You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course.
Oral Composition
- About
- Transcript
- Cite
Homer: Odyssey
In this course, we discuss four key themes in Homer's Odyssey. In the first module, we concentrate on the concept of oral poetry - the idea that the Odyssey was not originally written down, but passed orally from generation to generation - and the impact the poem's unique origin on its final, written form. In the second module, we explore the theme of the Homeric hero, arguing that Odysseus represents a totally different kind of hero to that seen in the Iliad. In the third module, we turn our attention to the concept of 'hospitality' or 'guest-friendship' - the Greek concept of 'xenia', while in the fourth and final module, we explore the theme of 'homecoming' in the poem.
Oral Composition
In this module, we explore the status of the Odyssey as an 'oral poem' - a poem was originally transmitted by word-of-mouth rather than being written down in a book. In particular, we discuss the figure of Homer (who may or may not have actually existed), the limitations of the original (oral) poets and the impact this has had on the final form of the poem, and the possible original performance contexts of the epic.
Hello, I'm Edith Hall.
00:00:03I'm Professor of Classics at King's College London,
00:00:04and this is my office and some of my books.
00:00:07Quite a lot of my books are actually about the great, archaic –
00:00:10which means very, very ancient – Greek poet Homer.
00:00:14Homer was responsible for the two great Greek epics, the story of
00:00:17Troy in the Iliad, and the story of Odysseus in the Odyssey.
00:00:23We don't actually know if there was an actual, real person called Homer.
00:00:28That was the name that the ancient Greeks gave to the man who they thought
00:00:32had composed both these two poems. In fact, these two poems took many,
00:00:36many hundreds of years to get into the form that we've got them,
00:00:40which are massive, twenty-four-book-long epic poems. And they actually take
00:00:44more than two days to recite if you start at the beginning and go on to the end,
00:00:49and it is unlikely that we can actually say that one man did all of them.
00:00:54What we think happened was that he put the finishing touches,
00:00:57and he may have been called Homer, to a five-hundred-year-old tradition of storytelling
00:01:01in verse, storytelling in poetry, and that's what epic poetry really meant
00:01:06in ancient Greece. The technical term for
00:01:12poetry that's written without the aid of writing, where people extemporise poems,
00:01:15rather as you might find rappers extemporising on a theme,
00:01:21is oral composition. And all that means is that it was with the use
00:01:26of the mouth, oral, and that it's composition, not actually writing.
00:01:30They're put together – which is what compono means –
00:01:34they're put together with the mouth of the poet. But in order to do that,
00:01:38he had to have a whole stock of different phrases and words. He had to have a sort
00:01:43of set of jigsaw pieces so he could put together the great oral epic,
00:01:48the jigsaw, as it stands. Just as a rapper might have
00:01:52individual phrases and individual rhymes that he repeats, but each time he does
00:01:55a rap, it'll be slightly different, and he's not using writing to do it.
00:02:00Now, there are certain features of orally composed poetry that make it different
00:02:05from poetry that you can write either with pen and ink, or on a computer screen.
00:02:10The most important difference between things that you write on a computer screen
00:02:15or with pen and ink, and if you're just extemporising them,
00:02:19they're coming up from your heart, and your brain, and your mind, and your
00:02:22tongue, are that it is much more difficult to create very delicate little effects,
00:02:25right? If you're working on a tiny little poem, tiny little love poem or sonnet,
00:02:32you can go back, and back, and back, and try four or five or twenty different readings.
00:02:36Oral epic is painted in much bigger brush strokes. So, what's it actually made of?
00:02:41Well, Greek epic is in rather a strange rhythm, and it's actually very unlike what
00:02:46we know the ancient Greek language sounded like. The ancient Greek language basically
00:02:51had a rhythm that went di-dah, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah, di-dah,
00:02:56like that, and Greek epic is much more rolling, and it has the emphasis
00:02:59on the first of groups of sounds, and it goes
00:03:04dah di-di, dah di-di, dah di-di, dah di-di, dah di-di, dah di,
00:03:04a bit more like we hear Italian. And a typical line in Homer,
00:03:08I'm going to do it in English, but in the meter, this particular meter
00:03:13that was used is ‘Who of the great gods caused these heroes to wrangle and combat?’
00:03:17‘Who of the great gods caused these heroes to ramble and combat?’
00:03:23It's got six beats, and it bounces along in a long, long line.
00:03:26And that is not really very natural in ancient Greek, but that was good for
00:03:31helping them to remember it. If it's rather strange,
00:03:36it's easier to remember than if it's something quite like everyday speech
00:03:39because then you might be more inclined to change it a little bit.
00:03:43Now, that meter is called, technically, the dactylic hexameter.
00:03:46That's really, really frightening. But in fact, hexameter just means six, like
00:03:51our word hexagon, and dactylic means that it's got that little pattern,
00:03:56dah di-di dah di-di, so it's a great, long, rolling meter.
00:04:00Now, in that meter, the epic poet had various different kinds of
00:04:04jigsaw puzzle piece. He had individual words,
00:04:07so he had some very, very long words, which meant
00:04:12things like ‘horse-taming’ ‘Horse-taming’. That's quite long in
00:04:15English, it's a very long word in Greek. But that fits into the meter nicely,
00:04:20and that gets attached to the name of Hector. Hector, who is the great king of
00:04:24Troy in the Iliad, is called ‘horse-taming Hector’,
00:04:30and it fits beautifully into the rhythm.
00:04:34In the Odyssey, we have other little rhythmical units like that.
00:04:36Very many of them involve Odysseus's name because it's about Odysseus.
