Lauri Honko, Jawaharlal Handoo and John Miles Foley (eds.), The Epic: Oral and Written. Central Institute of Indian Languages: Mysore, 1998. 234 pp. ISBN 81-7342-055-6.
(For copies write or call: Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore 570 006, India. Phones: 00-91-821-515558/515820. Fax: 00-91-821-515032. E-mail: ciil@giasbg01.vsnl.net.in)
This volume gathers papers delivered during six panel sessions organized by Lauri Honko for the 11th Congress of the International Society for Folk-Narrative Research, held at the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, India in January 1995. As such, the collection contains selected reports originating within the framework of a group of approximately 70 active scholars from five continents and 22 countries, known as the “Folklore Fellows in Oral Epics”, who at the time of the book’s publication had met four times in the years 1993-96. Essays from the first meeting in Turku, Finland in June 1993 appeared as “Epics Along the Silk Roads” in issue 11/1 of the journal Oral Tradition, edited with an introduction by Lauri Honko, while the second, smaller meeting (in Turku, June 1994) addressed “Modes of Performing Epics.” The result of the third meeting in Mysore in 1995 is what we find here, while the papers of the fourth meeting in Turku, June 1996 appeared in a volume “Textualization of Oral Epics” in October 2000.
The Epic: Oral and Written was published by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India, with support from the Academy of Finland. Jawaharlal Handoo, John Foley and Lauri Honko each shared editorial duties at different points in the project. The book opens with Lauri Honko’s thoughtful introduction, while the authors and essays themselves are grouped under four thematic headings according to the following scheme: “Oral Composition of Epics” (Lauri and Anneli Honko, John Miles Foley, Minna Skafte Jensen), “Epic Traditions in India” (Heda Jason, John Brockington, Mary Brockington, Susan S. Wadley), “Epic and History” (Doris Edel, Isaac Olawale Albert), and “Integrating Oral and Written” (Lauri Harvilahti, Kirsten Thisted, Jiangbian Jiacuo, Jia Zhi).
In his introduction Honko orients the focus of the diverse essays by presenting a theoretical framework in which the material might be best approached. Research on lengthy oral and semi-oral epics has rapidly improved in the last two decades, Honko tells us, primarily as a result of the quality and amount of fieldwork recently conducted concerning epic and epic-related genres in Africa, Central Asia, India, and Oceania. The study of epic in general, and of oral epic in particular, has almost always been conceived under the influence of the Homeric epics (p. 12), a historical circumstance that has caused distortions in the analysis of traditional supernarratives. Tradition-oriented supernarratives, and the many genres and sub-epics that constitute them, ostensibly stand to gain more from an analysis of their place within the linguistic environment, functional context, and tradition systems in which they live rather than from external comparison to an overburdened exemplum of Homer. To put it another way, the existence of comparative material matching the length of Homeric poetry now exists in abundance, and some of it, including epics collected in Bosnia and Hercegovina, even reveal certain genric similarities to Homer, while the living epics of Kirghizia, Tibet, and Mongolia easily dwarf the length of the Homeric material. In the case of Greece, furthermore, no written tradition survived to relate the facts of the origin or contemporaneous interpretation of Homeric poetry, and so those poems forever remain an anomalous case in which all analysis is involved to some degree in speculative retrieval, philological reconstruction, and aesthetic evaluation – which has sometimes resulted in the development of terminology lacking the coherence and logic of fieldwork-based analyses.
Honko divides epic into three categories: 1) literary, 2) semi-literary or tradition-oriented, and 3) purely oral epics (10). Milton’s Paradise Lost exemplifies the first, left outside the focus of the present work. Honko also refrains from a full-length discussion of the third, `pure’ oral epic category, whereby especially the claim to “purity” opens “a long chain of questions, even disputes” (12). It is thus the second category of “oral and written” epic which attracts the focus of the papers collected here. Honko adds, “One volume is not going to solve many problems, but it is certainly one way of screening the issues and showing the scholars’ view on what should be in the focus of our joint enterprise.” If there is one defining feature of the book, Honko’s quote points directly to it: theoretical studies of the interrelation between oral and written epics, presented alongside rich fieldwork reports analyzing oral performance and strategies of textualization, provide the reader with a broad range of material that will reward repeated study.
