Singer Of Tales Research Articles

Eall-feala Ealde Sæge: Poetic Performance and "The Scop's Repertoire" in Old English Verse

Eall-feala Ealde Sæge:Poetic Performance and "The Scop's Repertoire" in Old English Verse1 Paul Battles (bio) and Charles D. Wright (bio) Scenes depicting the recitation of verse, particularly in Beowulf, are among the most memorable and closely studied passages in Old English poetry. Beowulf repeatedly depicts the making and performance of poetry (Hill 2002), and it is the swutol sang scopes ("the clear song of the scop," Bwf 90a) that first draws the monster Grendel's attention to Heorot and sets in motion the major events of the first part of the poem.2 In Beowulf, the creation of new stories is inextricably linked with the recitation of ones already known, so that the poem "aligns itself with a poetics where transmission and composition are co-dependent, indivisible aspects of the same act" (Jones 2009:486). A different but equally famous depiction of the scop emerges in the Venerable Bede's account of Caedmon, wherein divine inspiration supersedes tradition as the source of poetic creativity. Of course, these and similar accounts concerning the making and performance of Old English verse cannot be taken as straightforward portraits of the Anglo-Saxon "singer of tales": after all, Hrothgar's scop is Danish and Bede's Christian poet is entirely ignorant of traditional song. Moreover, since Beowulf and other narratives depicting vernacular poets—such as Widsith and Deor—are fictional accounts set int he Migration Age, some critics have gone so far as to deny that they can tell us anything at all about the Anglo-Saxon scop (Frank 1993).3 Yet in the words of John D. Niles, such a position seems "to represent a veritable ecstasy of skepticism" (2003:37). Niles usefully characterizes oral poetry as both a living tradition in pre-Conquest England and also as a "cultural myth whose long process of construction was set in motion as soon as the first missionaries from Iona and Rome introduced the arts of writing to Britain in a systematic way" (38). Fictional portraits of the scop, then, combine elements of poetic practice with a deeply-felt nostalgia for an imagined ancestral past (see Trilling 2009). While not straightforwardly reflective of reality, neither are they completely divorced from it. Even fictional portraits of the making and performance of poetry can tell us much about Anglo-Saxon poetics. Several studies have shown that depictions of poetic performance throughout the corpus incorporate several recurrent thematic patterns supported by common lexemes; in turn, these patterns – traditional themes4—are the product of a tradition that has its roots in the oral recitation of verse. Among the Old English themes depicting the recitation of verse are "The Singer Looks at His Sources," (see Creed 1962; Renoir 1981); "Joy in the Hall," (see Opland 1976; Foley 1983) and the "Poet-patron" see Maring 2011). Like other commonplaces of "heroic" life5—such as feasting, fighting, and voyages by sea or land—in Old English poetry the performance of poetry is articulated through a nexus of conventional ideas, images, and verbal expressions. In this essay we identify and discuss a previously unrecognized theme relating to poetic performance, which we will call "The Scop's Repertoire." This theme, which stages or describes the making of verse, associates that process with three motifs: copiousness; orality; and antiquity. Copiousness references the performer's knowledge of many poems or songs, and implicitly or explicitly links this vast repertoire with the ability to skillfully and quickly weave new texts. Orality means that these texts take the form of spoken, not written, words; they are variously described as spoken tales, as poems, and/or as songs accompanied by instruments. Finally, antiquity adumbrates the power of tradition, characterizing either the texts known to the poet and/or their subject matter as ancient and therefore venerable. As we shall see, "The Scop's Repertoire" takes two forms: in one all three motifs are explicitly present; in the other, the motif of antiquity is absent or displaced. These two variants of "The Scop's Repertoire" articulate different models for what it is that poets do: in the tradition model, they accumulate a store of ancient songs, and learning these endows poets with the...

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.

Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative by Alison McQueen Tokita

Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative by Alison McQueen Tokita

Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative by Alison McQueen Tokita

Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative by Alison McQueen Tokita

Tureccy i bałkańscy „singers of tales” – „jarzmo” inspiracji czy epicka dwubiegunowość?

