to injurious spells and incantations of all kinds, obtainable from mounte-
banks and unsavoury old women. But there may have been a time when they
belonged in the province of the professional poet, the master of words, and
when it was not a private piece of hocus-pocus that was feared so much as a
public verbal assault.
CodificationsAnother use of verse was for the codification of knowledge or principles that
it was thought important to preserve from the past and transmit to the future.
By being versified they made a deeper impression and were more easily
remembered. More than that, the language of poetry invested them with a
certain solemnity and a relative fixity.
In general, verse could be used for listing names or things and for ordering
them, for example the details of genealogies, or catalogues of places and
peoples. There is much material of this kind in the Indian Pura ̄n
̇
as. It forms
the basis of the Greek tradition of catalogue poetry as exemplified in the
Homeric Catalogue of Ships and the Hesiodic Theogony and Catalogue of
Women. It bulks large in early Irish poetry: genealogies, lists of local
kings, lists of battles fought by a king or a tribe, heroes who took part in an
expedition, and so on. And it is present in several of the Eddic poems,
such as Vo ̨luspá,Grímnismál,Vafþrúðnismál, and Hyndlulióð. Many such
catalogues, technically called þulur, are preserved in manuscripts; we have
over 700 lines of them, making up a kind of poetic thesaurus, catalogues of
kings, dwarfs, giants, titles of Odin and other gods, terms for battle and
weapons, the sea, rivers, fishes and whales, ships and parts of ships, earth,
trees, plants, animals, birds, islands, and so on.^116 There is no doubt some
truth in the view that poets maintained these lists and catalogues primarily as
raw material for their own use, to draw on the information contained in them
as and when it came to be needed.^117
Verse was also a convenient medium for the transmission of laws and
precepts. The Solonic law-code once existed in a poetic version; the two
opening lines are preserved as a quotation. The Spartan and Cretan laws were
taught as songs, and the laws of Charondas too circulated in verse form. The
(^116) CPB ii. 422–46. There was a type of official orator called þulr, Old English þyle, whose
function may originally have been to memorize and recite such lists; cf. de Vries (1956), i. 402 f.;
Lorenz (1984), 280.
(^117) Cf. Thurneysen (1921), 56 f.; Campanile (1981), 53–74; (1988), 16; (1990b), 64 f., 66,
108–10.
70 1. Poet and Poesy