Units in purely oral composition
Lauri and Anneli Honko’s article analyzes certain “units of composition” found in the “purely oral” Siri epic as sung and dictated by Gopala Naika – a singer, tradition, and ritual context that they have been collecting and analyzing for over a decade. At the time of the Congress in Mysore, the three-volume Siri Epic project prepared by the Honko-led research team had not yet appeared, and so this essay presents a dense but focused account of (and an excellent introduction to) the many questions, approaches, and solutions that guide the massive 699-page Textualisation of the Siri Epic (FFC 264).
By comparing certain differences in the sung and dictated versions of the epic, the Honkos develop an analytic scheme that covers both emic and etic units. As they put it, “The critical moment in creating a methodology for an analysis of oral epics is choosing the units of composition. Theory must be brought into harmony with empirical field material. We have confronted this fact in our fieldwork among the speakers of Tulu in South Karnataka.” (34) The Honkos delimit their units on the basis of both external narrative logic and internal divisions mentioned by the singer in interviews, and they settle on the following scheme as a provisional framework for the description of narrative variation. “Multiforms” are defined as “repeatable and artistic expressions of variable length which are constitutive for narration and function as generic markers.” (35) They are based on the texture of the singer’s language and can be anywhere from 2 to 120 lines long. The overall narrative line of the song is referred to as the “path of composition”, which corresponds to Naika’s own use of the word saadi `path’ to describe the progression of narrative (43). A “step” is a minimal narrative move within a multiform and along that same path. An “episode” is a unit divided on the basis of narrative logic and overarching plot structure; it excludes non-narrative singing, but can include numerous multiforms. “Description” is a longer narrative unit consisting sometimes of multiple episodes, and it matches closely certain concepts found in ancient Indian poetics. Based on thick documentation and in conversation with previous folkloristic methodology, the Honkos demonstrate that their scheme explains both segmentations in the singing itself as well as wider plot variation in both synchronic and diachronic frames.
After presenting the framework, the article then analyzes three appearances of a “Having a divine child description” (where one will find the occurrence of a multiform within a multiform [49]) as well as the multiforms “Silken Cradle,” “Name-Giving,” and “Caring.” Each example is clearly presented and exhaustively analyzed. The Honkos take care to provide ample text in the original Tulu language so that readers can see for themselves the textural variation and reasons for their recalibration of oral-formulaic methodologies. The research team’s attempt to match their analytical scheme to the emic language of the singer, as well as their subsequent analyses on the basis of this framework, will be of great methodological assistance to folklorists planning their own future projects; by constantly referring this question back to similar problems raised by ancient Indian poetics, the Honkos’ take an additional step forward by opening a truly astonishing range of questions whose depth and significance will take many, many years to unravel. In this article, the reader is witness to epoch-making research.
John Miles Foley’s contribution, entitled “The Rhetorical Persistence of Traditional Forms in Oral Epic Texts”, is a valuable contribution to contemporary debates surrounding the interpretation of texts based on, or originating in, oral traditional performance. His chapter outlines a program for reading oral-derived texts by blending oral-formulaic theory, ethnography of speaking, and ethnopoetic approaches into an interpretive methodology that retrieves oral traditional rhetorical structures latent in oral-derived or tradition-oriented texts. The radicality of the tearing of oral performance away from its context in order to create visible textuality, Foley demonstrates, still leaves determinate traces of intralinguistic structures, networks of meaning, and story-patterns that would remain obscure if measured only by the canons of literary poetics. By beginning with the question of “what becomes of oral traditions, committed, in myriad ways, to textual form?” (85), and continuing with the goal of “how to ascertain as well as possible how a given text continues the tradition of reception” (90), Foley draws attention to the essential question of how to recover, interpret, and understand the phenomenal and semantic features in performance that are both preserved and lost, and, ultimately transformed (and frequently still legible) through the process of notation and textualization.
It is by “reading” in this way – by tracing and recreating traditional modes of signification and their still-legible rhetorical structures – that the poem’s life and afterlife, through reception and vigilant interpretation, continue to appear to later readers. A fuller elaboration of these reading methodologies can be found in Foley’s Singer of Tales in Performance.
The debate on transitional text
Minna Skafte Jensen’s point of departure is Albert Lord’s use of the term “transitional text” to describe certain texts that depend on both oral performance and writing for their form and structure. In The Singer of Tales, Lord first presented the idea of a hypothetical “transitional text” in order to deny, based on his empirical observations of singers in the former-Yugoslavia, that writing could help a living singer improve his composition by means of written media; for Lord, written and oral composition were incompatible.
