Oral-formulaic composition is a theory that originated in the scholarly study of
epic poetry
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.
...
and developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It seeks to explain two related issues:
# the process by which oral poets improvise poetry
# the reasons for orally improvised poetry (or written poetry deriving from traditions of oral improvisation) having the characteristics that it does
The key idea of the theory is that poets have a store of formulae (a formula being 'an expression that is regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express a particular essential idea') and that by linking the formulae in conventionalised ways, poets can rapidly compose verse.
Antoine Meillet
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (; 11 November 1866 Moulins, France – 21 September 1936 Châteaumeillant, France) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was ...
expressed the idea in 1923, thus:
In the hands of Meillet's student
Milman Parry
Milman Parry (June 23, 1902 – December 3, 1935) was an American Classicist whose theories on the origin of Homer's works have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Charles Darwin, Darw ...
(1902-1935), and subsequently the latter's student
Albert Lord
Albert Bates Lord (15 September 1912 – 29 July 1991) was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who, after the death of his mentor Milman Parry, carried on Parry's research on epic poetry.
Early life
Lord was bor ...
(1912-1991), the approach transformed the study of ancient and medieval poetry and of
oral poetry
Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain.
Background
Oral poetry is ...
generally. The main exponent and developer of their approaches was
John Miles Foley
John Miles Foley (January 22, 1947 – May 3, 2012) was a scholar of comparative oral tradition, particularly medieval and Old English literature, Homer and Serbian epic. He was the founder of the academic journal ''Oral Tradition'' and the Cen ...
(1947-2012).
Homeric verse
In Homeric verse, a phrase like ''rhododaktylos eos'' ("rosy fingered dawn") or ''oinopa ponton'' ("winedark sea") occupies a certain metrical pattern that fits, in modular fashion, into the six-foot Greek
hexameter
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It w ...
, which aids the ''aoidos'' or bard in extemporaneous composition. (The Iliad and The Odyssey both use
dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter (also known as heroic hexameter and the meter of epic) is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of the hexameter is usually as follows (writing – for a long syllable, ...
verse form, where every line contains six groups of syllables.) Moreover, such phrases would be subject to internal substitutions and adaptations, permitting flexibility in response to narrative and grammatical needs: ''podas okus Akhilleus'' ("swift footed Achilles") is metrically equivalent to ''koruthaiolos Ektor'' ("glancing-helmed Hector"). Formulas can also be combined into ''
type-scene A type scene is a literary convention employed by a narrator across a set of scenes, or related to scenes (place, action) already familiar to the audience. The similarities with, and differences from, the established type are used to illuminate deve ...
s'', longer, conventionalised depictions of generic actions in epic like the steps taken to arm oneself or to prepare a ship for sea.
Work of Parry and successors
Oral-formulaic theory was originally developed, principally by Parry in the 1920s, to explain how the
Homeric epics
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...
could have been passed down through many generations purely through word of mouth and why its formulas appeared as they did. His work was influential in the field of
Homeric scholarship
Homeric scholarship is the study of any Homeric topic, especially the two large surviving epics, the '' Iliad'' and '' Odyssey''. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies. The subject is one of the oldest in scholarsh ...
and changed the discourse on
the oral theory and the
Homeric Question
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'', and their Historicity of the Iliad, historicity (especially concerning the ''Iliad''). The subject has it ...
. The ''locus classicus'' for oral-formulaic poetry, however, was established by the work of Parry and his student Lord, not on oral recitation of Homer (which no longer was practiced), but on the (similar)
Serbian oral epic poetry of what was then of
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia (; sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Jugoslavija, Југославија ; sl, Jugoslavija ; mk, Југославија ;; rup, Iugoslavia; hu, Jugoszlávia; rue, label=Pannonian Rusyn, Югославия, translit=Juhoslavija ...
, where oral-formulaic composition could be observed and recorded ethnographically. Formulaic variation is apparent, for example, in the following lines:
:''a besjedi od Orasca Tale'' ("But spoke of Orashatz Tale")
:''a besjedi Mujagin Halile'' ("But spoke Mujo's Halil").
Lord, and more prominently
Francis Peabody Magoun
Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. Military Cross, MC (6 January 1895 – 5 June 1979) was one of the seminal figures in the study of medieval and English literature in the 20th century, a scholar of subjects as varied as soccer and ancient Germani ...
, also applied the theory to
Old English poetry
Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work ''Cædmo ...
(principally ''
Beowulf
''Beowulf'' (; ang, Bēowulf ) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The ...
