Alcidamas.^128 In Irish saga too we find the motif of the contest in which one
poet sets a half-quatrain and another completes it.^129
Finally, it is a recurrent story motif that the loser in a contest of wisdom
does not merely suffer chagrin but forfeits his life. In the Br
̇
hada ̄ran
̇yaka
Upanis
̇
ad (3. 9. 26) the interlocutor unable to answer the question has his
head explode. In the Melampodia the defeated seer dies, as do Homer in the
biographical tradition when he fails to solve the fisherboys’ riddle and the
Sphinx when Oedipus answers hers. In the Vafþrúðnismál the giant in pro-
posing the contest declares that ‘we shall wager our heads on our wisdom’
(19, cf. 7), and at the end he acknowledges his doom.
We can hardly suppose that Indo-European poets normally competed for
such stakes. The motif may be entirely mythical. Or perhaps some early king,
beleaguered by importunate poets, set the condition to discourage them.
Perhaps Indo-European poetry evolved, in more than one sense, by survival
of the fittest.
(^128) M. L. West, CQ 17 (1967), 440 f.
(^129) So in the story of Senchán in Cormac’sGlossary s.v. prúll (J. O’Donovan, Cormac’s Gloss-
ary (Calcutta 1868), 137), and in a tale of a contest between St Columbcille and the Devil (ibid.
138); also in the Tromdám Guaire (Thurneysen (1921), 266; Dillon (1946), 96) and the Colloquy
(Dooley–Roe (1999), 99). Dillon (1975), 65, notes the Indian and Irish parallelism but not the
Greek.
74 1. Poet and Poesy