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

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.

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

no subject

no subject

no subject