One of the things that Milman Parry and his colleagues found in investigating the oral transmission of poems is that the poems change with each telling. Sometimes the change is barely discernible. Sometimes it’s dramatic.
In one telling, a singer might abbreviate an entire scene to a single line. Or, inspiration taking hold, he might expand a single line into a long section.
In one sense, an orally transmitted poem is the property of an entire people, a national epic. But while the singer is performing, the poem is all his.
The versions of these epics are countless.
Before the printing press, changes also occurred in the transmission of written texts. A lot of the changes were simple errors made by tired scribes.
Imagine you are a medieval monk, a native speaker of English, charged with copying an ancient Greek text. Two lines end in the same word. It’s easy to skip a line and end up with gibberish, especially if you are tired and are copying by candlelight.
I used to think that you could best see the problems by looking at the text of the New Testament. The reason is that we have so many manuscripts of it. Whereas some works of classical Greek literature might rest on a manuscript or two, we have dozens of important manuscripts with at least parts of the Greek gospels.
When you look at the problem of establishing the earliest — and presumably the most authoritative — text, you have to look at the fragments of manuscripts from all over the ancient world: Rome, Alexandria, Syria, Jerusalem. There are thousands, and some of the variations are intriguing, telling us something about the local communities that produced them and the way they saw what is now a well known story.
If you put religious notions aside, you can learn something about how texts evolve as they were passed down, generation to generation.
• Source: Robert Kanigel, Hearing Homer’s Song; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
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