The Epic

Paul Merchant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315316666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

First published in 1971, this work examines the tradition of the epic and the many forms in which it has presented itself over time. After unpicking the defining aspects of an epic, the book tracks the literary tradition from the classical period through to modern day.

Exploring major texts such as Beowulf, Odyssey, Divina Comedia, The Faerie Queene and Ulysses, this work will be a valuable resource for those studying the epic and English literature.

1

Introduction

There would be no value in attempting a simple definition of a literary form which includes the Iliad, The Prelude and War and Peace. One may profitably, however, ask what it is that these and other epics have in common. In an article reporting from North Vietnam in the Sunday Times for 21 July 1968, Mary McCarthy described the war in these terms:

… their defence of their lan d has the quality of an epic, i.e., of a work of art surpassing the dimensions of realism.

Ezra Pound, in his ABC of Reading (London, 1961, p. 46) offers another apparently simple definition:

An epic is a poem including history.

These two phrases, ‘surpassing the dimensions of realism’ and ‘including history’, represent the two poles within which we place the experience described as ‘epic’. In War and Peace, for instance, history is included in the work of art, in the sense that the echoes aroused in the reader’s imagination refer to events both before and after the creation of the work; but this is not to say that history is in any sense the subject of the work.

The double relation of epic, to history on the one hand and to everyday reality on the other, emphasizes clearly two of its most important original functions. It was a chronicle, a ‘book of the tribe’, a vital record of custom and tradition, and at the same time a story-book for general entertainment. The latter aspect of epic, its value simply as a story, needs no elaboration; but epic itself may have originated in the need for an established history. In a.d. 98 Tacitus noted at the opening of his study of Germany (Germania, c.2) that the Germanic tribes of his day celebrate the founders of their race in ‘ancient songs, the only kind of folk-memory or chronicle available to them’. This function of epic is seen vividly in action in a famous passage in Odyssey 8, where the Phaeacian bard Demodocus sings, at the request of Odysseus in disguise, the story of the Trojan Horse, an episode in which Odysseus himself played a prominent part. The hero is so moved by the recitation that he weeps, and so reveals his identity. The apparent speed with which the tale had already established itself in the bard’s repertoire can be paralleled by a similar moment in the first book of Vergil’s Aeneid. Aeneas and his men are confronted in Carthage with the walls of the newly built temple, which have upon them scenes from the siege of Troy. One presumes that neither Homer nor Vergil would have suggested that it was likely in literal terms for a man’s fame to precede him so rapidly, but the point is surely being made that for the great hero the events of his own lifetime have already become subjects for epic.

The sophisticated relationship of the poet to his material, his awareness of historical perspective, reminds us that even our earliest epics date from a period when epic narrative had already been in use for some hundreds of years. We have no examples of the first lays; we can only make deductions from the poems we have inherited; and in these, two pressures are already in operation – the pressure on the one hand of a poet’s imagination and artistry, and on the other of an audience’s desire for entertainment. The poems are no longer purely chronicles, they are already to some extent fictional.

In the Old English Beowulf there is a similar awareness of historical perspective on the part of the poet, which in this case takes the form of a nostalgia for the glories of the past. Two passages spoken by the Danish king Hrothgar illustrate this attitude clearly. In the first, Hrothgar is offering the hero gifts after he has mortally wounded the monster Grendel:

Many times I have given a reward for less
to an inferior man, to a feebler warrior,
and honoured him with gifts. You, by your deeds,
have secured for yourself an endless renown.

(ll. 951–5)

Eight hundred lines later, after Beowulf’s underwater victory over Grendel’s mother, Hrothgar’s speech of congratulation reaches its climax in this passage:

Have nothing to do with pride,

noble warrior. Now the glory of your
strength is for a moment. Sickness or the sword will come at once
and rob you of your might —
or the grip of fire, or the welling of the waves,
or the onslaught of the sword, or the spear’s flight,
or terrible old age, or else the brightness of the eyes
will fail and darken. O warrior,
in a moment death will overpower you.

(ll. 1760B–8)

It is this prevailing tone which leads J. R. R. Tolkien to state in his famous essay ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ that:

Beowulf is not an ‘epic’, not even a magnified ‘lay’. No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose rather ‘elegy’.

The poet, in short, is using historical material for his own ends. For Homer the background of his Iliad is the fall of a great civilization; for the poet of Beowulf it is the passing of the old heroes, the theme so simply introduced in the opening lines of the poem:

Yes, we have heard the greatness
of the Danish kings in old days,
how the heroes did courageous deeds.

(ll. 1–3)

In the last analysis, however, as Horace comments, the epic poem centres upon men; exceptional men, but none the less human:

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon

but all of them, unknown, unmourned,

have slipped into dark oblivion

because no poet praised them.

(Odes IV, 9, 25–8)

The epic hero’s fame is directly linked with that of his bard; but the bard’s quality depends no less on an ability to concentrate all his energies on his subject. It is this sharp focus on to the central figure in his massive isolation that gives the great epics their grandeur and universality. We are confronted not by a man at a moment in history, but by Man in History. We are all involved in what becomes of him.