Turkish and Balkan “singers of tales” – a yoke of inspiration or epic independence?The research material is mostly based on the works of Albert Lord and Milman Parry, Karl Reichl, Ilhan Basgoz, Pertev Boratav. Epic singers played a significant part in spreading national spirit, be it Turkish or Slavic. The Balkan artists called guslar used a one-string instrument called gusle while a Turkish minstrel ozan and ashik usually used a two-stringed instrument called kopuz or saz. The typical stage for their activities were coffeehouses. Oral epics were transmitted by word of mouth from one singer to another, sometimes by way of formal training based on the transmission of repertoire and technique from master to apprentice. Representative of both traditions was the use of metrics and formulaic style. The song was orally composed in performance, with the audience’s participation. The musical aspect facilitated memorisation. The text to be learned by heart was a story in a song. Although the Turkish and Balkan epic traditions developed independently of each other, the effect of Turkish conquest on the Balkan epic tradition is evident, especially in the style of those singers who perform in borderland (in Kosovo and northern Albania). The Turkish occupation itself became the subject of many epics, reinforcing the national identity of the local population. However, oriental influences also emerged in some formal characteristics, such as the length of the songs, the ornamentation and stylised oriental images and the transformation of separate ballads and short narratives into epic cycles. In both cases for performers themselves this artistic activity became “a way of life”.

Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey

Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey1 Steve Reece (bio) My contribution to this Festschrift for Professor John Miles Foley has its origin in an experimental course on comparative oral traditions titled “The Singers of Tales” that I have taught three times in quite different formats, once at Vanderbilt University and twice at Saint Olaf College. I began envisioning this course at the 1992 NEH Summer Seminar on Comparative Oral Traditions administered by Professor Foley in his capacity as the director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri. The seminar was one of the most pleasant, productive, and pivotal experiences of my academic career, largely because of the warm collegiality of my eleven colleagues and the generous mentoring of Professor Foley, and it continues to this day to have an effect on both my teaching and research. In the most recent incarnation of “The Singers of Tales” I decided, at great risk to my reputation as a traditional teacher and scholar, that the form of the course should match its content—that is, that the entire course should be conducted whenever possible without the aid of reading and writing. Almost all the material that we were studying in this course was composed, performed, and in many cases transmitted without the use of writing and reading, in an “illiterate” or, perhaps I should say, “preliterate” period of history. Each successive time that I have taught this course, I have discovered that my students relate better and better to this orally generated material. This generation of students seems to be on the verge of ushering in a new “post-literate” period of history: they are engaged by the aural pleasures of music and speech and the visual pleasures of icons, and thanks to their exposure to newer methods of technologizing the word, their concept of a text is of something much more fluid than the silent, two-dimensional, black-on-white, typographical words that so tyrannized students of previous generations. There is a certain perverseness, is there not, in expecting our students to enjoy traditional Zuni narrative poetry or traditional Appalachian folktales by sitting alone, in a quiet recess of the library and under a fluorescent light, reading a text speedily and silently, without even moving their mouths? Hence, in the most recent version of this course I determined that textbooks, written quizzes, exams, and final papers would be replaced whenever possible by public readings (even very long readings of the Odyssey and Beowulf), by shorter musical performances (with Homeric lyres, South Slavic gusles, Southern fiddles and banjos), and by oral presentations (of final research projects). The results were gratifying: students were personally engaged in these often difficult and exotic narratives, their individual and team research projects were outstanding, the class as a whole developed into a close-knit, interactive community, and, best of all, I did not have to read any examination essays or term papers. I enthusiastically recommend it. We began the course, naturally, with Homer’s Odyssey, and one of the first methodological obstacles that arose on the first day was the question of the relationship between the glossy, compact, rectilinear texts that the students had recently purchased from the shelves of the college bookstore and the oral performances with musical accompaniment of epic verse by a Greek bard on (let us say) the island of Chios in (let us say) the late eighth century BCE. What vestiges of the historical oral performance do these modern texts preserve? How does one textualize an oral performance? How does one take a non-spatial utterance in time and record it as a spatial and timeless and silent sequence of symbols? It happened that on that first day of class a student who was understandably trying to save some money pulled out of his backpack a tattered copy of a prose version of the Odyssey that his mother had used when a student at Saint Olaf College some thirty years earlier. I was startled and overreacted. I begged him not to open it, appealing to the class with as much passion as I could muster to purchase the stichic verse version that I...

