homer oral or written tradidio essays

homer oral or written tradidio essays It is possible, on the other hand, that some lesser use of the new technique of writing was the determining factor in the ability to compose such long and complex poems out of pre-existing and much shorter oral songs. Many critics do not accept this however. The huge gap in quality as well as quantity being the main factor. In essence, the poems belong to an oral culture, whether or not their monumental form owes something to the main poet's ability to compose with the help of writing. These poems were to some extent transcribed orally too; these were works that continued to be knows, erratically and incompletely perhaps "by heart". Once they were produced, the poems had a stifling effect on their simpler, more typically oral predecessors. The memory of earlier songs and poems were all but obliterated. Among those that contributed to this were the Iliad and the Odyssey. If this was so, then their appearance before the translation from an age of literacy to one of partial literacy seems less strange. The polis, or city-state, emerged as the main focus of loyalties that had earlier been directed toward persons and families, toward feudal archetypes that still reflected some of the glow of the heroic world of Homer (Kirk 3). Emphasis on the oral nature of the Iliad and the Odyssey must be present for the understanding of the poems as poetry, as works of literature in the broader sense, and as vast and erratic forces in the cultural history of the ancient world. Any man never spoke the language of Homer. It is an artifical, poetical construction of phraseology and vocabulary that originated at different dates over a period of at least 200 and perhaps as much as 500 years (Kirk 4). Some parts of it are highly conventional and consist of fixed or formiluar phrases. Precisely how far the formular system extended, and where it merges with the symbolic and repetitive aspect of all language remains a question; but the need for literate ...