Oral-formulaic Theory Research Articles

The recurring collocation of vreiðr and vega in Old Norse poetry

Poetry in early Germanic vernaculars exhibits variations on a metrical form predicated on a pattern of alliterating stressed syllables linking two halves of a line (in contrast to syllabic metres in which scansion requires a fixed number of syllables per line). This gave rise to the phenomenon of recurring alliterative collocations: the repeated combination of alliterating words or word-roots within a given poetic corpus. It is likely that such collocations originated, like formulae in oral-formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and A.B. Lord, as building blocks for extempore composition during performance. However, there is strong evidence that Old Norse poetry was composed deliberatively and memorized for performance. Recurring collocations in Old Norse verse therefore reflect conscious artistic design rather than compositional expediency. This article focuses on one such collocation—the adjective vreiðr (angry) and the verb vega (to fight, to strike)—as a case study of the way in which composers of Old Norse eddic verse exploited the traditional resonances of certain collocations to shape audience understanding of character and plot.

Variations in the application of the components of the oral performance to Yoruba chants

It is common knowledge in oral literature that every oral form is naturally performed. The components of the oral performance are, namely, the text, the oral artist, the audience, music, and histrionics. Though these components apply to the performance of all oral forms, whether narrative or poetic, they are employed in diverse manners in consonance with the nature of the oral form being actualized. This is called the context of performance. The aim of this article is to do an inquiry into the contextual varying of the use of the components of the oral performance among oral traditional forms with emphasis on Yoruba oral traditional chants. My objectives are to verify how the nature of each chant dictates the degree to which the components can be applied to it in context. In other words, the prominence or unimportance of any component of the oral performance in each poetic form is determined by the rules surrounding the actualization of the subgenre. This survey is delimited to the Yoruba oral poetic forms classified as chants. The first is the context-restricted group that limits the use of the components of the oral performance by its own rules, thus making any deviation a taboo. The second group comprises forms that were originally context-bound but have begun to acquire secular features thus deemphasizing their invocatory worth and metamorphosing into entertainment subgenres. The third is the class of poetic forms that were originally secular. They have not only remained so, but have also absorbed the many influences of modernity. The data for analysis constitutes 13 oral forms which have been transcribed and translated from Yoruba to English. (Yoruba is one of the indigenous languages or mother tongues of Nigeria.) The oral performance theory which enumerates the variables listed above and functionalism which reveals the essence of the contextual applications of those components are handy for the theoretical framework and grounding of this article. Further, the oral-formulaic theory will be applied to chants in the first group above because their potency is tied to their formulaic structure.

An Outline of “Holistic Poetics”

In terms of technical approach, holistic poetics takes the Lord-Foley oral-formulaic theory as the main line, and partially absorbs the concepts, tools and models of “ethnopoetics” and “performance theory”; in methodological terms, it borrows Smuts’ concept of “holism” to grasp the whole picture and characteristics of oral literature from the holistic point of view, while at the same time endeavoring to combine the analytical method with the holistic one; and in terms of world view, it starts with historical materialism as the basis for understanding and analyzing the internal and external laws of oral literature. While emphasizing the synchronic method and paying attention to the relationship and interaction between different factors, holistic poetics introduces the dimension of historical development, thus presenting the artistic features and social functions of oral literature from multiple aspects. Compared with the written word and the Internet, “orality” is an information skill that has a long history but always remains new. As it has been dominant for a long time, it is a reasonable starting point for the “holistic view.”

Formula in the Praise Chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna, Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe (The Chief Oral Poet of the Ịzọn Nation)

This paper begins with the contention that scholars of African oral literature have exhibited a ‘best avoided’ approach towards formula, the most important aspect of the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. It argues that, even in this century, the dominant approaches to the study of African folklore have been performance, Marxism, formalism, structuralism, feminism and functionalism. Therefore, building on the meager literature on formula, this article investigates its occurrence in traditional Ịjọ poetry, particularly in the praise chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that the formula density is high in the bard’s praise poems. This article also notes that formulas are useful and necessary to the Ịjọ bard because they enable him to compose his poems rapidly in the course of performance.

Grief, Resurrection & Renewal: geniwad in Old English Verse

ABSTRACT This article examines the Old English poetic formula hyht wæs geniwad (“hope was renewed”) using tools derived from Oral-Formulaic Theory and usage-based linguistics. It suggests that the formula is specifically connected to Resurrection and that it was developed within a small group of closely-related poems, on the basis of an earlier formula expressing overwhelming grief and loss.

