Imitation Without Understanding: An Analysis of Paolini's Ancient Language Poetry

[snarkbotanya]

 

When Eragon arrives in Ellesméra in Chapter 26 of Eldest, he and Arya are greeted by a group of elves, one of whom begins to sing a song in the Ancient Language. Paolini clearly intends this to be the beginning of an in-universe epic, which is only natural for someone who strives, in his own words, “for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.” However, as with many of Paolini’s attempts to imitate better writers, this one falls completely flat. In this post, I will address two ways in which the poem presented fails as an imitation of epics, one structural, and one in terms of content and worldbuilding.

Structure

To begin, let us examine the text and structure of the poem, for which we do not need to go into translation. Only the first four lines are presented to us in Eldest. They are as follows:

Gala O Wyrda brunhvitr

Abr Berundal vandr-fodhr

Burthro laufsblädar ekar undir

Eom kona dauthleikr… 

The first criticism should be obvious: there is no identifiable meter. The poem simply does not scan. Certain epic forms do not place emphasis on meter, rhythm, or even length of the lines; however, epics that lack features such as rhythm and meter often have other features, such as repetition or alliteration.

This is where Paolini’s self-proclaimed admiration for Beowulf may offer a point of contrast. Beowulf belongs to a family of epics written in Germanic languages, which have a structure consisting of alliterative couplets. As an example, here are the first three lines of Beowulf:

Hwæt wē Gār-Dena   in geār-dagum

þēod-cyninga   þrym gefrūnon,

hū ðā æþelingas   ellen fremedon

Each line is effectively a couplet separated by a caesura in which the “main” words of each part alliterate: Gār-Dena with geār-dagum, þēod with þrym, and æþelingas with ellen (as vowels are allowed to alliterate with all other vowels).

Applying this structure to a constructed language like the Ancient Language may seem something of a stretch, but given its overwhelmingly Germanic structure and lexicon, being essentially a slightly-modified English cipher with primarily Old Norse vocabulary, the Germanic epic tradition seems the most suitable. Unfortunately, its structure is not present in the slightest. One could make a clumsy attempt to pair the lines together as couplets, resulting in the following:

Gala O Wyrda brunhvitr   abr Berundal vandr-fodhr

burthro laufsblädar ekar undir   eom kona dauthleikr

However, there is simply no consistent alliteration here. One could make an argument for brunhvitr and Berundal, but the second couplet has absolutely nothing. Ekar, undir, and eom could be considered to alliterate under the vowels rule, but only ekar, “oaken,” could possibly make the claim to be the stressed word in its half-line. Undir and eom, as prepositions, rate very low in the hierarchy of which words should be stressed.

Content

In order to examine the content, we will need to look at a translation. While one is not provided in the chapter of Eldest where the poem is sung, it can be found in the book’s Ancient Language glossary:

Sing, O white-browed Fate

Of ill-marked Berundal

Born under oaken leaves

To mortal woman… 

This actually does follow an established trope of epic poetry. Specifically, this echoes the proem of Greek and Latin epics, complete with an invocation of the goddess. Here are a few examples from the Iliad and Odyssey (translations are my own):

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’s son Achilles

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who many times

was turned aside, after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy

Unfortunately, this use of an actual epic device is rather misplaced, given a detail we learn later in the text of Eldest:

Eragon blinked. That did not tell him what he wanted to know. “But who, or what, do you worship?”

“Nothing.”

“You worship the concept of nothing?”

“No, Eragon. We do not worship at all.”

While the invocation of the goddess is a well-known feature of epic poems, it makes no sense for it to show up in an epic written by an atheistic culture. The closest precedent I can find in actual literary history is the invocation of Venus in the opening of Lucretius’s didactic epic, De Rerum Natura, which later goes on to argue for a more deistic idea of gods. However, that was written in the context of a polytheistic culture where invoking the goddess was the accepted way to open a poem, and served essentially to ease the reader’s way into a work that would eventually challenge their beliefs—the “honeyed cup,” to use Lucretius’s own metaphor. What cause do Paolini’s elves possibly have to invoke the goddess at the beginning of their poems?

Perhaps, one could argue, the elves have a polytheistic past, and some poems or literary devices have stuck around since then. Yet, immediately prior to the above revelation of the elves’ atheism, Eragon says that he has been able to find nothing about religion in the “hundreds of elven scrolls” he’s read. This implies either a complete lack of religious tradition, or that any previous religion has been scrubbed from the records, both of which would not lend themselves to the invocation of the goddess being a common literary device in their culture.

This, then, is yet another instance of inconsistent worldbuilding. Paolini attempted to open a poem similarly to epics he had read, without thinking of how well such an opening fit the culture of the poem’s in-universe authors.

