Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and tradition transmitted
orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally
transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of
folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants. In this way, it is possible for
a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other
knowledges across generations without a writing system.
A narrower definition of oral tradition is sometimes appropriate. Sociologists
might also emphasize a requirement that the material is held in common by a
group of people, over several generations, and might distinguish oral
tradition from testimony or oral history. In a general sense, "oral
tradition" refers to the transmission of cultural material through vocal
utterance, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore. As an academic
discipline, it refers both to a set of objects of study and a method by which
they are studied—the method may be called variously "oral traditional
theory", "the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition" and the "Parry-Lord theory"
The study of oral tradition is distinct from the academic discipline of oral
history, which is the recording of personal memories and histories of those
who experienced historical eras or events. It is also distinct from the
study of orality, which can be defined as thought and its verbal expression in
societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the
population. Study of oral tradition
= History= The following overview draws upon
Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated
Bibliography,; additional material is summarized from the overlapping prefaces
to the following volumes: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and
Methodology,; Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral
Epic; The Singer of Tales in Performance and Comparative Research on Oral
Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry. in the work of the Serb scholar Vuk
Stefanović Karadžić, a contemporary and friend of the Brothers Grimm. Vuk
pursued similar projects of "salvage folklore" in the cognate traditions of
the Southern Slavic regions which would later be gathered into Yugoslavia, and
with the same admixture of romantic and nationalistic interests. Somewhat later,
but as part of the same scholarly enterprise of nationalist studies in
folklore, the turcologist Vasily Radlov would study the songs of the
Kara-Kirghiz in what would later become the Soviet Union; Karadzic and Radloff
would provide models for the work of Parry.
= Walter Ong= In a separate development, the media
theorist Marshall McLuhan would begin to focus attention on the ways that
communicative media shape the nature of the content conveyed. He would serve as
mentor to the Jesuit, Walter Ong, whose interests in cultural history,
psychology and rhetoric would result in Orality and Literacy and the important
but less-known Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness
These two works articulated the contrasts between cultures defined by
primary orality, writing, print, and the secondary orality of the electronic age.
Ong's works also made possible an integrated theory of oral tradition
which accounted for both production of content and its reception. This
approach, like McLuhan's, kept the field open not just to the study of aesthetic
culture but to the way physical and behavioral artifacts of oral societies
are used to store, manage and transmit knowledge, so that oral tradition
provides methods for investigation of cultural differences, other than the
purely verbal, between oral and literate societies.
The most-often studied section of Orality and Literacy concerns the
"psychodynamics of orality" This chapter seeks to define the fundamental
characteristics of 'primary' orality and summarizes a series of descriptors which
might be used to index the relative orality or literacy of a given text or
society. = John Miles Foley=
In advance of Ong's synthesis, John Miles Foley, who studied with Robert
Creed, began a series of papers based on his own fieldwork on South Slavic oral
genres, emphasizing the dynamics of performers and audiences. Foley
effectively consolidated oral tradition as an academic field [4] when he
compiled Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research in 1985. The bibliography gives
a summary of the progress scholars made in evaluating the oral tradition up to
that point, and includes a list of all relevant scholarly articles relating to
the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition. He also both established
both the journal Oral Tradition and founded the Center for Studies in Oral
Tradition at the University of Missouri. Foley developed Oral Theory beyond the
somewhat mechanistic notions presented in earlier versions of Oral-Formulaic
Theory, by extending Ong's interest in cultural features of oral societies
beyond the verbal, by drawing attention to the agency of the bard and by
describing how oral traditions bear meaning.
The bibliography would establish a clear underlying methodology which accounted
for the findings of scholars working in the separate Linguistics fields. Perhaps
more importantly, it would stimulate conversation among these specialties, so
that a network of independent but allied investigations and investigators could
be established. Foley's key works include The Theory of
Oral Composition; Immanent Art; Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey,
Beowulf and the Serbo-Croatian Return-Song; The Singer of Tales in
Performance; Teaching Oral Traditions; How to Read an Oral Poem. His Pathways
Project draws parallels between the media dynamics of oral traditions and
the Internet. = Acceptance and further elaboration=
The theory of oral tradition would undergo elaboration and development as
it grew in acceptance. While the number of formulas documented for various
traditions proliferated, the concept of the formula remained lexically-bound.
However, numerous innovations appeared, such as the "formulaic system" with
structural "substitution slots" for syntactic, morphological and narrative
necessity. Sophisticated models such as Foley's "word-type placement rules"
followed. Higher levels of formulaic composition were defined over the years,
such as "ring composition", "responsion" and the "type-scene". Examples include
the "Beasts of Battle" and the "Cliffs of Death". Some of these characteristic
patterns of narrative details, would show evidence of global distribution.
At the same time, the fairly rigid division between oral and literate was
replaced by recognition of transitional and compartmentalized texts and
societies, including models of diglossia. Perhaps most importantly, the
terms and concepts of "orality" and "literacy" came to be replaced with the
more useful and apt "traditionality" and "textuality". Very large units would be
defined and areas outside of military epic would come under investigation:
women's song, riddles and other genres. The methodology of oral tradition now
conditions a large variety of studies, not only in folklore, literature and
literacy, but in philosophy, communication theory, Semiotics, and
including a very broad and continually expanding variety of languages and
ethnic groups, and perhaps most conspicuously in biblical studies, in
which Werner Kelber has been especially prominent. The annual bibliography is
indexed by 100 areas, most of which are ethnolinguistic divisions.
