Caesar’s third region was inhabited by a people who call themselves Celts in their own language but whom the Romans called Gauls. In our domain the dwellers in this region are those who concentrate on the texts of the poetry or, more properly, on words and groups of words and on the many ways, often very subtle, in which they are put together to express the thoughts and feelings of the oral traditional poets and of their traditional societies. These scholars constitute, I suggest, the “philologists,” who belong perhaps to a separate branch of philology concerned with a kind of oral poetry characterized by a special technique of composition, a technique peculiar to a significant group of traditional oral poetries. It is with that kind of oral traditional poetry that Milman Parry, as a classical philologist, was engaged. The members of this third school give a specialized meaning to the adjective “oral,” indicating a specific technique of composing, performing, and transmitting a traditional literary composition. Although these scholars are all intent on the text, most of them are also, however, deeply concerned with poetics and poetic structure—in short, with “quality”—as well as with understanding the traditional meaning conveyed by that particular kind of text.

In his research Parry was not comparing a “peasantry” with a “governing class” but the techniques of oral narrative verse making of two separate language cultures, one ancient and the other modern. He had reason to believe that the techniques were the same, or similar, and the comparison demonstrated by means of textual experiments that both cultures exhibited the same stylistic traits that Parry believed arose from the necessity of composition in performance.

They forgot that the ruling class in what was Yugoslavia consisted for some five hundred years of viziers and pashas, whose courts inherited the brilliance of Byzantium. These rulers had been preceded by Serbian kings and emperors and were eventually followed by more Slavic kings and princes. The Moslem epic in South Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina was, up until the end of World War I, the poetry of the governing class. The Serbian Christian poetry also was that of the governing class, first in the Middle Ages—for example, in the time of Emperor Dušan in the fourteenth century, although we have no texts from that period—and again from the nineteenth century to 1945, and perhaps to the present day, as parts of Serbia began to be liberated from the Ottomans; the Christian poetry was that of the emerging or reemerging kings and princes, who were not ousted until World War II. Both the Moslem and the Christian poetry expressed the ideals of the governing class even when out of power. Havelock and Green have been too cavalier with the facts of Balkan history and social structure.

Perhaps most important to realize is that the phrase “oral theory” with regard to the investigations into South Slavic oral epic by Parry and me is a misnomer. These findings do not constitute a “theory”; rather, they provide demonstrated facts concerning oral traditional poetry. The particular singers whom Parry described as unlettered were designated as such after careful inquiry and not by guess or hearsay. Southern Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro were chosen as places for conducting Parry’s experiments because a living tradition of epic singing was still practiced there, and these regions were accessible, albeit with special effort. Where else but to a tradition continuing into modern times could a scholar go to look for clues to the nature of epics such as the Homeric poems and Beowulf, the method of whose composition is not documented and is subject to controversy?

Substantial portions of the epics recorded by Parry have been transcribed, with meticulous attention to every syllable. Many of the epics have been published, with every possible attempt to achieve accuracy and fidelity of transmission, and they have been made available also through English translation. For scholars who are debating whether a poem from antiquity or from the Middle Ages is “oral” or “written” to disdain Parry’s investigations into South Slavic epic is to reflect a narrow elitism and is nothing short of perversity. Information about the poetics of unlettered singers, the range of their ability, the structure of their lines, the themes of their songs, and the cadences of their expression, all this is surely useful and valid for comparative study.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the case of several of the songs composed in the traditional formulaic style by two of Karadžić’s singers, Tešan Podrugović and Filip Višnjić. Under the influence of the monastery at Sišatovac they were told about some of the church legends and made songs of them, songs that were a new kind of creation: the formulaic style was the same, but the subjects were not the traditional ones. Thus, alongside Podrugović’s traditional songs such as “Marko Kraljević and Musa Arbanasa” and “Marko Kraljević and Ðemo Brđanin,” we find a religious legend, Nahod Simeun, “The Foundling Simeun.” Filip Višnjić gave Karadžić two religious songs, such as Sveti Sava, “Saint Sava,” and a version of Smrt Marka Kraljevića, “The Death of Marko Kraljević,” which contained clear reference to church legend. In the last, for instance, the dead Marko is found by Vaso, a monk from the Serbian monastery of Hilandar on Mount Athos, which was given by the Byzantine emperor in 1189 to Simeon and Sava Nemanja, the founders of the illustrious Nemanjić dynasty. Vaso and his deacon take Marko’s body to Hilandar, where it is entombed. This element is found only in the version by Višnjić and those texts derived from it. Interestingly enough, other versions, including one in the Parry collection, tell of a monk discovering the body of Marko; the monk is not from Mount Athos, however, but from the church at Samodreže, an establishment found only in the traditional poetry, which scholars have not been able to locate either historically or geographically.