Beowulf’s Singers of Tales as Hyperlinks

Beowulf’s Singers of Tales as Hyperlinks

A Bibliography of Publications by Albert Bates Lord

A Bibliography of Publications by Albert Bates Lord Morgan E. Grey (bio), Mary Louise Lord (bio), and John Miles Foley (bio) Note: All items listed here can be found in Ellis Library at the University of Missouri, Columbia, either in Special Collections (Ellis 401) or in open stacks (see the affixed call numbers below). Many journals are available online to University of Missouri faculty, staff, and students, and of course through other institutions as well. A full collection of article-length items is maintained in hard copy and on CD in Special Collections. 1936. "Homer and Huso I: The Singer's Rests in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song." Transactions of the American Philological Association 67: 106-113. 1938. "Homer and Huso II: Narrative Inconsistencies in Homer and Oral Poetry." Transactions of the American Philological Association 69: 439-445. 1948a. "Homer and Huso III: Enjambment in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song." Transactions of the American Philological Association 79: 113-124. 1948b. "Homer, Parry, and Huso." American Journal of Archaeology 52: 34-44. 1950. "The Oral Epic." In Conference on the Defense of Poetry, August 14-17, pp. 158-165. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University. 1951a. "Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos." Transactions of the American Philological Association 82: 71-80. 1951b. "Yugoslav Epic Folk Poetry." Journal of the International Folk Music Council 3: 57-61. 1951c. Ed. and trans. with Béla Bartók, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs. New York: Columbia University Press. Location: Despository, 780.9 C723s 7 1953a. "Homer's Originality: Oral Dictated Texts." Transactions of the American Philological Association 84: 124-134. 1953b. "Opening Statement, Symposium IV, Fourth Session." In Four Symposia on Folklore, ed. Stith Thomspon, pp. 305-311; discussion, pp. 311-323. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Location: GR40.T45 1953-54. Coll, ed., and trans. with Milman Parry, Serbocroatian Heroic Songs (Srpskohrvatske junačke pjesme), vols. 1-2: Novi Pazar. Cambridge, Mass. and Belgrade: Harvard University Press and the Serbian Academy of Sciences. Location: M1704.P3 S4 6 1954. "Notes on Digenis Akritas and Serbo-Croatian Epic." Harvard Slavic Studies 2: 375-383. Location: PG13.H3 1956a. "Avdo Medjedović, Guslar." Journal of American Folklore 69: 320-330. 1956b. "The Role of Sound Patterns in Serbo-Croatian Epic." In For Roman Jakobson, ed. Morris Halle, Horace G. Lunt, Hugh McClean, and Cornelius H. Van Schooneveld, pp. 301-305. The Hague: Mouton. Location: 404 H152f 1956c. Ed., Slavic Folklore: A Symposium. Bibliographical and Special Series, 6. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society. Location: GR138.L6 1956 1959. "The Poetics of Oral Creation." In Comparative Literature: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Werner P. Friederich, pp. 1-6. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Location: PN1303.L62 1961. Beginning Serbocroatian. The Hague: Mouton. Location: PG1231.L6 1961 1962a. "Homeric Echoes in Bihać." Zbornik za narodni život i običaje južnih slavena 40: 313-320. 1962b. "Homer and Other Epic Poetry." In A Companion to Homer, ed. Alan J. B. Wace and Frank H. Stubbings, pp. 179-214. London: Macmillan. Location: PA4037.A5 W3 1962c. "The Epic Singers." Atlantic 210: 126-127. 1962d. "A Comparative Analysis." In Preface to Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola, pp. xiii-xxix. Boston: Beacon Press. Location: GR360.A5 E5 1962e. Beginning Bulgarian. The Hague: Mouton. Location: PG835.L6 1964. "Ivo Andrić in English Translation." Slavic Review 23: 563-573. 1965a. "Beowulf and Odysseus." In Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis P. Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert P. Creed, pp. 86-91. New York: New York University Press. Location: PN681.B42 1965b. "Oral Poetry." In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger, pp. 591-593. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Location: PN1021.E5 1974 1967. "The Influence of a Fixed Text." In To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (11 October 1966). Janua Linguarum, Series Maior, 2, pp. 1199-1206. The Hague: Mouton. Location: P26.J32 2 1968a. "Homer as an Oral Poet." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72: 1-46. 1968b. "Igra riječi i značenja...

