Joel Christensen of Brandeis has a post Where Did Homeric Book Divisions Come From? that discusses “questions about design and the relationship between the parts of the Iliad and the whole”; I’m just going to reproduce a chunk of the conclusion (follow the link for the bulk of the post). He quotes Bruce Heiden as follows:
The analysis will first consider the placement of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’. It will show that all the scenes that immediately precede a ‘book division’ manifest a common feature, namely that they scarcely affect forthcoming events in the story. All the scenes that follow a book division’ likewise display a common characteristic: these scenes have consequences that are immediately felt and continue to be felt at least 400 lines further into the story. Therefore, all of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’ occur at junctures of low-consequence and high consequence scenes. Moreover, every such juncture in the epic is the site of a ‘book division’.
The second stage of the analysis will examine the textual segments that lie between ‘book divisions’, i.e., the ‘books’ of the Iliad. It will show that in each ‘book’ the last event narrated is caused by the first, as are most of the events narrated in between. But the last event seldom completes a program implied by the first. Thus the ‘books’ of the Iliad display internal coherence, but only up to a point. They do not furnish a strong sense of closure. Instead their outline is marked by a sense of diversion in the narrative at the beginning of each.
Then comes this, from Steve Reece:
We may acknowledge the orality of Homeric epic, we may refer to it as performance, we may pay obeisance to the study of comparative oral traditions, but we remain addicted to our printed texts, our book divisions and line numbers, our apparatus critici, our concordances and lexica. We rarely try to reconstruct or even imagine a production of an epic performance.
Joel himself then says:
[My] take on the major issues presented here is that the final three approaches are reconcilable from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary model for the creation of the Homeric epics (on which, see Nagy 2004 and Dué 2018), posits a movement from greater flexibility to greater fixity over time. If we imagine Homeric epic already existing notionally between episodic performances and monumental events involving multiple singers, we can see these episodes more or less coalescing around smaller performance units that could be stitched together in grander performance contexts. Any process of textualization would necessarily include stages of dictation and transcription providing performance units that were largely coherent as a whole and which would present different levels of internal coherency based in the individual performance. As the whole cultural phenomenon was transferred from performance contexts around the Greek speaking world to the libraries of the Hellenistic cities, they would achieve a textual fixity and polish that would harden, where possible, the joins between books.
We’ll never know for sure, of course, but I find that take on it reasonably convincing. (For those who care about such things, I note that apparatus critici is plural and thus the -u- in apparatus is long.)
fascinating!
to me, the structure that heiden describes is itself quite a strong argument for the book divisions emerging from performance. if you’re doing an extended piece broken into episodes – in the mode of a hakawati, say, to keep it regional – what he describes is just what you want: a high-impact start, and an ending that gives a certain amount of wrap-up without mattering much to the next episode (part of your next audience will have missed it; part of your hopefully-returning audience may well be a bit worse for wear). that way you can keep up momentum without relying on cliff-hangers, or on more intrusive formal gestures like a return to a frame story.
Seconded. I was going to say exactly that about the relationship with performance. @rozele has put it much better.
Is there also some memory-prompting going on? I can’t finish reciting this ‘Chapter’ until I’ve connected back to the first event.
The evolution-driven-by-functionality account here contrasts interestingly with the now-traditional division into chapters of the various Biblical books, where we know historically when and where it happened and we are able to assess from our own vantage point that … sometimes the chapter breaks make good sense in terms of “natural” division points in a given book’s narrative structure, and other times eh, not so much. It would not have surprised me had someone explained that the traditional subdivision of the Homeric epics into books is the result of scribal/editorial decisions X centuries later of somewhat variable aesthetic quality, but … that’s not this argument.
apparatus critici: Latinity is not quite dead when this guy assumes that his readers will know the number of apparatus from that of critici.
Compare and contrast with apparati critici: a dreadful false friend to the Italian reader, but surely a more plausibly classical formation.
I have a soft spot for the Latin fourth declension plural in -ūs on the grounds that it corresponds exactly from a comparative standpoint to the single most productive Welsh plural ending, -au (as in siopau, a loanword of unknown origin meaning “retail outlets.”)
