What a strange subject for a blog! I came across it while researching the term ‘continuity’. I was thinking of novels and movies where continuity, or rather the lack of it, is a problem that the creators face. For example, in a movie if the actor is wearing a red hat at the start of a scene and this changes to a yellow one without explanation halfway through the scene this won’t make sense to a viewer.

So, what has continuity got to do with ‘Homeric nods’?

Homer was an Ancient Greek poet who wrote very long poems, hence the term ‘epic’ as used in the Wikipedia extract below:

“A Homeric nod (sometimes heard as 'Even Homer nods') is a term for a continuity error that has its origins in Homeric epic. The proverbial phrase for it was coined by the Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica:[2] "et idem indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus" ("and yet I also become annoyed whenever the great Homer nods off").

There are numerous continuity errors in Homer that can be described as "nods", as for example:

·       In Iliad,[3] Menelaos kills a minor character, Pylaimenes, in combat. Pylaimenes is later[4] still alive to witness the death of his son.” (Wikipedia 2023)

Think about how this continuity error would look in a movie!

The reason I was looking into ‘continuity’ is because I was thinking about God’s bible. Forty authors, most of whom had no contact with each other, wrote a book over approximately 1,500 years and maintained continuity. Single authors struggle to do that in a single novel!

Even for the continuity alone God’s bible truly is a uniquely remarkable book. More than this it has a message for us that can help us live better today, and also offers the hope of a perfect life that lasts forever. Worth checking out!

Reference:

“Continuity” Wikipedia 2023 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_(fiction)#Homeric_nod (17 Sep 2023)