Rereading Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales. Revisiting the definition and application of formulas in Sesotho praise poetry

Access to a fresh set of video-recordings of Sesotho praise-poetry made in the year 2000 enabled the author to revisit his adaptation of Albert Lord's definition of the formula as a dynamic compositional device that the oral poet utilizes during delivery. The basic adaptation made in 1983 pertains to heroic praises (dithoko tsa marena) and was based on King Griffith's poem that dates back to the early 20th century. While the adapted version is retained here, the rereading led to a clarification of a number of issues with special reference to the use of formulas by Morabaraba Lehloha in a praise-poem dedicated to the late King Moshoeshoe II. There is a distinct density in the configuration of formulas, not only of the one-word variety but of word-group formulas as well. The article finally explores Lord's view of ‘theme’ as ‘a group of ideas regularly used in telling a tale in formulaic style’, and shows how Lehloha's imaginative formulaic chronicle of the turbulent concluding part of the King's life unfolds through a set of eight consecutive scenes by which a particular rounded narrative structure is achieved.

Performance and Text in the Italian Carolingian Tradition

Performance and Text in the Italian Carolingian Tradition Antonio Scuderi Truman State University [*eCompanion at www.oraltradition.org 1 ] One of the most fascinating aspects of the chivalric-epic tradition of Italy is the historical dialectic between its manifestations as oral performance and written text. Based primarily on Carolingian lore, the oral and written traditions influenced each other in a symbiotic dialogue across the centuries. John Miles Foley, one of the leading experts on world epic traditions, discusses the interaction of oral and written processes in his book, The Singer of Tales in Performance: "The old model of the Great Divide between orality and literacy has given way in most quarters, pointing toward the accompanying demise of the absolutist dichotomy of performance versus document. . . . Consequently, text can no longer be separated out as something different by species from the oral tradition it records or draws upon; the question becomes not whether but how performance and document speak to one another" (1995:79). The dialectic interaction of oral and written manifestations of Carolingian lore in Italy will be the primary focus of this study. Special attention will be given to 1) the cantari, medieval poems that hail back to the beginnings of the chivalric-epic in Italian literature; and 2) oral performances of epic lore in the Sicilian cunto, which up until the early part of the twentieth century were still part of a living tradition. The epic tradition in Italy, both oral and written, is primarily based on the French chansons de geste, in particular the Chanson de Roland. Foley asserts that the chansons de geste were originally oral-derived texts: "Behind these manuscript-prisoned epics stands a tradition of oral composition and transmission by singers of tales, called jongleurs, although clerical and scribal activity intervened in various ways between oral performance and written record" (2002:177). With specific reference to the [End Page 68] Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, he explains that it "derives in some fashion from oral tradition and retains structures and textures typical of oral poetry . . . . We know it only as a manuscript dating from about 1100, but it's without doubt an oral poem" (2002:177-78). Foley, with his extensive scholarship and astute methodology on the subject, lends an authoritative and contemporary voice to the issue. But the belief that the chansons were derived from oral performance is certainly not new. 2 The Cantari It is believed that stories and songs from France came into Italy in the twelfth century with merchants traveling to northern and central Italy for commerce and pilgrims on their way to Rome, but especially via minstrels and jongleurs, some of whom may have accompanied the other travelers. 3 These stories and songs would include chansons de geste, which were war songs such as the Chanson de Roland; Arthurian romances; and lyric poetry. Important evidence of the popularity of the French chivalric tradition in Italy during this time is provided by one of the most important historical figures, Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), the son of an Italian merchant. Francis was enamored of the chivalric tradition and sang troubadour songs of chivalric deeds in Provençal. His sermons to popular audiences were often in a chivalric register, using the knight's code of honor as a metaphor for leading the Christian life (Cardini 1989; Frugoni 1995). The French tales began to be written down in Italy, and the form that is of particular interest to this study, the cantare (pl. -i, from the Italian "to sing"), consists of verses in octaves. Cantare refers both to the poem as well as to its internal divisions. The earliest extant manuscripts date from the 1340s. Most likely it was literate cantarini (cantari performers) who wrote down the first cantari, thus most of the standard structural features, discussed below, are performance-derived. French tales, mostly Carolingian [End Page 69] and to some extent Arthurian, were the primary sources of the early cantari. Later, in the fifteenth century, we find...

