12.03.08
Dragonslayer
Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die
Storytelling is under assault in schools, universities and from the internet, but the power of narrative shows no sign of waning, says Sam Leith
There is a case for deprogramming people from the hypnotic effect of ‘stories’ lurking behind ideologies, etc,…but the basic point here is well take: the architecture of ‘stories’ seems almost built-in to human intelligence. There are two sides to the question.
In fact, it is worth considering as an hypothesis that language evolution, far from being a bootstrap process via genetic mutations, although that too, was partially top-down via the telling of tales.
In the case of epic and/or simple poetry the connection with the emergence of music is another lead, with an obvious connection.
The emergence of classic evolutionary literatures is still visible (in the context of the eonic effect) in world history: witness the Axial package of the Homeric corpus, the Indic version (Mahabharata) and the Old Testament history, which is a history in disguise of the emergence of a literature: the Old Testament canon. And we are closing in on the Gilgamesh variant of this as the evolution of writing and emergence of the proto-Gilgamesh stories somehow emerged together (such statements are less documented than the later Axial, so this may or may not be the case).
We have lost the record of what must be still earlier cases.
The classic case is the Indo-European corpus: consider
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Paperback)
In How to Kill a Dragon Calvert Watkins follows the continuum of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages, from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. He uses the comparative method to reconstruct traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity that stretch as far back as the original common language. Thus, Watkins reveals the antiquity and tenacity of the Indo-European poetic tradition.
Watkins begins this study with an introduction to the field of comparative Indo-European poetics; he explores the Saussurian notions of synchrony and diachrony, and locates the various Indo-European traditions and ideologies of the spoken word. Further, his overview presents case studies on the forms of verbal art, with selected texts drawn from Indic, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Hittite, Armenian, Celtic, and Germanic languages.In the remainder of the book, Watkins examines in detail the structure of the dragon/serpent-slaying myths, which recur in various guises throughout the Indo-European poetic tradition. He finds the “signature” formula for the myth–the divine hero who slays the serpent or overcomes adversaries–occurs in the same linguistic form in a wide range of sources and over millennia, including Old and Middle Iranian holy books, Greek epic, Celtic and Germanic sagas, down to Armenian oral folk epic of the last century. Watkins argues that this formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text, and a central part of the symbolic culture of speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language: the relation of humans to their universe, the values and expectations of their society. Therefore, he further argues, poetry was a social necessity for Indo- European society, where the poet could confer on patrons what they and their culture valued above all else: “imperishable fame.”
by Calvert Watkins