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The Nature of the Poem
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Homer: Odyssey
In this course, Professor Richard Jenkyns (University of Oxford) explores Homer's Odyssey. We begin by thinking about the nature of the poem, focusing in particular on the nature of oral poetry and the Odyssey's relationship (if any) with the Iliad. After that, we think about the structure of the poem, including the idea that there are two kinds of Odysseus here, before moving on in the third module to consider the kinds of social and moral values that one finds in the poem – from the concept of divine justice to the importance of hospitality. In the fourth module, we think about society of gods and (especially) goddesses in the poem, before moving on in the final module to think about two of the most important characters in the poem after Odysseus himself – Nausicaa and Penelope.
The Nature of the Poem
In this module, we think about what sort of poem the Odyssey is, focusing in particular on the concept of oral poetry, the Odyssey's relationship with the Iliad, and the structure of the poem.
I'm Richard Jenkyns. I used to be a professor at Oxford,
00:00:03and this is a series of short talks about the Odyssey. And I'm going to start by
00:00:07thinking in general terms about what sort of poem this is. And that will give us a
00:00:14basis for thinking more in detail about other aspects of the poem.
00:00:19We're in a funny position with the Odyssey. Usually with ancient Greece,
00:00:25one is very conscious of knowing so much less than the Greeks themselves did.
00:00:33So a position of humility is appropriate. The odd thing about the Homeric epics is
00:00:38that in some ways, we understand some of their features better than the
00:00:44Greeks themselves did, because we understand that these Homeric
00:00:48epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey are poems in an oral tradition.
00:00:53And I'd just like to think a little about what we might mean by that.
00:00:57We know that for centuries in early Greece
00:01:02there was a period when they lost the use of writing,
00:01:07and it didn't come back until, well, around about the late
00:01:11eighth century BC. In that period, anyone who was making poetry had to make
00:01:15it without the aid of writing. And we can also see that these poems have
00:01:21characteristics, which suggest that they come out of a tradition of composing
00:01:26without the aid of writing. I mean, anyone who reads The Odyssey
00:01:31quickly notices that there are phrases that are repeated a lot.
00:01:36For example, Odysseus is over and over again. He is Odysseus of many wiles,
00:01:41or Telemachus is shrewd Telemachus. And then there's that line about the dawn,
00:01:48"as soon as early rosy-fingered dawn shone forth," which comes again,
00:01:52and again, and again. And these repeated phrases and lines
00:01:57suggest a way of thinking and composing, which you can do in your head without the
00:02:03aid of writing. There are plenty of other reasons why we recognise that these poems
00:02:12come out of an oral tradition. Now, it doesn't mean that they are
00:02:20themselves fully oral, it's perfectly possible that a poet can be
00:02:24an oral tradition. But the way that poems of this huge size were created was that a
00:02:31new technology, writing, arrived and an ambitious poet or poets seized the
00:02:36opportunity of creating something bigger and more ambitious than you could do
00:02:42purely without writing because it could be recorded. However these poems came into
00:02:50existence in the first centuries, they must have been received mostly
00:02:58through being heard because most people didn't read, and the books, such as they
00:03:03were, were very rare. So they are orally received,
00:03:08but they could well have come into being through being either dictated or the poet
00:03:15himself learns to read. And that is how I myself think that these
00:03:23poems did come into being, that they were written down at the point of composition.
00:03:28So they use a great deal of traditional material, traditional phrases,
00:03:35lines, story patterns even, which may be much older than
00:03:40the principal poet. But nonetheless, essentially, each poem can be regarded as
00:03:46the work of a single mind using all this traditional material.
00:03:57And now, the Greeks themselves were strangely unaware of this.
00:04:03Almost all of them supposed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by Homer in
00:04:09the same sense that Hamlet was written by Shakespeare. A few of them thought that
00:04:15the poet of the Iliad was different from the poet of the Odyssey.
00:04:21That's still disputed. But whether the poet of the Iliad and the
00:04:28poet of the Odyssey are one person or two, we have got with the Odyssey for the first
00:04:36time that we can see in European literature, the sense of a poem that is in
00:04:43relation to another poem. The Odyssey appears to be composed very
00:04:48consciously inspired by, and in a kind of relationship
00:04:54to the Iliad. Let me think about one or two features of that kind of relationship.
00:05:02Aristotle, philosopher, also literary critic,
00:05:13literary theorist writing in the fourth century BC pointed out that both the Iliad
00:05:18and the Odyssey handle a single action. What he meant by that is, in the case
00:05:26of the Iliad, it's not, as we might expect, the story of ten years of
00:05:31the Trojan War, it's only the story of one small incident. The wrath of Achilles and
00:05:36the consequences of that, this enormous poem of 15,000 lines,
00:05:45most of it takes place across only 3 days,
00:05:50and the whole thing across only a few weeks.
00:05:54the Odyssey is, curiously enough, not an Odyssey. And in the modern sense by
00:05:58an Odyssey, we think of – it means long picaresque journey through many troubles.
00:06:04Well, of course, that happens in the Odyssey, but only in four books out
00:06:10of the twenty-four So the voyaging bits are only the bits which the hero narrates in
00:06:15his own person. And they're incorporated as a flashback into a larger story,
00:06:24which is indeed a single action. It's a story of what the Greeks called nostos,
00:06:32return home, it's the story of how Odysseus came home and killed the Suitors,
00:06:38a single action. So all those years of wandering are put into a flashback.
00:06:43The Trojan War is a very complicated story in total. There's a huge amount of
00:06:50material for the Iliad. One may feel there isn't so much
00:06:55for the Odyssey. This is a naturally shorter story, which has been expanded to
00:06:58a kind of epic length. It's also been expanded and complicated in
00:07:03other ways, it's a more complex plot. I mentioned one feature already,
00:07:09a very obvious feature, the fact that you've got a flashback narrative and
00:07:14something that wasn't actually followed very much by later epic poets,
00:07:18a narration in the first-person. Virgil in the Aeneid, because he's imitating
00:07:24the Odyssey, imitates that. So we have two books of Virgil's Aeneid
00:07:28narrated by Aeneas himself. But otherwise, this was – seems rather
00:07:34original idea that wasn't followed all that much. The other thing is that it's
00:07:39now become a double story. So Odysseus doesn't,
00:07:45in fact, appear until Book 5. We've got one story of Odysseus on the
00:07:49edge of the world coming home, and we've got the story of his son stuck
00:07:53at home, and going out, and exploring the world.
00:07:59And eventually, these two stories are dovetailed together. So we have here
00:08:02a poet and a poem, which is interested in connecting types of story that
00:08:08are rather different. And this pleasure in juxtaposition is what
00:08:15I'm going to talk further about in my next talk.
00:08:22
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Jenkyns, R. (2018, August 15). Homer: Odyssey - The Nature of the Poem [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/homer-odyssey-jenkyns/society-and-morality
MLA style
Jenkyns, R. "Homer: Odyssey – The Nature of the Poem." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/homer-odyssey-jenkyns/society-and-morality