Jørgensen's law
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.
Nun ist es, wie schon Kayser bemerkt, nicht die gewöhnliche Art des Dichters, wenn es heisst: ,Ein Gott schickte einen Hirsch'; eine Wendung wie ,Athene schickte einen Hirsch' würde uns viel natürlicher vorkommen...
[3] In some cases, they also attribute divine action to the wrong god:[4] Odysseus, for instance, blames Zeus for a storm which was earlier narrated to have been raised by Poseidon.
[7] The classicist Jenny Strauss Clay has suggested that it serves to emphasise the distinction between the omniscient narratorial voice, which is considered to be inspired by the divine Muses, and the comparative ignorance of the poems' mortal characters.
Telemachus, for instance, tells Penelope in Odyssey 1 that Zeus must be blamed for the suffering of the Greeks who fought at Troy, moments after hearing the bard Demodocus sing of how Athena had caused them.
[23] In certain cases, major deities are named when their actions are so characteristic of them as to be proof of their identity: for instance, Artemis and Apollo are closely associated with unexplained, sudden death, and so are credited with causing this by mortal characters in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
[25][c] In Odyssey 3, Nestor breaks Jørgensen's law in giving a detailed account of how Zeus executed the wrath of Athena against the Greeks on their return from Troy.
[28] In the Iliad, Jørgensen's law is broken during Nestor's description of the war between the Epeians and the Pylians, in which he participated: both Poseidon and Athena are identified as acting during the conflict.
[29] Calhoun suggests that the general observation of Jørgensen's law in tales told by characters from their own experience gives those tales an air of belonging to the present moment, and marks them as distinct from legends of the distant past, in which the appearance of the gods was more expected; conversely, he argues that Nestor's invocation of Athena and Poseidon lends "a tone of bombast" to his story.