The Manifestations of Fate in Medieval Germanic Poetry and Lithuanian Folk Songs

Reflections of mythical worldview are embedded in traditional oral poetry, viz. Old Icelandic collection of poems Poetic Edda, Old English poem Beowulf, and Lithuanian folk songs. Archaic motifs and archetypal imagery are conveyed by means of poetic grammar (alliteration, kennings, epithets, etc.). Through interpretation, the hidden (symbolic) meaning of the poetic grammar is unveiled, and the connection between the two worlds, the sacred (the divine) and the profane (the human) (Eliade 1959), is exposed. To advance the analysis of poetic narrative, the methodology employed in the paper combines comparative Indo-European poetics (Watkins 1995) and oral-formulaic theory (Kiparsky 1976; Foley 1996). The paper focuses on the poetic narrative’s motifs that encode the archetypal image of the goddess(es) of fate in the Germanic and Baltic traditions. Selected passages from Old Icelandic, Old English, and Lithuanian poetic texts reveal the motif of fate in the following contexts: the establishment of the laws governing human life, the courtship and wedding narrative, the inescapable decrees of misery and death, the warrior’s fame and fate, and the connection between the goddess of fate and the cuckoo bird (in the Lithuanian tradition). The poetic grammar and poetic formulas, in particular, reveal the prototypical characteristics of the supernatural beings who rule fate – Norns, Wyrd, and Laima – and present them as an integral part of the Indo-European mythological system.

The collection as a text-forming mechanism: A case study of a playful bachelor song

Based on the example of the Old Polish song “Pannom świat, / A mężatkom niebo, / A wdowusiom raj, raj, raj, / A babkom piekło” (En. lit. ‘For maidens the world / For married women heaven, / And for widows paradise, paradise, paradise / And for crones hell’) and its many variants in Polish song folklore, the author discusses the text-forming mechanism of the basic collection: maiden — married woman — widow — crone, which is the starting point to introduce some coupled, or mirrored collections of the type: heaven — paradise — purgatory — hell. The concepts of collection and complex are applied here as useful analytical tools which allow for identification of culturally stable stereotypical sets, and for labelling them with the use of superordinate lexemes, e.g. VEHICLES: coach-in-four — royal coach — stagecoach — wheelbarrow; DRINKS: wine — beer — weak, home-brewed beer — water, etc. The analysis of a multi-variant song, performed in the present study, leads to the conclusion that Albert Lord’s oral-formulaic theory of atext of folklore needs to be extended by introducing a more general idea of the “textual pattern” active on the level of individual text elements, as well as on the level of an entire text. In the case discussed in the present paper, the factor that integrates the whole message is constituted by a mocking intention assigned to the male (“bachelor’s”) point of view.

Matija Murko, Roman Jakobson in Parry-Lordova teorija ustnega pesništva

Namen pričujoče raziskave je prikazati do sedaj zanemarjeno vlogo češkoslovaških slavistov pri oblikovanju Parry-Lordove teorije ustnega pesništva. Potek predstavlja v obliki zgodbe o pristnem odkritju, ki izhaja iz določenega znanstvenega okolja (Antoine Meillet, praški lingvistični krožek itd.). Glavne vloge v njej igrajo Matija Murko, ustanovitelj češkoslovaške slavistike Roman Jakobson in nekateri drugi raziskovalci. Največ pozornosti članek posveča Murkovim in Parryjevim znanstveno-raziskovalnim strategijam, ki sta jih uporabljala med potovanji na Balkan leta 1930, in jih primerja. Članek razkriva tudi določene povezave med Murkom in Lordom, ter nekatere njihove dokaze, ki do sedaj še niso bili objavljeni.

The Psalmic Oral Formula Revisited: A Cognitive-Performative Approach

Abstract In the wake of Milman Parry’s and Alfred Lord’s groundbreaking discovery of oral composition in Homeric epics, biblical scholars analyzed the formulaic language of the biblical Psalms with a view toward establishing a similar compositional function. This approach met with little success. Among the many recent refinements to the Oral-Formulaic theory is the distinction between oral composition and oral conception, a distinction which allows for identifying oral features of a “text” which do not necessarily reflect composition in performance. The goal of this article is two-fold. First this article proposes a new model for identifying oral formulas based on the theory of prototypical categorization developed within the field of cognitive sciences, particularly cognitive linguistics. Second, this article argues that the psalmic oral formulas are best understood as linguistic registers which evoke a performance arena, a feature of orally derived literature described most extensively by John Miles Foley.

