Homer, Odyssey, Books 1, 2, 3.
Oral Tradition and Oral-Formulaic Epic Composition (the "Parry/Lord Hypothesis"): Homer's song, or more properly "the Homers' song," challenges all our notions of individual artistic creativity, shaped as they had been by print culture and authors' copyright laws since the early C18. Folk music, blues music, and other "traditional" singing literatures still preserve the older mode of composition and reception. But we tend not to treat these literatures as serious art, though they have won a small place in the Norton Anthologies which teach English majors the "canon" of great literature.
The "Parry/Lord Hypothesis" was developed at Harvard by Milman Parry and his student, Albert Lord, who studied the Homeric epithets ("Menelaos of the loud war-cry," "Achilles the man-breaker," etc.). These repeated formulae struck modern scholars as oddly uncreative uses of language set amid the epic's usually wonderfully varied narration strategies (extended similes, flashbacks and foreshadowing). Parry theorized that the epithets so commonly mated to the characters' names were part of a compositional formula based on the meter (rhythm) of the line in which they occured. To test the hypothesis, Parry and Lord brought sound-recording equipment to the mountains of then-Yugoslavia (modern Bosnia, Croatia, etc.) where they discovered living, illiterate oral-formulaic poets who could improvise poems the length of the Odyssey over a period of three weeks, singing two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. When compared between performances, the songs always changed in countless tiny ways, so they clearly were not rote-memorized, word-for-word. Rather they were recreated in each performance based on a repertoire of narrative structures that could be creatively expanded and combined, and based on that fundamental set of rules for combining the metrical formulae out of which the poem's smallest compositional units were created. You can read a clear memoir of the discovery by Albert Lord in his The Singer of Tales (1960). Since the Parry/Lord hypothesis was generally accepted as a foundation for study of Homeric poetry, it also has been applied to Anglo-Saxon epic verse, especially Beowulf.
For modern studies of oral-tradition composition, literature students often ally themselves with anthropologists. The Oral Tradition is a Web site maintained by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, University of Missouri--Columbia) http://www.oraltradition.org/ [This site also contains a link to Oral Tradition Journal, accessible online from Project Muse.] Among the resources on this site is An eEdition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey performed by Halil Bajgorić, a Bosnian singer recorded in 1935 by a research team headed by Milman Parry (text edited and translated by John Miles Foley). It's not Homer, but if you look for structural parallels in the type scenes, plot motivations, and character functions, you will hear echoes of the Odyssey in the hero's journey through danger to his wedding.
What differences do I notice between the Homeric text you are
reading and The Wedding? It's leisurely, almost fulsomely
repetitive, but the Homeric text is compressed, leaping ahead from
episode to episode. Homer has "longeurs," of course--look
for "catalogues" where the narrator revels in lists of people and places
before moving the plot forward again. I suspect it was like
paid political advertising for the cities or donor-shout-outs on NPR.
It does preserve the dramatis personae of the cultural context,
though, and their kleos also matters.
Book 1‑‑
1)
What questions are asked by the poet's invocation of the
Muse and how do you expect the poem to answer them?
What is the relationship
between poet and audience, poet and Muse, Muse and
audience?
2) What information is introduced to the plot by the council of the gods? How do the gods' interest in Odysseus affect your expectations regarding what his character will be like? Is this what you would have expected after reading The Iliad, where the fate of the city of Troy is fought over by Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, and Apollo, as well as a host of other minor immortals?
3)
How is Telemakhos described when we first see him, and how old
do you think he is, based on this description?
(He's about 20.) What
are the gods asking him to do and why?
4)
How do the gods send their message to T?
In the Homeric hymns and
other texts, some characters are unable to
recognize gods while others can.
How is T's "god‑sensor" working
and why?
5)
When asked if he is Odysseus' son, what does Telemakhos say and why does
he respond in this fashion?
6)
What problem do the suitors pose for Penelope and Telemakhos?
Why can't they end it by simply telling them to go away?
7)
With what famous son is Telemkhos compared?
What is the thematic "constellation" formed by this son's family compared
with Telemakhos' family?
8)
Phemios, the bard, sings an epic song.
What is its subject and where
would you go today if you wanted to her it?
What is Penelope's response,
and how does her son react to her?
What has changed in the court of
Ithaka?
9)
When Eurymakhos asks T about the identity of his mysterious visitor, how
does T respond and why? What does
that tell you about his character?
10)
How did Eurykleia come to live in Odysseus' household?
What is her role and how does the poet describe her special status?
Book 2‑‑
1)
What are the "Robert's Rules of Order" for an Ithakan
assembly? What does the poet
draw your attention to in each of
the characters who speaks?
2)
By what arrangement did Penelope come to be Odysseus' bride?
How does that relate to Athena's advice in Book 1 (338)?
3) What is Telemakhos' argument regarding how the suitors should be treated? Note that in traditional patriarchal cultures based on warfare, killings must be carefully justified, and in Greek culture, especially, guests have a fundamental right to safety and even protection from their hosts, a right enforced by Zeus, himself.
4) How are the suitors individualized by the poet? Look up their names in the index of Graves' Greek Myths. What do their names mean?
5)
How, according to the suitors, has Penelope been occupying her time in
Odysseus' absence?
6)
What omen appears to the suitors and how is it interpreted?
How do the suitors respond and why?
How is the audience to take this moment?
7)
How do the gods assist T in carrying out his instructions?
Especially, in what form does Athena help him and why?
What topic of their previous discussion reappears in this new encounter
and what specifically do we learn about Odysseus' character here?
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25010630
8)
What do we learn about their characters from the encounter between
Antinoos and Telemakhos near the end of Book 2?
9)
What kind of event in the life of a young man is Telemakhos'
voyage? How does it affect
his relations with his parents, and
what does this mean for his sense of himself as a man?
How is it related to the
events of Book 1?
10)
If you were one of the suitors, what would you want to do
regarding Telemakhos? Why?
How might this relate to the
situation in Aeschylus' Orestia trilogy?
11)
In the mythic chronology upon which both works depend, which
came first, the events in Books 1 & 2 of The Odyssey, or the
events in The Orestia?
Book 3‑‑
1) What is the situation in which
Telemakhos first encounters Nestor, and how does Nestor handle it?
2) What is the format of a Grecian
feast for the gods? What can
you tell about the gods' characters from the ceremony?
3) How does Telemakhos handle the
introduction of his mission in Pylos and what has changed in his account of
himself from Book 1?
4) Why shift the implied narrator in this part of the text?
What stories does Nestor tell, and what is the effect of hearing the
story of Agamemnon from Nestor?
5) How does Athena correct
Telemakhos, and what is the basic principle underlying her statement?
6) What is the role of the poet/singer in Agamemnon's household?
Why is this task given to a poet?
7) How might the contents of this
section have influenced Aeschylus in his composition of the Orestia?
8)
Consult the map of the Peloponnesian
Peninsula. Why did Telemakhos
and Peisistratos travel from Pylos to Sparta by chariot instead of continuing
the journey by sea?
9) How does Nestor react to the
discovery that Athena has been his guest and how does the poet guide your
evaluation of that reaction
10) Given what we have been told in
this book about events in Argos, and where Telemakhos is heading in Book 4, what
is the significance of Nestor's family?