Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Michael J. Jeffreys. "Byzantine Metrics: Non-Literary Strata." Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik, 31:313-34.

A history of the development of Byzantine metrics that takes account of the oral roots of many of the surviving texts, with emphasis on the artificial oral Kunstsprache employed in verse composition. Understands the oral tradition as existing in the "non-literary strata of Byzantium" before "inspiring learned experiments in the twelfth century and appearing in its own right in the fourteenth" (333). Concludes that "within the decaying antique forms we shall be able to observe the birth and development of new metres which, after a period of preservation among the non-literary strata of Byzantine society, came into literature in the last centuries of Byzantium and served as the basis of all Greek poetry, until the displacement of stichic metres at the beginning of this century" (334).
Area: BG