Was Digenes Akrites an Oral Poem?

Abstract

It is often suggested that Digenes is in some way connected with oral poetry, whether the oral folk poetry of the modern 'acritic' ballads or the type of oral epic tradition identified by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in the Homeric poems and in modern Yugoslavia. Some clarification of the possible role of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Digenes now seems overdue, and in this paper I propose to examine the texts of the poem in the light of recent work on 'oral literature', so as to define more precisely in what sense any of these can be described as 'oral', and then, more tentatively, to suggest a possible framework for the growth and transmission of the poem which might account for these results. Ever since the discovery of Digenes in 1870 it has been widely believed that one source, at least, for the poem was the oral traditions of the tenth-century frontier between Byzantium and Islam, where the action takes place. Some scholars, such as Stilpon Kyriakidis and Henri Gregoire, maintained that the poem in its earliest form had been closely derived from these oral sources, while others, such as Petros Kalonaros and John Mavrogordato, saw their * The now somewhat distant origin of this, paper was a colloquium on Narrative Style in Medieval Greek Poetry, arranged by David Holton for the Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, in February 1978, at which I gave a brief paper on formulas in Digenes. I am grateful to all the participants on that occasion, whose views have greatly deepened and extended my own, and in particular to Margaret Alexiou, Anthony Bryer and Michael and Elizabeth Jeffreys for many valuable comments and suggestions while this paper was in preparation. The views expressed remain, of course, my responsibility alone.

Narrative coherence inDigenes Akrites(G)

“…First, there is the emir's violent, non-consensual abduction of his future wife (1. [59][60][61][62]. Then follows the planned but unimplemented consensual abduction of the same character, now the emir's wife and mother of the small Digenes, to Syria to the emir's mother (2.129-169, including the metaphorical narrative of a dream about a falcon pursuing a dove).…”

“…59 This symbolic meaning, as noted by Roderick Beaton, even touches on the mystical in the implied reference to Christ, the Only Begotten Son. 60 Similarly, speaking names, often doubled and used for two different places (as the above-mentioned Trosis or Blattolivadin) can bear meaning. 61 Another means of helping the audience to find order in the labyrinth of non-causally linked, often doubled episodes is narratorial comments, which determine the character of the narration in the G version to the extent that they can be considered a prominent mark of its style.…”