Finally, there is one quality inherent in our use of the word ‘epic’ that should be discussed. It is implicit whenever we speak of an ‘epic journey’ or an ‘epic struggle’; in the cinema we are familiar with the terms ‘Biblical epic’ and ‘Epic Western’; Mary McCarthy and Ezra Pound use the words ‘surpassing’ and ‘including’. In their different ways these usages all point to an underlying conception characteristic of epic – the notion of ‘scale’, ‘mass’, ‘weight’. While the epic need not necessarily be long (and many are), it must be large in scale, it must have ‘epic proportions’. In the chapters that follow, a number of such works will be examined, ranging from Homer to Ezra Pound, from the earliest epic to an epic still in progress, in an attempt to uncover the creative pattern underlying these expansive and ambitious ‘poems including history’.

2

Classical Epic

ORAL EPIC

We are surprisingly well informed about certain aspects of early epic, and in particular about the manner of recitation. Homer’s account of the singing of the Phaeacian poet Demodocus in Odyssey 8 has already been discussed to show the relationship of the bard to his material. This superbly written book also offers valuable evidence for the actual conditions of performance.

A herald soon came bringing the famous singer,
whom the Muse had befriended, giving good with evil:
she had taken his eyes, but left him the gift of sweet song.
Pontonous placed a silver chair among the banqueters,
close to the stout pillar, and there
he hung from a nail the melodious lyre,
just there, above his head, guiding his hand
to where it was.

(8, 62–9)

The singer is blind. Perhaps we should not be too certain about the poetic meaning of this celebrated image. The blindness may symbolize the poetic use of imagination and memory, so important to an oral poet; or it may reflect on a sociological circumstance, that the blind man is at an advantage in the difficult task of impromptu composition. It may be even more simple, that the poet is describing (and how vividly he does so, with the telling image of the hand led to the lyre) an actual blind bard. Whichever explanation we might prefer, one impression is inescapable – that of the almost religious awe with which the poet describes one of his fellow practitioners. In Book 22 Phemius, the bard in Odysseus’s palace in Ithaca, claims immunity from the sentence passed on the suitors:

You will regret it afterwards if you kill
a bard, the singer for gods and men.

I am self-taught, and God planted in my heart
the various ways of song.

(22, 345–8)

Homer appears to be insisting on some theory of poetic inspiration, but at the same time the striking word ‘self-taught’ appears to imply a high degree of consciousness of technique in the poets.

To return to Book 8, the first lay sung by Demodocus concerns the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. This so moves Odysseus that King Alcinous suggests adjourning for an athletic contest. After the athletics the bard sings a story of the adultery of Aphrodite with Ares and the revenge of her husband Hephaestus. Later in the evening he sings a further tale, the story of the Wooden Horse:

Prompted by God, he began and fashioned his song
starting at the point where some of the Greeks sailed away
in their well-benched boats, after burning their huts,
while the others, together with famous Odysseus,
lay hidden inside the horse in the main square of Troy.

(8, 499–503)

In the first of these recitations, the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, there can be seen the germ of a whole epic like the Iliad, which begins with a similar quarrel. It is easy to see how a story of this kind might be used for a brief lay, for a chanson de geste, or might develop into a full-length epic. The central theme of an epic need not be more complex than this. The second of the two stories, which was accompanied by a dance, perhaps a mime of the action, is of a different order. The writing is lighter and more humorous, the subject mythical rather than heroic. If the first relates to the Iliad, the second, more folk-tale than saga, seems closer to the Odyssey.

The third recitation, however, moves into the shadowy area behind the Homeric poems. Proclus, an early commentator on Homer, pointed out that the Sack of Troy, a poem in the Homeric cycle, began at this moment, with the Greeks sailing away, leaving the Wooden Horse behind. The phrase ‘Starting at the point where …’ echoes line 10 of the Odyssey itself, where the poet asks the Muse to help him to begin ‘at some point or other’. Clearly the poets held in their heads a vast number of plots and synopses belonging to various points in the epic cycle, any one of which they would be prepared to relate in words of their own choosing. The Iliad ends before the Sack of Troy; the Odyssey begins after it. Is it possible that the poet deliberately inserted the Fall of Troy here in miniature, as an acknowledgement of the great theme which haunts the whole Trojan Cycle? If the effect is not as calculated as this might suggest, it is clear that the Odyssey poet regarded the connection of Odysseus with the Trojan Horse as an important piece of background information. In Book 4 (266–89) the same topic is raised when Menelaus describes the experience of being with Odysseus inside the Wooden Horse.

A short passage in Beowulf provides a remarkable parallel to the Homeric picture ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFATORY NOTE
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 CLASSICAL EPIC
• 3 NEW FORM
• 4 RENAISSANCE AND LATER EPIC
• 5 FORMS OF MODERN EPIC
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX