Indo-European Poetry and Myth

2

Phrase and Figure

‘So with the Soma-offering I bring to birth for you, Indra and Agni, a new
praise-poem’ (RV 1. 109. 2). This is one of nearly sixty places in the Rigveda
where the Rishi refers to his song as new or the newest.^1 Zarathushtra sings
‘I who will hymn You, Truth, and Good Thought as never before’ (apaourvı ̄m,
Y. 28. 3). In the Odyssey Telemachus justifies the bard Phemius’ singing of a
recent event on the ground that ‘men set in higher repute that song which
falls newest on the listeners’ ears’. Alcman calls upon the Muse to sing ‘a new
song’ for the girls’ chorus to sing. ‘Praise old wine,’ says Pindar, ‘but the
flowering of new songs’; and another of his odes too he characterizes as a
‘new wingèd song’.^2
There may seem something paradoxical about this insistence on newness
by poets writing in traditional genres and availing themselves of many lin-
guistic and other archaisms. It is not as if the old was scorned and tradition
seen as something to be repudiated. ‘Ancient songs’ was an honourable term
in several Indo-European cultures. Varro wrote of the old Roman praise-
songs as carmina antiqua, and Tacitus uses the same phrase of the Germans’
mythological poetry, surely echoing a native claim. Slavonic narrative poetry
was referred to similarly. The Russian poems now generally called byliny were
until the early nineteenth century known as staríny or stáriny, and likewise
the Serbo-Croat epics as starìnske ̄ pjesme, ‘ancient songs’.^3
The point about the ‘new song’ is not that it is novel or breaks with
tradition, but on the contrary that it is an addition to the body of older
poetry. This is made explicit in many of the Vedic hymns: ‘I would guide him
here for new praise, (him) who has been fortified by former praise-songs, by

(^1) e.g. 1. 27. 4, 60. 3, 105. 12, 130. 10, 143. 1; 2. 17. 1, 24. 1, 31. 5; 5. 42. 13; 6. 49. 1; 7. 53. 2, 61. 6;

8. 
   
   
   
   20. 19, 25. 24, 51. 3, 95. 5; 9. 91. 5; 10. 4. 6. Cf. Campanile (1977), 51 f.; B. W. Fortson IV,
       ‘návam
       ̇
       vácah
       ̇
       in the Rigveda’, in Mír Curad 127–38.
   
   
   
   

(^2) Od. 1. 350–2; Alcman, PMGF 14, cf. 4 fr. 1. 6; Pind. Ol. 9. 48, Isth. 5. 63; cf. perhaps
Simonides(?) in PMG 932. 3. The motif is familiar also from the Hebrew Psalms (33. 3, 40. 3, 96.
1, 98. 1, etc.; Isa. 42. 10).
(^3) Jakobson (1962–88), iv. 443.