The Epic (Poetic Terms)

Poetic Terms You Have to Learn

The Epic

The are few words that evoke such a powerful image in our minds as the word epic, whether you be an early teen reading a thrilling fantasy novel, or an ancient professor of literature. In our current use, the term is used to describe anything that is very large in scale, important, historically significant, and awe-inspiring. An "epic" goal, to use an example from informal hockey sports commentary, is one that involves a player in an important game, usually unassisted, going "coast-to-coast" or from one end of the ice to the other with the puck, skillfully avoiding several opposing players, and eventually finishing by scoring a goal that leaves the tender wondering what happened. In a way, this does capture something about the term in its literary use that is highly significant; epic work involve a character traveling great distances and overcoming tremendous odds to achieve a goal of the utmost importance. The scale of the hockey example does not compare (after all, how important is any hockey game compared to the defeat of an entire civilization or the protection of another from an invading force?), but there is an interesting metaphorical connection that adheres and keep the term current thousands of years after the first epics were recorded.

It occurs to me that you might find it odd that a sub-series on the epic would appear in a section devoted to the exploration of poetry; after all, you might be saying to yourself, I know that an epic is a long, extended story of adventure and heroism, which looks nothing like a poem at all. In response to this, I would answer that you are right in defining some of the characteristics of the epic, but wrong in your evaluation of the limits of poetry. Today, the poems we know and love most are usually relatively short, and it is a sign of this century and the last that T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land is considered a long poem, even though it only comprises about 433 lines. We tend to contrast the poem with the novel, and in comparison, poetry is considered to be short and musical, full of images and descriptions, while the novel is lengthy, less descriptive and imagistic, and focused on character development, psychology, and the telling of an extended tale.

Of course, while these distinctions apply pretty well to contemporary literature, there was a time, believe it or not, when no long literary story would have been written in prose. When a piece of literature tells a story, it is known as a work of narrative literature, or simply a narrative, and although poetry does not usually perform this function or possess this characteristic today, for most of the history of literate humanity it was the primary vehicle for telling tales. An epic, therefore, is defined as a long narrative poem, detailing the legendary adventures of heroes, involving elements of the supernatural, and embracing countless myths and stories that circulate in the society in which it is produced. The epic is one of the cornerstones of Western literature, and you would be hard pressed to find a person over the age of 14 who had never heard of Homer or the Odyssey. Some of the foundational characters of the Western literary imagination can be found in the earliest epics we have, and to leave this ancient and influential form out of a discussion of poetry and poetic forms would be like leaving a discussion of silent pictures out of a discussion of film history.

Aside from the epic characteristics discussed in the previous article, epics must also be about vitally important subject matter, and written in a high or grand style. Appropriate topics include large scale wars; the exploits of a hero and their impact on a region, as well as his kingdom; the foundation of a city, or even a nation; the capturing of a great city; and the defense of a city, nation, and even an entire culture and its way of life. Needless to say, only the most important people and events have ever been captured by epics, and that the day-to-day workings of ordinary people are simply not appropriate.

Since the subject matter is so highly elevated, the tone in which the epic is recited or written needs to be comparably formal, and lofty. Epics, therefore, are composed in the highest form of poetic language, and no interferences from common use and slang are permissible. In fact, even prose is considered too ordinary, common, and unadorned for the production of an epic, and so poetry is the only vehicle considered sufficiently equipped to carry an epic to its proper conclusion. This high level of formality is maintained in the character of the speaker, as well as his point of view or narrative perspective on the events that are taking place. The ultimate goal is objectivity; the speaker tries to be no more than an empty vessel that takes the poem from his mind and pours it onto the audience in either oral or written form. He should be invisible in it, not himself becoming a character, and not making comment on the events nor intruding in the narrative chain of events he is relating to us. Therefore, the word "I," unless it appears in dialogue, has no home in the epic. The focus needs to be firmly on the incredibly important events and characters that are the subjects of the work, rather than on the insignificant teller of the tale.

Again, some of you who have read some epic poetry, especially that of the Greeks and Romans, are probably saying to yourself, "wait a minute! This guy is trying to pull a fast-one on us! I know for a fact that the beginning of the Aeneid starts off something like 'I sing of arms and the man.' There isn't a more obvious or blatant use of the word 'I' that you can think of!" Again, I would say that, while this is a valid observation, the objectivity of the Aeneid, and many other epics poems, is enhanced by this use of "I," not diminished in any way. It seems odd that I would claim that the subjective first-person pronoun would somehow make something more objective in its tone, but the argument rests on a literary convention that goes beyond the effect that the "I" on its own would create.