The Challenge of Oral Epic to Homeric Scholarship

The epic is an intriguing genre, claiming its place in both oral and written systems. Ever since the beginning of folklore studies epic has been in the centre of interest, and monumental attempts at describing its characteristics have been made, in which oral literature was understood mainly as a primitive stage leading up to written literature. With the appearance in 1960 of A. B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales and the introduction of the oral-formulaic theory, the paradigm changed towards considering oral literature a special form of verbal art with its own rules. Fieldworkers have been eagerly studying oral epics all over the world. The growth of material caused that the problems of defining the genre also grew. However, after more than half a century of intensive implementation of the theory an internationally valid sociological model of oral epic is by now established and must be respected in cognate fields such as Homeric scholarship. Here the theory is both a help for readers to guard themselves against anachronistic interpretations and a necessary tool for constructing a social-historic context for the Iliad and the Odyssey. As an example, the hypothesis of a gradual crystallization of these two epics is discussed and rejected.

Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I)

Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I) Frog (bio) Discussions1 of parallelism in verbal art have customarily focused on semantic and grammatical parallelism between adjacent verses or equivalent units, "similarities between discourse segments that are sequentially juxtaposed" (Urban 1991:60).2 It is easy to get the impression that parallelism mainly concerns dyadic pairs that form couplets, even if it is common to acknowledge extended series of parallel verses,3 figures like cross parallelism or chiasmus,4 and parallelism between verses separated by one or a few lines of intermediate text.5 However, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1959 [1865]:84) reflected that "perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces to the principle of parallelism," a perspective that is today more familiar from Roman Jakobson's view that the "recurrent returns" of parallelism are "the essence of poetic artifice" "at every level of language" (1981 [1966]:98). From this perspective, "recurrent returns" at the level of sounds, words, syntax, morphology, semantic units, and so forth, all fall under the aegis of "parallelism;"6 alliteration and rhyme are "only a particular, condensed case of a much more general" phenomenon of parallelism (1981 [1960]:39). It may seem peculiar to some readers that parallel verses that reiterate the same information should be compared to rhyme, but this line of thinking was current at least as early as the seventeenth century,7 and is built into the German term Gedankenreim ("thought-rhyme") for semantic parallelism. In this article I am interested in theorizing and formalizing this broader view of parallelism with a focus on verbal art, and in developing methodological tools for its analysis. Research on verbal art tends to look at how a tradition works in terms of the surface levels of communication—what is heard and seen in a performance situation. Everything involved in the verbal part of communication tends to be viewed more or less exclusively at the level of language. A "theme" in the sense of Oral-Formulaic Theory is thus recognized as a unit of narration but is treated as a unit of language, a unit of utterance, rather than as something mediated by language (for example, Foley 1999:83-86). Here, a central concern is to peel apart the layers involved in communication, separating sounds from the words they mediate, words from the images and motifs they mediate, and these from the signs that they mediate, and so on. When these layers are distinguished, parallelism can be seen as "recurrent returns" of elements within the same layer in relation to the metered frames of units of utterance. Parallelism in each layer can then be looked at in relation to what is happening in other layers, how and whether parallelism in language relates to motifs or themes, and so on. The approach to parallelism presented here has developed from my work on identifying and understanding units that are meaningful in a tradition, whether they are narrated through language, allusively referred to in conversation, represented iconographically, or enacted. There is nothing profound in observing that a motif is not, strictly speaking, a unit of language but rather something that can be communicated using language or in some other way. Working across language, material culture, and embodied activity motivated me to differentiate types of units in order to address how they interact in use. It became necessary to examine how these units are affected or shaped by a medium such as language and may become interfaced with it. Here, the focus is on verbal art and meaningful units mediated through language in verbal art. However, the platform for approaching the units and their relations has a much broader background. Thus, the definitions of "motif" and other units of tradition described here have been developed to analyse symbols and their arrangements in Iron-Age burials, how the same units can be found across medieval poetry, prose, and iconography, how verbal art may relate to actions, objects, and the environment in a ritual performance, or the anticipated outcome of violating a taboo (see, for example, Frog 2014a:360-79 and 2015a:35-47). I present an overview of what becomes observable in verbal art when language is distinguished from...