Lord’s initial disagreement was with Homeric scholars who frequently argued that writing must have been used to improve orally composed materials in order to produce an epic as complex and polished as Homer’s. Lord, in response, countered by arguing that the notion of a “transitional text” was not only foreign to the singers whom he had observed in Yugoslavia but ultimately meaningless in a context where separate compositional techniques (the one written, the other oral) exist side by side. Lord therefore concluded that the use of the notion of a “transitional text” in the Homeric case was fundamentally flawed. According to Lord, the Homeric poems might well have been dictated to scribes, with a pace allowing the singer to eliminate metrical and lexical infelicities, but they certainly were not written down by the poet himself; writing and oral composition were two separate techniques, “contrary and mutually exclusive. – – The written technique … is not compatible with the oral technique, and the two could not possibly combine, to form another, a third, a `transitional’ technique” (quoted by Skafte Jensen, p. 94). Interestingly, in The Singer of Tales Lord also proposed other appellations for similar sorts of intermediate, intermedial, or tradition-oriented texts, including “autograph oral” and “oral dictated” texts, the latter of which is a favorite point of contention among Homerists, the former of which seems to have gone relatively unnoticed of late.
However, Lord famously revised his view that the “transitional text” is an impossibility, much the result of having read more closely certain poems in South Slavic traditions in which literate authors exhibited an undeniable competence in both oral and written compositional forms, sometimes in the same poems and in the same `literary’ collection. The crucial essay where Lord announces his change of mind is “The Transitional Text” (in A. B. Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale, Cornell UP, 1995.) As Skafte Jensen points out, Lord’s “The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient Values” (in John Miles Foley [ed.], Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context, University of Missouri Press, 1986) is also essential. According to John Miles Foley’s The Theory of Oral Composition (IUP, 1988, p. 49, 55), Lord first considers the possibility of “transitional texts” in an article published in 1968 (entitled “Homer as Oral Poet”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72: 1-46), but also discusses the topic in 1986 in “Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula” (Oral Tradition 1: 467-503), to which Skafte Jensen also refers.
After the change of mind, Lord explained with characteristic clarity that “transitional texts” could, in his opinion, be found in cases where oral traditional rhetorical modes were skillfully used in literate compositions by authors who grew up in and around living traditions and had early on composed oral epics but later become fully literate poets. However, it is important to remember that the hypothetical case of a skilled singer of long narrative who also personally uses writing in order to improve the quality of his or her own oral composition, remained, for Lord, anomalous.
Skafte Jensen, knowing all of this very well and presenting it clearly, wants to revisit and reaffirm Lord’s initial denial of “transitional texts” in order to shield Homeric studies from the reappearance of the idea of writing-as-an-aid-to-composition, and so she presents her discussion as a critique of the concept of the “transitional text” in general. Skafte Jensen first reviews some of Lord’s better critics (certain medievalists and anthropologists who argued, in opposition to Lord, for a continuum of texts between oral and written), and then discusses recent theories concerning the origin of the Greek alphabet and its relation to Homeric transcription in order to demonstrate that Homerists have once again reinstated the “transitional text” as an explanatory model. She points out that recent Homeric scholars such as Barry Powell, in particular, have returned to Lord’s notion of “transitional text” in order to argue that writing was responsible for the original form of the poems (certainly writing was essential at some point, but how remains a vexed question).
Rejecting Romantic hypotheses about the “fixation” of early Homeric texts and the oral tradition that gave rise to them, Skafte Jensen’s essay wisely separates the notion of “transitional text” from “oral dictated text.” She argues that the use of writing for fixation is based on a fallacious conception of history-as-progress, or of the development of culture as oral-to-written, and she recalls the fact that in early Greece writing technology had other, performative functions, particularly in funeral inscriptions, and graffito, where the voice of the written inscription is one of performative authority. Her conclusions not only square with folkloristic research but also reaffirm “the relevance in general of the oral comparison” (112) by rejecting the recent obsession among Homerists with the notion of “fixation”: “… the idea of fixation has in general been rather prominent. What if this is totally misdirected? In a way, I think we should consider letting go of the idea altogether” (108).
