Furthermore, in many of the literary traditions Tolkien was building on, formulaic phrases are just the way it’s done. For a well-known example in epic literature, take Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of repeated wordings which, if you’re being uncharitable, you could call clichés or dead metaphors. It’s simply not the level you look at to appreciate that particular genre, any more than you would look for grand allegories in P. G. Wodehouse.
Anybody complaining that the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of clichés is forgetting that they were written several thousand years ago. The clichés where stolen from Homer, not the other way around!
Sure, but even internally. Like a lot of long oral literature in verse, it has a smallish set of colorful epithets for often-mentioned things. For example, where the rhythm requires it, Ulysses might be called πολύτροπος, resourceful; where there’s less room in the hexameter, he might be δῖος, glorious – over and over and over again.
It’s not just that we don’t think of “rosy-fingered dawn” as being fresh because we know Homer used it: it’s that even if you’ve never heard it before, it will have lost its freshness halfway through the Odyssey.
So word-by-word freshness is usually not a useful or fun thing to look for in epic literature. While people can criticize Tolkien for a lack of eye-kicks (as I think I remember William Gibson calling phrase-scale fireworks in cyberpunk), a tree can be green-fingered twenty times without it being a violation of the rules of the game he’s trying to play.
(Also, for all we know, Homer might have stolen all his clichés.)
In studies of Balkan epic poetry and Irish oral tradition, these are sometimes called stereotypes. (Not to be confused with the modern PC term.) One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic. Keep in mind that these orations could go on for four entire evenings. Stereotypes let longer passages fit into fewer mental entities.
One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic.
Bingo. I think this is very important insight from CS to this kind of literature. You might enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s discussion of Haida myths, where he calls them fractal in a way that doesn’t set my teeth on edge (the way most non-rigorous uses of that word do).
This is the kind of thing that makes me sad about the two cultures problem. The few scholarly discussions of oral literature that I’ve read seem to be groping for this kind of concept, while a lot of hackers I know are dismissive of the idea that there’s anything of real interest in fields like anthropology. Everyone loses if we can’t find ways to say things like “self-similar structures compress well” across fields.
A few Irish tunes have a somewhat self-similar structure. There are two parts, which are a call/response to each other, and each of the two parts themselves have a call/response structure. Sometimes it goes another level, but then we start getting down to the granular limit of a distinct melodic idea.