‘The Tranquillity of the Mansion:’ Fields and Formulaic Diction in a Gothic Novel

No study of formulaic language in Gothic fiction is currently available. This article explores the structure of Gothic formulaic discourse in one of the ‘Northanger novels,’ The Necromancer (1794). Using the corpus-linguistics concept of collocation, as well as insights from the oral-formulaic theory of composition, the article distinguishes formula from formulaic pattern and proposes a definition for the latter concept centred on the notion of ‘field.’ Whereas this novel has often been berated for its incoherence, subsequent analysis shows that formulaic language builds up complex fractal networks that belie this charge and also suggests that Gothic is best looked at as a liminal genre, halfway between literary and folk narrative.

Beyond Nostalgia: Formula and Novelty in Old English Literature

Oral-formulaic theory has had an immense impact on the way we read and interpret Old English literature. Formulaic theory, however, can only think in terms of the repetition of “discrete,” pre-existent, and isolable units. But for Henri Bergson, the real is continuous and creative, not discrete and immobile. Following Bergson’s account of “continuous multiplicity” in Creative Evolution and drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s extension of Bergson’s thought in A Thousand Plateaus, I propose a higher order theory of Old English literary production that acknowledges its traditionalism and formulaicity, even as it attempts to conceive of the corpus in terms of novelty, originality, and experimentation. The wager is that vitalist philosophical models will allow readers to conceive of Old English literature beyond a nostalgic insistence on the return of the same.

Study on Communication of Characteristics Smart Learning from UX Perspective

Researches on smart learning have so far focused on e-learning contents, infrastructure, and the quality of teaching and learning method. This thesis based on the stance that, as smart learning is mainly practiced through smart devices people carry with them every day, its platform evaluation should go beyond just simple evaluation of content effectiveness but to more diversified aspects such as users’ feeling, association, and difference. And such smart learning analysis and evaluation should be connected to subsequent emotional UX management and brand asset management that serve as strategic guidelines for mobile telecommunication op erators’ platform business and e-learning content production. This study examined more customized functions of mobile telecommunication operators’ smart learning platform services currently available in the market by considering the perspective of the emotional UX. By doing so, this thesis sought to make some strategic approaches to create values. We, for the purpose of this study, selected T-smart learning of SK Telecom, the first South Korean mobile telecommunication carrier to launch a smart learning platform. For case analysis, we employed Yin’s theory, adopted the explanation research method to interview involved officials and users and recorded interview details and resulting reports by using the case study method. In addition, based on previous studies and in the perspective of emotional communication rather than technological perspective of Smart Learning, it drew four categories: (1) interdisciplinary, (2) customized management, (3) motivation, and (4) knowledge network. The characteristics of SK T-learning UX factor was interpreted on the basis of Oral-Formulaic Theory by Ong, Walter J (1995). As a result, it was revealed that oral-formulaic characteristics were found in the Smart Learning factor in the smart environment. Also, it was found that the oral-formulaic characteristics were in the same context with the smart characteristic of smart learning.

The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature

When he assembled the recordings and texts that today form the core of the collection bearing his name, Milman Parry was pursuing very different goals than many, if not most, folklorists and collectors of his time. Partly, perhaps, that is because he was not himself a folklorist by profession. At the time of his death in 1935, Parry was Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard University, specializing in the study of the Iliad and Odyssey. When he set out for what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the summer of 1933, he was interested above all in testing a hypothesis he had formed about the way in which the Homeric poems had been composed—a hypothesis that later became known as the “Oral-Formulaic Theory.” 1 Parry approached his task as a scientist and an experimentalist. While others might have focused on discovering previously unknown epics, Parry deliberately spent time recording multiple versions of songs he had already documented, so as to understand better the manner in which they were recomposed in performance. Of course, like any collector, Parry looked for the most knowledgeable and proficient informants he could find. But instead of always striving to record such informants at their best, Parry not infrequently devised ways of disrupting performances or asked singers to perform novel tasks (for instance, to translate a song from one language into another). 2 Again, his purpose was to learn how master craftsmen handle the tools of their art. Parry nevertheless managed to create one of the most comprehensive archives of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian oral traditions in existence. In the course of two field campaigns —an initial survey in the summer of 1933 and an extended expedition from June 1934 through August 1935—he collected a vast number of recordings and written documents. There are 12,554

The return of epic formulas in various Italian translations of Kosovka djevojka (The Kosovo maiden)

This paper makes a comparative analysis of the various Italian translations of the famous Serbian popular poem Kosovka djevojka [The Kosovo Maiden] and illustrates the different interpretations and consequent translations of epic formulas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy. The Parry-Lord oral formulaic theory, together with other important contributions in the field of oral studies, is a starting point for this analysis, which also takes into consideration the socio-cultural context in which these translations were produced. Translation solutions are therefore brought into relation with the poetics of individual translators and especially with the socio-cultural context of their time. Particular attention is devoted to the centuriesold Italian rhetorical tradition, which influenced even the greatest experts in popular poetry in their interpretation of the figures and clich?s typical of oral production.

