. The cores of themes, then, will often be key words and short phrases of great flexibility, all attracted by an abstract idea-pattern, without the kind of line-for-line verbal correspondence among instances that is typical of many themes in the Serbo-Croatian epic tradition. It is crucial to any aesthetically sound interpretation of Beowulf that we recognize these traditional features in their idiosyncratic Old English form, and that we dispense with the often undertaken but pointless search for what amounts to a tradition-dependent form from another tradition (for example, the Homeric Greek formula, the canonical unit). Once recognized, these traditional features can provide the most immediate context for a successful reading of the poem.

As is often the case in dealing with an Old English poem, the diachronic perspective must focus on a Germanic structure overlain by, and often blended with, a Christian sensibility. In Beowulf this is a particularly knotty problem, since in this poem the two are so masterfully integrated. Nonetheless, comparative diachronic analysis of the kind suggested by Alain Renoir (esp. 1981b, 1986) can create a traditional context to assist in a faithful reading of a work, particularly in those cases in which, as in Beowulf , the conventional contextualizing instruments of literary history are virtually useless because of lack of information. Finally, I would mention the research on Indo-European meter and at least pose the question of the relationship between alliterative verse and a possible ancient precursor (see further chapter 3). We can be sure of one measurement along these lines: the alliterative meter has evolved much farther away from the reconstructed Indo-European syllabic and quantitative line than have corresponding verse forms in ancient Greek and Yugoslav epic, an evolutionary history traceable to the proto-Germanic shift of stress and consequent redefinition of the metrical "prosodeme" from syllable to initial stress. A great deal more work remains to be done in this last area.

5. The final exemplar text to be considered in the light of the reading program for traditional texts is the Old English Seafarer . The unique copy of the poem forms part of the Exeter Book manuscript, a miscellany of various kinds of works ranging from folk riddles through short lyric poems to the macaronic Latin and Anglo-Saxon Phoenix and variations on the antiphons for Advent in the Roman Breviary. We know that the manuscript as it presently stands is a tenth-century collection donated by Bishop Leofric to Exeter

Cathedral, but we know nothing of the history of the making of The Seafarer previous to its inclusion in the codex. Both because of that uncertainty and because of the ample evidence in the poem of the poet's Latin learning, we must ascribe it to the oral-derived category of texts. In fact, the appearance of traditional and non-traditional structures side by side in the same text has led not a few scholars to accuse The Seafarer of inconsistency or mixed modes. But as I have argued elsewhere, the presence of two kinds of forms for articulating meaning need not prompt an accusation of interference between the two.^[41] Rather, we may understand the traditional and non-traditional as simply two different and complementary ways of evoking meaning, the one through reference to the poetic tradition and the other through reference to religious tradition and the deployment of rhetorical figures borrowed from the Latin ars rhetorica .^[42] The text is, in modern critical terms, "active"—that is, it calls for a complex, multi-leveled response on the part of the reader, and it offers an aesthetic experience which takes shape along two distinct phenomenological axes.

The hybrid nature of the diction extends to the poem's genre as well. The Seafarer has been termed an elegy, an allegory, an ascetic journey of expiation (a peregrinatio ), and a medieval planctus . But we would be most accurate to view each of these labels as apposite rather than as all-inclusive, and to understand that The Seafarer is a work sui generis . Its truest comparands in Old English are poems which answer some of the same generic criteria and which demonstrate a similarly hybrid phraseology, rhetorical structure, and Christian sophistication; among them would be numbered The Wanderer, The Wife's Lament , and The Husband's Message . Outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the shorter Christian poems from Serbo-Croatian oral tradition, which also show traditional forms in the hands of a gifted artist, offer a promising analog (see Foley 1983b). Finally, many of the same tradition-dependent and diachronic considerations may be applied to The Seafarer as were applied to Beowulf Again the pagan-Christian blend is most prominent here, and is of course intimately connected with other parts of the reading program.

From this point on I shall turn away from both general issues in contemporary oral literature research and the reading program for traditional texts in order to conduct a more focused examination of epic poems from the ancient Greek, Old English, and Serbo-Croatian traditions. In accordance with the reading program, we shall first look at the comparability of the documents themselves in order to assess as exactly as possible what authority each has in presenting its oral or oral-derived poem.

[41] See Foley 1983a,b. The co-existence of oral traditional structure and Latin learning in the same text may be explained in part by the cultural diglossia prevalent in the medieval period; see further Stock 1983 and Ong 1986.

[42] For examples of the latter technique, see Campbell 1966, 1967, 1978.