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The Iliad as heroic poetry
Heroic song is not chronicle and the events related may have no historical
importance provided they can be given dramatic interest and symbolic
significance. The death of Roland did not change the course of history but
a last stand with loyal vassals dying around their liege was a feudal ideal
worthy of commemoration. If an event could not be given that sort of
significance there would be little point in making a song about it. If a song
was made about it shabby deeds became heroic and a trivial event, forgotten
by historians, acquired cosmic significance. 7 From the very beginning
then there will be deformation.
The primary source of deformation, familiar to historians, is 'ethnic
truth'; an event must be what it ought to be. So the rearguard of
Charlemagne's army was cut off by Saracens not by Basques, and the
disaster was not due to rashness or accident but, like the defeat of Kosovo
in the Serbian tradition, to treachery.
A kind of deformation to which heroic song is especially prone is that
caused by the typology in terms of which the event is perceived and related.
In a tradition of song most things are perceived generically; in the Germanic
tradition a battle takes place in a confined space, the hall of Hrothgar
in Beowulf, or that of Etzel (Attila) in the Nibelung story: in Greek, heroic
action is often teamwork (the hunting of the Calydonian boar, the quest for
the golden fleece, the attacks on Thebes and Troy); an assault on a fortification
takes the form of a simultaneous attack on each of its gates, as in the
Theban story or the Trojan attack on the Achaean camp in Iliad book 12.
The song itself is built up of episodes typical of its tradition (vol. 11 15-27).
There is an excellent instance of an Iliupersis analysed into its constituent
themes in Od. 8.500-20, an analysis which has the advantage that it does
not depend on the intuition of a modern theorist. The sack of Troy is there
broken down into a sequence of council, androktasia, and aristeia assisted
by a tutelar divinity. The obscure Finn episode in Beowulf (1068-1159)
is essentially a similar summary. A council breaks down into a series of
speeches, a battle into a series of combats, and so on, until minimal statements
are reached (see pp. 12-13). At each stage the conception is generic.
Any event can be seen in these terms, so that their application to a particular
event is tantamount to fiction.
What these techniques of creating and preserving a song bring into
the foreground is of no evidentiary value. The grains of truth, if any,
lie in the background, in the event described, or (to be on the safe side) in
the background of the event. It is easy to quote examples from less austerely
7 The inclusion of the crucial phrase et Hruodlandus Brittanniae limitis praefectus is a matter of
debate in the textual criticism of Egginhard's Vita Karoli. One must guard against the strong
will to believe that exists in these matters.
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