The best thing is water; gold shines like a blazing fire
in the night above all proud wealth;
but if you yearn to sing of games, my heart...^131
TheRa ̄ma ̄yan
̇a provides a couple of fine examples: 2. 34. 25, ‘Without
strings a lute cannot be played, without wheels a chariot cannot move,
and without her husband a woman finds no happiness, though she have a
hundred sons’; 2. 98. 6, ‘An ass cannot match the pace of a horse, birds cannot
match Ta ̄rks
̇
ya’s pace, nor have I the power to match yours, lord of the land.’
From Old Norse and Old English we may adduce Hávamál 53 lítil lá sanda,
lítil lá sæva, lítil ero geð guma, ‘narrow the sands’ edge, narrow the seas’ edge,
narrow are the minds of men’;Maxims B 16–20, ‘The hawk belongs on the
glove ...; the wolf belongs in the forest ...; the boar belongs in the wood
...; a good man belongs in his native land, forging his reputation’; 21–8, ‘The
javelin belongs in the hand ...; the gem belongs on the ring ...; the stream
belongs among the waves ...; [four more items, then] the king belongs in his
hall, sharing out rings’ (trs. S. A. J. Bradley).
This evidence is perhaps rather too scant and scattered to allow us at
present to claim the priamel as an Indo-European figure. But future observa-
tion may augment it.
Behaghel’s Law; the Augmented TriadThe priamel is an end-weighted structure, the final component forming a
climax. To this extent, at least, it fits a pattern widely attested for Indo-
European. The principle underlies what is known as Behaghel’s Law, or the
‘Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder’. This is the rule that shorter phrases tend
to be placed before longer ones, both in prose and in verse, so that the
sentence gains rather than loses weight as it develops.^132
A special case of Behaghel’s Law that is distinct and easily recognizable is
what I call the Augmented Triad. It consists of the construction of a verse
from three names (or occasionally other substantives), of which the third is
furnished with an epithet or other qualification. I have devoted a paper to this
topic and collected there numerous examples from the Vedas, the Indian
epics, the Avesta, Hesiod and Homer, and the Germanic and Celtic literatures
(West 2004). A few will suffice here by way of illustration. I can now add one
from Hittite and a couple from Latvian.
(^131) Pind. Ol. 1. 1 f., cf. 3. 42–4; Bacchyl. 3. 85–92. For the Vedic comparison see Wüst (1969),
70–108.
(^132) O. Behaghel, IF 25 (1909), 110–42; cf. Hermann Hirt, Indogermanische Grammatik (Hei-
delberg 1927–37), i. 126, vii. 232 f.; Gonda (1959), 61–4, 69–71, 142–4; Schmitt (1967), 272–4.
- Phrase and Figure 117