'') in which formulaic variation such as the following is prominent:
:''Hrothgar mathelode helm Scildinga'' ("
Hrothgar
Hrothgar ( ang, Hrōðgār ; on, Hróarr) was a semi-legendary Danish king living around the early sixth century AD.
Hrothgar appears in the Anglo-Saxon epics ''Beowulf'' and ''Widsith'', in Norse sagas and poems, and in medieval Danish chron ...
spoke, protector of the
Scildings")
:''Beowulf mathelode bearn Ecgtheowes'' ("Beowulf spoke, son of Ecgtheow")
Magoun thought that formulaic poetry was necessarily oral in origin. That sparked a major and ongoing debate over the extent to which
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
poetry, which survives only in written form, should be seen as, in some sense, oral poetry.
The oral-formulaic theory of composition has now been applied to a wide variety of languages and works. A provocative new application of oral-formulaic theory is its use in attempting to explain the origin of at least some parts of the
Quran
The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Classical Arabic, Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation in Islam, revelation from God in Islam, ...
. Oral-Formulaic theory has also been applied to early Japanese works. The oral-formulaic theory has also been applied to the Olonko epic of the
Sakha people
The Yakuts, or the Sakha ( sah, саха, ; , ), are a Turkic ethnic group who mainly live in the Republic of Sakha in the Russian Federation, with some extending to the Amur, Magadan, Sakhalin regions, and the Taymyr and Evenk Districts ...
of Siberia.
Precursors of Parry
Before Parry, at least two other folklorists also noted the use of formulas among the epic tale singers of Yugoslavian (known as ''guslars''), (something acknowledged by Parry):
[Parry, Adam, ed. 1971. ''The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry'', Oxford: Clarendon Press, p.270 n.1][ Dundes, ''Fables of the Ancients?'', 2003: p.16]
#
Friedrich Salomon Krauss
Friedrich Salomon Krauss (7 October 1859, Požega, Kingdom of Hungary – 29 May 1938, Vienna, Austria) was a Croatian Austrian Jewish sexologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and Slavist.
Education
In 1877–78, Krauss attended the Universit ...
(1859-1938), a specialist in Yugoslavian folklore, who had done fieldwork with ''guslars'', believed these storytellers depended on "the fixed formulas from which he neither can nor wishes to vary".
#
Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep (23 April 1873 – 7 May 1957) was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist.
Biography
He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg (since 1871, part of the G ...
(1873-1957), who suggested that "the poems of the guslars consist of a juxtaposition of cliches relatively few in number and with which it suffices merely to be conversant … A fine guslar is one who handles these cliches as we play with cards, who orders them differently according to the use he wishes to make of them".
[Arnold van Gennep. 1909. (tretise) "La Question d’Homere", p. 52][ Dundes, ''Fables of the Ancients?'', 2003: p.16-17]
See also
*
Oral tradition
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (1985 ...
*
Oral poetry
Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain.
Background
Oral poetry is ...
*
Oral-formulaic theory in Anglo-Saxon poetry Oral-formulaic theory in Anglo-Saxon poetry refers to the application of the hypotheses of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on the Homeric Question to verse written in Old English. That is, the theory proposes that certain features of at least some of t ...
References
Bibliography
*
* Foley, John Miles (ed. and trans.), ''An eEdition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as performed by Halil Bajgorić'' (2005)
*
* Lord, Albert B. ''The Singer of Tales.'' Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960 (Second edition: edited by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Third edition: edited by David F. Elmer, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2019 ).
* Magoun, Francis P., Jr. "Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry", ''Speculum'', 28 (1953): 446–67.
*
Parry, Milman. "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I: Homer and Homeric Style." ''Harvard Studies in Classical Philology'' Vol. 41 (1930), 73–143.
*
Parry, Milman. "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. II: The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry." ''Harvard Studies in Classical Philology'' Vol. 43 (1932), 1–50.
* {{cite book , last1=Parry , first1=Milman , title=The making of Homeric verse : the collected papers of Milman Parry , date=1987 , publisher=Oxford University Press , location=New York , isbn=978-0195205602
Reece, Steve. "Orality and Literacy: Ancient Greek Literature as Oral Literature," in David Schenker and Martin Hose (eds.), ''Companion to Greek Literature'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015) 43-57.Reece, Steve. "Greek Epic Formulae," in Giorgios Giannakis (ed.), ''Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics'' (Leiden: Brill, 2014) 613-615.Windelberg, Marjorie and D. Gary Miller (1980): "How (Not) to Define the Epic Formula," ''Olifant,8'', 29-50.
Improvisation
Poetry