Quarto said:
That's not really true. We know humans are capable of memorising such long texts perfectly, yes. And we know they passed The Iliad and The Oddyssey on from generation to generation. However, we often make the mistake of assuming that those bards were interested in keeping the story exactly as it was - but they weren't. A bard is neither a tape recorder nor a historian - a bard is an entertainer. Bards would modify the work they performed, for all sorts of reasons, ranging from their personal taste and style to the political opinions of the people they were performing for. We *know* this is how they worked, because the bardic tradition was still alive as late as the 19th century in parts of south-eastern Europe, and thus was the subject of various ethnographic studies.
We have a huge amount of respect for The Iliad and The Oddyssey today, and we find the notion that somebody might try to "correct" them almost unthinkable. However, when the Greeks heard them, they didn't have this 2500 years' worth of accumulated respect. To them, what today we perceive as the great artistic tradition of Greece, the origin of Western culture, et cetera, et cetera... it was all just common-place.
Sorry, you're quite wrong here... First, this has nothing to do with bards whatsoever, or with any form of culture that came AFTER the advent of written registry of knowledge... These works were already very old when Plato wrote down about Socrates. The Illiad and the Odissey were taught in the "academies" of the helenic world and in rome, and these teachers kept the oral lore quite well. They were not artists and composers, but teachers. For a long time, humanity transmited knowledge and lore through oral traditions, were the generations would pass down the epic poems and stories down. This was not just ART, it was the very essence of their culture. It has nothing to do with our modern day notions of art and composition... It is a known fact that these works would endure the decades fairly intact. Some verses would sometimes changes, but the bulk of the matter would remain the same. It HAD to, it was a most revered tradition. theis kind of thing happened all over the world. North, East, West.
The works of Homer were not just literature and entertainment, they embodied the values and ethics of that culture. for that reason, these works varied very little with the passing of the years... Of course they weren't unchanged, but the ability of the human mind to orally transmit this kind of knowledge was very different before writing. We were able to pass on long epic poems to another person without changing it, and the other person would be able to memorize it.
They had to store and manage a lot less information, before writing. The works of Marshall McLuhan are quite enlightening on this subject. I sugest you read them, before mixing up stuff like Bards and Greeks.
Quarto said:
I didn't say it was (though I'd sure love to know why in your opinion it's not a great literary work - but let's stick to the topic here
) - I just objected to the implication that a work's age is a factor in assessing a work's quality.
Oh, sure, I was not objecting to your comment on age. I was just stating that, no matter how much one likes the works of Tolkien (and I do like them very much), it cannot possibly be considered half as important as the Illiad. The subjective aspect of liking and disliking literary works have no relation to the works' place in literary history. Although the LotR is a great thing in the imagination aspect, several important items are not that good. I have neither the time nor the will to enlarge this, I may talka about it in another occasion.
. Ever heard of a literary (sorry, oral) work of fiction that universities started teaching about in the same year it was published? Neither have I. Logic dictates The Iliad and The Oddyssey had been transmitted by bards (who most certainly were a part of Greek culture... you know, what with Homer being a bard and all that