You see, most epics begin with what is known as an invocation to the muse. This is a mouthful, but once you know the terms, it becomes easy to understand and remember. The most problematic term here is probably "muse," which you might know as a verb which basically means "to think," as in "I mused over the question for days before coming up with the answer." Better instead, in this case, to think of it in relation to another English word, this time, "museum." After all, what is kept in a museum? In the commonest sense of the word (I know there are other kinds of museums, but by default we tend to think of one particular thing unless someone puts "of natural history" or something similar after the word), we tend to think of a museum as housing art; keep this in mind, as it will help you to remember what the word "muse" means in the context of the epic.

The connection between the "muse" and art goes back to the ancient Greeks, whose pantheon (their collection of gods, goddesses, and assorted divinities) included nine goddesses led by Apollo, god of reason and the arts. These goddesses were known as the muses, and these divinities were needed in order to recount stories involving the gods, as well as important historical events (as many ancients believed their myths were). The poet had to be careful when constructing an epic, for purely fantastic literature was seen as frivolous, and even deception; think, after all, of the distinction still made between fact and fiction. However, it was an acknowledged impossibility that no man could write about detailed events in the heavens and in the distant past with complete (or even approximate) accuracy. This is where the invocation to the muse comes in.

At the beginning of an epic poem, it became traditional for the speakers to admit to their own shortcomings and limited vision, and to give the credit for what was to follow to the muses, from whom the speaker would allegedly receive the tale he was about to tell, or later, write. In this way, the believability of the specific details included in the epic was restored, and people could read, hear, and perform them without fear of spreading lies. It would have been impossible, for example, for Homer to write accurately about what Achilles said to Agamemnon, or certainly what the gods talked about to each other in the heavens; there were no written records of any of these events, and even if there had been, listening in on the immortals is not something a historian could have made notes about.

Today, the word muse has another meaning in English that is very closely related to the original Greek. An artist may have someone he calls his muse, which does not mean that he is literally considering her divine and asking for her help, but rather that she is his inspiration, giving him the energy and motivation to start and complete his work, which is very often explicitly about her. The original Greek muses also performed the functions of motivating and energizing, though they were themselves seldom the subjects of literary works. They did, however, feature prominently in painting and sculpture, even far beyond the ages when they were literally believed in, and I encourage anyone who is interested to go a quick Google search; some of the art featuring them is both ancient and inspiring.

This brings us back to the original reason we began talking the muses in the first place, and their invocation. When the poet begins an epic, he usually undertakes the invocation to the muse, and this act is like a frame or border before the beginning of the action proper. It is an important action, and one that must certainly be completed before the tale can begin. However, it is not a part of the narrative that is about to unfold, and so does not need to adhere to the same rules. It is a short passage (or several) of introductory material, which places the rest in context. Here, the speaker may refer to himself, but this is not to make him the focus of attention, or a subject in the work. He is placing himself firmly outside the work through his admission that he needs help to tell his story, a story that he could not possibly know nor tell by himself. He uses this framing device to distance himself from the characters and action, and so proves his perspective even more objective than if he had merely never referred to himself in the first person at all.

After the invocation to the muse, the voice of the speaker or narrator of an epic poem fades into the background, and he thrusts the events and personalities within the story world to the foreground. There are many ways of doing this, of course, and each epic author in each epic he writes uses different techniques of storytelling to achieve the various effects he wants to produce. One of the most common devices we see in almost all epics, however, is beginning in medias res. Fittingly, this is an ancient Latin term, and as we have explored in great detail in another series, it means "in the middle of things." This is opposed to beginning ab ovo, which means "from the egg," or "from the beginning." Take, for example, Homer's great epic poem The Odyssey. The story begins not at the end of the Trojan War, which is where Odysseus' (the protagonist after whom the epic is named) journey home would most naturally begin, but rather on the island of a goddess who is holding him captive, more than halfway through the journey home. We get to hear of the rest of his journey in an extended "flashback" of sorts, when he eventually (after his captivity with the goddess) tells a king who is hosting him how he came to wash up on his shores.

