Singers and tales in the twenty-first century

Open access

This volume presents a wonderful collection of predominantly nuanced and sophisticated essays and articles on oral tradition research. The contributions originate from the 2010 conference Singers and Tales in the 21^st Century: The Legacies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, held in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Lord’s Singer of Tales (1960). The result is a Festschrift-type celebratory volume, in which contributions engage with the research of Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord as well as so-called Oral-Formulaic Theory (OFT) in various ways. Some readers may have already encountered the collection as a 2016 open-access special issue of the journal Classics@, where the contributions appeared alphabetically by author and without the valuable introduction.

The twenty-two contributions are by prominent scholars and represent a wide variety of interests and specializations. As in many Festschriften, the contributions are extremely heterogeneous. Although most are solid research articles, some are more essay-like, while others move in the direction of reports. Many contributions remain at the level of case studies tethered to particular materials or disciplinary discussions and leave it to the reader to consider the more general relevance and applicability of their findings. The heterogeneity is ultimately a strength, given the variety of oral tradition research to which it introduces the reader. Several contributions present major scholars’ contemporary work, interests, and approaches in microcosm (e.g. Foley, Lindahl, Reichl, Tarkka), while others open new directions, especially in epic research (e.g. Bonifazi & Elmer, Neziri & Scaldaferri) or present developments in international scholarship (Chao, Bamo).

The fourteen-year gap between the 2010 conference and the current publication has resulted in a fluid temporality in the book. The empirical studies, methodological perspectives, and theoretical insights are by no means out of date. The citations make it apparent that several contributions have been rewritten or updated since 2010 or 2012, but it is for the most part unclear when and to what degree, especially when the more recent references are only to the author’s own works. Consequently, it can be difficult to situate particular papers in the history of discussion, and statements occasionally seem anachronistic for 2024, like calling a 2009 publication “recent” (p.24) or saying “More than sixty years later” when more than seventy have passed (p.97). Some readers may also be surprised to find John Miles Foley among the authors of a ‘new’ book more than a decade after his passing. This temporal ambiguity does not impact the value of the scholarship, but the volume does read as a new edition of a fifteen-year-old book, and the intermediate 2016 journal special issue is surprisingly unmentioned aside from a single footnote (p. 173 n. 1).

The content is extremely rich, offering valuable knowledge, insights, and inspiration. For the introduction, rather than a general overview of Parry, Lord, and their impacts, the editors chose to present a more focused discussion of the ‘polyphonic archive’ of the Milman Parry Collection before introducing the book’s organization in six parts: Formula and Theme, Comparative Approaches, Multiformity, Orality and Textuality, Performance and Context, and Audible Archives. Coherence and cohesion are a challenge for any Festschrift, and this substantial volume is one to peruse in order to collect its many pearls rather than one to be read systematically from cover to cover.

Minna Skafte Jensen begins Formula and Theme with an introduction to Patricia Arant’s concept of ‘story pattern’ (1963) as complementary to OFT’s formula, theme, and song. Jensen illustrates the value of this tool by exploring its use in meaning-production in episodes of the Odyssey. Françoise Létoublon then follows in the tracks of Parry with a study of generic and fixed epithets for the city of Troy/Ilios, arguing for the city’s status as a character. Dwight F. Reynolds then introduces his own fieldwork experiments, inspired by Parry and Lord, with an Arabic oral epic tradition of Northern Egypt. These experiments brought into focus a high degree of fixity of certain epic passages as opposed to others and also formulae and extended formulaic passages that could vary in accord with the needs of rhyme.

Comparative Approaches opens with Margaret H. Beissinger’s study of Romanian marriage songs and especially those with themes of incest. Beissinger’s thought-provoking essay explores the relationships of these songs to kinship structures and social norms. Anna Bonifazi and David F. Elmer, comparing Bosniak and Homeric epic, then introduce an approach to ‘propositional visuality’ as narrating the act of seeing and ‘pragmatic visuality’ as narration that prompts and guides visual imagination. Their essay introduces valuable analytical tools. Although some of the actions and events they consider ‘visually intense’ (e.g. pp. 133–134) may seem more reflective of today’s cinematographic imagination than of emic reception, Carl Lindahl’s essay in a later section may support their interpretations. Joseph Falaky Nagy provides a study of three-hearted brigands with one or more serpents in those hearts. Relevant traditions are found in South Slavic and Old Irish, and Nagy suggests that a common tradition in their background may ultimately be an echo of the Indo-European dragon-slaying motif. I very much enjoyed Nikolay P. Grinster’s comparison of Homeric and Sanskrit epic presentations of laments, which includes the reconstruction of a Proto-Indo-European formula and which may be fruitfully brought into dialogue with comparative lament research.