Managing the "Boss": Epistemic Violence, Resistance, and Negotiations in Milman Parry's and Nikola Vujnović's Pričanja with Salih Ugljanin

Managing the "Boss":Epistemic Violence, Resistance, and Negotiations in Milman Parry's and Nikola Vujnović's Pričanja with Salih Ugljanin Slavica Ranković (bio) Without a doubt, Albert B. Lord's seminal work The Singer of Tales owes much of its success to the series of pričanja ("conversations")1 conducted with the South Slavic singers in 1933-35 by his mentor, Milman Parry, and his native assistant, Nikola Vujnović. This was an endeavor that Lord initially assisted in and benefited from as a student, and a practice he adopted during his own subsequent research trips to Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Along with the hands-on experience of listening to and recording performances of epic songs and other lore, these interviews proved crucial to the forming of the so-called "Oral-Formulaic Theory" inasmuch as they provided vital contextual information, as well as some basic interpretative tools for approaching the sizeable body of recorded epics. Moreover, in the course of the interviews, the singers offered valuable insight not only into what they already knew and did (for instance, how they acquired their skill, how they composed, or what in their opinion counted as a truthful, beautiful, or "correctly" sung tale), but also into what they could know and do, as the interactive and heuristic nature of the interview presented Parry with ample opportunities to test his hypotheses—those that he brought from Harvard and the Sorbonne, and those that were forming and being transformed during the interviews themselves. The ways of thinking that resulted from such probing and experimentation2 must to a significant degree account for the applicability and usefulness of the Parry-Lord method beyond the narrowly South Slavic context.3 As John Miles Foley attests (1998:149): "to date more than 100 language areas have been affected by the approach they initiated." While explored and exploited as a rich resource for learning about oral tradition, the singers' place within it, and attitudes towards it, these conversations are seldom considered as performances in their own right—that is, as meta-performances—that themselves feature the recitation/telling/singing of epic poetry and other traditional lore.4 Although they are likely to be as "genuine" as any other interviews (recorded or not), these conversations bear clear signs of staging. To take those with Salih Ugljanin as an example, just before the "official" conversation begins, the faint whispers of Nikola Vujnović's leisurely, often preparatory chatter with the singer can sometimes be distinguished from the crackling background noise of the phonograph already set in motion. So, too, can some of Parry's barely audible interventions and instructions to Nikola be made out in brief pauses, often marking the turning points of an interview;5 even amidst apparently impassioned debates, charged with ethnic and religious tensions (e. g., PN 659, VI:47-48, R 1053: 0:51-0:52),6 Nikola will not forget to remind the singer, under his breath and fully composed, to voice his contrary opinion glasnije ("louder").7 At other times, the singer himself speaks in a lower voice: when tired or in pain, when insecure, or when he judges the content of his remark as not record-worthy (e. g., PN 654, II:67-68, R 928: 2:19-2:30). In these cases his interviewers rarely follow suit and instead ask him to repeat the remark more loudly, not missing an opportunity, paradoxically, to stage some spontaneity and realism as well. Casting the conversations in terms of useful, primarily supplementary material8 must have obscured, to a significant degree, their performative aspect, as well as rendered all too transparent the otherwise subtle relationships that developed between the collector, the informant, and the routinely neglected third figure that looms large in these recordings, that of the interpreter/mediator. However, one of the more mundane reasons for the conversations' remaining unstudied in their own right must have been the restricted availability of the phonographic recordings to a wider scholarly audience. With the recent establishment of the "Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature On-Line" (MPCOL) hosted by Harvard University, and their ongoing digitization of Parry's and Lord's recordings, it is becoming more and more possible...