(I honour my Brythonic forbears as the only Indo-Europeans to see the full potential of u-stems.)
Slavic hasn’t neglected them, though of course they haven’t flourished as floridly as in the land of Flewellen.
Doubtless the Holy Trinity has other functions, but from my perspective it serves neatly to teach Latin declensions to my fellow choristers–well, in the singular at least. Throw in the Virgin Mary as well to cover the first declension and we have everything but the fifth.
Among my favorite Slavic u-stem morphophonemic alterations is the Czech for “blood”—the nominative is “krev,” a monosyllable; the genitive is “krve,” a bisyllable with syllabic R.
Czech krev is cognate with English raw and (via Latin) crude. And also, W-ary tells me, Gothic hraiwadūbō ‘turtledove’, lit. ‘carcass dove’. Why?
@JWB: yes, i’d’ve expected that kind of argument more, to be honest! but it does also show how different the two texts are, functionally as well as otherwise, and what that means for their possible histories.
@AntC: i’d think so! you want people to feel like what they heard held together solidly, but it also does help you stay on track. i’m thinking about the ways that ballads will use a phrase or a word from the last line of a verse in the first line of the next one (or echo it even more directly: “…un mayn lebn oystsushraybn / keyn tint un feder volt nit klekn. / / oyb tint un feder volt shoyn yo klekn / dan voltn mayne hent nit stayenen…”)
‘turtledove’, lit. ‘carcass dove’. Why?
There is an etymological summary in Lehmann, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary, p. 190, available here.
I would like to see Ernst A. Ebbinghaus (1976) ‘Gotica XIII’ in General Linguistics 16, p. 9–13, but I can’t get to it right now. Maybe someone else can.
(Luke 2:24 here. The sacrificial context is interesting. The markings on the neck like the cut made in a sacrificial victim?)
Lehmann’s conclusion:
Not shown there: most Slavic languages have extended the u-stem gen. pl. ending to all masculines, Polish has also extended the u-stem dat. sg. ending to all masculines…
IIRC, Sorbian has extended the old u-stem gen. pl. to all genders.
I stem, you stem, everybody wants u-stems!
Rock, rock my *bʰébʰrus, rock!
Some guys out exercising their tumbler pigeons reminded me of this thread. Lehmann (linked to above) on Gothic hraiwadubo:
Schrader’s discussion is here. The Vedic nírr̥ti mentioned there is ‘dissolution, destruction, calamity, evil, adversity, also personified as the goddess of death and corruption and often associated with mr̥tyu, death’. The whole hymn Rig Veda X.165 is addressed to the Vishvedevas (“all the gods”), asking them to drive away the dove of nírr̥ti:
Translation from Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton (2014) The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India.
The following is the passage from Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum (book 5, chapter 34) that Schrader refers to:
Translation (not the best…) quickly taken from here. I wonder if the Langobard custom had anything to do with the homing abilities of doves.
(Now Rodelinda, my favorite of Handel’s operas, is in my head.)
A pole makes a lot more sense than a gravestone over an empty plot, particularly when there are many bodies and no guarantees that they will be buried respectfully. (Personally I hold marked graves to be superstitious. Gale wanted her ashes to be buried with my parents and various (unashed) cats between two feral apple trees on the Austerlitz property, but when Dorian and I and a few friends went there to do so, the weather was very adverse (a cold downpour), so I reserved some for a few friends who had requested them and then dropped the rest into a seasonal stream.
I have now sold the house.
I would like to see Ernst A. Ebbinghaus (1976) ‘Gotica XIII’ in General Linguistics 16, p. 9–13, but I can’t get to it right now. Maybe someone else can.
For *dūbōn, he prefers Suolahti’s “onomatopoietische Bildung,” here.
For *hraiwa-, Pokorny’s *(s)ker-/kor-/kr-, “Schallnachahmung für heisere, rauhe Töne,” here.
There are several pages of details, of course, but at least some of it is covering the “time-honored theory,” and yeah-but for it.