Multiformity starts off with Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott’s introduction to the Homer Multitext database and its potential for considering multiformity in Homeric epics. This sounds like a fantastic resource, aiming for critical editions of all source texts and fragments with an interface that facilitates comparison. However, the essay reads like an advertisement, and its interesting examples aim to challenge the tendency to interpret Homeric epics and their formulaic language as fixed in ideal texts rather than variable. There is a lack of critical discussion of differences between oral and scribal multiformity or that the respective variations do not qualify as ‘composition-in-performance’ in Classic OFT (cf. Lord 1981). Lotte Tarkka then offers a strong theoretical contribution on genres, their interfaces, hybridity, and potential for meaning production in oral poetry traditions. These are explored and illustrated through the corpus of Finno-Karelian Kalevala-metric poems, and I found particularly interesting her observations on genre in situations of cultural change. Mirsad Kunić argues that, within the Bosniak epic tradition, the themes and heroes of the Krajina form a cycle with a distinct narrative-historical world, explored with a focus on its King Arthur-like figure and variation in songs of this figure’s death. The section closes with the theoretical discussion of John Miles Foley. Foley explores the relationship between the individual and collective tradition through oral epic in the South Slavic Stolac dialect, illustrating concepts such as traditional morphology and distributed authorship.

Olga M. Davidson opens Orality and Textuality with a thought-provoking comparative study of the aetiological legend/myth of the origin of the Persian Shāhnāma [‘Book of Kings’] as reconstructed from the gathered fragments of an earlier written work. Davidson first shows that this legend has deep roots within the culture and then considers parallels in other Indo-European cultures and beyond, arguing for the fragmented text as a widespread metaphor for reimagining oral variation in the past. Gísli Sigurðsson then takes the reader to thirteenth-century Iceland, where the vast medieval corpus is predominantly viewed through the lens of literature. He illustrates how acknowledging oral traditions can shed light on Old Icelandic poetry, mythology, and sagas. Aida Vidan wraps up the section with a nuanced adaptation of M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque (1986). Connecting back to the discussion of genres, Vidan shows the interplay of oral and literary traditions in meaning-making in cases of Croatian Renaissance drama.

Performance and Context starts off strongly with Thomas A. DuBois’ study that challenges scholarship’s tendency to isolate and reify oral texts as stable and enduring objects made of language. DuBois examines early emic representations of Samic joik as pointing to alternative strategies for representing a situation-dependent genre embedded in social interaction. Carl Lindahl then offers a multidimensional study of a fairytale tradition, introduced by a prelude on Lord’s approach to performance as contrasted with the performance-oriented turn of North American folkloristics. Lindahl returns to the topic of visualization, this time in reception, recollection, and emotional experience, in some ways anticipating Peter McMurray’s contribution in a later section. Gejin Chao shifts the focus to a review of epic research in China, where OFT only entered in 1990. He discusses the resulting paradigm shift from treating tradition as text to focusing on performance and practice and expresses the hope that Chinese research will advance from a consumer of Western theories to a producer of theories on the global stage. Qubumo Bamo advances and elaborates this discussion with a review of China’s Institute of Ethnic Literature as a case study of the work and strategy developing in the wake of this paradigm shift. Such reviews are vulnerable to becoming obsolete, and both have been updated since 2010: Bamo includes references through 2018 as well as a statement that suggests revisions in 2020 (p. 389), and Chao includes references through 2019.

Audible Archives opens with a paper on the audible rather than on archives. Karl Reichl points out that the title of Lord’s seminal work refers to singing rather than telling tales (1960), yet the musical side of performance has remained marginal to epic studies. Linking to both DuBois’ and Tarkka’s contributions, Reichl valuably illuminates the relevance, complexity, and tradition-dependence of music in epic research, especially when the diversity and interaction of genres is considered. Zymer U. Neziri and Nicola Scaldaferri then introduce Albanian epic songs and their position in the Parry Collection. They illuminate the significance of sung, recited, and interruptive dictation on the text-setting and metrical form of these epics through recent fieldwork experiments, which equally reveal the significance of embodied behaviour in documentation situations. Ronelle Alexander takes the reader along a tangled path that deconstructs Foley’s approach to the epic register as a foil in order to look at conversations in Parry’s field recordings, which are evaluated as not representative of a neutral conversational register; in an unexpected twist, she considers it thus correspondingly impossible “to achieve a full-fledged description of the performance register” (p.471). Peter McMurray draws the volume to a close with a thought-provoking essay in which he sets out to “argue that there is, in effect, no such thing as oral poetry” (p.476). He springboards through a series of fascinating cases concerned with the diversity of media and interpersonal experiences entangled with the flattened and limited evidence of archival holdings, complementing the discussion of Neziri and Scaldaferri. If I understand McMurray’s argument, oral poetry as commonly conceived is an imaginary product of cultural documentation technologies that isolate the voice and the verbal from socially situated and embodied events.

Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century is a valuable collection that contains a number of gems by brilliant scholars. The variety of cultures, traditions, and topics covered is remarkable, and many essays illuminate and enrich one another. The great value of this volume lies in its individual contributions, which I sincerely recommend exploring rather than merely cherry-picking the one or two relevant to a particular research topic.

Works Cited

Arant, Patricia. M. 1963 [1990]. Compositional Techniques of the Russian Oral Epic, the Bylina. New York.

Bakhtin, M.M. 1986. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin.

Elmer, David F., and Peter McMurray, eds. 2016. “Singers and Tales in the 21st Century: The Legacies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord.” Special issue, Classics@ 14. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.jissue:ClassicsAt.Issue14.Singers_and_Tales_in_the_21st_Century.2016.

Lord, Albert Bates. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass.

Lord, Albert B. 1981. “Memory, Fixity, and Genre in Oral Traditional Poetry”. In Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord. Ed. John Miles Foley. Columbus. Pp. 451–461.

Authors and Titles

Introduction: Parry, Lord, and the Polyphonic Archive (David F. Elmer and Peter McMurray)

PART I. FORMULA AND THEME

1. Menelaus in the Odyssey: Introducing the “Doubled Pattern” (Minna Skafte Jensen)
2. The Trojan Formulaic Theater (Françoise Létoublon)
3. Composition in Performance, Arab Style (Dwight F. Reynolds)

PART II. COMPARATIVE APPROACHES

4. Spiritual Kinship, Incest, and Traditional Weddings: Honor, Shame, and Cultural Boundaries in Romanian Marriage Songs (Margaret H. Beissinger)
5. Visuality in Bosniac and Homeric Epic (Anna Bonifazi and David F. Elmer)
6. Heroes and Their Snakes (Joseph Falaky Nagy)
7. Common Grief: Weeping Over Hector and Rāma (Nikolay P. Grintser)

PART III. MULTIFORMITY

8. The Homer Multitext and the System of Homeric Epic (Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott)
9. The “Field of Song” and the Four-Legged Horse: On the Dialogue of Genres in Kalevala-Meter Poetry (Lotte Tarkka)
10. The Many Deaths of Mustaj Beg of Lika (Mirsad Kunić; translated by Peter McMurray)
11. Oral Epic in Stolac: Collective Tradition and Individual Art (John Miles Foley†)

PART IV. ORALITY AND TEXTUALITY

12. The Written Text as a Metaphor for the Integrity of Oral Composition in Classical Persian Traditions and Beyond (Olga M. Davidson)
13. The Oral Background of the Eddas and Sagas (Gísli Sigurðsson)
14. Držić’s Magician and Lucić’s Captive Maiden: Oral Sources and the Croatian Renaissance Drama (Aida Vidan)

PART V. PERFORMANCE AND CONTEXT

15. Performances, Texts, and Contexts: Olaus Sirma, Johan Turi, and the Dilemma of Reifying a Context-Dependent Oral Tradition (Thomas A. DuBois)
16. The Poetics of Immanence in the American Mountain Märchen (Carl Lindahl)
17. Indigenized Applications of the Oral-Formulaic Theory in China (Gejin Chao)
18. The Institute of Ethnic Literature’s Institutionalized Approaches to Living Oral Traditions (Qubumo Bamo)

PART VI. AUDIBLE ARCHIVES

19. The Singing of Tales: The Role of Music in the Performance of Oral Epics in Turkey and Central Asia (Karl Reichl)
20. From the Archive to the Field: New Research on Albanian Epic Songs (Zymer U. Neziri and Nicola Scaldaferri)
21. Tracking the South Slavic Epic Register (Ronelle Alexander)
22. There Are No Oral Media? Multisensory Perceptions of South Slavic Epic Poetry (Peter McMurray)