162
Comments from an Editorial Perspective
Clive Tolley, University of Turku
Frog’s article in the previous volume of
RMN
Newsletter offers a detailed analysis of so-
called multiforms in some traditional Finnish
and Karelian verse; a multiform, to put it
crudely, is a formulaic chunk of text that recurs
across variants and redactions. Frog considers
these units from a structural and variational
perspective, and highlights a good many
fundamental points about the nature of certain
aspects of the verse they occur in. My concern
here, however, is not in the least focused on
critiquing or commenting on the scholarly
contribution Frog makes; instead, it relates to
presentation, and Frog’s article merely serves
as a spring-board for some observations on this
topic.
In the earlier part of the article, Frog
deliberately takes a provocative approach to
presenting some examples of oral poetry from
the Finnish-Karelian tradition. Recognising the
distinction between oral and written verse (but
without, in the present context, considering
how this distinction operates in other traditions
such as the Old Norse – something he will no
doubt be considering in further publications),
he decides to present five variants of one poem,
The Singing Competition, in a manner to which
scholars of (ostensibly) written, literary texts
found in manuscripts, such as classical or
Germanic verse,
are accustomed, with just one
variant being presented as the main text, the
others being reduced to notes in the apparatus.
The effect of doing this is to show that in certain
respects old manuscript poems may be more
similar in their development and realisation to
oral poems than is sometimes appreciated, and
hence to suggest that a greater element of orality
may underlie such poems than the tradition of
19
th
-century scholarship and its successors
have argued. This is all to the good.
Unfortunately, moving beyond these basic
points into the detail of the poems, and the
point of the discussion (the multiforms), for me
the presentation just does not work. The
multiform and all it entails, and more widely
oral poetry in general with its many variants,
do not lend themselves to being confined
within this sort of straitjacket. As Frog notes,
the variants cannot be read without an
archaeological excavation and reconstruction
from the notes, or else a resort to the
Suomen
Kansan Vanhat Runot. Hence it becomes
impossible to perceive how the variants really
differ from each other and how they are
related. Among the chief problems with
presenting one text with
variants noted merely
in the apparatus is that it privileges one form
over others; this may sometimes be appropriate
for medieval manuscripts, though it often is
not, but it does not suit oral poetry, and implies
a hierarchical valorisation such as may have
suited the politics of the 19
th
century, but is
scarcely appropriate today. All this is obvious
and well established.
Frog has taken the deliberately question-
raising,
and
challenging,
approach
of
presenting oral poems as if they were medieval
manuscript versions, which as it were cedes the
ground to the well-established editorial
tradition of presenting classical texts. I would
argue it is high time, on the contrary, for this
antiquated mode of presentation of classical
and medieval texts to be brought up to date and
made to adhere to something that would also
be more fitting for oral poems. Again, this call
is hardly trail-blazing; a number of texts have
been edited and presented in a manner which
obviates the weaknesses of the classical
textual-apparatus
approach.
Yet
it
is
astounding how many editions stick rigidly to
the well-worn but outdated pattern.
One of the main reasons for this is the
adherence to presentation in traditional printed
book form. There is still a place for the
physical book. But that place should be
shrinking faster than it is, since digital
presentation can offer so much more. Often,
however, even digital presentation merely
mirrors what takes place in a printed book, and
fails to realise the potential of the new medium.
163
My immediate thought – taking into
account, in a modest way, the possibilities
offered by a digital presention – when
attempting to disentangle the multiforms, the
smaller variants, the scenes and other
overlapping structural elements of Frog’s cited
example of verse was that these elements could
be colour-coded. Reading the article, however,
soon revealed just what levels of complexity
need to be brought into the discussion, ranging
from small-scale alliteration and case endings
up to quite large chunks of text. Any system of
colour-coding, even with the addition of
features such as italics, bold etc., would just
leave something more reminiscent of a neon-
flushed scene of the hoardings of Las Vegas
than an edited text.
Also, and more fundamentally, using
features such as colour in this way hard-wires
them into the text as presented. In a printed
text,
everything is hard-wired into the
presentation, and the same, unfortunately,
applies to many digital presentations which
simply ape the printed. What digital media
offer, however, is the possibility to make a
sharp distinction between
content and
structure – and making such a distinction is, it
should be quite clear, an essential prerequisite
to
engaging with, and analysing,
materials in a
scholarly way. Some structural elements may
be perceived by the singer of a poem, but most
are the constructs or percepts of the scholar;
either way, it is essential to distinguish them
from content.
There is a well-established method of
carrying out this task. SGML (standard
generalised mark-up language), with its more
sophisticated successor XML (extended mark-
up language) and the derivative HTML
(hypertext mark-up language, used for coding
web pages), has been around for a good while
now. Essentially, structure is marked using
tags: we might have e.g.
put this in
bold, and any number of these tags
can be inserted. The beauty of mark-up
language is that structure is discrete from form
– it forms a collection of metadata: how the
tagged material is presented is defined
elsewhere, and can be changed, so e.g.
everything tagged bold could appear as red, or
not be marked at all, according to what is
needed in particular circumstances. Thus, in
terms of multiforms, an extant body of tagged
text could be made to show all examples of, let
us say, multiform type 1 (however defined),
but not highlight e.g. individual formulae
(which could be selected for viewing on a
subsequent occasion if desired, without
changing anything other than the definition of
how specific tags are to appear). If we turn to
something like ancient Germanic verse, we can
free ourselves from matters like the forced
presentation of the verse in lines, which is not
original but which contrasts, in the original
manuscripts, with Latin verse, which
was often
set out as verse – a distinction that is lost in the
printed edition, which must always make an
irrevocable choice: the verse can then be set
out as it appears in the manuscript, or divided
into traditional half-lines, providing this
feature is tagged. Of course, the level of
complexity, such as is discussed in Frog’s
article, means that extensive multi-layered
tagging is necessary (indeed, as the example on
p. 79 of Frog’s article shows, down to the
inflectional level), but these simple examples
illustrate the principles involved.
All this is rather old hat, and it feels almost
embarrassing to set it out. Yet I think it is
necessary. In my twenty-odd years of working
professionally on the preparation of academic
texts for publication, one thing that has
astonished me is the slow pace of change
towards taking advantages of the use of mark-
up language in a digital context – though, as
noted, a few large-scale projects have
exploited the potential. I have raised this
matter on a few occasions, without receiving
much more than a bewildered and not specially
enthusiastic response. One retort is “we don’t
have the resources for that”. This seems on a
par with having arrived on a tour of scriptoria
around 1500 and suggesting that
the future lay
with the new technology of printing,
allowing,
among other things, for swift and cheap
reproduction and dissemination of learning,
only to be told “we aren’t set up for that, so
we’ll just carry on copying out a few copies a
year by hand” – with the result, we might
imagine, of a world in which printing was only
taken up for popular romances and eschewed
by the elite of the scholarly world. The basics
of XML can be learnt in a few days, and should
be as much a part of the job for those engaged