Appendix D
The Lost Epics and the Homeric Epics (Wiederholungen)
In Chapter XVIII., on Homer and the “Cyclic” Poems, I fear that I have not succeeded in understanding Mr. Murray’s view of the subject. The fault of misapprehension is not perhaps entirely without excuse. Generally speaking, I give the erroneous impression that Mr. Murray thinks the Iliad later than what are usually called the “Cyclic” poems on the themes connected with Troy. He certainly says that passages in the Iliad “seem to be derived from the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis....”1
He also says: “In its actual working up, however, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles, if I may use the term.” Moreover, “we happen to know that there was an old chronicle poem which both contained a catalogue of the ships2 and also narrated at length the assembling of the fleet at Aulis—the so-called Cypria or Cyprian verses. Our Catalogue has in all probability been taken from there.”3 Here we are told that our Iliad derives some passages and the Catalogue from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, and from several other named epics, “the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis,” while, “in actual working up, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles....” It was natural that, on hearing how the Iliad borrowed from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, I should think that the Cypria was regarded as an old chronicle poem complete in itself before it was borrowed from by the Iliad. The chronicle poem of events so mythical and remote could not resemble a monastic chronicle in receiving additions from contemporary history. This remark also applies to the other poems with names, Sack of Ilion, and so on, and with contents which must be definitely known, if it be known that the Iliad borrowed from them, or seems to have borrowed from them. One could not but be convinced, then, that these old books which lent, were supposed to be earlier finished than the book, the Iliad, which borrowed from them. But Mr. Murray also said, and here the prospect wavers: “The truth is that these various books or masses of tradition were growing up side by side for centuries. All the great books were growing up together, and passages could be repeated from any one to any other.”4
Now a book is one thing—a book with a name, such as Cypria, is not equivalent to “a mass of tradition,” which is another thing. To take an example, we have The Wallace of Blind Harry (circ. 1460), a book about as long as the Odyssey. Harry’s materials were “a mass of tradition,” including, it is believed, popular ballads, concerning events then remote by a century and a half. We cannot call the mass of tradition “a book which was growing up”; nor can we call the mass of tradition about the Graeco-Trojan affairs before the tenth year of the siege, a book. There is no book till the Cypria is made, and the Cypria cannot be borrowed from before it is made. A poet who relies on the mass of tradition is not borrowing from a book, any more than Harry was borrowing from a book (his use of an alleged book by Wallace’s chaplain, John Blair, is another question). Manifestly incidents from a mass of tradition about Thebes, about the Greek and Trojan affairs before the war, and so on, may be introduced into an epic about the actual siege of Troy. That is all very natural and probable. But if a poem, with a definite name and a definite scope, the Iliad, borrow passages from another poem with a definite scope and name, the Cypria or others, then the poem that lends is the earlier, and the poem that borrows is the later. It was the use by Mr. Murray of these definite names of poems, Cypria, Little Iliad, Aethiopis, and so on, with his assertion that another book, the Iliad, borrows passages from them, which led me to suppose that the lending poems were, in his opinion, complete (in one form or another) when the Iliad borrowed from them. Here I misinterpreted him.
Had Mr. Murray written: “Other passages,” in the Iliad, “seem to be derived from the masses of tradition about matters previous to and later than the opening and end of the Iliad—masses of tradition which in time became the topics of the Cypria, the Little Iliad, the Aethiopis,” then I should have understood and agreed with him. The true view of the case, Mr. Murray’s own view, seems to be this: there might be actual Greek books (probably not definitely named till a later age), and these books might, like the Chanson de Roland, be remaniés; might be modernised, and might receive additions; and another book, that which we call the Iliad, might exist, and, like the Chanson de Roland (in the Roncevaux poem) might receive additions, the facts, in some cases, being taken from the other books, which were undergoing similar vicissitudes.
This is not my own view of what occurred, but it is a thinkable state of things, and I regret that I did not understand Mr. Murray’s position.
At the same time, if one found in a chanson of the thirteenth century matter borrowed from the conclusion of Roncevaux (the remaniement of the Chanson de Roland), one could not say that it was borrowed from Roland, a substantive earlier poem, in a metre not that of Roncevaux.
There is a sense in which all early Greek epics might be said to borrow passages from each other. The statement would, however, I think, be misleading. The fact would be more correctly expressed by saying that the epics probably (like our own traditional ballads certainly) employ a common set of formulae to express habitual and often repeated actions and events—dawn, night-fall, feasts, preparations of food, arming, arraying a host, greeting a guest, falling in battle, and other constantly recurring circumstances.
“They hadna sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three.”
“They hadna walked in the bonny greenwood,
Na an hour but barely are.”
The formula for the death of lovers—
“The one was buried in Mary kirk,
The other in Mary quire,” etc.,
is of constant recurrence.
The murderer always
“takes out a little penknife
That hung low by his gare,”
or—
“Lifts up a gilt dagger
Hung low down by his knee.”
The mother or lady, awaiting her son or lover, always
“Looks over tower and town,”
or—
“Looks over Castle Doune.”
