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