Hearing I ask from all holy-born,
the greater and lesser sons of Heimdall!
You desired me, Odin, to tell forth well
the old tales of men, those earliest that I recall. (Vo ̨luspá 1)Many skaldic poems too begin with a call for attention.^60 Specht inferred an
Indo-European opening formula, which he tried to reconstruct as idém,
gˆono ̄ses, úpolute, ‘Hear this, men!’ Schaeder added from the Ga ̄tha ̄s
at
̃
fravaxsˇya ̄: nu ̄ gu ̄sˇo ̄du ̄m, nu ̄ sraota ̄,
yae ̄ca ̄ asna ̄t
̃yae ̄ca ̄ du ̄ra ̄t
̃isˇaθa ̄.
I will tell forth –– now listen ye, now hear ye,
who come seeking from near and from far, (Y. 45. 1)and also Y. 30. 1–2, ‘Now I will proclaim, O seekers... Hear (sraota ̄) with
your ears the best message’.^61 Schaeder’s further claim that all these poems
were cosmogonic is questionable, but the parallelism in the form of incipit
seems real. One might recognize the same pattern in Helen’s interpretation of
an omen in Od. 15. 172, κλ τ μοι,α1τα` ρ $γd μαντε3σομαι, ‘Hearken ye,
I am going to prophesy’. It is to be noted that hlióð, sruta, sraota ̄,κλ τε are
all from the same root.
A narrative very often begins with the verb ‘to be’ in the present or past
tense and in initial position: ‘There is.. .’, ‘There was.. .’.^62 The present tense
is appropriate for specifying a place where the story is set. There are several
Homeric examples, such as Il. 6. 152 #στι πο ́ λι Ε, φ3ρη μυχ;ι eργεο
Tπποβο ́ τοιο κτλ., ‘there is a city Ephyra in a nook of horse-pasturing Argos,
and there Sisyphus dwelt, most cunning of men’. In the Hittite story of Appu
the verb is omitted: ‘A city, its name Sudul, and it is in the land Lulluwa on the
sea coast. Up there lived a man named Appu.’^63 So in the Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a (1. 5. 5),
Kosalo na ̄ma, ‘(There is a land), Kosala its name...’.
The pattern ‘There was a king, N his name’ has been widely traced, from
MBh. 3. 50. 1 a ̄sı ̄d ra ̄ja ̄ Nalo na ̄ma, ‘There was a king, Nala (was his) name’, to
the Old Irish Scéla mucce Meic Dathó (Story of Mac Datho’s Pigs), boí rí amrae
for Lagnaib, Mac Dathó a ainm, ‘There was a famous king in Leinster, Mac
(^60) See Gering–Sijmons (1927–31), i. 2.
(^61) F. Specht, ZVS 64 (1937), 1–3= Schmitt (1968), 50 f.; H. H. Schaeder, ZDMG 94 (1940),
399–408= Schmitt (1968), 61–71. Cf. Schmitt (1967), 30–2, 201–4.
(^62) Briefly noted by Wackernagel (1943), 18; cf. K. H. Schmidt, ZCP 28 (1960/1), 224; Schmitt
(1967), 274 f.; W. Euler in W. Meid, H. Ölberg, H. Schmeja, Sprachwissenschaft in Innsbruck
(Innsbruck 1982), 53–68; Watkins (1994), 681; (1995), 25.
(^63) J. Siegelová,Appu-Märchen und Hedammu-Mythos (Studien zu den Bogazköy-Texten 14;
Wiesbaden 1971), 4. For an Akkadian parallel cf. West (1997), 259.
- Phrase and Figure 93