The Kalevala and the World's Traditional Epics (review)

The Kalevala and World's Traditional Epics. Studia Fennica Folkloristica. Edited by Lauri Honko. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002. When a folk-literary scholar, not herself an expert in poetry, digs into thick texture of this substantial volume on Kalevala and traditional epics, she is very soon enveloped in a quite rare elsewhere in folk-literary scholarship. Not only do scholars proudly proclaim elitism of their object of research, but they also imply that research of epics is an elite branch among varieties of folk-literary study. Most of them situate their research across boundary of literature and oral tradition. Their study is thus most pertinent to all who want to critically examine constructed dimension of category of folk literature in general, and specifically oral literature. One need only read a few stanzas or lines of any piece of poetry to sense poetic refinement and skill invested in creation of poetry. Only seldom does one encounter that level of sophistication in folk prose, and then only in specific forms of folktale that tend to straddle written-oral divide. I am reminded of a discussion I had with late editor of this volume, Lauri Honko, after we had been listening to a brilliant paper on urban legends delivered by one of our colleagues. Honko congratulated himself on having access to such textual riches as Finnish laments or South Indian epics, which he rated much higher than somewhat-in his eyes-banal oral narratives of modern urban cultures. The volume encompasses twenty-eight essays by twenty-seven authors. Honko himself contributed both a theoretical introductory essay and a more traditional comparative study of epics in eastern Baltic region. The essays break down thematically as follows: Kalevala across borders (five essays); European traditional epics (six essays); American and African traditional epics (two essays); Asian epics (six essays); and traditional epics of eastern Baltic region (nine essays). On whole they reflect intensified interest and common work done by scholars in last two decades, led and inspired by Honko himself through epic network he initiated within framework of Folklore Fellows International. Another important and leading figure in field is his close colleague John Miles Foley, founder and editor of Oral Tradition, who has contributed to volume an article that deals with metonymic character of oral with reference to an assumed pool of (113; cf. Honko, Textualizing Sin Epic [Folklore Fellows Communications 264], 1998; Textualization of Oral Epics, 2000). Although dynamics between persistence of traditional forms as textual rhetoric (120) and arena (121) may seem to be yet another refinement of competence-performance complex (e.g., Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art, 1998), Foley formulates astutely what seems to be at present a dominant intuition in studies: the old model of Great Divide between orality and literacy has entirely given way in most quarters, pointing toward accompanying demise of absolutist dichotomy of performance versus document (121). That may also provide generalizing perspective that makes this volume as a whole worthwhile reading for all folk-literary scholars and probably textual scholars, without distinguishing between genre and mode. Thus good or bad news, depending on one's point of view, or maybe no news at all, is fact that so-called Homeric question has definitely not disappeared or been rendered irrelevant by recent scholarship. In this sense assumption that A. B. Lord laid down in his Singer of Tales (1960), whereby oral-formulaic theory was to put an end to debate whether Iliad and Odyssey were textual culmination of an oral tradition of generations or rather stroke of a unique genius, Homer, has been disproved. …