To this suggestion one would like only to add: could we not also let go of the term “transitional text” itself, and adopt a less teleological, and more phenomenologically precise, term? Is not the notion of a “transition” from “oral” to “written” historically and folkloristically naive? Not surprisingly, Lauri Honko answers this question in the introduction to this volume when he writes that, “The idea of a predominantly one-way traffic from oral to written has been replaced by the more complex models concerning, for example, oral styles in written text and the `written-like’ handling of materials in oral performance; the visible or invisible use of notebooks and manuscripts in the oral performances of epics; various forms of `copying’ oral text; the transfer of ownership of oral texts, the mental editing of textual elements, oral and written, between performances, the intertextual formation of mental texts in the mind of the singer, etc. This discussion has generally made the border between orality and literacy more fluid than before.” (26) (Also Kirsten Thisted’s essay, discussed below, explicitly rejects the term altogether.)
Epics across continents
In perhaps the most ambitious article in its own way, Heda Jason offers an analytical framework for “the description of epic traditions in the Euro-Afro-Asian area (Christian Europe; Moslem North Africa, Near East and Central Asia, non-tribal India, both Hindu and Moslem; and partly, Buddhist Tibet and Mongolia)” (117). Although Jason begins by advocating an ethnopoetic genre of epic, she next provides an abstract categorical framework into which the epics of these regions can be arranged according to four components: compositional structure, internal complexity, mode of characterization, and relation to historical reality, the last of which is then subdivided into “historical”, “national”, “universal” and “mythic” epics.
The question raised by such an ambitious framework is whether these categories (which are open to the charge of being one scholar’s opinion only) have been erected on the basis of empirical observations (i.e., collected texts, oftentimes of fragmentary material, translated primarily into English, German, and Russian, sometimes with little or no contextual information), or are strictly theoretical divisions irrespective of historical transformations and functional variation. To put it another way, if we take the case of the Gesar narrative, an epic whose traditional life has flourished from Ladakh to Tibet and Mongolia and deep into Russian-Mongol Buryatia, one wonders if its myriad versions might not have penetrated many of her categories of “mythic”, “universal” and “national” epic in different contexts and at different moments in the life of the tradition and its performers. In any event, her suggestions are provocative, her knowledge encyclopedic, and her essay a welcome contribution to the classic debate surrounding the classification and typology of folklore materials in general, and tradition-oriented epics in particular.
John Brockington’s article on formulaic expression in the Ramayana provides a useful inventory of different formulaic repetitions and their functions in the epic, and notes that formulary expressions are not randomly deployed but exhibit a distinctive narrative function. Brockington argues that formulaic padas appear more and more frequently in later parts of the Ramayana in order to imitate a tradition already in decline, and he concludes that this higher frequency of formulaic language is “not an index of orality but rather a sign of decay of the genuine oral tradition” (137), a reversal of earlier oral-formulaic approaches in which scholars attempted to prove the oral provenance of a text by means of statistical or quantitative measures alone.
Mary Brockington gives a provocative and plausible account of the historical interaction in certain Indian traditions of “The Two Brothers” motive (AaTh 303) and the “Stepmother Redaction”, the latter of which Kurt Ranke studied extensively in his 1934 FF Communications volume, Die Zwei Brüder. Although Brockington’s article is brief, she adduces a copious number of variants and secondary works in order to demonstrate how “The Two Brothers” and “Stepmother Redaction” have almost certainly influenced each other’s development in passing through the Ramayana, international folktale traditions, and back again. The “Appendix: Selected Texts and Variants” gathers variants distributed as widely as Bosnia and South Asia.
Susan S. Wadley’s paper is based on many years of fieldwork (from 1968 to the present) and offers penetrating insight into the many interacting oral and written traditions surrounding the North Indian Dhola epic. The many manifestations of the epic are widely divergent in form, style, and even content, and her detailed discussion of the possible and actual variations is intriguing. Perhaps the most surprising anecdote concerns the singer Matol, with whom Wadley has worked extensively, a literate singer who produced philosophic versions of the epic filled with verbal games, textural sculpting, and theoretical interpretations but a minimum of narrative continuity. Matol’s career as a performer, however, is entirely another matter, since he leads a troop of Dhola performers who present the epic by way of harmonium accompaniment, bowed instruments, percussion, and multiple singing. The existence of such variation in one individual, from rapturous musical performance to studied philosophical epics, is a fine example of the flexibility of traditional reception and the capacities of individual performers to remold the pool of tradition in myriad ways.
The inclusion of a category reserved for the relation between “epic and history” is a refreshing and provocative choice on the editor’s part. Doris Edel’s account of the proliferation of Irish Táin epics and the surprising stability that governs their many versions gives rise to the proposal that a “mental text” once belonged to the singers, tellers, and tradition, even before written versions appeared. The question of the point of contact between onomastics, historical events, narrative dissemination, and geography is broached here, and the addition of maps, graphs, and other visual aids make the article a unique and useful study.