Conclusion

The Ancient Language poem fragment in Eldest chapter 26 is a microcosm of one of Paolini’s greatest problems as an author: his tendency to imitate without understanding. In an attempt to create the opening of an epic poem, he throws together a collection of important-sounding epithets in a construction reminiscent of epic poetry he has previously read, without considering the original structures and contexts of said epics. We see this in the lack of a proper poetic structure, and in the misplaced use of a common epic device in a cultural context where it makes little to no sense. Ultimately, like so many things in the Inheritance Cycle, what this poem truly needed was a bit more thought and research.

 

Comments

[ultimate_cheetah]

Wow, this is amazing and well thought out. Do you study literature?

The first criticism should be obvious: there is no identifiable meter. The poem simply does not scan. Certain epic forms do not place emphasis on meter, rhythm, or even length of the lines; however, epics that lack features such as rhythm and meter often have other features, such as repetition or alliteration.

How would you make sure you have a consistent, identifiable meter? Is meter more focused on iambs or does it include rhyme as well?

This implies either a complete lack of religious tradition, or that any previous religion has been scrubbed from the records, both of which would not lend themselves to the invocation of the goddess being a common literary device in their culture.

The elven culture is really weird. They believe in fate, but are completely atheist. That, along with goddess invocations, implies that they had some religion in the past, so what happened to it? If your second option is true, there could be a dark patch in the elves history, since religions don't go without a fight. Maybe a faction of elves took over and eliminated or persecuted all who adhered to religion. Elven kings and queens rule a long time, so it's likely they could raise a successor who kept to their desires because they'd have more time to put everything in place. Thus, everything can stay the same for centuries.

[snarkbotanya]

Wow, this is amazing and well thought out. Do you study literature?

I have a bachelor's degree in Classics (Greece and Rome) with an emphasis on languages and literature. The bit about Lucretius? Reconciling his use of inherently polytheistic tropes with the more deistic Epicurean philosophy he espouses later in the poem is actually what I wrote my thesis on.

How would you make sure you have a consistent, identifiable meter? Is meter more focused on iambs or does it include rhyme as well?

The meter of a poem is essentially its rhythm. Iambic pentameter is the most obvious example, but iabms aren't the only kind of foot you can have in a meter. Greek epics use dactylic hexameter, and later Roman epics adopted it as well. Rhyme is totally separate.

Dactylic hexameter is a little complicated. You have six feet per line. The first four can be either dactyls (long, short, short) or spondees (long, long), the fifth is almost invariably a dactyl, and the last can be a spondee or a trochee (long, short). Since it's based on syllable length, scanning a line of Greek poetry can be pretty easy once you learn the long vowels and diphthongs. Example:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
ME-nin a-EI-de the-A PE-LE-i-a-DEO a-chi-LEI-os
X - - | X - - | X X | X - - | X - - | X -

I'm not quite as qualified to talk about the meter of Germanic epics, since I haven't studied them as extensively, but I know that it's really more about the alliteration of strongly-stressed syllables. Meter isn't as much of a feature as far as I can tell.

[torylltales]

An excellent analysis. I think I only analysed the translated version of this, and not from quite the same angle as yours. "imitation without understanding" really sums up Paolini's entire creative process. Not only of his works, but of his marketing persona as a writer/celebrity. He imitates that which he sees as good, without understanding what makes it good.

[epistler]

If he lived in the His Dark Materials universe, his daemon would be a mockingbird because it also imitates things without really understanding them.

[torylltales]

No, it'd be a liarbird, because they take bits of other people's sounds and then cobble it together and pretend it's their own song.

[epistler]

I would have picked a lyrebird, but in-canon people's daemons match their country of origin and mockingbirds are native to America while lyrebirds aren't.

...oh shit I'm a nerd.

[snarkbotanya]

I would have picked a lyrebird, but in-canon people's daemons match their country of origin and mockingbirds are native to America while lyrebirds aren't.

Not necessarily - Lord Asriel is Brytish, but his daemon Stelmaria settled as a snow leopard.

[epistler]

...oh shit, you're an even bigger nerd!

[torylltales]

[epistler]

Of course, we all know Anya's daemon would be a ginger kitty. It's just common sense.

[snarkbotanya]

According to the personality test, my daemon would settle as... a snow leopard.

[torylltales]

On the subject of the AL, don't you think it's interesting that the AL clitic for vocative expressions is exactly the same as that of English?

Gala O Wyrda brunhvitr

Sing O Fate brow-white

Paolini didn't even try to do something different, like marking the vocative with an affix or sound change. Not even a different vowel, just O, exactly as in Alice in Wonderland when she remembers her brother's Latin declension book: "a mouse, of a mouse, to a mouse, a mouse, O mouse".

[snarkbotanya]

I doubt he knew what a vocative was when he was writing Eldest, and honestly I doubt he knows now.

Meanwhile, I put a weird little construction in my own conlang where if you address someone by a vocative adjective, you are commanding them to be that way.