Epic Singers Research Articles

Turkic Oral Epic

Turkic Oral Epic Karl Reichl (bio) What is oral poetry? When Socrates asks Laches what courage is, he gets as a first answer that courage is when someone bravely fights against the enemy without taking flight. Socrates is not pleased with this answer, because he wants to get to the essence of virtue rather than discuss examples of virtuous behavior. So, what is oral poetry? Like Laches I will have to answer by giving examples rather than getting to the essence. Oral poetry in my field—which I take to be that of Turkic oral epic (rather than medieval “oral” epic, although it is as a professor of medieval English that I earn my living)—is first and foremost when a professional singer performs narrative poetry (together with some other well-defined types of poetry) to an audience. A professional singer? Maybe one should say a professonal traditional singer, that is, a singer who has acquired his repertoire in the traditional way, by “studying” with a master singer rather than at a music academy. But here already we run into all kinds of difficulties (Socrates would have his fun): sometimes singers have not had the benefit of staying with master singers and learning from them, sometimes they have had additional or simply different ways of acquiring a repertoire (by hearing books/manuscripts read to them or reading them themselves; by listening to taped performances; even—yes, contradictiodefinitionis!—by studying at a music academy). Sometimes singers cannot be professionals because there is no market for their goods anymore, and sometimes a tradition is moribund and only the amateur carries it on. But the prototypical epic singer, as it were, does exist and is still very much a reality in some traditions: the Kirghiz bard (probably the strongest tradition), the Uzbek bakhshi (in particular in the south of Uzbekistan), the Karakalpak zhyrau (about to die out), the Kazakh aqyn (mostly in Xinjiang, China), and others. And how oral is “oral” in these cases? Again, the prototypical case is that of the singer learning orally an epic that exists only in oral form and is orally performed by singer-generation after singer-generation. This is, of course, an idealized picture, idealized for the twenty-first century, but also [End Page 247] for the twentieth century. It is true that compared to Europe the folklore of Central Asia has been only fragmentarily recorded, and recording started seriously only in the thirties of the last century (with some exceptions like Radloff in the nineteenth century). Yet literacy as well as books have been around for some time, and in some traditions (like the Uzbek tradition of Khorezm) the written word has never been spurned by singers. Nonetheless, all things considered, I would say that “oral” in the case of Turkic epic means orally composed, orally transmitted, and orally performed. What are the most interesting new directions in oral tradition studies in my field? I think one new direction is simply the greater awareness among native scholars in Central Asia of western scholarship. This new awareness might lead to better and fuller documentation and eventually to new interpretations of their material. However, this development is still in its infancy. If I had to single out a recent publication in my field (with a catholic definition of “field” by incorporating the Indian subcontinent), I would mention the late Lauri Honko’s edition and translation of the Siri epic of southern India (Honko et al. 1998, Honko 1998). This is a publication that is based on meticulously documented material; it has an extensive and in many ways ground-breaking theoretically oriented introduction (of particular note is the idea of a “mental text”); and it is exemplary in combining western scholarship with the expertise of native scholars. Karl Reichl Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Karl Reichl Karl Reichl is Professor of English philology at the University of Bonn. He is the author of books on Middle English literature, English word-formation, and Turkic oral epic poetry, including Singing the Past (2000) and a German translation of the Uzbek heroic epic Alpamish (2001). He is at present preparing a performance-oriented edition of the repertoire of a Karakalpak oral epic...

Eumaios and Alkinoos: The Audience and the "Odyssey"

is aware of itself as a poetic product.l As is increasingly recognized, Odyssey is often concerned with what Doherty calls the reflexive quality of work-what might be called its attention to its own reception.2 Such discussions note how Odysseus appropriates language and gestures of epic singer, functioning as an internal narrator within greater narrative. There is thus a general awareness that principal narrator identifies himself with Odysseus and vice versa. Necessarily, if an internal narrator, such as Odysseus, parallels certain tendencies of principal narrator, so some of internal audiences depicted in poem suggest parallels and connections with an external audience, even ourselves.3 In Odyssey, telling and hearing narratives are part of reception of guests. The hospitable host provides both environment as well as specific impetus for most of tale telling. The longest internal narratives are Odysseus' narration of his wanderings, delivered to Phaiakians, accounts Nestor and Menelaus give to Telemakhos, and those disguised Odysseus and Eumaios exchange with each other. All of these contexts are extended treatments of hospitality, in which an exchange of narratives is an element in type-scene.4 The Odyssey offers many other internal narratives, from Phemios' first song, songs of Demodokos, to Odysseus noting that he narrated his exploits to Aiolos,

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition.

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition.

Epic singers and oral tradition

Epic singers and oral tradition

Kleos and its Ironies in the Odyssey

This study of the role of kleos, heroic fame, in the Odyssey attempts to relate the anomalies in Odysseus' heroism to the poem's self-consciousness about the epic singer and his song. This hero wins by guile rather than force, conceals rather than proclaims his name, and in describing his own deeds as past events already fixed as heroic tradition sings of his own kleos, like a bard. His narration to the Phaeacians, his meeting with the Cyclops, and his restoration of festive song as at a wedding near the end of the poem offer different models for the social function of song and memory. The immobility and putrefaction associated with the Sirens are a negation of the vital power of epic kleos to reach between living and dead. In book XXIII Odysseus not only creates (or re-creates) kleos in words, like a bard, but once more wins kleos as a hero who performs great deeds. Even here, however, the unheroic elements, stressed in the second Nekyia, leave Odysseus' kleos surrounded by ambiguities and paradoxes.

Oral Poets of South India: The Todas

The student of the earliest literary works of our Western culture, those of Greece, soon learns that not all of them are literature in the strict sense. The Homeric poems are not works that were composed with the aid of writing materials. They bear within themselves very patently the marks of oral composition and recitation, and the Greek traditions about them are hardly intelligible on any other interpretation. European poetry, however, soon exchanged oral composition for that based on the use of writing materials, and our literatures in the Western world are to the present day predicated in an extraordinarily intimate fashion on this newer technique and its consequences. So much is this so, that for many scholars over many centuries the implications of oral composition for the understanding of Homer were forgotten. Not all had been oblivious, to be sure-one need mention only Gilbert Murray and the Chadwicks to refute that-but there was a need for some new impulse to make the matter vivid enough to be vital in Homeric studies. This new impulse was external and analogous, as it turned out. An American classical scholar originally of the University of California, Milman Parry, knew well enough the method of composition of the Homeric poems and knew too that there existed in the modern world and in a geographical area not far removed from Greece an oral epic. In the comparatively peaceful period between the two World Wars he went to Yugoslavia and in the mountains of the southern part of that country and of Albania he recorded and investigated the South Slav epic. He and his collaborators and pupils found there a technique remarkably similar in many details to that which had been postulated for Homer. It was possible to go on and to apply profitably to Homeric interpretation other details of the technique of the South Slav epic singers. Much of the needed reexamining of several of these literatures based on oral composition has been done by Maurice Bowra in his masterly and suggestive