Isaac Olawale Albert’s account of Nigerian Yoruba singers and their place in relation to regional royalty is not only fascinating in and of itself, but useful for helping readers to understand and conceive the position singers might have once held (and in some cases continue to hold) in official courts, while the analysis of the value and degree of accuracy or `truth’ that such singers are expected to create, narrate, codify, and preserve, is similarly stimulating.
Lauri Harvilahti provides a dense and informative study of various ways in which variation in performance, genre, metrics, and music can be recovered and analyzed within a corpus of collected texts, and his particular point of departure is material from Ingria. Harvilahti begins by considering the possibility of “incompetence in performance”, which is to say, instances in which performances for collectors were disfigured by external, contextual, or functional factors. His example is the singer Naastoi, who in West Ingria once sang excellent songs for the collector V. Alava, but in the following year produced only sixteen verses of one song and another with the help of a daughter-in-law, neither of which compared in scope or complexity to the earlier collected songs. Whereas some interpreters might conclude from this “thin” information that the later materials represented a decay in the tradition or a decline in a particular singer’s ability, V. Alava’s diary explains that this was certainly not the case: instead, the singer was “in a bad mood” (195) at the time of subsequent collection and did not wish to sing on account of various feasts taking place in the village at the time. Without this contextual information, any number of erroneous hypotheses concerning the singer’s failure to produce comparable singing might have been offered. Harvilahti’s point, however, is that the ethnopoetic context explains that what V. Alava witnessed was an instance of “incompetence in performance,” albeit for perfectly explicable reasons, not a decline in the tradition. This study reminds the reader that performance traditions do not always produce texts suitable for typological analysis, hierarchical arrangement, and systematic historical-developmental interpretation.
Harvilahti’s essay, however, goes farther. He outlines different modes of performance in Ingria, and sketches the diversity of thematic concerns performed there, thereby demonstrating the complexity of the tradition and the heterogeneity of texts that its collectors produced. In Ingria, for example, lyrical and lyric-epic women’s songs span the semantic spectrum from everyday themes of family life, birth, and courtship, to mythical songs and aetiological poems. Harvilahti invokes Matti Kuusi’s observation that women’s singing in the region makes frequent use of a “poetic” first person singular “I” as the subject of the poem, even when “the poetic `I’ does not necessarily represent the singer herself” (197) but instead reperforms the experiences of the traditional community by means of a first person singular that compresses and expresses in a traditionally referential manner the emotive particularities of the song for its hearers.
What is so curious, and so interesting, Harvilahti explains, is that “certain scenes and formulas centered around the poetic `I’ link together poems that do not belong together contentually” (198), but instead form “extensive networks” that include domestic themes of the daughter’s fear of isolation in marriage quite alongside mythic, aetiological poems otherwise without thematic relation. Harvilahti concludes that the predominance in this region of a deictic “I” spread across genre and otherwise distinctively different thematic material offers an instance of “adaptation prompted by the lyric-epic poetic network,” which is to say, a local tradition of performance that has adapted to the particular narrative concerns of the singers and audience found there, by means of the traditional narrative forms, genre, and techniques available to them. The additional analyses of ways in which notated melodies can be brought to bear on texts, and the demonstrations of metrical incongruencies between collected melodies and collected verses, serve not only to shed light on the Ingrian tradition itself but also to offer useful strategies for folkloristic analysis that will be of interest to a wider audience of folklorists.
Kirsten Thisted’s account of the history of collecting in Greenland adds another important, nuanced voice to the discussion of tradition-oriented epics. In fact, Thisted’s essay is so nuanced and detailed that it could have easily appeared in any of the sections of this book (except, of course, the section on India) without further qualification. She explains the process and influence of Danish collectors working in Greenland as early as 1823, and presents a useful depiction of certain issues debated, at the instigation of Hinrich Rink, by the Danish administration concerning literacy, `spiritual decline,’ and technological change in Greenland. After a section on “early principles of editing” and a critical evaluation of famed Greenlandic collector Knud Rasmussen’s work, Thisted not only synthesizes her findings (212-13) but adds them to the debate surrounding “transitional texts” and “transitions” from orality to literacy. Significantly, Thisted reacts to Lord’s use of the term “transitional text” by suggesting that it be discarded. Rejecting the implications of teleological development from orality to literacy latent in so many discussions of tradition-oriented texts, Thisted instead argues that one should discuss the “transformation” of oral storytelling into a written medium, or a “meeting” between “traits” of oral and written poetics preserved by authors and editors who enjoyed relative degress of competence and incompetence in both performed and written media (218). In doing so, she eliminates much of the unnecessary debate in which the strawman of `orality-vs.-literacy’ is fruitlessly set up and knocked down ad nauseum.
