Reading a review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate made me think back to ring composition in Homer. Here’s an explanation, from Ralph Hexter’s A Guide to The Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1993):
Ring composition is a characteristic archaic Greek device that poets frequently employed to organize their material and that we presume helped singers and listeners to keep both details and the whole clearly in mind. In other words, it functions in part as a mnemonic device. A ring may involve words or phrases within one sentence, thoughts in a paragraph, or [. . .] narrative blocks. The classic form involves the treatment of elements a, b, and c, after which the poet takes them or variants of them and presents them in reverse order, c′, b′, a′, so that he or she concludes where he or she began.There are many rings in Homer’s epics (for instance). My favorite is the one that structures the wanderings of Odysseus. I would ask students to memorize it and, in the spirit of oral tradition, recite it (for some number of 100s for quizzes). So I’d have students coming in before or after class or during office hours to recite. Many students thought the memorizing would be daunting. But I never had a student who was unable to do it. Along the way I heard some wonderful stories from students being helped and cheered on by roommates while practicing.
The following schema is from assignment pages that would go out with books 9–12 (Odysseus’s account of his wanderings):
[Click for a larger view.]I just remembered: I once spoke to a high-school English class about the Odyssey, and an account of my visit appeared on the school’s page in the local newspaper. I was said to have given the students “inside information” on Homer’s poem. In other words, I showed them this ring.
Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)
[I’ve spelled proper names as found in Stanley Lombardo’s translation. Contra the review that prompted this post: ring composition is not a matter of digression.]
comments: 2
I’m a little skeptical, not about the existence of the ring structure itself, but about whether ring composition on that level is necessarily evidence of oral composition and performance. I would want to know whether the person we think of as Homer thought that oral poets worked that way. What we have in the Odyssey, as far as I remember, are scenes where an aoidos sings specific episodes taken from an established larger corpus of narrative poetry that may have been fairly fluid. Constructing fairly subtle deep narrative parallels across an entire "work" doesn’t seem like it's the bard’s task, as Homer portrays it. So you might argue that structural ring composition on a large-scale is evidence that "Homer" saw himself as doing something new that we might call "authorial," not coincidentally at more or less the same time that the Greek alphabet was invented. (Barry Powell has suggested that the alphabet was developed specifically in order to write down epic poetry.)
I think of two kinds of performance in the Odyssey. Demodocus (in the land of the Phaeacians) is something like a performer taking requests from an audience for favorite bits. And then Odysseus steps in and does four episodes’ worth of poetry (in the manner of an epic poet, perhaps doing a six-night engagement in some noble household). That seems to be poetic performance on a different level. And at the end of his performance, he omits retelling what his audience already knows from what he told them the night before (pretty meta). If I remember correctly, and I never thought about it before, we don’t hear anything from Demodocus — maybe he’s afraid he’s going to have to look for a job on some other island. : )
It could be that ring composition began as a way to organize speeches and then became a scheme for larger structures. It’s present in the opening and closing episodes of the Iliad too, in pretty elaborate ways. I’d like to imagine that that’s a matter of Homer turning traditional matter into something greater.
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