How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#41

Post by grawprog » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #36

devindotcom wrote: post #5

I read some of the classic epics before learning about their mode of delivery and memorization, and was a bit perplexed at some of the repetitions and formulae. Then I learned that, for example, some characters would have multiple epithets (grey-eyed, neat-ankled, all-seeing, etc) that in Greek would be selected essentially not because they were the best descriptor, but because they were the ones that would complete…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_blues_verses > In the folk tradition, there are many traditional blues verses that have been sung over and over by many artists. Blues singers, who include many country and folk artists as well as those commonly identified with blues singers, use these traditional lyrics to fill out their blues performances. Artists like Jimmie Rodgers, the "blue yodeler", and Big Joe Turner,…

Reggae dancehall is similar. It's very much based around live performances and the deejays will usually have lines and verses they can use over riddims of differing tempos and keys or will adapt their own songs to whatever riddim the selector chooses.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#42

Post by avetisk » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

It’s funny how much we limit our understanding of the past by our own current limits.

Back in the days I had quite old teachers who knew few dozens long poems by heart and most of them learnt in their youth.

I think that the way we manage our memory and the context as well as the ratio short/long term memory demands scoped to that context is totally different and is diverging from old times.

As for the writing, there are many instances of long novels where the author radically changes the style even nowadays.

Last but not least, we have inherited a disfigured version of those epics. The originals sung by their authors are long gone. Thus the iterative divergence by the following generations of bards in terms of style and even in addition/deletion is inevitable.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#43

Post by awinter-py » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

ugh what's up with writing an article about a book without saying the name of the book? It's The Singer of Tales

Also how do you write this article without using the word 'epithet'? The whole book is about epithets

Best modern oral work using epithets is Brad Neely's wizard people (listen to it without the video, the video only detracts)

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#44

Post by posterboy » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

lordleft wrote: post #38

God I love heroic epithets. I wish they would come back in modern life: “swiftly coding Dylan” or “ceaselessly refactoring Anna”

suchlike do exist in literature (Dennis the mennace?), and occosionally in artist names (Evil Knevil, Zedric the Entertainer, Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, L[adies] L[ove] cool J.) and I'm sure some exist in the specific pattern you suggested though I don't remember any.

Reddit-memes are full of these, too, bad luck Brian for example.

And Jane likesbynames Doe is a known productive pattern as well.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#45

Post by posterboy » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

Metacelsus wrote: post #39

pjc50 wrote: post #26

> This also provides us with an elegant explanation for the Bellerophon story: epic poetry preserved the idea of writing even though the technology had been lost for over 500 years Wait, what?

The ancient Greek civilization was one of the only ones to have lost writing. Linear A and Linear B were the original forms; the current Greek alphabet was adopted later based on the Phoenician one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

what? How can you speak of the civilization, as if them were unified at either of these points in times?

Koine probably marked unification at least in writing, not earlier than 300 BC if I recall correctly.

On top of that, Linear A is not even clearly identified yet.

A very interesting topic.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#46

Post by posterboy » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #32

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #8

Did scholars really believe that verbal transmission of poetry/religious was rare? It's a well documented trait of tons of Proto-Indo-European cultures such as Celtic, Norse, Germanic, Greek, Iranian, and Indic.

There's even a Platonic dialogue, the "Ion", in which Socrates converses with a rhapsode whose entire life career is reciting Homer. Seems unlikely that Plato would just make up something like that from whole cloth.

missing the mark by half a millenium at least though

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#47

Post by cperkins » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

A very important aspect that Parry and Murko uncovered is that _music_ was the thing that helped them memorize these incredibly long works. The guslari played a one string "gusle" (iirc) and recited the work along with a song.

Some of the guslari bards could not perform the recitation without their instrument.

And, fwiw, I recall that some assert that the guslari bards were all illiterate. It has been asserted (not by me) that literacy interferes with the guslari activity of memorizing and replaying enormous epics.

Check out Ted Goia "A Subversive History of Music" for an overview - but there is a lot of other scholarship on this.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#48

Post by posterboy » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #19

hnaa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the oration of these poems might be akin to jazz playing, where a musician knows the broad, basic structure of a work and fills it in with improvisation.

Also akin to freestyle rap, where the storyteller knows the beats of the tale they're telling, and comes up with a particular rhyme on-the-fly for each sentence by following the structure of the verse.

How very daring, comparing dear homer to freestyle rap.

I don't disagree, but have to say freestyle is ideally song-writing in real time. Personally, I think this means the opposite of recitation. In practice, it is just-in-time and thus very repetetive (I'm happy I managed to make this comment HN on-topic! Thoughts?).

Therefore, it's as variable as any writing, though the constraints may require certain techniques and methods. I don't know, there's a reason freestyle battles aren't hugely popular. Many battle shows are pre-written. One can easily tell the difference. I won't say that's cheating, but will judge it according to expectations.

It's practically no different from regular discourse, ranging from repetitive, casual or formulaic small talk over thought out hacker news comments--I made a draft of this one in my head and am anxious I forgot something, or add too much--or a team meeting with the boss at work, up to legal procedures where the "oral" statements are frequently read out from paper, drafted by a team of experts, or even just submitted as briefs in congress to be bundled with the plenar protocol.

The only difference is the meter, which is not even rigidly up-held in modern poetry slams, nevertheless prosody is an important part of natural language (for lack of a better word).

Prosody in writing should be an interesting topic. Perhaps that's why my writing tends to be hard to read, as I'm a second language learner without much oral experience these days.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#49

Post by arbitrage » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #35

hnaa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, all of the "wine-dark sea"s and "rosy-fingered dawn"s might have worked as filler while the poet was queueing up the next part of the narrative.

Wine-colored sea is a different story, I think. I've seen other languages also describe the sea as red, orange, etc. This is more of a situation with color naming: cultures separate colors on the spectrum into named categories in a more or less consistent way (e.g. blue and green come apart towards the end, and some languages still have the two merged). Red is one of the first colors to be named. Apparently there is…

yes, that could be true. but the point still stands, that the repetition of certain phrases, even if they understood colours differently than modern audiences, still served the purpose of aideing memory and familiarity among the storyteller and the audience.

Re: How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?

#50

Post by hnaa » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #37

hnaa wrote: post #2

This is how the books of the Odyssey are structured: TROY ---- 1. Kikones (innocent city is ambushed) 2. Lotus Eaters (temptation, delay) 3. Cyclops (monster) 4. Aeolus (greedy crew delays journey) 5. Laestrygonians (monster) 6. Circe (temptation) 7. HADES 8. Sirens (temptation) 9. Scylla (monster) 10. Cattle/Sun (greedy crew delays journey) 11. Charybdis (monster) 12. Calypso (temptation, delay) 13. Phaecia (innocen…

This is called a Chiastic structure (from the greek letter chi which looks like an X - i.e., the shape the chiastic structure makes if you indent each succeeding level). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiastic_structure "These often symmetrical patterns are commonly found in ancient literature such as the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey."

Also in Milton's Paradise Lost, I believe.