Culls

In perusing the words of Ong this morning about the difficulty that pre-literate people, that is to say oral people, would have had compiling lists, I was referred to the famous list of the contingents of the Greek army at Troy in Book II of the Iliad, where it occupies some 400 lines.

I remembered that I had an old copy of the Iliad, the one detailed at reference 2, and as luck would have it, it was still on the right place on the shelf. Somehow it had survived the various culls which have taken place since I last noticed the book back in 2010 and for which see reference 3. A copy which includes curious inscriptions in pencil by a former owner, possibly one Gladys Courtenay.

With the aid of a magnifying glass, I can confirm that the book, while printed in Edinburgh, was indeed originally sold by the Whiteleys of Westbourne Grove of reference 4. So the book was probably sold before the shop moved in 1911 to the grand premises that I remember in nearby Queensway, now, according to Satellite View in gmaps, a building site. In the snap above, the A4206 is Westbourne Grove and the B411 is Queensway.

In its day a very grand store, complete with large dormitories for its staff to sleep and large farms on which to grow their grub, very much on a par with the two stores which cropped up yesterday at reference 5, Debenham & Freebody and Selfridges. And, as it happens, subsequently bought up by Mr. Selfridge.

While it looks as if it would cost rather more than the fiver or so that I paid to replace the book in question. And I could pay a lot more for a fancier, older edition of the same translation.

Less luck with reference 6, also relevant to the Ong thesis. I book which I had owned for a long time, but which now appears to have succumbed. Not in its proper place on the shelf. But I shall take another look after breakfast.

PS: in the event, Spence did not turn up, but I did remember about Ong also writing about the Iliad being the product of an oral culture and being written in hexameters. Which I now know that Pope translated (to some extent, at least, from the Latin rather than the original Greek) into heroic couplets, that is to say rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. English, it seems, is something called a stress-timed language, which does not do hexameters very well, Ancient Greek not being such a language. I also know that these translations of Pope's made him a great deal of money from all the people who did not do Greek at all; set him up for his not very long life - his being a very short chap with all kinds of ailments, not least some species of tuberculosis.

References

Reference 1: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – Walter J. Ong – 1982.

Reference 2: The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer - Homer, Alexander Pope (trans.) & Theodore Alois Buckley (notes) & Flaxman (illustrations) - 1896. Albion edition published by Frederick Warne & Co., London, etc.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=pope+iliad.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteleys.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/double-wigmore.html.

Reference 6: The memory palace of Matteo Ricci - Spence, Jonathan D - 1984.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexameter.