In the study of oral poetics, progressively greater attention and accord have been paid to the capacities of the traditional audience, that group of knowledgeable individuals for whom or before whom a poem or song was originally performed. Past research on oral or oral-derived works, conditioned by certain fundamental assumptions regarding texts and authors, focused on the text itself or on the skills or identity of a reconstructed author/performer. The audience involved—not seldom long lost in the past—was often simply assumed, its interpretative arsenal and methods subsumed under tabulations of information with which audience members were said to have been familiar: "folklore," "native lays and traditions," "analogues," "traditional matter," "vernacular learning." In his seminal 1936 essay on Beowulf, J. R. R. Tolkien used just these terms to describe a set of information shared between author and audience that he found implied by the rich fabric of allusions and contrasts of imagery inherent in the Old English poem. In describing these, he was able to conclude that "the whole must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet's contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with deep significance . . ." (107). Dorothy Whitelock's The Audience of Beowulf (1951) took these assumptions regarding the "minds of the poet's contemporaries" further by trying to establish what backgrounds, gender, and livelihoods the "alert and intelligent" audience of the work was likely to have had in the first place. But as scholarship revealed ever-greater complexities in both the composition and performance of oral works, some scholars refused to accord an equal sophistication to their audiences: Paull F. Baum (1960), for instance, roundly rejected Whitelock's assumptions, preferring instead to see Beowulf as the product of a genius poet writing largely only for himself and probably comprehensible to barely a handful of highly gifted readers. And although modern reception theory has rekindled scholarly interest in the audience as a significant part of the performance of
On an auspicious day, two families from Ne’u na Village, a small village along the Yellow River in Western China’s Qinghai Province, gather to celebrate a wedding. The day has been chosen specifically for this purpose. Midway through the wedding banquet, a man stands before the crowd already so drunk that his words are almost unintelligible, and he speaks. He begins with an invocation to several deities, and then a statement about how auspicious this day is and how it has been chosen specifically for this purpose. After describing the beautiful dress of the bride down to the smallest hair ornament, he begins to describe Tibet and its geographic and historical relations with Nepal and China. Next, with exquisite imagery, he tells of the unique physical environment of the Tibetan plateau, and finally he discusses the beauty and auspiciousness of the very village in which the wedding is being held. At every turn this area and its people are described with detailed references to the religious and natural worlds in which Tibetans live. The speech is the highlight of the wedding in Ne'u na. Following the speech, guests offer gifts to the new couple—first from the groom’s side, then from the bride’s—and people from both sides begin antiphonal singing until late into the night.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a cache of ancient manuscripts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek discovered in eleven caves from 1947-1956. Most scholars associate the Dead Sea Scrolls with an ancient Jewish community who lived in a complex of ruins on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea known as Khirbet Qumran. Early on scholars identified this “Qumran Community” with the Essenes, a well-known Jewish group discussed by Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder. As pointed out by Géza Vermes, the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is due to their great antiquity compared with our previously oldest copies of biblical books: “Before 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the whole of Isaiah was the Ben Asher codex from Cairo dated to 895 CE, as against the complete Isaiah scroll from Cave 1, which is about a millennium older” (2004:15). Overall, as summarized by Vermes, the Dead Sea Scrolls have substantially altered our views concerning both the text and the canon of the Bible, as well as ancient Jewish scribal practices (15-16). For a number of reasons beyond the purview of this article, scholarship over the last fifty years has made it difficult to succinctly describe the ancient Jewish communities associated with the so-called “sectarian” compositions in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Robust challenges to the Essene 1
A Pebble Smoothed by Tradition:Lines 607–61 of Beowulf as a Formulaic Set-piece Michael D.C. Drout (bio) and Leah Smith (bio) In lines 607–61 of Beowulf, just before the battle between the hero and the monster Grendel, the Danes and visiting Geats celebrate their comradeship in the great hall of Heorot.1 While venerable Hrothgar, king of the Danes, presides, Queen Wealhtheow, bedecked with gold, carries the ornamented cup of fellowship to each warrior in turn, old and young alike.2 The passage, which for convenience we will call "Wealhtheow's cup-bearing," is one of several depictions in Beowulf of the social happiness that Anglo-Saxon poetry often calls dream ("joy") and has been described as "the most detailed description we possess of the offering of the ceremonial drinking cup to an honored guest in early Germanic society" (Fulk, Bjork, and Niles 2008:155). But in contrast to Wealhtheow's later appearance in the poem (lines 1168b-231)—in which she thwarts Hrothgar's attempted adoption of Beowulf, promotes the king's nephew Hrothulf as a protector for her sons, and gives the legendary Brosing necklace to the hero—nothing much happens. Jeff Opland (1976:446–57) does not include the passage in his list of "joy in the hall" type-scenes. Yet new computer-assisted "lexomic" methods of analysis3 show that these seemingly banal lines contain some of the highest concentrations of unusual lexical, metrical, grammatical, and formulaic features in Beowulf, and the overall distribution of vocabulary in the passage is so distinctive that it affects computer-assisted cluster analysis to a greater extent than any other similar-sized segment of the poem. In the discussion that follows, we introduce several techniques of lexomic analysis and explain how these approaches identify qualitative differences between lines 607–61 and the rest of the poem. We then show how all of these differences are best explained by positing that the passage has a source different from its surrounding textual matrix, a source that was most likely not a written text, but a traditional type-scene.4 A close reading of the lines in the light of recent approaches to the formula in Old English explains how the passage, so well polished by tradition that it preserved low-level linguistic features to almost the same degree as a written source would, could nevertheless have been easily adapted to other narrative contexts. Lexomic Methods Lexomic methods combine computer-assisted statistical analyses with traditional literary approaches such as close reading, philological analysis, source study, and cultural interpretation. The specific techniques employed in this paper fall into two categories: hierarchical clustering, which uses the mathematical calculation of similarity and difference to create groups of texts or segments in which the members inside the group share more features than those outside, and rolling-window analysis, which produces a visual representation of the average frequency of particular words, letters or phrases within whole texts, allowing us to identify much smaller features within them. In cluster analysis, we determine the relative frequencies of every word in a group of texts or text-segments, calculate the differences among these relative frequencies, square the resulting numbers, and uses the square-root of the sums of the differences to find what is called the "Euclidian distance" between each pair of segments. From this information, the Lexos software5 uses the free implementation of hierarchical, agglomerative clustering to group the segments, without pre-specifying the number of groups to be created, by clustering together those with the smallest overall differences in word frequencies (these have the most words in common) in a branching diagram, or dendrogram, that visually represents the relative similarities of the segments.6 Branches of the dendrogram are called clades, the similarity of which is represented by the vertical distance between the branch-points: the shorter the line, the more similar the clades. Because variations in the distribution of very common words (most often function words such as conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns), more strongly influence dendrogram geometry than the presence or absence of rare words in particular segments, cluster analysis can often identify broad patterns of vocabulary distribution that are not always...
The Fairy Seers of eastern Serbia:Seeing Fairies—Speaking through Trance Maria Vivod (bio) The Fairy-Seer The fairy-seers of Southeastern Europe are (mostly) women who are able to communicate with women-like creatures from the supernatural world. Sometimes the fairy-seers induce a trance state in order to establish communication with these creatures. During their communication with the fairies the fairy-seers can prophesy about future events. The fairy-seers can also deliver messages to the living on behalf of their deceased relatives. Similarly, they advise about how to heal an ill individual or the treatment of that individual can proceed after consulting the fairies. These illnesses are usually a form of so called "fairy-illness"—a disorder that has its origins in a curse or a spell wrought by fairies offended by that individual. In the narratives of fairy-seers, fairies are described as three young, beautiful longhaired women, dressed either in white or in black. The women who can see and speak to the fairies have been chosen by them early on, usually in their childhood or adolescence. By dancing and singing on special days of the orthodox Christian calendar, these women fall into a trance state and then communicate with "their sisters," as these invisible creatures are called by these women. The fairy-seers are called numerous names in various languages across southeastern Europe. The semantic field of these varying designations is far from identical: sometimes the seers need not enter into a trance to see them, sometimes they fight (nocturnal) battles in the sky to ensure good crops for their region, where they live and work as any normal human being. But there is one common denominator to all of them: they undergo a process of initiation (prompted by these creatures) and the invisible creatures with whom they communicate are females. I choose to use this term in an attempt to cover and to depict a vast range of more or less similar phenomena across the Balkans with an English term, with the goal of creating an "umbrella term" in the English language (nowadays a lingua franca) for working purposes. The Context The phenomenon of individuals capable of communication with creatures of the invisible world—vilarkas ("the ones from the fairies"), padalicas ("the ones who fall"), vilenicas ("the ones from the fairies")—and of doing good in their communities of birth in south-eastern Europe has been scientifically analyzed over the past five or six decades from several perspectives. First, as fragments of pre-Christian belief-systems that were mostly to be found in historical documents such as witch-hunt trials (see Ginzburg 1966 for Italy; Klaniczay 1983, 1984, and 2006 for Hungary; Henningsen 1993 and Čiča 2002a for Croatia). Second, as remnants of still existing complex popular belief systems about witches and fairies and the syncretism between these two female benevolent/malevolent creatures (for instance Pòcs 1986 and Zentai 1976 for Central Europe; Bošković-Štulli 1953 and 1960 for Croatia; Đorđević 1952 for Serbia and Yugoslavia). Third, from the ethnomedical standpoint as vestiges of traditional holistic beliefs about human health and its connection to nature and divinities (for Serbia see Tucakov 1965; Radenković 1996; Vivod 2014).Traces of this phenomenon, such as the texts of charms or fairytales, were often analyzed as bits and pieces of the local folklore (for Serbia see: Zečević 1981; Radenković 1996; Šešo 2003; Đorđević 1989). Oral tradition studies was one of the main fields that produced a detailed description of and provided the most abundant bibliography about fairy-seeing individuals. The texts of charms and songs and healing procedures were one of the topics to which some of the best scientific pieces were consecrated (see Pócs 1985 for the Hungarian speaking region or Radenković 1996 for the South-Slavic population). Majzner (1921), Luka Šešo (2003) and Bošković-Štulli (1953 and 1960) provided actual descriptions and collected narratives from individuals who either knew a fairy-seeing person or someone who consulted a fairy-seer. The phenomenon was usually elaborated from the point of view of the creatures as the most picturesque elements of oral literature and...