There is certainly nothing wrong with starting a story at the beginning, providing some exposition, and slowly introducing an audience to its characters and setting. However, we must remember that epics tell tales of legendary adventurers and events, meaning that everyone in the audience was familiar with the characters and already knew what happened. This puts a great burden on the poets creating their epics, because they cannot rely on the story itself, and the suspense of not knowing what happens next, which can hold an audience's interest, is not available to them. So, the focus is on the manner of telling, in the artful arrangement of events, rather than just on the events themselves. By starting halfway through the action, the poet cuts to the interesting things immediately, avoiding the unnecessary exposition and introduction which would only be useful if the audience did not already know the characters and events in question. Starting in the midst of the action gets the readers and listeners excited from the beginning, ensuring they would stay to hear the poet's take on what came before and after these events.

The fact, mentioned above, that epic poems are constructed from the commonly known folktales, myths, and legends of a given people and culture is significant in many other respects as well. How did Homer, for example, come to know about the fall of Troy, about the wrath of Achilles, and the cunning of Odysseus? He certainly did not read a story about them, or look them up in a historical document or encyclopedia. These characters pervaded the collective consciousness of the Greeks, and were passed on through successive generations by parents to their children. Relating this to modern culture here in the West, a full hundred out of one hundred people I ask on the street about Goldilocks or Cinderella will immediately know whom I am talking about. There are important differences between these characters and those of Greek myth, however, for we don't believe that either of these two famous female characters ever existed, and they are not important ancestral, cultural heroes to us. However, we still know them, and think how much better the Greeks would have known and remembered their characters whom they did believe were real, and who took part in events that shaped and defined their culture and identity.

Aside from parents passing on the folktales and legends to their children, which was certainly an important and pervasive form of transmission, there was also a parallel system of cultural preservation and passing on, which relied on the actions of professional performers. As we have seen earlier in this series, these performers (though they had different names in different cultures, including scops, minstrels, and jongleurs) were widely known as bards, and theirs was a fascinating craft that combined poetry with music, singing, and performance. An early instrument of choice for the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as many later performing poets, was the lyre, a small harp-like instrument they used to accompany their sung poetic performances. The connection between poetry and song, still evident today though not to the same degree, was indisputable in the past; think about the modern term "lyric," which refers to both a type of poetry, as well as a line or lines from a song. This word comes from that early little harp-like instrument, the lyre, which the earliest poet-performers used in their songs.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, however, epic poetry is very, very long, and no epic you can name would have lent itself well to being performed in its entirety by any performer, especially not all in one sitting. Some research has suggested that the Iliad was performed in this manner once a year in conjunction with a religious festival, but that it took more than 24 hours, and even then was likely shortened. The traveling bards who made their money by entertaining the wealthy and powerful after meals and at special events could not afford to take a day to tell their tales, and so they told small, focused pieces about well known characters and specific adventures they had. In fact, many of these bards, not to mention the people for whom they performed, did not have an exact order and chronology set in their minds about the tales they told. There would be a tale, for example, about how Odysseus tricked and slew the Cyclops, and another about how he outwitted the witch Circe. People would know the general frame of the story, that Odysseus was coming home, but would not have his itinerary concretized at all. One of the characteristics of Greek myth was that it was flexible, and so it was possible for stories that contradicted each other in some way to exist in the imagination at the same time, and to be told at the same sitting. For those familiar with the Bible, we can see something similar happening with the two stories of creation in Genesis. In one, God creates the world in six days, and rests. Immediately after, we get a different account of the creation of humanity and various elements of the natural world. Scholars and theologians continue to debate whether these accounts can be seen as complimentary, but the point is that these two very different tales of origin are not reliant upon, nor obviously connected to, each other.

However, you might be saying to yourself, the epics that I know about are coordinated and consistent, and the events are definitely presented in a definite chronological order. I would answer, if I could somehow hear what you were thinking and speak to you across the distance that separates us, that epics are composed as a collection of the various specific stories that were in wide circulation among the bards and the people for whom they performed. Homer's Iliad, for example, is a collection and selection of smaller stories and events that he would have told and heard.