Jazz Musicians and South Slavic Oral Epic Bards

Albert Lord writes in The Singer of Tales (2000:13) that for the South Slavic oral epic poet, or guslar, "the moment of composition is the performance." The guslar is concurrently performer, composer, poet, and singer. In performance, he participates creatively in shaping the tradition of which he is a part rather than acting merely as a transmitter. Similarly, though in a much more restricted sense, European art music of the late nineteenth century embraced a concept of performance—as contrasted to presentation—in which the musician provided "linear tension that went beyond what could be notated . . . and freely manipulated every part of every phrase . . . to achieve a performance that was itself inherent to the process of communication" (Ledbetter 1977:149-50). Until the 1920s, students of Franz Liszt and Theodor Leschetitzky, the unrivaled moguls of nineteenth-century pianism, flourished in a veritable hothouse environment of idiosyncratic performance styles.1 Such discretionary powers today have been abrogated by the modern notion of "fidelity to the score."2 However, echoes of nineteenth-century performance practice resonate today among jazz musicians, who view their improvisatory art as a process of communication with a live audience that itself participates in the performance event. This essay explores the startling kinship that the jazz musician shares with the guslar. [End Page 155] Comparisons between various oral performance traditions and jazz music have often been made, directly or implicitly,3 and it is logical and natural to associate these groups since each artist produces his art "live" in performance, without text, and before an audience. That one discipline is verbal art and the other musical need not overshadow the common ground that they share: both involve specialized languages. Each art form is subject to traditional rules that govern a spontaneous and ever-changing mode of aural expression. Most important, perhaps, is that both art forms share the medium of live performance, which makes unique demands on the artists and essentially defines their manner of composition. Indeed, the comparison is so immediate and attractive that it may thereby invite hasty and inaccurate assumptions. For example, whereas the oral poet is fluent in an epic language of formulaic phrases, he does not simply stitch together ready-made formulas to produce a familiar but "new" recombination. Likewise, jazz improvisation consists not of combining and recombining memorized motivic elements but of composing, within the parameters of traditional rules, new musical phrases that resonate with and respond to familiar chord progressions, themes, or styles. Jazz musicians and oral epic bards focus upon process rather than product, which is to say that their "product" exists only as the performance event itself, which temporally frames the "process" of creativity. A brief (and necessarily selective) review of relevant scholarship that explores creative processes in traditions of oral composition—both verbal and musical—will provide a wider perspective from which to investigate similarities between the jazz musician and the guslar. Margaret Beissinger has examined varieties of structural modification within oral composition by Romanian epic singers, or la'utari, who "are able to employ variation and innovative patterning within the traditional boundaries of epic song" (2000:110). She asserts that the smallest unit of musical composition within the Romanian epic tradition is the melodic formula, a traditionally derived element with which the la'utari construct linear sequences of larger systems that she calls "musical strophes" (101). Thus the Romanian epic singers' creative process involves an improvisatory "re-assembly" of traditional elements. [End Page 156] In a detailed study of the transmission of Gregorian chant, Leo Treitler writes that it is misleading to consider the medieval sacred singer's improvisation a "special" practice lest it be invoked solely as a rationale for explaining the unusual characteristics of problematic transmissions (1974:346). He conceives of a practice that involves elaboration and variation upon a Grundgestalt, or "fundamental model," and explains that "the singer learns one melody and imitates its pattern in...

Performed Narratives and Music in Japan

My field is performed narratives in Japan, especially genres with a strong musical component. In Japan, where literacy has been defined by the use of Chinese characters, writing in the vernacular using the phonetic kana scripts is closer to orality, and captures the sounds of the Japanese spoken language. With modernization much oral culture was lost, but collection of folklore from the early twentieth century was stimulated by the introduction of the Western discipline. Since the 1980s the oral-formulaic theory began to influence literary and other studies. Japanese translations of Lord’s The Singer of Tales and Ong’s Orality and Literacy have appeared in the late nineties. The disjunction of modernity has led to the reification of the premodern, now commonly called the traditional. Traditional has become a synonym for Japanese, native, non-Western, and pre-modern. A keyword in the performing arts and literary traditions is “transmission” (denshoo), which is congruent with the concept of oral tradition. In the postwar period, this concept has given way in official discourse to the concept of “tradition” (dentoo), which smacks of invented traditions. The report on Japanese studies in oral tradition by Hiroyuki Araki in

Winged words revisited: diction and meaning in Indian epic

Scholars working in the field of oral epic all have a particular form of words committed to memory—Milman Parry's celebrated definition of the formula. The definition in fact appears in two slightly differing forms in Parry's writing. In 1928 he wrote, ‘In the diction of bardic poetry, the formula can be defined as an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 13). Two years later came the more familiar version: ‘The formula in the Homeric poems may be defined as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 272). The differences between the two forms of the definition are negligible, and Parry made no further attempt to refine or modify it during the five years of life that remained to him. For Albert Lord, too, the definition was clearly adequate as it stood: in ch. iii of The singer of tales he simply quotes it verbatim (Lord, 1960: 30), and proceeds directly to a consideration of the function of formulaic diction.

John Miles Foley, The singer of tales in performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi, 235. Hb $29.95, pb $14.95.

John Miles Foley, The singer of tales in performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi, 235. Hb $29.95, pb $14.95.

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Singer of Tales in Performance

The Korean Singer of Tales

The Korean Singer of Tales