The paper discusses previous research of the Hittite poetic meter,
emerged since 1951 when H. Güterbock wrote that so called Song of Ullikumi
(Kumarbi cycle) does have a regular meter. He suggested also that Hittite poetry
was organized on the count of accent (tonic nature of poetry), and that it demonstrated
the same style as Akkadian and Sumerian poetry: four stresses and two
cola per line. He came out with the idea that a poetic line coincide with a clause
in Hittite texts; that all of the texts were written as a prosaic ones, in a row,
without any separation of poetic lines. Unfortunately, the following researchers
took his words for granted and started searching for the ways to comply with the
“Mesopotamian tradition”. Analyses were carried out using the material of the
Song of Ullikumi, some other texts from the Kumarbi cycle and other texts
marked with a logogram SÌR (hitt. išḫamaiš, meaning ‘song’), in the direction
of determining the words that were unstressed, in order to make it 4 stresses per
line (clause). No comprehensive statistical analysis, though, had been provided
for the Hittite poetry: all the reports were dealing with a limited amount of
clauses from the Song of Ullikumi or the Song of Nesa. Most researchers,
among them prominent Hittitologists, such as S. P. Durnford and H. C. Melchert,
would discuss possible lack of stress in clauses on the basis of their arbitrary
opinion of what kinds of words could be united into one stress unit with
another word (e.g. dependent noun genitive with its head noun). Obviously, one
could find almost anything needed with this approach. Our own preliminary
analysis of stresses in Ullikumi has demonstrated that only 30 % of its text
might yield 4 stresses per line, which is indeed too little to call it a verse. The review discusses the lack and the necessity of a proper statistical analysis on the
corpus that would include all the allegedly poetic texts of Hittite tradition. The
authors have argued that available evidence, contra previous research, cannot
suggest any stress loss/reduction, and that in order to separate the Hittite poetry
from the Hittite prose, and to determine the principles of the Hittite poetic meter
one should provide different evidence using corpus and statistical methods, and
analyzing the very basics of versification in Hittite, e.g., the principles of line
separation.
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