The expression at 7. 7. 6 mántram
̇
yé... átaks
̇an, ‘who fashioned the song’
(cf. 1. 67. 4; 2. 35. 2), has its Avestan counterpart at Y. 29. 7 tə ̄ m a ̄zu ̄to ̄is ˇ Ahuro ̄
ma ̨θrəm tasˇa t
̃
, ‘the Lord fashioned that chant of the ghee-libation’. As men-
tioned earlier, a strophe of the Ga ̄tha ̄s was called a vacatasˇt i -, a ‘fashioning of
the utterance’; a half-strophe was a nae ̄mo ̄-vacatasˇt i.^41
Pindar is again in the van of the Greek poets who illustrate this metaphor:
Pyth. 3. 113 $πων κελαδενν;ν,τκτονε ο<α σοφο | α= ρμοσαν, ‘resounding
verses such as skilled carpenters have joined together’;Nem. 3. 4 μελιγαρ3ων
τκτονε κ.μων, ‘carpenters of honey-voiced encomia’. Cratinus began a lyric
of his comedy Eumenides (fr. 70) with an invocation of τκτονε ε1παλα ́ μων
μνων, ‘O carpenters of skilful hymns’. The derived verb τεκτανομαι appears
in a similar connection in a fragment of Democritus (21 Diels–Kranz),
‘Homer, having a nature in contact with the divine, fashioned an array of
verses of every kind’, and in one of the Hellenistic poetess Boio (2 Powell),
who wrote of the legendary prophet Olen as the first who ‘fashioned the song
of ancient verses’. The epigrammatist Nicarchus praises Homer’s supremacy
inτεκτοσ3νη $πων (Anth. Pal. 7. 159. 3). This phrase, like Pindar’s$πων ...
τκτονε and Democritus’$πων κσμον $τεκτ νατο, conjoins the same roots
as the Vedic váca ̄m
̇
si taks
̇am and Avestan vacatasˇt i-.
The *tes root has been lost from Celtic, but the concept survives in
another lexical form.
The Welsh bards called themselves the carpenters of song, seiri gwawd or seiri cerdd,
and claimed as their own all the tools and technical terms of the craftsman in wood,
e.g. the axe, knife, square. When a rival imitated their themes or methods they told
him bluntly to take his axe to the forest and cut his own timber.^42
This reminds us of the Greek and Latin use of ‘timber’ words ( λη,materies,
silua) for the subject matter of literary compositions. In Irish, linking
alliteration was called fidrad freccomail ‘staves of joining’, and types of
internal rhyme were called uaitne‘pillar’ and salchubaid‘willow-rhyme, post-
rhyme’.^43
In Old Norse the craftsman who works in wood, metal, or stone is a
smiðr, and the term is also applied to poets in such compounds as lióðasmiðr
‘songsmith’,galdasmiðr‘spellsmith’; Bragi is frumsmiðr bragar, ‘proto-smith
(^41) Christian Bartholomae, Altiranisches Wörterbuch (Berlin 1904), 1037, 1340.
(^42) Sir Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin 1944), 7. Cf. RV 10. 53. 10,
‘Sharpen now, O poets (kavayah
̇
), the axes with which you do joinery (táks
̇
atha) for the
immortal one’.
(^43) S. N. Tranter in Tristram (1991), 261 f. In Norse too the alliterating words were called
‘staves’. Another Irish term for alliteration was uaim‘stitching’.
- Poet and Poesy 39