Present developments explore the implications of the theory for rhetoric
and composition, interpersonal communication, cross-cultural
communication, postcolonial studies, rural community development,[5] popular
culture and film studies,[6] and many other areas. The most significant areas
of theoretical development at present may be the construction of systematic
hermeneutics and aesthetics specific to oral traditions.
Process Oral cultures face a few unique
obstacles when passing down information. Without the use of writing systems to
transmit information through time, oral cultures employ various strategies that
serve similar purposes to writing. For example, heavily rhythmic speech filled
with mnemonic devices enhances memory and recall. A few useful mnemonic
devices include alliteration, repetition, assonance, and proverbial
sayings. These strategies help facilitate transmission of information
from individual to individual without a written intermediate, and they can also
be applied to oral governance. Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book
provides an excellent demonstration of oral governance in the Law of the
Jungle. Not only does grounding rules in oral proverbs allow for simple
transmission and understanding, but it also legitimizes new rulings by allowing
extrapolation. These stories, traditions, and proverbs are not static,
but are often altered upon each transmission barring the overall meaning
remains intact. In this way, the rules that govern the people are modified by
the whole and not authored by a single entity.
Criticism and debates The theory of oral tradition encountered
early resistance from scholars who perceived it as potentially supporting
either one side or another in the controversy between what were known as
"unitarians" and "analysts" – that is, scholars who believed Homer to have been
a single, historical figure, and those who saw him as a conceptual "author
function," a convenient name to assign to what was essentially a repertoire of
traditional narrative. A much more general dismissal of the theory and its
implications simply described it as "unprovable" Some scholars, mainly
outside the field of oral tradition, represent this body of theoretical work
as reducing the great epics to children's party games like "telephone"
or "Chinese whispers". While games provide amusement by showing how
messages distort content via uncontextualized transmission, Parry's
supporters argue that the theory of oral tradition reveals how oral methods
optimized the signal-to-noise ratio and thus improved the quality, stability and
integrity of content transmission. There were disputes concerning
particular findings of the theory. For example, those trying to support or
refute Crowne's hypothesis found the "Hero on the Beach" formula in numerous
Old English poems. It was also discovered in other works of Germanic
origin, Middle English poetry, and even an Icelandic prose saga. J.A. Dane, in
an article characterized as "polemics without rigor" claimed that the
appearance of the theme in Ancient Greek poetry, a tradition without known
connection to the Germanic, invalidated the notion of "an autonomous theme in
the baggage of an oral poet." Within Homeric studies specifically,
Lord's The Singer of Tales, which focused on problems and questions that
arise in conjunction with applying oral-formulaic theory to problematic
texts such as the Iliad, Odyssey, and even Beowulf, influenced nearly all of
the articles written on Homer and oral-formulaic composition thereafter.
However, in response to Lord, Geoffrey Kirk published The Songs of Homer,
questioning Lord's extension of the oral-formulaic nature of Serbian and
Croatian literature to Homeric epic. Kirk argues that Homeric poems differ
from those traditions in their "metrical strictness", "formular system[s]", and
creativity. In other words, Kirk argued that Homeric poems were recited under a
system that gave the reciter much more freedom to choose words and passages to
get to the same end than the Serbo-Croatian poet, who was merely
"reproductive". Shortly thereafter, Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato
revolutionized how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it
was the product of an oral tradition, but also that the oral-formulas
contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural
knowledge across many different generations. Adam Parry, in his 1966
work "Have we Homer's Iliad?", theorized the existence of the most fully
developed oral poet to his time, a person who could creatively and
intellectually create nuanced characters in the context of the accepted,
traditional story. In fact, he discounted the Serbo-Croatian tradition
to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of
oral-tradition above all others. Lord reacted to Kirk's and Parry's essays
with "Homer as Oral Poet", published in 1968, which reaffirmed Lord's belief in
the relevance of Yugoslav poetry and its similarities to Homer and downplayed the
intellectual and literary role of the reciters of Homeric epic.
Many of the criticisms of the theory have been absorbed into the evolving
field as useful refinements and modifications. For example, in what
Foley called a "pivotal" contribution, Larry Benson introduced the concept of
"written-formulaic" to describe the status of some Anglo-Saxon poetry which,
while demonstrably written, contains evidence of oral influences, including
heavy reliance on formulas and themes A number of individual scholars in many
areas continue to have misgivings about the applicability of the theory or the
aptness of the South Slavic comparison, and particularly what they regard as its
implications for the creativity which may legitimately be attributed to the
individual artist. However, at present, there seems to be little systematic or
theoretically coordinated challenge to the fundamental tenets of the theory; as
Foley put it, ""there have been numerous suggestions for revisions or
modifications of the theory, but the majority of controversies have generated
further understanding. See also
American Indian elder Folk process
Hadith Intangible culture
Oral history Oral law
Oral literature Oral Torah
Oral Tradition Journal Oral-formulaic composition
Orality Parampara
Patha, Śrauta Secondary orality
Traditional knowledge Understanding Media
World Oral Literature Project References
External links Back to the Oral Tradition
The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition The Milman Parry Collection of Oral
Literature Online Oral Tradition Journal
The World Oral Literature Project Post-Gutenberg Galaxy
Dédalo Project. Open Software Platform for Management of Intangible Cultural
Heritage and Oral History Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative at
Texas Tech University