The parallel between the phenomenon of these two singers, Tesan Podrugović {199|200} and especially Filip Višnjić, and that of Cædmon is striking. The Serbian Orthodox Church was having a revival in the late eighteenth century and during the nineteenth. A significant sociologic change was taking place in the nineteenth century, and the old traditional Serbian epic was being adapted to the new circumstances. In Cædmon’s time, a great religious change was taking place and the traditional songs were being adapted to the new religion. In both cases, traditional poets were using the oral traditional formulaic style in which they were already expert.

Presumably both Podrugović and Višnjić were dictating line by line to Karadžić, or possibly to the archimandrite Mušicki. Their performances were those of dictating—a kind of performance, by the way, of which not nearly enough has been written in detail. They may have, and probably did, think about the songs beforehand, just as extempore speakers usually think of what they are going to say before they rise to their feet, although they may not have put it into fixed words until the moment of performance, as it were. I suspect that we shall never know whether Cædmon fixed his nine lines in his mind—in other words, memorized them—before he performed them for his fellows, or expressed his well-thought-out ideas in the traditional style when at last his turn came to sing. In the first case, he was a memorizer of nine lines of oral traditional formulaic poetry; in the second, he was composing in performance.

Clearly the question of memorizing belongs as much in the land of the Aquitanians, because it is part and parcel of the separation of composition and performance, as in that of the philologists.

 

I consider the theme as a repeated passage—not a repeated subject—within the songs or poetry of a given individual, thus constraining it not only to a single poet but also to a more or less stable set of words. It is demonstrable that it exists as an entity that can be employed in the poetry whenever its subject is pertinent to the song at hand.

Something more has been made of unperiodic enjambment than it really deserves, I fear, but it is true that there is a decided tendency in the oral traditional poetic narratives with which I am acquainted to enclose an idea of sentence length—if that is the way to put it—within a line and not to run it over to the next. It is a tendency more noticeable in some traditions than in others. The Homeric poems contain run-on lines, but the unperiodic relationship between the first and the second lines of the Iliad is what Parry had in mind. The South Slavic poetry follows this concept fairly well, but Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its frequent cases of a sentence beginning in the b-verse, does not. The presence or absence of unperiodic enjambment is more a rule of thumb than a conclusive test.

A word on thrift: It is certainly a Homeric phenomenon but I am not sure that it has been properly investigated in medieval epic. One has to confine the test to songs or poems by a single person in order to arrive at reliable results, and such material is not readily available in medieval literature.

It seems to me that those difficulties came to be ignored by scholars, either because they were understood and taken for granted or, more likely, because they were not considered significant. In their place, as it were, the concept of composition in performance became most troublesome to both classicists and medievalists, because it was equated with extempore improvisation, which I have discussed above.

Let me end this chapter not with criticism but with a positive statement, a creed, as it were. Literature, in the sense of the artistic use of words, began without writing and was already highly developed when writing was invented or introduced into a given society. The style created by many practitioners over several generations persisted long after writing came in. Only gradually, and under influences outside the traditional milieu and people, was the oral traditional style modified by conscious breaking with tradition and movement in the direction of conscious originality and nontraditional choice of words and constructions. It was easier to change subject matter than to change style, to adapt old words to new contexts, as did Cædmon in Old English, moving from pagan to Christian themes but preserving the old style.