Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] How do we know about oral cultures? By starting where you'd never expect, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toutch.
[00:00:12] How do oral cultures work? How do they pass along their traditions? How accurately? And why? Did scholars first get interested in the question? Not at all in the way that you might think. Here's how I discuss the matter in my book, Jesus before the gospels.
[00:00:30] The beginning of studies of orality singers in Yugoslavia.
[00:00:37] The 20th century study of oral cultures can be traced back to the groundbreaking work of Millman Perry, a scholar of classics and epic poetry at Harvard, and his student Albert Lord, 1912 to 91. As a classicist, Perry was especially interested in the homeric question, which is actually a set of questions about Homer, the alleged author of the great classics the Iliad and the Odyssey. Was there a Homer? Were these books actually written by him? Were the two books even written by the same person? Even more, is each book itself a single literary composition? Is each of them instead a collection of earlier stories that have been patched together?
[00:01:24] Is it possible that any one person could compose such lengthy texts in an age when there was not massive literacy? How could anyone remember that much poetry?
[00:01:35] These questions had long intrigued scholars, especially in Germany, but also in english speaking climes. Normally, these scholars had addressed the issues by analyzing in detail the internal tensions and contradictions of the greek epics themselves.
[00:01:52] Perry thought there was a better way. In particular, he wondered whether oral cultures in the modern world could shed light on how long epics could be orally constructed, performed, and preserved. He found what he was looking for in Yugoslavia. There had been an age old tradition in Yugoslavia of singers who produced and recited oral epic poetry, tales sung in verse that were as long as the Iliad and Odyssey. In the early 20th century, this tradition was still alive and well. Perry wanted to find out more about it and decided to engage in extensive fieldwork among yugoslavian singers. This, he thought, could shed light on what may have been happening millennia earlier in nearby Greece, back in the time when it was commonly thought that Homer's works were finally written down.
[00:02:44] Perry made a brilliant start on this work, uncovering the techniques that singers used in order to compose and retell their tales, and showing how very similar techniques can be detected behind the now written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Unfortunately, Perry died a tragic death before bringing his work to fruition. Killed, as it turns out, while unpacking his suitcase and inadvertently discharging a firearm. He was only 33 at the time. Perry's student, Albert Lord, picked up his mantle to pursue the work Lord eventually became a professor of slavic and comparative literature at Harvard, a post he held for many years. His great classic on oral epic poetry was published in 1960 as the Singer of tales. This is a great book of real historical importance both to those interested in Homer and to those intrigued with the question we are addressing here involving the preservation of tradition in oral cultures. Lord persuasively made a crucial point that has been confirmed and reconfirmed by studies since his day. Oral cultures have a different conception of tradition from written cultures. In written cultures such as ours, the idea of preserving a tradition means to keep it intact verbatim, the same from one telling to the next. An accurate preservation of a tale, a poem, a saying, for most of us is one that does not vary from its earlier iteration. The reason we think that way is that we have ways of checking to see whether it is the same tradition or not. Oral cultures have no way of checking. All someone can do is try to remember if a spoken version of a tradition is the same as an earlier version or not. But in fact, being exactly the same in our sense of verbatim repetition is not a concern in oral cultures. That concern came into existence in written cultures where such things could be checked. Those passing along traditions in oral cultures are not interested in preserving exactly the same thing. They are interested in making the same thing relevant for the new context that necessarily involves changing it every time. For that reason, when someone in an oral culture claims that the current version of the tradition, a story, a poem, a saying, is the same as an earlier one, they do not mean what we mean. They mean the same basic thing. They do not mean exactly the same at all. This is crystal clear from Lorde's work and by significant amounts of work done since his day. Perry and Lorde listened to and recorded yugoslavian oral epic poetry and extensively interviewed both yugoslavian singers and those listening to them reading the results of their fieldwork, leaves no doubt about their findings in that oral context. Every time a story is told, it is changed. The gist remains pretty much the same see the previous chapter. But the details get changed. Often they get changed massively. Because a singer changes the story every time it is performed, he, in effect, composes it each time anew. That means, though, that in oral performance there is actually no such thing as the original version of a story or poem or saying. Every performance is and always has been different. The idea that there is an original that comes to be later altered derives from written cultures, where later forms of a text can be compared to earlier forms and there is some kind of original but as Lord shows quote in a very real sense every performance is a separate song, for every performance is unique and every performance bears the signature of its poet singer, unquote. That last point is very important. Whoever performs the tradition alters it in light of his own interests, his sense of what the audience wants to hear, the amount of time he has to tell or sing it, and numerous other factors. And so as a result the one who sings the tales is at one and the same time the performer of the tradition and the composer. One striking fact to emerge from Perry and Lorde's extensive interviews is that the singers of these folktales consistently and frequently insisted that their performances were the same every time. But when they said so, they did not mean it was literally the same for a singer. The fixity of the song quote does not include the wording which to him has never been fixed or the unessential parts of the story, unquote.