00:04:40So he's got several adjectives that you'll see when you're reading,
00:04:44or epithets, which are things like ‘cunning Odysseus’,
00:04:48‘resourceful Odysseus’, ‘much-suffering Odysseus’,
00:04:51and they fit into the meter. So polútlās Odusseús
00:04:55is ‘much-suffering Odysseus’.
00:04:59So, we've got these phrases, and they sort of form half lines,
00:05:02and the poet puts these together into particular scenes.
00:05:06But he also has certain kinds of particular scene types,
00:05:11so that if, for example, he's going to describe a feast,
00:05:15he's got lots of ready-made phrases about ‘and then they brought out the great big
00:05:18calf ready for sacrifice, and then the servants came round and filled up all the
00:05:23wine cups’, or ‘and then the divine bard took up his beautiful lyre and
00:05:28began to sing’, right? So, depending on what kind of scene type you're in,
00:05:34you'd got all sorts of stock phrases, especially if you're working
00:05:38yourself up to a real climax or something very, very special that doesn't often
00:05:41happen in the poem, say, something like the contest of the axes,
00:05:45that vocabulary's very special. And you often find before a very special
00:05:50bit like that, that only comes once, that you have one of the rather more
00:05:54common or garden scene types before, like laying out the feast, because the
00:05:58poet's kind of getting ready to be very, very creative. Now, the other really
00:06:02important features of oral poetry that make it instantly recognisable and
00:06:10different from written down poetry are things that, actually, we associate
00:06:14with the oral poetry in our own societies, which is usually that taught to children
00:06:19before they can read and write. That is, nursery rhymes, and common
00:06:24or sort of certain kinds of Christmas carols and so on, that little children
00:06:29can handle. If you just think of The Twelve Days of Christmas –
00:06:33‘On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me...’ – what did
00:06:36she send me? ‘On the second day...’ – what did she send me, and then the first day.
00:06:39Catalogues, lists, where you repeat them over and over again,
00:06:44possibly expanding them by one each time or changing them is absolutely typical
00:06:47of oral poetry. It's much easier to remember. You also get something called
00:06:52ring composition, which is – very simply means that it's sort of circular.
00:06:57You start out with a particular theme, ‘So then, Odysseus stood up and his great
00:07:03shoulders trembled with anger,’ and then he makes a speech. And then Odysseus sat
00:07:08down, and his great shoulders no longer trembled so much with anger.
00:07:13You sign off at the end to show to your audience, who are listening to you,
00:07:18that you've finished, but also, it gives you that minute to think
00:07:23up what you're going to say next. And you also get, in addition to catalogues
00:07:26and ring composition, far more direct speech than you tend to
00:07:31in written down poetry. That is, that about one-quarter of
00:07:36the Odyssey is individuals actually either singing a song,
00:07:41or making a speech themselves, one kind to another, performing a speech act.
00:07:46In fact, there's slightly more than that in the books of the Odyssey – well,
00:07:50it's a lot more than that in the books of the Odyssey where Odysseus is
00:07:53recounting his adventures which are all in the first person. He is making a speech
00:07:58through all of that. This is a bard, as he performed,
00:08:02liked to impersonate other people performing, so you get a very high degree
00:08:05of song and speech in direct form, not in indirect form, in the Homeric epithets.
00:08:11The last thing I'd like to talk about is simply the performance context.
00:08:20What do we know about how these poems were actually performed?
00:08:23We know they were written down towards the end
00:08:26of the eighth century BC, and that was so actually they could be
00:08:28carried all over the Greek world. It was during the period of colonisation,
00:08:32where people actually liked – if you're going to go and found a new city
00:08:36in France, or the Black Sea, or Italy, from Greece – they actually liked
00:08:39to have a copy to take with them to their new city, in case no poet
00:08:44ever visited, no bard ever came, so they wouldn't forget it.
00:08:48I think that's why they liked to write them down during the period
00:08:52of colonisation. But the important thing is what we know about where
00:08:55and how they were actually performed, and we get four basic pictures.
00:08:59We get festivals of the gods, like the Olympic games,
00:09:02but for Apollo. Apollo is god of the lyre and he's associated with the Muses.
00:09:06And we have a beautiful description, in a very archaic hymn, of all the
00:09:12Ionian Greeks meeting together on the island of Delos to hear beautiful poetry.
00:09:18We also get a reference in another epic poet, called Hesiod,
00:09:24to people gathering to honour the death and reputation of a great king.
00:09:28So there were probably epic poems performed at funerals,
00:09:34and funeral games. We also have, in the Odyssey itself,
00:09:37pictures of two bards who are employees of great households, more like we would
00:09:41imagine a mediaeval minstrel, who perform, actually, at the dinner parties of kings.
00:09:46There are two of them, One on the island of Scheria,
00:09:53at Nausicaa's father's house, and the other is actually Phemius,
00:09:56Odysseus's own bard back in Ithaca.
00:10:01But the final context, which we mustn't forget,
00:10:03where we actually hear about these performances taking place.
00:10:06It's actually private home entertainment.
00:10:09The greatest hero of them all, perhaps, Achilles, the hero of the Iliad,
00:10:12when several of the other Greek captains go to see him when he's exiled himself,
00:10:17he's alone in his tent and he's sulking, how did they find him?
00:10:21He's playing his lyre, his kithara, and singing,
00:10:24just to his companions, of the great deeds of gods, and heroes, and kings
00:10:27on the wide planes of Troy. So, here is an epic bard,
00:10:33who's actually also the subject of a poem produced by an epic bard,
00:10:38the warrior singer. It's wonderful.
00:10:43
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Hall, E. (2018, August 15). Homer: Odyssey - Oral Composition [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/homer-odyssey/the-homeric-hero
MLA style
Hall, E. "Homer: Odyssey – Oral Composition." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/homer-odyssey/the-homeric-hero