It is tempting, from a modern perspective, to judge the epic poets we know as being plagiarists, unable to find their own material and resorting to stealing from well known songs and stories they heard from others. It must be remembered, however, that the idea of originality of content as the highest form of creativity, as well as the idea of the individual author, are values that have come to dominate art and performance only relatively recently. When the most ancient epics were written, there were only so many acceptable ways one could tell a serious story, and only so many topics which would have been considered appropriate. Today, poets and authors of all kinds are free to write on just about anything they like; in the past, however, this was not the case. Only legendary and heroic characters and events were considered proper subject matter, and further, a poet had to be careful how much license he took with the telling of a given story. After all, even though there was flexibility in the stories surrounding a character and their relation, there were certain key "historical" points that could not be ignored. Troy, for example, could not have won the Trojan War; Hector could not have defeated Achilles; Odysseus could not have been killed at sea; and Aeneas could not have married Dido and lived happily ever after with her.

It was therefore important for the authors of epic works to know the broad outlines of given stories, and to remain faithful to the basic known (or perhaps, accepted) outlines of specific important instances of given stories. Within this framework, however, was where the creative magic happened, and this is where a great bard was separated from a fair or poor one. If you had a beautiful voice, a gift for playing the lyre, and the ability to turn an excellent poetic phrase, you would be well off. If, however, any of these aspects of the performance were missing, you would find yourself on the move, never welcomed for long in any given place.

Because there were countless stories circulating about any given hero and event, part of the task and invention of the epic poet was the selection of which stories to include, and how they should be united. It is tempting to think of the epic poet as merely the person who collected all of the stories regarding his subject, but he was in fact a highly selective and creative editor of this massive body of work in circulation at the time. Some stories would have gone against others, and some would have painted the protagonist in a different way than the author intended. In order to keep thematic threads tied, and characters relatively consistent, the epic poet had to select, arrange, blend, and focus the available raw story materials into a unified whole. No one would argue that the earliest epics are seamless, but it is difficult to disagree with the thematic power these works hold, which is a testament to the skill of their authors.

At this point, an important distinction between two different epic traditions must be pointed out; that of the primary epic, and that of the secondary epic. To put it most simply, the primary epic arises from a strong oral tradition, and is often performed and transmitted for many, many generations before someone actually writes it down. The secondary epic, on the other hand, is written down from the start. This would seem to create a significant division between the two types, and may lead some of you to believe that what I was speaking about above applies only to one kind or the other. However, as we will discuss in the next segment, the same basic characteristics of epic creation apply to both.

The primary epic is the older of the two epic forms, and is in contention for the oldest surviving literary form, certainly taking the title of oldest surviving narrative literary form. As its title indicates, the primary epic is the least planned and contrived of the epic forms, and has its roots in literary traditions that far outdate its being transcribed. The primary epic arises from the vast ocean of stories available in a given culture, all centered on a certain series of events, usually set somewhere in "the mists of time" and based on the adventures of key heroic characters and their interactions with each other and the gods.

Primary epics are oral compositions, and as a result exist in a living, breathing way that seems alien to the literate cultures of the present. We tend to think in terms of unified stories and final or official texts, but this simply was not the case before writing took hold of the literary world. Each individual teller was free, within a given range, to alter or amend the epic story, to tell as much or as little as fit the occasion, and to pick episodes that were most appropriate to a given context. Here, the line between performer and author are blurred into obscurity, and the primary epic becomes not the work of a single individual, but of an entire community of storytellers through time and across great distances. Primary epics eventually become standardized and concretized when they are transcribed, which ensures their propagation and allows for their translation into even more wide-ranging cultures and languages, but which largely ends their continued development.

Secondary epics, on the other hand, are not created in the same way, though some characteristics of their creation are held in common with their primary counterparts. Obviously, no story arises in a vacuum, and just about any topic that is worthy of the epic treatment is going to be something that has a huge cultural resonance. As a result, the common literary culture of a people, whether that be oral, written, or both, is going to influence the authors of a secondary epic. Notice, though, that in this case, unlike the case of the primary epic, I used the word author, and this usage was quite intentional. Secondary epics are defined by their being written down at the point of their invention, by what is usually an identifiable author. If the primary epic is a large community effort, the secondary epic is far more in line with our current notions of individual authorship.

Because of the different origins of primary and secondary epics, they display different formal characteristics. Since we are most familiar with works which are written from the time of their inception, it will be most useful to display the differences between the two forms by looking first at the features of the primary epic that look foreign to us, or that seem most striking in their novelty. It should be noted that various secondary epics do contain some features that are typical of primary epics, but that they occur to a lesser degree, and have been very intentionally included. Authors of secondary epics, wanting to follow in the primary epic tradition, copy various devices, as well as thematic and stylistic elements to recapture the power of primary epics so well known and admired.

