HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

416 ALBERT В. LORDMeter and the influences on it, such as music and musical instrumentalaccompaniment, are fundamental for a comprehension of thediction and style of any oral traditional narrative song. They providethe molds, or matrices, into which thought is poured, and they are anespecially important part of the definition of a formula set down byMilman Parry in the late 1920s, as a "word or group of words regularlyused to express a given essential idea under given metrical conditions. "In each of the four Slavic areas we are considering metrical conditionsare different, except that in South Slavic, in both the Serbo-Croatianand Bulgarian traditions, the most commonly used epic line is decasyllabic,with a diaeresis after the fourth syllable. In short, the matrix ofthe two South Slavic traditions is of the same length and has somewhatthe same content. The most significant second variable, however, is inall cases the specific Slavic language involved, with its distinctiveaccentual patterns and word lengths, as well as its characteristicsyntactic patterns. The same essential idea in each of the four areaswill be expressed in words and groups of words appropriate to eachlanguage and metrical base, or structure, in the broadest sense of"metrical." It is necessary to elaborate, briefly at least, on the formulaiclanguage of the oral traditional narrative song of the four areas.It is not sufficient to say merely that the epithet most often used for"horse" in three of our areas is "good." One must be much moreprecise. First, it is necessary to define the size of the matrices in eacharea and the accentual or other rhythmic patterns of the specificlanguage that condition whether an epithet is needed or used in anygiven position, and then, to determine what those epithets, if any, arein the several languages.For example, one of the frequent syntactic patterns of the bylina linein Russian begins with the verb and places either the subject, the directobject, a prepositional phrase, or some combination of these in thesecond part of the line. Thus one finds in Gil'ferding: Седлае уздаедобра коня ("he saddles, bridles his good horse"); 1 or in the plural:Седлайте уздайте добрь'їх коней ("saddle, bridle, your goodhorses"); 2or, combining a pronominal direct object with a prepositionalphrase, Посадите ю на добра коня ("put her on a goodhorse"); 3or, combining a substantival direct object with the same1Oneźskie byliny, collected by A. F. Gil'ferding (in the summer of 1871),4th ed., vol. 2 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), p. 408, line 161.2Oneźskie byliny, 2: 415, line 58.3Oneźskie byliny, 2: 418, line 146.