Successful Forgeries
David L. Cooper · Cornell University Press eBooks · 2023
This chapter explains how epic poems of the Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts became integrated into the Czech national myth. Both manuscripts were able to meet the demand of an eager public with their convincing simulation of ancient Slavic poetry. The chapter offers an analysis of Czech manuscripts while referencing John Miles Foley's revision of oral-formulaic theory that focused on the South Slavic, Homeric, and Old English epic traditions. The manuscripts were not as pervasively formulaic as their models, but still much closer to those models than to contemporaneous literary poetry in the degree of lexical repetitiveness. The chapter cites how the forgers struggled to simulate the existence of formulaic epic tradition.