this may derive from a longer, twelve-syllable verse broken down into hemi-
stichs. Thirdly, there are strophes in which the octosyllable alternates with a
six-syllable line without caesura, the most popular arrangement being 6 || 6 ||
8 || 6 |||.^83
Albanian oral poetry, according to a nineteenth-century scholar, was non-
strophic and unrhymed, consisting of a series of loose octosyllables, among
which seven- or six-syllable lines sometimes appeared. There is also epic verse
in 4 | 6 decasyllables similar to those of the neighbouring Serbo-Croat
tradition.^84
Finally, I should not wish to be reproached for overlooking the Tocharians,
who are believed to have migrated to their historical seat in Chinese Tur-
kestan from the west and ultimately from Europe. Their verse appears to be
purely syllabic.^85 Cola of between three and eight syllables are combined in
long lines. The commonest are of twelve syllables (4 | 4 | 4 or 5 | 7), fourteen
(7 | 7), and eighteen (7 | 7 | 4). Less common are fifteen (5 | 7 | 3 or 7 | 8 or
8 | 7), seventeen (6 | 6 | 5), and twenty-five (5 | 5 | 8 | 7). Lines of equal
or unequal length are grouped in four-line strophes.
These structures might be derived from the same set of prototypes as those
discussed above; the prevalence of four-, five-, seven-, and eight-syllable cola,
and the occurrence of such conjunctions as 5 | 7 and 8 | 7 among the rest, are
suggestive. Watkins notes that the heptasyllable commonly has a caesura after
four syllables. But one cannot build anything firm on these foundations.
If the Tocharian, Baltic, and Germanic evidence is inconclusive, the Italic,
Celtic, and Slavonic traditions provide positive encouragement to think that
the metrical principles extrapolated from Vedic and Greek were not valid only
for Graeco-Aryan but, by and large, also for the rest of Europe; in other
words, for MIE. It remains to ask whether indications of a similar system can
be detected in Anatolia (apart from Phrygian, which does not belong to the
Anatolian but to the Graeco-Aryan group). If they can, the inference will be
that it can be attributed to PIE.
The usable material is disappointingly slight. We have a small number of
extended mythological narratives in Hittite that are clearly poetic in nature,
but they are translated or adapted from Hurrian originals, and it is not clear
(^83) V. J. Zeps in A Festschrift for Morris Halle (New York 1973), 207–11; Gasparov (1996),
11–13.
(^84) Alberto Straticò,Manuale di letteratura albanese (Milan 1896), 60; J. Kolsti in C. E. Gribble
(ed.), Studies presented to Professor Roman Jakobson by his Students (Cambridge, Mass. 1968),
165–7. Examples of octosyllabic songs can be found in Auguste Dozon, Manuel de la langue
chkipe ou albanaise (Paris 1878), 85ff.
(^85) Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling, Tocharische Sprachreste, i. A (Berlin 1921), x–xi.
Cf. C. Watkins in H. Eichner and H. C. Luschützky (edd.), Compositiones Indogermanicae in
memoriam Jochem Schindler (Prague 1999), 601–14, especially 604 f.
56 1. Poet and Poesy