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 (: 'a god'), and (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.
The principle of Jørgensen's law traces to a 1904 article by the Danish classicist Ove Jørgensen, in which he proposed that Homeric characters typically use generic terms, particularly (: 'a god'), and (Zeus), interchangeably to refer to the action of gods, whereas the narrator and the gods themselves always name the specific gods responsible:
Instead of understanding and articulating its supernatural origin, human beings affected by divine influence may perceive it as the action of their (internal urges). In some cases, they also attribute divine action to the wrong god: Odysseus, for instance, blames Zeus for a storm which was earlier narrated to have been raised by Poseidon. Alternatively, characters may use the name of Zeus, or invoke the actions of the gods, rhetorically to refer to an event which appears without explanation.
Jørgensen's law sometimes requires a break with the usual narrative conventions of Homeric poetry: when an event is narrated twice, it is usual to employ the same wording and epic formulae, but observing Jørgensen's law requires variation when the same events are narrated by mortal characters and the narrator or the gods. 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. By extension, it highlights that the passages of the Odyssey narrated by Odysseus himself are done so without the benefit of divine knowledge and detachment.
Jørgensen credited the German classicist Karl Ludwig Kayser with observing, in 1835, that Odysseus does not credit Athena with assisting him during the stories he tells to the Phaeacians during Odyssey 9–12, whereas she intervenes frequently on his behalf elsewhere in the poem. Kayser explained this inconsistency as a result of Odysseus's ignorance of which divine power had been acting during his experiences. Other classicists, such as Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch in 1840 and Heinrich Düntzer in 1861, had used Odysseus's ignorance to explain the absence of Poseidon's anger from the same part of the poem: still others, such as Wilhelm Hartel in 1865 and Carl Rothe in 1882, had explained it as a narrative decision to focus on the anger of Helios, which had been immediately responsible for the shipwreck that led to Odysseus's arrival among the Phaeacians.
The classicist Ruth Scodel has described Jørgensen's article as the "standard analysis of ... the rules that govern human speech about the gods". Jørgensen originally made his observations upon books 9–12 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus uses all four of Jørgensen's terms, but only names a specific god (apart from making generic reference to Zeus) when he has since been informed of that god's actions by the goddess Calypso or the prophet Tiresias.
Jørgensen's law can be applied throughout the Odyssey: for instance, to the speech of the suitor Amphimedon in Odyssey 24, where he attributes the return of Odysseus to Ithaca to ('an evil '). Later in his speech, Amphimedon incorrectly credits Zeus, rather than Athena, with urging on Odysseus and Telemachus during their battle against the suitors. Other characters in the Odyssey, including Odysseus, recognise Athena's actions as the handiwork of a god, but are unable to identify her as the source. During the false account Odysseus tells of his voyage to Ithaca to the swineherd Eumaeus in Odyssey 14, he follows Jørgensen's law nine times, attributing all divine action to "a god", "the gods" or to Zeus. It has also been applied to the Iliad: for instance, in Iliad 23, Idomeneus correctly reports that Eumelus has crashed his chariot in the race against Diomedes, Menelaus and Antilochus, but is unaware that Athena has caused the crash.
Jørgensen's law has been used to explain apparent contradictions in the Odyssey, where Odysseus, as narrator, names Zeus as the originator of actions which the poet has previously described as the work of another god: under Jørgensen's principles, Odysseus's invocation of Zeus should be understood as a generic reference to divine action. Sometimes, mortal characters follow Jørgensen's law by attributing misfortunes to Zeus, even when they know that they are in fact the work of a different god. 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.
The Homeric scholar Erwin F. Cook, while upholding the general validity of Jørgensen's observations, has questioned the interchangeability of with the other terms of reference, pointing out that Zeus is more often credited with responsibility for events involving fate and the weather. Cook argues that this reflects the early association of Zeus and his antecedent deities in pre-Greek culture with the heavens and storms. The classicist Irene de Jong has also suggested that is more closely associated with events perceived by the speaker as negative. Generally, the term does not appear in the narratorial voice, though three exceptions exist in the Iliad.
Jørgensen's law is not universally followed in Homeric poetry, though most apparent exceptions can be explained away or follow other conventions of Homeric narration. It does not apply to minor gods, such as Proteus, Eidothea, Circe, Aeolus and Calypso. Nor does it apply when characters relate legendary stories or those that they know at second hand, rather than retelling their own experiences. 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.
Odysseus's realisation that he has been addressed by the god Hermes in Odyssey 10 is unexplained, though Jørgensen's law would normally expect him to remain ignorant of Hermes's identity unless the god revealed it to him. 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. Helen also breaks it in Odyssey 4, by naming Aphrodite as the cause of her infatuation with Paris; in the same book, Menelaus breaks it by crediting Athena with leading Helen away from the Trojan Horse. 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. 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.