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The Iliad as heroic poetry
encouraged a certain amplitude of style, a complex sentence structure with
enjambment and subordination. The deseterac engendered a staccato antiphonic
style: 'What is white in the green wood? | Is it snow? Is it swans? | If
it were snow it would have melted; | swans would have flown away. | It is
not snow, it is not swans; | it is the tent of Hasan Aga.' The two-part
alliterative verse of Old English produced the unmistakable appositional
style: 'Hnaef spoke then the war-young king: | "This is not dawn from
the east nor is the dragon flying here, | nor of this hall are the gables
burning; | the enemy approach, the birds cry, | grey wolf howls, the
war-beam resounds, | shield answers shaft."' The strict alternation of
quantities in the hexameter, as always stricter in the last feet than in the
first, must be responsible for the creation and preservation of the special
language in Greek and for the accumulation of formulas. Formulas including
runs of verses, dialect mixture, and linguistic archaism including the
retention of glosses are widespread (Hatto, Traditions n 209-12), but the
Greek Kunstsprache appears to stand at an extreme of complexity.
We can next ask what is entailed by the stichic form. We shall get
no answers from Old French epic (which is composed in hisses, 'stanzas')
defined by assonance, nor from Medieval German (which is again in stanzas)
. But one might get something from Anglo-Saxon, from Medieval and
Modern Slavic, or from Turkic. What one gets is a strong implication that
the stichic form goes with techniques by which the song, which is of course
well rehearsed through previous performances, can be recreated in performance,
of which the most obvious outward sign is a verbally fluid text.
(Compare HyHerm 1-9 and HyHom 18.1-9, and see Finnegan, 76-80.)
Deviant versions of songs and even maverick versions are easily collected in
the field, as well as cases of very high stability. 1
The Odyssey (1.325-44, 8.485-520) provides brief descriptions of the