It is a truism that many of our ancient epics resonate with a kind of language that has been labeled ‘‘elevated,’’ ‘‘austere,’’ ‘‘formal,’’ and the like. Here again modern-day oral epics offer the opportunity to understand the origin and function of such stylistic convention. By looking at analogues from the contemporary world we can gain an appreciation of both the structure and the meaning of epic registers (types or subsets of language) in the Iliad, Gilgamesh, and even such deeply literary works as the Aeneid (see Sale 1999).
Research has established salient differences between what we may for the sake of convenience term the ‘‘standard’’ and poetic registers employed in oral traditions (see J. Foley 1995: especially 49-53, 82-92). Whereas an everyday language, that brand of discourse glossed in most desktop dictionaries, follows certain rules of order, flexibility, and implication, epic registers tend to diverge from the standard set of rules (on ancient Greek, medieval English, and South Slavic, see Foley 1990, 1991, 1999b). Often an epic language will mix dialect forms from various geographical regions, as well as preserve archaic words and forms that long ago dropped out of the quotidian register used outside the performance arena. Word order will often be more dependent on the meter and music that partner phraseology than on the usual rules for everyday speech.
The basis for the creation and maintenance of these features may be traced to the oral poet’s special lexicon. As the South Slavic singers attest, they think and compose not in terms of our words (typographically or linguistically defined) but rather in terms of‘‘large words’’ - in the case of the guslari no smaller than a metrical verse-part in length and as large as a narrative pattern or even a whole epic (Foley 2002: 11-21). Thus bytes of phraseology are frequently recurrent, as bards deploy a vocabulary of phrases that have been called ‘‘formulas.’’ At the level of narrative structure, many oral epic traditions employ recurrent ‘‘typical scenes,’’ multiform units that recur in the same and different songs, varying within limits. At the top level, ‘‘story-patterns’’ present structural pathways for the action of entire epics; the dramatis personae and all other details are subject to change, but the flexible framework of the story as a whole governs the bard’s composition and the audience’s reception (Lord 1960; Foley 1999b). Of course, modern-day epic registers are distinctly unalike one from the next, but, while each shows its individuality, most such registers are alike in the fact of their conventional structure, and thus in their divergence from what linguists might refer to as the ‘‘unmarked standard.’’
Consider a few examples of this epic language from South Slavic oral tradition. At the level of the entire story, hundreds of epics recorded from various parts of Bosnia and Croatia follow the same basic narrative sequence as Homer’s Odyssey (see Chapter 22, by Slatkin). Interestingly, the morphology of this pattern in South Slavic and everywhere else the so-called Return Song has been thoroughly collected is binary: alongside the ‘‘faithful wife’’ outcome stands the ‘‘unfaithful wife’’ possibility, in what amounts to approximately an equal distribution among well-collected traditions (see Foley 1999b: 135-67; also Reichl 1992: 160-70 on the Turkic Alpamis; Badalkhan 2004 on Balochi oral epic). Just this much information about the structure of the epic language in an analogous tradition suggests a great deal about the anachronistic texture of the Odyssey, the obstinate indeterminacy of Penelope, and the climax of the story in a riddle known only to wife and husband (all well-established, indeed defining conventions of the Return Song). Similarly, the South Slavic tradition contains numerous examples of typical scenes, from the arming of heroes to caparisoning of horses, preparing of feasts, testing of subordinates and family members, verbal combats, and beyond. These story-patterns and typical scenes, both of them examples of‘‘larger words’’ (which the guslari emically call reci (literally, ‘‘words’’)), are flexible conventions that both vary within limits and convey idiomatic meaning from instance to instance, song to song, and bard to bard. Such is the multiform and echoic nature of the epic register as a dedicated language.
Nor should we leave the analogy of the South Slavic register without examining the simplest, most obvious feature of epic language: its highly patterned, recurrent phraseology. Through the performances of the guslari we find dozens of equivalents to Homer’s ‘‘swift-footed Achilles,” ‘‘prudent Penelope,’’ ‘‘sweet sleep,’’ and ‘‘green fear.’’ Like their Homeric equivalents, these South Slavic phrases are metrically defined in extent and internal organization, and in that respect the meter-phraseology symbiosis helps to preserve them over time. Once realized as part of ‘‘larger words,’’ the variant dialect forms and anachronisms that can distinguish constituent elements tend to persist because they are parts of integral wholes, shielded from linguistic change by having become ‘‘syllables’’ within the larger units. But an understanding of structure is not the only yield of the analogy. Phrases like kukavica crna (‘‘black cuckoo’’) and suZianj nevoljnice (‘‘miserable captive’’) are far more than metrical accommodations or ready-made fillers. Bards use the ‘‘black cuckoo’’ phrase to indicate that the woman so designated is now or soon will be a widow; it thus has a traditional, sometimes proleptic force idiomatically greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise, a ‘‘miserable captive’’ names by convention not just any captive but quite specifically the imprisoned hero of a Return Song; fluency in the epic language provides characterization far beyond anything available in even the most detailed lexicon of the standard language. Thinking comparatively, then, we will not be surprised to learn that ‘‘swift-footed Achilles’’ and ‘‘prudent Penelope’’ can serve as cues that summon complex characterizations by convention, that ‘‘sweet sleep’’ marks a narrative fork in the road, or that ‘‘green fear’’ has little to do with its literal denotation but carries the traditional sense of‘‘supernatural fear’’ (numerous additional examples at Foley 1999b: 201-37). Oral epic language is conventional in idiom as well as structure; at every level, both its systematic morphology and its connotative power are simply special cases of the general theorem of human language. As I have suggested elsewhere by formulating a pseudo-proverb (2002: 127-8), ‘‘Oral tradition works like language, only more so.'
World History