Following Brian Street explicitly, Thisted pluralizes the notion of writing technology into “literacies” and thereby vastly but fruitfully complicates any attempt to write a single “history” of an oral-cum-written literature from a developmental or sequential point of view. Interested readers of this article will want to consult Victor Mair’s extensive scholarship on certain Chinese texts that were based on oral storytelling and contributed to the spread of a prosimetric form or “chantefable” from India, through Buddhism, and into popular Chinese culture; Mair explains that the very translation of this genre of “pien-wen” texts is “transformation texts.”
Jiacuo Jiangbian’s report on “Gesar in Contemporary Tibetan Society” is a brief but tantalizing review of recent work conducted in Tibet. The epic tradition of Gesar remains vibrant in oral and written form, but its remote location and beguiling multiformity leave much still in obscurity. The reader will find discussions of context, forms of transmission, relations to other Tibetan art forms, and speculation on modes of traditional `persistence’ of genre down to the present day.
Jiangbian explains that Tibetans still recite Gesar on feast days, for sacrificial rites, and in religious worship. In times past, according to Jiangbian, warring tribes recited Gesar before leaving for battle in order to secure the protection of the war-god. Merchants recited Gesar before setting off for long travels (along the Silk Road, perhaps?). Since Tibetan society has remained largely illiterate outside of temple life, the recitation of Gesar has served as the primary means of education concerning the history, enlightenment, and national culture among Tibetan communities. The epic is filled with folk proverbs, Jiangbian tells us, and these proverbs have entered the daily speech of the people and often provide norms and exemplars for decision-making and judgment.
Jia Zhi’s survey of epics among Chinese minorities concludes the volume and gives a valuable overview of the research presently underway concerning epic traditions that still flourish in China. Jia discusses the topos of “acquisition by divine inspiration” or “god granting” modes of epic-learning (230), a particularly prevalent phenomenon in western China and Tibet in which singers frequently claim to have learned the epic in dreams, during difficult illnesses, from bronze mirrors, and through other revelatory experiences on the steppes and mountain plateaus. Other singers in the region, it is worth noting, are “self-studying” and learn “painstakingly by themselves, during their roaming and begging.”
Interested readers will want to read Lang Ying’s study of the great Kirghiz Manas-singer Jusup Mamay in a forthcoming issue of the journal Oral Tradition, where Mamay offers several multiform accounts of his own version of the “acquisition by dream” experience. Jia also points the reader to the work of Chinese Tibetologist Yang Enhong, whose decades of fieldwork in Tibet now combined with her research on textualization methodologies is sure to produce a sea-change in the Western understanding of Tibetan epics. Jia’s discussion of the documentation of singers carried out by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Ethnic Minorities’ Literature and his taxonomy of singers and epics among Chinese minorities will undoubtedly point many in the direction of China, and one looks forward to the results.
In conclusion, it can be said that this collection does a fine job of bringing the problem of tradition-oriented epics into sharper focus. From ancient Greece to the present day, tradition-oriented epics have attracted a mixed bag of speculation concerning compositional integrity, modality of existence, and interpretation of the written materials in question. Analysts have tended to define tradition-oriented epics by pointing out what they are not: they are not purely oral phenomena dependent on an organic functionality within a living context, nor can they be meaningfully analyzed by the same interpretive techniques demanded by the literature of, say, Wordsworth, Joyce, or Beckett. Instead, tradition-oriented epics – stripped of immediate context but for that reason textually reborn – hover somewhere in between and demand a composite methodology that engages both the micrologies of variation as well the critical traditions that allow such variation to be interpreted within a historical context. Nordic folkloristics, because so thoroughly grounded in fieldwork, documentation, and linguistic expertise, are in a particularly strong position to define and develop this methodology. This collection of essays, grounded in the fundaments of Nordic methodologies but generously engaged in an international conversation, certainly goes a long way in placing the discussion on firm empirical and theoretical ground.
Aaron Tate
University of Missouri
FF Network No. 21
(March): 22-27