As we have mentioned in previous installments of this series, primary epic poetry is rooted in the oral tradition, but beyond being simply oral, primary epic poetry was originally designed to be sung, or at the very least recited with strong musical accompaniment. If you are fortunate enough to be able to comprehend any primary epic in its original language, take the opportunity to listen to its undeniable music; the poetic stress patterns and syllabic arrangements lend themselves well to song, and it is no coincidence that a musical instrument was a key piece of equipment for any early bard.

Considering the task of the epic poet, it is hardly surprising that music plays such a strong role in primary oral epic composition and performance. After all, think about the last time you tried to remember the contents of a story the length of a novel...not such an easy task. There are certain features of narrative that make it easier to remember than, for instance, text-book information or random lists of facts, but in prose form, this would be a daunting proposition. Regular poetry, because of its metrical consistency, makes memorization easier by limiting the number of options available for any given line, but even thus, anything epic length is going to be a challenge to keep together in the mind. By further amplifying the metrical regularity with music, however, it becomes possible to keep a far more complex story in mind, and to present it with consistency that would otherwise be unfathomable.

Because of the primary epic's song-based roots, it contains a good amount of repetition, which courses through every aspect of the work. On the broadest level, different episodes possess structures which mirror others, and unfold in very similar ways, despite being in very different narrative contexts. Moving to a more basic level, characters often address others in very repetitive, conventional ways, but also tell then their stories with great regularity. New episodes and new encounters most often begin with some retelling of previous events, which gives the primary epic a cascading feeling, and gives the impression of an evolving chorus behind the major melody of the verse.

An even more specific example of a repeated element, which adheres between epics as well as within them, is the use of character-specific descriptive epithets. Examples include, in translation of course, "swift-footed Achilles" or "clever Odysseus." Phrases like this make clear to the audience which attributes of the character are important, but they have another effect that is directly related to song and rhythm. In the Greek versions of primary epic poetry, lines tended to be a standard length, adhering to a given stress pattern. The repeated epithets formed phonetic units that allowed them to be placed more easily into different parts of a given metrical line, making their use as much musically as practically motivated. These are sometimes used in secondary epic, but do not serve the same function, because a secondary epic author could work the names into the work much more easily, since he would have had as much time as he needed, and had no need to try to compose his written work on the fly for an anxious and demanding audience who would be paying his fee.

Because of the explicitly oral roots of the primary epic, it has a definite "on-the-fly" character that firmly roots it in the realm of semi-memorized, semi-improvised performance. The story in its broad outlines was obviously well known to both the bard and the audience, so there would be a strong framework within which the poet could create as he composed and performed. Critics have noticed a similar but somewhat less broad general structuring occurs at the level of the episode, and primary epics definitely have a highly episodic character. In his Poetics, Aristotle, speaking of much later Greek drama rather than ancient Greek epic poetry, encouraged an organic plot structure, where each event flowed seamlessly into the next with no obvious breaks or divisions, where each event is dependent on the next. This is a noble literary goal, to be sure, but it was one that the performers of primary epics would have found highly inconvenient, if not completely impossible. After all, remembering the events and their order over the course of such a long work as en epic would have been a Herculean task if there were no strong grouping and ordering apparent in the structure of the whole. It is much more manageable if the epic is broken up into smaller chunks, with each serving also as a conveniently timed piece to fit into a social occasion in the span of an hour or thereabouts. Thinking about how the epic was constructed in the first place, with diverse tales and songs being combined into a larger whole, we can see that the episodic nature of the epic comes very naturally to it.

Another device that made spontaneous performances of such very long stories possible was the epic simile, a device first seen in Homer and used throughout primary (and copied in secondary) epics. A simile, most basically, is an explicit comparison using "like" or "as," and usually compares two dissimilar entities on the basis of a single, shared, characteristic that is highly pronounced in one entity and applied in an exaggerated fashion to the second (in the simile "he was as white as a ghost," the ghost carries the characteristic of whiteness to a very high degree, whereas it applies to the person in an exaggerated fashion). An epic simile takes this basic idea, and stretches it out over a long period of time and text, going into the comparison in explicit detail, exploring may facets of the comparison until, almost, a miniature version of an allegory is achieved. An excellent example comes from the Odyssey, where Homer compares Odysseus driving a heated sharpened stake into the eye of the Cyclops to a blacksmith thrusting a newly forged blade into water to cool it. He expounds upon the hissing sound, the shuddering of the steel/wood, and compares the rising steam and smell. This all serves the literary purpose of making what is already a gruesome scene even more horrifically graphic, but it also serves a more practical purpose. This event is a little "set-piece" the poet would have memorized by heart, and would have been an opportunity to show great virtuosity with grand gestures, and extremely fluid recitation. It also could have been used as a very brief stand-alone piece when the occasion demanded, but even more than this, it is so powerful and graphic that it would have been very easy to remember, making the episode as a whole more easily memorizable. Similes like this would have further divided the episodes into even shorter, more manageable units, aiding the poet in his recitation and memorization, anchoring him to the events of the scene immediately in front of him.

