Jørgensen's law
Principle of Homeric narration / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jørgensen's law (sometimes written as Jörgensen's law) is a principle of narration in Homeric poetry first proposed by the Danish classicist Ove Jørgensen in 1904. According to Jørgensen's law, mortal characters in the Homeric poems are generally unaware of the precise actions of the gods, unless possessed of special powers, and so attribute them generically to "the gods", Zeus, or generalised forces. The narrator and the gods themselves, meanwhile, invariably name the specific god involved, making the audience aware immediately of the true nature of divine action.
Jørgensen's law is not applied universally: it does not cover minor gods, nor legendary stories told by characters from outside their own experience. Since Jørgensen's proposal of the law, scholars have identified subtle distinctions in the way that the terms θεός (theos: 'a god'), δαίμων (daimon) and Ζεύς (Zeus), considered by Jørgensen to be interchangeable, are employed. However, Jørgensen's law is followed with few exceptions in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and has been called the "standard analysis of ... the rules that govern human speech about the gods" by the classicist Ruth Scodel.[1]