Re: Beowulf, Gilgamesh

Matt K. writes:
<< [. . .] but our fixed text would be quite strange to the scops and
warriors who thought of poems very differently from how we think of them.
We think of epics as long narrative stories in fixed texts (sometimes in
different revisions); for original audiences for *Beowulf*, they were
stories sung/performed in a particular setting. Analagous to freestyle rap
performances, perhaps-a distinction from lyrics in liner notes that we
wouldn't be too quick to dismiss. >>

I'm not sure about this. First, virtually every early literature is claimed
by someone or other to have had its start in a tradition of sung
performances, though virtually no early literature presents clear evidence
of this claim. The obvious archetype is Greek, and for them the image is
very accurate. A class of bards and travelling rhapsodes certainly existed,
they sang poems to the public, often or usually accompanied by a chorus of
dancers, and these facts are widely attested in the original literature and
depicted on pots and murals. Early plays probably evolved from this
practice, as different performers started to perform sections of poems
pertaining to different characters, and eventually came to "act" in our
sense, remaining in-character and giving all dialogue in the first-person.

Hardly anybody else gives evidence of such a practice but the Greeks,
though, and in many places there's even evidence to the contrary. It's been
suggested by some credible scholars that the Gilgamesh poems, for instance,
were committed to clay tablets from the very beginning and were primarily
relegated to the Mesopotamian aristocracy. I am not up on the minutiae of
pre-modern Europe, so I can't say for Beowulf. I believe that so little is
known about it and its native tradition that perhaps nobody can say, really.

Certainly the ancients had a different understanding of these texts
generally, though, even where they were firmly committed to writing. It is
clear, for instance, that they were often much more comfortable than we
would be editing received texts themselves, and sometimes even bringing
disparate texts together through artful redaction. We learned from the
community at Qumran, for instance, that as late as the first century CE, in
a tradition as committed to the accurate preservation of written books as
the Jewish one, that different versions of the same book sat side-by-side in
a library, apparently with no preferential treatment for either one. Texts
were less carved-in-stone, in other words, even when they were literally
carved-in-stone.

I don't think they were quite like free-style rap performances, though,
where the goal is to generate spontaneously (and quickly) any rhymes that
are sensible, even when they are quite empty. They are never sustained, and
usually never repeated. The development of sustained poems that would be
preserved and repeated, even if they had more "give" than our poems, was
very early relative to the length of recorded history in most places, and
nothing substantial that predates this development survives (for obvious
reasons).

<< If the *themes* of *Beowulf* are important across cultures and time in
the same way, it does not follow that the particulars of the poem are, as
well. >>

I have spent enough hours struggling to understand and to translate
fragments from ancient and long-dead languages that I will not hesitate to
agree with this, though I must make it clear that I mean "particulars of the
poem" in a very linguistic/grammatical sense, and that the better our
knowledge of the language the less significant this problem.

Of course, it is important to note that the modern world has at least SOME
degree of cultural continuity with most all known poetry. Probably the most
culturally isolated from us are the early Sumerian poems (even their
language is of no known family of languages), and aside from occasional
difficulties,which seem always to stem from words or idioms that are unknown
because they are so rare in what literature we've recovered, they are quite
familiar and even beautiful.

(I wonder if our ability to comfortably call something poetry implies
"continuity" enough? It's difficult to imagine what utterly alien "poetry"
would look like. . . I don't think I've found any in the ancient
literatures, at any rate.)

<< But again, it's the mythos of *Gilgamesh* that constitutes its universal
appeal, not the poetry. >>

I disagree with this very strongly. I don't read any Akkadian (or, needless
to say, Sumerian) aside from what little I gleaned from reading through a
small grammar one afternoon and by analogy to its Semitic cousins, but the
Gilgamesh epic-proper to a great degree -- and significantly the smaller
poems as well -- reaches me powerfully as poetry.

Of course I want to shy away from "universal appeal," too, and I can find
innumerable men and women for whom no poetry has ever been appealing. (The
thought of them reminds me of a final exam described to me that consisted of
two questions: 1- What book read this term did you like the least? and 2- To
what defect in your character do you ascribe liking this book less than the
others?) But it sounds like your claim is not merely that Gilgamesh lacks
the universality that the aforementioned men and women imply is lacked by
all poetry, but that its poetry is somehow stuck forever in ancient
Mesopotamia, and this I know not to be true.

<<We've been building culture around the same stories for lots of centuries.
But when those stories disappear from the cultural bedrock, they just won't
be universal anymore. They won't make any sense. >>

I doubt that either of us is in a position to assert or deny the truth of
this with any credibility. The best hint we've got at the moment, as it
seems to me, is the sensibility of the literature that've we've dug up from
civilizations distantly isolated from us -- and while none seem to be nearly
so isolated as the one you're postulating, isolated as they are they remain
potent to sensitive readers.

-Robbie
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Sun Dec 14 04:36:18 2003