Another well known ordering device of the primary epic is the extensive catalogue, also appropriately known as the epic catalogue, which takes the form of a long list of people, places, events, or any other noteworthy entities that demand to be considered in a fuller or more complete fashion. People who are coming to epic literature for the first time are often put off by these lists, and wonder what on earth they have to do with moving the plot of the story forward. The short answer to this question is very simple: the epic catalogue does nothing to move the plot forward, as that is not its point at all. Rather, it is a device intended to add to the atmosphere of the work, to take its readers back in time into a long-forgotten realm where the heroes and giants of the past can be believed to have lived. In the Iliad, for instance, one of the first catalogues we see is the massing of the armies of the Greeks. The contribution each city-state makes to the Greek forces is discussed in explicit detail. Their heroic leader is described, usually in terms that reflect the national characteristics that are supposed to apply to those people as a whole. Their great numbers are given, as is the number and type (as well as the quality) of vessels that they pilot. After going through each city-state, the reader gets an overwhelming sense of the sheer size of the invading force, as well as the incredible organizational and tactical powers which would have been necessary to conduct such a huge operation. We are reminded that, rather than some minor tale about a single family or local group, we are being treated to a story of epic proportions, which will dwarf all other stories in both its magnitude and its scope.

Aside from the important tasks the epic simile serves in story, it also serves several functions that work at other levels. The most obvious of these is the creation of suspense in situations where there would not really be any otherwise. Looking at another example from the Iliad, we see that there are often extended descriptions and lists of the arms used in particular battles, which are inserted just before the battles actually take place, but after it is clear that there is about to be a battle. At this point, the reader is primed for the excitement of the fisticuffs that are about to unfold. However, rather than simply give the reader the expected battle immediately, the poet instead begins the catalogue of the weapons that are about to be featured, describing who is wielding them, what qualities they possess, and in some cases where they came from and what other battles they have taken part in. At first, this is mildly irritating for many readers, who want to get on to the actual battle at hand, but in time the list takes on a life of its own, weaving an almost magical spell on the reader and causing them, almost, to forget about the battle about to commence and to focus on the wonder of the weapons they are being presented with. After the atmosphere has been set, and the suspense for the fight built to the maximum, the list ends and the battle goes on, made all the more interesting by the catalogue that came before it. Obviously, while plot and action are key aspects of epic poetry, what makes it truly epic are the grand flourishes that elevate and decorate every aspect of it, taking the expected and regular and turning it into something awesome to behold.

At a meta-level, the catalogue performs a function that has as much to do with the composition and performance of primary epics as it does with the effect it creates on the readers or audience. Like other devices we have discussed so far, it acts as a breaking point in a given episode, which allows the poet to more easily remember what events come in what order; when you have several landmarks standing in a given, necessary relation to one another in an episode, remembering what comes next becomes far easier. Going beyond this, the epic catalogue allows the performer several moments to think about what is coming next, and to plan out how he is going to sing the events that will follow the catalogue. Think about it in these terms: you are telling a story to a friend, an amusing anecdote, and while you obviously know what happens, you don't know exactly what will need to be included and in what order. So, partway through the story, you pause for a moment to think about how you will proceed so that the story makes sense and retains its amusing elements. The epic catalogue fulfilled the same function. It was not considered proficient for a bard or minstrel to stop partway through a performance, so he could use these catalogues as a way of collecting his thoughts. One could make the catalogue as long as one wanted, and nothing about them was necessary to the plot, so the poet could go on auto-pilot for a while, and use the time to consider how the next events would best be sung. The placement of these catalogues before major events, aside from creating suspense as was discussed earlier, was significant in that it allowed the poet to mentally prepare for the important recitation that was to follow shortly. The catalogue gave him a chance to marshal his own forces and to make the telling as powerful as possible.