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...
Oral Features of the Qur'ān Detected in Public Recitation Mary Knight (bio) Introduction The first audience for the Qur'ān did not receive leaves with writing on them (98:2),1 nor something on parchment they could touch (6:7), nor a book from the sky (4:153). They heard it. The Qur'ān arrived orally, piecemeal, and, significantly, each piece of which was heard before it was written down. Within a quarter of a century the pieces were collected, their order standardized, and uniform copies of the whole soon became available. At that point, believers could access it by ear or by eye (and by heart for those portions they had memorized). This complementarity of hearing and reading, a bimodal approach to verbal comprehension, has endured within Muslim communities to this day, but for many scholars in the West, the primary interaction with the work has been in its printed form, as a text read, usually silently. But since the words are the same whether read or heard, what difference does it make? This essay examines some of the textual features of the Qur'ān that emerge more prominently when listening to it, features that may enhance insight gained during slow or silent reading sessions. A comparison with ancient Greek oral works, such as those of Homer, highlights features of orality in both, demonstrating that both are meant to be heard. An examination of Classical memory methodologies reveals how rhetorical figures and other linguistic devices facilitate transmission and continuing presentation of works such as these in an "audiome" (sound-rich environment or one in which communication by sound predominates, whether in preliterate or literate societies), as well as their preservation in written text. Figures and devices involving structure, meaning, diction, syntax, and sound are sampled from the Qur'ān so readers might recognize their aural power and thus their significance within the text. All translations are by the author, unless indicated. The rudimentary translations of Quranic material provided herein by the author (best translation of the Qur'ān into English to date is that by Abdel Haleem 2004) are intended to convey as much as possible the original word order so that the sequence of ideas flows as original listeners would have heard them in Arabic; however, this order may not account for the emphasis words normally have in a statement because of the language's typical relative placement of Topic and Focus (see Edwards 2002:9–13). Citations from the Qur'ān are from the riwāyah of Ḥafṣ, given in the form [sura number: āyah number], and appear in parentheses without other attribution.2 Qur'ān and Kitāb—and Some Homer The work orally received and orally transmitted by Prophet Muhammad is called by Muslims and non-Muslims alike the Qur'ān, the "much-recited," whose Arabic root means "to recite or read aloud." The name Qur'ān is far and away more common than the work's second most popular name, al-Kitāb al-Karīm, "the generous book," with the root of the word for book, kataba, meaning literally "he has written, he wrote," but because it is the simplest form of the verb it is used as the dictionary entry and thus as shorthand for "to write." The Qur'ān was received in segments, not as a single whole, because the pieces came in response to events (Madigan 2001:63). While the idea of the Qur'ān as a "single whole" (25:32: jumlatan wāḥidatan) is most appropriate to writing, and the piecemeal origin of the book suits its oral reception and the oral style of the text, the Qur'ān is no less a book because of its oral character.3 In fact, there is no great divide between orality and literacy, nor an easy diagnostic tool to classify this or that work as strictly oral or strictly literate. To ignore either literate or oral interpretative approaches, however, will fail to provide sustainable perspectives and a growing enrichment of our understanding of the Qur'ān. Indeed, the complementarity of Qur'ān and Kitāb highlights for us how much this sacred work includes both "oral" and "literate" (written) stylistic...
A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge since James Ross published “A Classification of Gaelic Folk-Song” in 1957.1 Ross’s study was typical of a time when scholars favored a clinical and taxonomical approach to oral traditional culture, before modern theories about text, context, and genre began to raise good questions about the application of scientific methods to the analysis of cultural activity. The search for answers to these questions has greatly advanced the way ethnographers and ethnomusicologists understand culture, including the cultures of the Gael.2 After six decades, it seems fitting to revisit Ross’s classification system, and to examine whether the effort of constructing such a system is still worthwhile or not. In The Anthropology of Music, Alan Merriam (1964:209) suggests that we understand musical activity by considering the uses and functions that music serves within a given culture:
Between the Oral and the Literary:The Case of the Naxi Dongba Texts1 Duncan Poupard (bio) "…it is not the case that words are one thing and the rite another.The uttering of the words itself is a ritual." (Edmund Leach 1966:407) Shafts of sunlight stream through the crooked rafters, piercing the heavy smoke from the fire. Before you sits a dongba ritualist. He reads from the beautifully written manuscript in his hands, singing of the Naxi ancestors and their encounters with spirits—good and ill. He closes his eyes, lost in memory. He has stopped reading, but he keeps on singing. This dongba ritualist, unlike the Tibetan paper singers, is fully literate; and unlike a priest reading a sermon from the Bible, he is versed in the craft of oral poetry. The book in front of him can, unlike the prop of the paper singer, be read, for it is a receptacle of the written word; but unlike the Bible, it can never be read with the same two combinations of words. Research into oral traditions has long been centered on contrasting what is perceived to be "oral" with the "literary," as if the two stand on opposite sides of some unbridgeable chasm. This began in earnest with the work of Milman Parry,2 who divided literature precisely into these two forms: "the one part of literature is oral, the other written" (1933:180). Even today, after Derrida's opening up of the oral versus written dichotomy, and in spite of research on living oral traditions in cultures that use writing for other social interactions, the two forms are still perceived as essentially separate. They can co-exist, but can they co-exist within the same text? If so, how? And what if there was a tradition of literature that could be shown to bridge this divide? It is my argument that not only can the ritual texts of the Naxi3 people of southwest China be proven to be demonstrably oral in nature, but that they also exist in a realm of potentiality that occupies the uncontested territory between the two extremes of oral and written: they are truly transitionary texts. Oral literature, in terms of Parry's Oral-Formulaic Theory,4 has traditionally been identified by its repeated phrases or "formulas," and this formulaic nature is key to its composition. In comparison, written texts have fewer repeated phrases, with unique lines and unusual words employed to non-standard effect. Parry's work has come to be regarded by a number of modern scholars as an outmoded phase in Homeric scholarship (and in the field of oral tradition that sprung from it). Some say that oral theory itself is a "myth," because the Homeric hexameter is dependent upon the written alphabet (Bellamy 1989:307), others that we can "put a pen in" Homer's hand (Shive 1987:139). This understanding does not resolve our problem: if "oral epics" are written and not oral, then we are no closer to discovering an in-between stage, texts that are demonstrably both oral and written. The debate as to whether much literature that is perceived of today as "oral" was in fact orally composed is always hampered by the fact that we are reading and analyzing the texts in their written form. In essence, the pen is always hypothetically in Homer's hand. As Parry himself said: "If one wishes to think that Homer composed his poems orally, and then sat down and wrote them out, there is little that can be said in disproof, and little that needs to be said" (1930:144). The question we are asked to ponder here is whether or not Homer used the technology of writing to compose his epic poetry, and what effect might this have on our understanding of oral vs written composition. On this point, Merritt Sale has argued, "we may think it improbable, but an oral poet could have learned to write" (1996:375). But why is it improbable in the first place that a ("primitive") oral poet could write? It is our chirographic bias that teaches us so. Jakobson and Bogatyrev made the famous claim that oral works...
A widespread kind of parallelism is a relation between sections of text such that each resembles the other in linguistic form, or in lexical meaning, or in both form and meaning. In poetry, this kind of parallelism can be systematic, and when it is, it holds between two adjacent sections. The new claim of this article is that these sections are short enough for the whole parallel pair to be held in working memory (in the episodic buffer). Parallelism thus shares a property with the other added forms of poetry - meter, rhyme and alliteration - that it holds over material which can be held as a whole section (such as line or couplet) in working memory. I conclude by suggesting that processing the parallel pair in working memory brings advantages to the poetry: an emotional effect from contrastive valence, an epistemic effect from the fluency heuristic, and the production of metaphorical meaning.
