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| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/worldofhomer00languoft |
THE WORLD OF HOMER
BY
ANDREW LANG
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1910
PREFACE
In 1895 I published Homer and the Epic (pp. 424), containing acriticism of Wolf's theory, if theory it can be called, which isthe mother of modern Homeric criticism. I analysed, book by book,the Iliad and the Odyssey, observing on the modern ideas ofinterpolation and the modern objections to many scores of passageswhich, as a rule, I defended from charges of "lateness" andinconsistency.
I added chapters on the Lost Epics of Greece, on Archeology, and on theearly Epic poetry of other ages and peoples which offers analogies,more or less imperfect, with Homer.
On the whole my conclusions were identical with those of SignorComparetti, in his preface to his learned book on the FinnishKalewala. He says:
"The anatomical and conjectural analysis which has been applied sooften and so long ... to the Homeric poems and other national epics,proceeds from an universal abstract principle, which is correct, andfrom a concrete application of that principle, which is imaginary andgroundless."
The true principle, recognised since the end of the eighteenth century,separates the "personal" and learned Art Epics, like the Æneid andthe Gerusalemme Liberata, from those which belong to the period ofspontaneous epic production, "when Folk-singers fashioned[Pg vi] many epiclays of small or moderate compass." (Perhaps Folk-singers is hardly theright term. Such songs of exploits as the Borderers "made themselves,"as Bishop Lesley said in 1578, were not "epic lays," but ballads like"Jock o' the Side," and "Archie o' Cafield," and "Johnie Cock," despiteits name the most romantic of all.)
"These epic lays were called 'national' or 'popular,' not only byvirtue of their contents, sentiment, and audience, but mainly becausethe poetry which takes this form is natural, collective, popular, andhence 'national' in its origin and development." (By "collective"I understand the author to mean, not that a whole country-sideautomatically and collectively bellows out a new ballad, but that theoriginal author uses traditional formulae in verse wherever he can,and that his ballad is altered in the course of recitation by others,so that any version which has been obtained from recitation is, infact, one of many variants which have arisen in course of time a