Further delving into the structure of the primary epic, we can see another telling feature that shows the intimate and inextricable link between the mass of stories and folktales of a given people, and the content of their epics. As we have been discussing, primary epics are oral compositions that have only later been written down. They have their origins in the traditional tales which are pivotal to the culture in which the epic grew up, and likely began as a series of diverse tales around a certain subject that gradually became linked into a single monolithic mythic tale. This accounts for the episodic nature of primary epics, and it also shines light on why digressions, both large and small, permeate primary epics to the degree they do.

We are used to reading stories in which every action, every element, is necessary to the moving forward of the plot or at the very least the major themes of the work, but most often both together. However, if we look even quickly at any primary epic, we can see that there are many "side-stories" that take up a fair part of the text but which seem largely unconnected to it. Many times, critics claim that these digressions are designed to further the thematic thrust of the main action, and while this is possible in some cases, very often this argument looks forced; after all, if this were the case, wouldn't the poet, composer, or eventual writer of the epic have made the links between these digressions and the main stories somewhat more evident? In many cases, we have digressions inserted without any apparent connection to the surrounding story.

The seemingly out of place digressions put the apologetic scholar in a difficult position, one not unlike the exegete (Biblical scholar and interpreter) who has to make some sense of the two stories of creation found in the book of Genesis. There, we first see that there is a God who makes the world in six days, everything coming in its order, and the specific details sacrificed so that the larger picture can be the main focus. Then, on its heels and with no narrative connection, we are presented with a story that is far more focused, and talks specifically of humankind and the Garden of Eden, where the order of some of the events talked about in the broader creation story just mentioned are reversed (for example, the order in which humans and animals are created). Scholars have been trying to bridge this gap for centuries, talking about nested stories and thematic reflection and reinforcement or complete refocusing, but in the end we are left with a text that obviously does not mesh, whose pieces, while standing side-by-side, do not form a cohesive whole with regard to narrative structuring.

Nowhere is this more evident in a primary epic that with Beowulf, where some of the digressions, while forming interesting and captivating stories by themselves, cannot be linked up to the main action of the story in any way that even suggests narrative unity. In fact, the epic tale begins not with the main action of the Beowulf story, but with a much older period of time, the period when Scyld Scefing, legendary leader of the Danes, had been born and come to power. It talks of his prowess, his kingly virtues, and it gets into his offspring, their accomplishments, and finally ends up telling us how this line led to Hrothgar, the current king of the Danes, the man that Beowulf has been commissioned to help. While it is interesting, perhaps, from a historical point of view, to hear about the exploits of the ancestors of one of the characters who will be featured in the story we are about to hear, as far as narrative motivation is concerned, there can be no real justification for its inclusion, especially at the beginning of the epic poem. It is obvious that it has some relation to the characters who will become the focus, but the narrative motivation for this genealogical lesson is missing.

As with other characteristics of the primary epic, it is useful to look not only at how some device would have affected the listeners and early readers, but also at how those who had been performing the epic would have seen it, and what their motivations would have been. It is obvious that bards, or in the case of the Anglo Saxon performers of Beowulf, scops, wanted to delight and amuse their listeners. However, the epic served another function in society, one that was, arguably, even more important. After all, since primary epics were not written down till well after they had been well established, the poets had no real way of recording all of the stories that they knew other than memory and cultural inheritance, passing the stories and songs down through the generations. The epic structure provided a way for poets to string many various tales and songs together around a common core, and to more easily remember the songs as a result. The Iliad and Odyssey, as well as Beowulf, are excellent examples of these epic collections, and there were likely many more in either society, dealing with different subject matter, that have been lost to us today.

The motivations for collecting and arranging various tales around a given node are many, for it is much easier to remember the various events of a single story than it is to memorize a collection of loosely related or unrelated different stories. So, various epics were born as collection points for groups of stories and songs. Undoubtedly, there were some tales that didn't really have enough supporting lore surrounding them to warrant their own epic, so often these would be presented in the context of another epic series of events, with no more than a tenuous link to the surrounding story. The Scyld episode at the beginning of Beowulf, as well as several others throughout that epic, seem to have made it in primarily for that reason. Moving further along in Beowulf, we come across the more closely connected, but still divergent episode where Unferth mocks Beowulf for losing a swimming race to Beowulf's friend and rival, Breca, in their youth. Beowulf recreates the incident that Unferth has mentioned in great detail, showing him up, and proving himself to be a far more heroic, powerful, and amiable character than Unferth. Of course, this is a great opportunity for the poet to insert a story that, while featuring Beowulf as a main character, has no bearing on the plot, since it took place long before Beowulf was a great leader and fearsome warrior. However, such a great story could not merely be left out of the epic collection surrounding the great Beowulf, so it is included here.

