What drives the argument of this most useful book is the content to be found in Appendix 1. The myths collected there by E. can be viewed as a ‘type’ in folklore studies, and the ‘type’ can be subdivided into ‘motifs’ that are integral parts of the ‘type’. For those who are unfamiliar with the terms ‘type’ and ‘motif’ as used in standard reference-works by folklorists like Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther, E.’s book offers lucid explanation and analysis. In fact, one of the many merits of this book is that it provides a convenient introduction to the overall ‘state of the art’ in folklore research.
E.’s Appendix 1 consists of 40 texts, labelled T1 to T40, which are the basis for the folktale type that he is reconstructing – and for its constituent motifs. The genres vary, but the easiest way to grasp what these collected texts have in common is to think of them as ‘tales’. Throughout the book, E. compares these tales with a construct that he calls ‘the myth of Helen’ – which in its general outline is quite familiar to Classicists. But such familiarity does not easily translate into an adequate understanding of this myth or tale or story – whatever we call it – in the historical and linguistic contexts of its ancient Greek reception. E. seeks to achieve a broader and deeper understanding of the myth by combining rigorous internal analysis of the Classical evidence (E. is an eminent Classicist in his own right) with a variety of typological comparisons as exemplified by the tales that he has collected and analysed.
What exactly is a ‘typological’ comparison? What E. finds by way of comparing the 40 tales with each other and with ‘the myth of Helen’ is a ‘type’ consisting of a sequence of two basic ‘motifs’: (1) a beautiful wife is abducted from her husband by another man, and (2) the husband wins back the wife by way of some kind of stratagem that in some way defeats the other man. The comparison of 40 texts that contain such a ‘type’ would be a ‘typological’ comparison, and the target of the comparison here is ‘the myth of Helen’, which is the primary ‘explicandum’ of the book. And this ‘myth’, as understood by E., centres on the sum total of stories about Helen and the Trojan War.
E. describes the initial impetus for his many years of research in typologically comparing the texts of his 40 examples with the ultimate target of comparison, ‘the myth of Helen’ (p. 12), as follows: ‘My hope was to return to my explicandum, the myth of Helen, to show that it was an instance of the type defined on the basis of my examples, and to propose that this type was the “basic story” of the Trojan War, without arguing, in the first place, for anything more than a typological relation’. As E.’s research progressed, however, he evidently found that the methods of typological comparison as developed by folklorists needed to be reconfigured in the light of problems inherent in the overall ‘myth of Helen’.
One of these problems involves the pervasive Greek ‘motif’, let us call it, of Helen's relationship with the Divine Twins or Dioscuri (cf. pp. 336–7 in my review of M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth [2007], CR 60 [2010], 333–8). Another such problem is the sporadically-attested practice of worshipping Helen as a goddess. A case in point is the reference made by Herodotus (6.61.3) to Helen as τὴν θεόν in the context of her cult at Therapne. There is room for disagreement, but in any case E. grapples with these problems forcefully and honestly. Another problem involves the nature of the 40 texts collected by E. for the purpose of comparing these texts with each other and with ‘the myth of Helen’. In this case as well, E. deals with the problem most effectively.
E. starts with the question: how can we be certain that we understand the system of thinking that generated a given tale? Different experts show different degrees of certainty. In some cases, the collector of a given tale may have been all too certain about the meaning of the tale. E. (p. 12) cites the example of David Bynum: the text of a tale he recorded in a village in Zambia (1969) led to the publication of a book (The Daemon in the Wood [1978]) where this tale, which is T4 in E.’s collection, became for Bynum the basic story that best explains the meaning of a range of tales attested worldwide, including the story of the Trojan War.
E. (p. 12) speaks of the tale T4 that was ‘collected’ by Bynum – E. uses the term ‘collected’ here in the folkloristic sense of ‘recorded’ – as a ‘version’ of T3, which was a tale collected many decades earlier in the same village by a predecessor of Bynum. E. finds both T3 and T4 relevant to his own understanding of the ‘basic story’ of Helen and the Trojan War, but he expresses some worries about developing an explanatory model that is circular. As E. says (p. 12), he seeks to avoid constructing a ‘circle’ of the kind that he finds in Bynum's book – a circle that ‘begins from and is driven by a single motif’.
Such problems in the process of typological comparison cannot be blamed on the fact that the 40 tales represented by the 40 texts chosen by E. are for the most part historically unrelated to the ‘myth of Helen’ – or to each other. That is to be expected, since the point of comparing these tales typologically is not to establish any kind of common origin or mutual influence. Rather, at least in folklore studies, typological comparison is simply the comparing of types with other types purely for the purpose of achieving cross-cultural insights into the general ways in which tales are told. But E. hopes to achieve something more by way of his own typological comparisons: he aims to build a model that will explain the ancient Greek narrative traditions about Helen and the Trojan War in terms of a system of meaning. For the building of such a model, E. borrows the terms langue and parole as developed by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Cours de linguistique général [1916]), according to whom the systematic aspect of language-as-grammar is langue, whereas the practical aspect of language-in-action is parole.
In order to overcome the inherent difficulties of coming to grips with the meaning(s) in the 40 texts he collects, E. proposes to reconstruct an underlying system of meaning that drives the 40 tales as well as ‘the myth of Helen’, and such a reconstruction, he argues, needs to operate on the level of langue as distinct from parole. On the surface, the 40 texts are examples of parole as distinct from langue, and there are inherent difficulties in trying to extract the meaning(s) of these texts. That is why E. argues for a reconstruction of an underlying langue that could account for whatever meaning(s) these texts may have in common.
Here I return to E.’s concept of the ‘circle’, by which he means the vicious circle of circular reasoning. A related term used by E. is ‘presupposition’ (p. 6). I think that E. need not worry about ‘circles’ or ‘presuppositions’ when it comes to analysing structures that operate on the level of langue. As an old student of Roman Jakobson, I still remember his words of encouragement about the analysis of langue as ‘grammar’: the grammar that is language, he used to say informally in his seminars, exists whether or not there is a grammarian out there who comes along and describes it. If a grammarian can describe successfully a grammar, that description is a simulacrum of the grammar. The point of reference for the ‘circle’ that is the grammar is the grammarian, who is needed to describe and thus help understand the language. A description that works well will mirror the working structure that it describes. E.’s book has succeeded in achieving such a description.