Homer and His Peers: Neoanalysis, Oral Theory, and the Status of Homer

Both leading trends in contemporary Homeric scholarship, Neoanalysis and Oral Theory, recognize today that the Iliad and the Odyssey frequently evoke episodes whose proper place is in the poems of the Epic Cycle. Yet, while in the Neoanalysts' eyes the intertextual relations between Homer and the Cycle mean that Homer enjoyed a special status which was due to the fact that his poems were composed with the help of writing, from the standpoint of oral formulaic theory Homer and the Cycle should nevertheless be placed on the same plane as independent variants of a common tradition. The article's main argument is that, contrary to the oralists' opinion, the position of the Homeric poems in Greek epic tradition was indeed unique. Contrary to the Neoanalysts' opinion, it is of little relevance whether it was in oral or in written form that they attained this position.

On the Oral-Formulaic Theory and its Application in the Poetic Edda: The Cases of Alvíssmál and Hávamál

The aim of this essay is to make some considerations concerning the usage and the development of the Oral-Formulaic Theory since its initial stage in the field of Eddic studies. Doing so I will comment on the most relevant problems and scholarly views I encountered while I was dealing with the subject, and in some cases give my own interpretation of them. In the second part of the paper I will then discuss more in detail the Eddic poems Alvíssmál and Hávamál from an oral-formulaic point of view.

Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century

Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century Chris Jones (bio) nis þær hearpan sweg, / gomen in geardum, swylce ðær iu wæron (2458b-59)1 There is no sound of the harp, delight in courts, as there once were The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it. (Pound 1951:56) Even within an advanced print culture, poetry arguably never escapes the oral dimension. For Ezra Pound, whose highly intertextual epic The Cantos, so conscious of its page appearance, could only be the product of such a print culture, poetry was nevertheless "an art of pure sound," the future of which in English was to be the "orchestration" of different European systems of sound-patterning (Pound 1973:33). Verbal orchestration is meaningless without auditors; it goes without saying that the notion of oral literature simultaneously implies the concept of aural literature. This much is also evident from the very beginning of Beowulf: Hwæt, we Gar-Dena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon …. ("Listen, we have heard of the Spear-Danes in times past, of the glory of the people's kings …," lines 1-2). While the conventionality of the opening might suggest the evocation of a formulaic idiom often associated with oral composition,2 the emphasis is clearly on aurality, on hearing a voice. Much work has been done in recent decades on the evidence in Old English written texts for a poetics that draws on compositional methods derived from an oral culture, either as it had survived into a period of widespread literacy, or as it was imagined to have once existed.3 This essay will not directly address that valuable rehabilitation of oral-formulaic theory into a more sophisticated understanding of early medieval scribal culture, although it will draw on it at times. Rather, I wish to pay some attention to the contiguous matter of that emphasis on listening for voice, of trying to make a space in the text for audible performance, before moving on to consider an analogous impulse in modern poetry and to argue for a new of type of textual allusion. A number of Old English poems could be used to explore the first idea, but the present essay will limit itself to some observations about Beowulf. Beowulf is a poem that stages the making and/or performance of poetry on several occasions;4 one could say that poetry itself, or its creation, is one of the poem's major themes. Although it is in some ways a self-referential impulse, one hesitates to call this preoccupation metatextual, lest that should suggest that Beowulf is concerned to observe and investigate the production of poems like itself, that is to say, textual in its usual sense, made of words in their written, material form. Our Beowulf, an inscripted text, the product of a late tenth- or early eleventh-century scriptorium,5 is intrigued by the sound of oral composition, perhaps as much so as modern scholars of early Germanic verse.6 Through this staging of the voice or voices of oral poetry, Beowulf situates itself as listening in to that tradition.7 In doing so, the poem implicitly aligns itself with a poetics where transmission and composition are co-dependent, indivisible aspects of the same act, just as its opening rhetorical gambit implicates speaking with hearing and collocates narrator and audience, suggesting through the plural pronoun that a poet is always also a listener, as the second epigraph to this essay makes explicit. A prime example of this straining to listen for the voice of oral composition occurs in the episode that takes place the morning after Beowulf's victory over Grendel, when one of Hrothgar's thanes word oþer fand / soðe gebunden ("found other words, truly bound," 870b-71a) in order to tell sið Beowulfes ("Beowulf's adventure," 872a). We are informed that the thane knows a great deal of traditional material; he is guma gilphlæden, gidda myndig / se ðe ealfela ealdgesegena / worn gemunde ("a man full of speech, mindful of poems, who remembered a multitude of many old songs," 868-70a). We are also told...