Because of the extemporaneous composition of each epic performance, it is possible that no listener would have heard precisely the same tale twice. This makes things lively and interesting, since it means that even if you are listening to a familiar story, it will still contain an element of unpredictability and novelty. However, it also means that modern scholars have a very difficult task trying to pin down origins and the state of the epic as it was performed at any given time, and what changes were made as the society developed. The value of such ventures can be great: after all, the changes that get made over time to a communal work like an epic are often reflective of changes that the culture is going through in much broader terms. One of the greatest motivators for the creation of primary epic is cultural upheaval, an event or series of connected events so powerfully and obviously transformative that they leave a mark on all those who live through it, and on generations which come thereafter. An excellent example is the Trojan War, which spawned not only one epic about its progress and outcome (the Iliad), but another about its aftermath (the Odyssey), and likely countless more that have since been lost to us. Note that although both of these were likely composed, collected, and then written down long after the events they describe, they are based on such a profoundly life-altering event that they still seem relevant centuries later.

Such grand events, featuring upheavals and mass migrations or murders, also gain a new resonance in later ages when similar events, while perhaps not happing on the same scale, are being played out again for the next generation. While the origin of a primary epic can often be seen as nesting in a pivotal event, its continued popularity has to do with its resonance in contemporary events, which is why, even today, the epics of previous millennia are still studied, and still strike a chord with readers who no longer believe in the same gods or use the same technologies.

The myriad of features of the primary epic that has to do with its oral conception and transmission are almost too numerous to count, and although we have discussed many of them already in the series, one further, primary point about the effects of oral transmission needs to be addressed. As we know, there is no single author for any particular primary epic, since it encapsulates the stories and performances of an entire culture, a people, a place, and a time. It is both art and history, sometimes believed as literal history, but always as a strong account of the literary history and tradition of a given culture. It is obvious that the many poets and performers who worked daily with a given epic and its constituent stories deserve credit, but there are many, working even further behind the scenes, that have molded the character and form of the primary epics we have as they appear to us today. These people are the transcribers, known as scribes in some cultures (note that the word "transcribe" contains the word "scribe" within it, which is appropriate considering the root means to copy or write down), who were in charge of making copies of original manuscripts, which themselves, since writing was done only by hand for the ancients and early medievals. Homer, perhaps, was the first, or most notable, figure to write down the Iliad, and it is certain that the specific shape he gave it is a creative reflection of his literary and artistic vision. The same, it can be argued, is true for the early transcribers of that famous work, who would have added their own content in places, and changed details as they saw fit.

Perhaps the best example of the power a scribe could have on an epic work is Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon epic of the first order, which shows definite signs of influence from those who wrote and copied it. In the case of the medieval Anglo-Saxons, we have, in the early centuries A.D., an illiterate culture, but one which possessed a remarkably rich oral tradition of verse, both narrative and lyric, and its own distinctive poetic forms. When Christian missionaries, most notably Bede, came to convert the Anglo-Saxons, those who were not killed had a tremendous influence, and the people became Christian in a very short period of time. With this influx of religion came the Latin language, and thus the Anglo-Saxons got an alphabet with which they could write down their stories and songs. Of course, this recording process was not unbiased, since monasteries were the centers of such early publication, and Christian monks were in change of doing the transcribing and further copying. Beowulf holds a remarkably pagan worldview, since this was the traditional culture in which it is set, but this wasn't quite acceptable to the Christians, by this time native Anglo-Saxon monks, who wanted their heroes to resemble them in the present, and to embody virtues thought especially important. So, the epic presents two worldviews living with one another, sometimes lining up very well, and sometimes proving difficult and contradictory. It is possible to read the work as a Christian one, if one is willing to ignore some key aspects of the pagan culture, like the quest for fame while here on earth, and the incessant violence. It also possible to read it as a pagan work if one ignores the reference to a single God, and the blatantly (perhaps appended) Christian ideas of Jesus. An interesting tension is created here, a tension made possible by not the author, nor the performers, but rather by those who copied and amended the work they were given, transcribers who became editors and authors in their own right.