After a death it is always
“Bells were rung and mass was sung.”
“‘A grave, a grave,’ Lord Bernard cryd,
‘To put these lovers in.’”
“‘A bed, a bed,’ Clark Saunders cried,
‘A bed for you and me.’”
Motherwell, who wrote without Homer in his mind, seems to state the case of the ballads very clearly. “There is not an action, not an occurrence of any sort, but what has its appropriate phraseology; and to enumerate all these would, in effect, be to give the principal portion of all our ancient ballads. For in all cases where there is an identity of interest, of circumstance, of action, each ballad varies not from the established mode of clothing these in language.... They were the general outlines of every class of human incidents....”
Motherwell adds that “something of the same sort, though in a less marked degree, may be discovered in the construction of the longer metrical romances.”5 When we look at Book viii. of the Iliad, we see that, in Mr. Leaf’s words, “it has undoubtedly great spirit and movement,” though “nearly one-third” of the lines “are found again in the Iliad and Odyssey—sometimes with a slight difference.”
For reasons connected with the study of ballad poetry I have made some imitations of the traditional ballads, and find that, though the stories I tell are new, yet they abound in ballad formulae: indeed, a ballad, if it is to resemble the traditional sort, cannot be made on other principles. Ancient Greek epic poetry, intended, like the ballads, to be recited, not to be read, preserved the old popular and traditional convention. Critics quarrel as to the parts of the epic in which the lines are “original” and the parts in which they are “borrowed.” Of many of them we may say that they are neither borrowed nor original, but are parcels of the common epic stock.
I lately met with a curious example of the critical method of treating Homer applied in certain criticisms of Scottish ballads. One ballad, “Auld Maitland,” was distributed, by the critic, between Hogg and Scott. In certain stanzas he found Wiederholungen of lines in the English ballad of “Chevy Chase,” and of others in Herd’s version of “Otterburne” (1776). The verses in “Auld Maitland” which presented these Wiederholungen were speculatively assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd; because, in a confessed interpolation by him of two lines, where only half a stanza was received from the recitation of “Auld Maitland,” the words “Remember Percy” occur. In “Chevy Chase” we have “But trust me, Percy.” Hogg was following “Chevy Chase.” But in “Auld Maitland” we read, “King Edward rode, King Edward ran”; while in “Jamie Telfer” we have “The Scotts they rode, the Scotts they ran.” Now that line occurs in Scott’s, and did not occur in Hogg’s version of “Jamie Telfer.” Moreover, Scott himself, the critic believes, wrote the part of “Jamie Telfer” where the Scotts ride and run. “If Hogg is responsible for the insertion of this line” (“King Edward rode, King Edward ran”), “he must have borrowed it from “Edom of Gordon,” where we have “Sum they rode, and sum they ran.”
He must have borrowed it! How like is all this to the higher criticism of Homeric Wiederholungen! In fact, ballad poetry and Homeric poetry have stocks of formulae open to every maker. Not to use them would be not to play the game.
Thus the criticism went on, and Scott’s hand was detected exactly as Hogg’s had been, by the occurrence, in “Auld Maitland,” of ballad-formulae which also appear in ballads edited by Scott.
Enfin, “Auld Maitland” was declared to be, in the critic’s opinion, in origin a composition of Hogg’s, which he tried to palm off on Scott as traditional. Scott detected Hogg, entered into the plot, wrote stanzas and lines into the ballad, and palmed it off on the public.6
The critic happened not to know (or did not mention) the history of how the ballad was first heard by Laidlaw in the mouth of a servant girl; and how Laidlaw got a version in manuscript from Hogg, who heard a recitation by his uncle, Will o’ Phawhope. The critic had never seen the extant original MS. sent by Hogg to Laidlaw, and given by Laidlaw to Scott. He had never, of course, collated that manuscript with the copy published by Scott. When we make the collation, we find that Scott neither rejected nor added a single stanza; that he made a necessary and successful emendation in one line; and that the few small verbal differences between Hogg’s MS. and Scott’s printed ballad may be accounted for by the fact that the copy printed from was that received from a recitation by Hogg’s mother.
Thus the higher criticism, working on lines recognised as orthodox in Homeric circles, was absolutely erroneous from beginning to end. The critic was acute, ingenious, even brilliant, but he had scanty knowledge of the facts in the case. He had not consulted certain printed books germane to the matter; he had not consulted the ballad-manuscripts at Abbotsford, and the manuscript letters.
In Homeric criticism, alas! we have not the letters and manuscripts of the poet. But it is clear from the case of “Auld Maitland” that, in the absence of facts, our motto, in conjecture, should be—Gang warily!
Notes
1 R. G. E. p. 165.
2 As has been said, I am aware of no evidence for this statement.
3 R. G. E. p. 164.
4 R. G. E. p. 163.
5 See Motherwell’s essay on “The Origin and History of Scottish Ballad Literature,” in his Ancient and Modern Minstrelsy.
6 Further Essays on the Border Ballads. By Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. Fitzwilliam Elliot. 1910.