Homer and Oral Tradition: The Type-Scene

Mark W. Edwards
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1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Terminology and Definitions
Since our concern is with type-scenes only, our first business must be to define the terminology. Following Milman Parry (1971:451-52), A. B. Lord used the term “theme” for “a subject unit, a group of ideas, regularly employed by a singer, not merely in any given poem, but in the poetry as a whole” (Lord 1938:440). But within such a definition several different types of recurrent pattern can be distinguished, and more precision is needed. Here the following definitions will be used:

1.1.1 A TYPE-SCENE

may be regarded as a recurrent block of narrative with an identifiable structure, such as a sacrifice, the reception of a guest, the launching and beaching of a ship, the donning of armor. Many of the commonest of these were identified and studied nearly sixty years ago as “typischen Scenen” (Arend 1933). In narratological terms, an amplified type-scene is not necessary to the “story,” the “content or chain of events (actions, happenings), plus what may be called the existents (characters,  items of setting)” (Chatman 1978:19; de Jong 1987:31 uses the term fabula for this), but is a part of the “discourse,” “the expression, the means by which the content is communicated” (Chatman ibid.; “story” in de Jong). The poet could have told how Telemachus went on his adventures, and met old Nestor (the “story”), without necessarily narrating for us the fullest extant example of the type-scene of sacrifice (Od. 3.417-72).
Verbal repetition between different instances of a type-scene may or may not occur; Lord’s later definition of “theme” as “not simply a repeated subject, such as a council, a feast, a battle, or a description of horse, hero, or heroine…. The ‘theme’ in oral literature is distinctive because its content is expressed in more or less the same words every time the singer or storyteller uses it. It is a repeated passage rather than a repeated subject” (1991:27) does not apply to Homeric type-scenes…

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