The Formulaic Quality of Spontaneous Sermons

Abstract

ALBERT B. LORD'S EPOCH-MAKING STUDY of oral composition, The Singer of Tales, is the summing up of decades of collection, analysis, and formulation by him and his mentor at Harvard, Milman Parry. The original intention of these men had been to learn something about Homeric epic, and their quest led them on a scholarly odyssey to Yugoslavia, where they recorded and interviewed the Serbo-Croatian guslars, supposedly the last remaining singers of oral epics in the West. Even then, three decades ago, the oral epic tradition was in decay: the disease of literacy was infecting the oral singers, gradually since World War I and rapidly since communization.2 Consequently, when this tradition passed, we also lost the possibility of field-testing Lord's hypotheses, and the guslars have left as a legacy a mountain of conjecture. There has been a great deal of controversy concerning the application of the Parry-Lord theories of oral composition to Old English poetry, especially to Beowulf. The early work done by Francis P. Magoun, Jr. and his disciples has significantly altered our understanding of Old English poetry and its composition; the speculation in this field, based upon a close and often trenchant reading of the available texts, is among the most interesting and possibly the most important to be applied to Old English criticism in this century.3 Many of the original theories have subsequently been modified and refined; as a result we have a clearer understanding of oral composition, transitional texts, and the nature of formulaic