Vedic Metre in its Historical Development c4.20

c4.20

This discussion may seem to lead to an unsatisfactory result in so far as it increases the doubts that must be felt as to the general correctness of the Saṃhitā text, and thereby seems to shake the solid structure unde omnia cognita pendent. But the errors of the text in small details are so numerous that no commentator has ever left them unnoticed. The question rather arises whether the understanding of the Rigveda would not make better progress if the task of emendation were more vigorously taken in hand. Upon this question I have hardly ventured to enter in the body of the book, for a better knowledge of the metre seems to me an indispensable preliminary to textual correction: although in the *Metrical Commentary* I have indicated a fair number of simple alterations in the text which (if admissible on other grounds) have the advantage of removing metrical difficulties. But where difficulties of interpretation and of metre concur in the same verses, I have little doubt that the solution is to be found in that direction: and therefore I have suggested (though only in a tentative way) in Ch. IX this method of dealing with some of the hymns in the ‘uneven lyric’ metres, which are here for the first time recognised as entitled to rank as a distinct class of established metrical forms.