The World of Homer

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The World of Homer, by Andrew Lang


In 1895 I published Homer and the Epic (pp. 424), containing a criticism of Wolf's theory, if theory it can be called, which is the mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book, the Iliad and the Odyssey , observing on the modern ideas of interpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passages which, as a rule, I defended from charges of lateness and inconsistency.
I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on the early Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies, more or less imperfect, with Homer.
On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of Signor Comparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the Finnish Kalewala . He says:
The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied so often and so long ... to the Homeric poems and other national epics, proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, and from a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary and groundless.
The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century, separates the personal and learned Art Epics, like the Æneid and the Gerusalemme Liberata , from those which belong to the period of spontaneous epic production, when Folk-singers fashioned many epic lays of small or moderate compass. (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly the right term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers made themselves, as Bishop Lesley said in 1578, were not epic lays, but ballads like Jock o' the Side, and Archie o' Cafield, and Johnie Cock, despite its name the most romantic of all.)
These epic lays were called 'national' or 'popular,' not only by virtue of their contents, sentiment, and audience, but mainly because the poetry which takes this form is natural, collective, popular, and hence 'national' in its origin and development. (By collective I understand the author to mean, not that a whole country-side automatically and collectively bellows out a new ballad, but that the original author uses traditional formulae in verse wherever he can, and that his ballad is altered in the course of recitation by others, so that any version which has been obtained from recitation is, in fact, one of many variants which have arisen in course of time and recitation.)