Writing Homer: A Study Based on Results from Modern Fieldwork by Minna Skafte Jensen (review)

CHINOPERL Papers No. 30 (2011)©2011 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature SHORT NOTICES OF NEW RESOURCES Writing Homer: A Study Based on Results from Modern Fieldwork. By Minna Skafte Jensen. Scientia Danica, Series H, Humanistica 8, vol. 4. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2011. 439 pp. 16 illustrations. Paper DKK 375.00. This work, by Minna Skafte Jensen, Professor Emerita of Classical Philology at the University of Southern Denmark, treats the ³oral theory´ of Parry and Lord in the light of recent fieldwork on oral traditions from all over the world, mainly from the last three decades. Both oral poetry and prose are taken into account. With lucid expositions of former debates the reader is brought up-to-date on the development of research in the wake of the pioneers of the 1930s up to the preseQW7KHDXWKRU¶VRULJLQDO theory of how the Odyssey and the Iliad were written down, published in The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory (Copenhagen 1980), is in the present work tested against the findings of scholars who have engaged themselves in the study of living oral traditions East and West. The book is recommended for readers of CHINOPERL Papers. It not only presents an insightful treatment of theories that most of us feel much obliged to, but also offers an exceptionally clear and well-founded hypothesis for the primordial step from the oral to the written, a problem right in the center of our concerns. Vibeke Børdahl Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen University ...