Perspectives on a Method

Ancient epics survive to our time as tablet, scroll, papyrus, and vellum, but some of them - in particular, the earliest Greek and Near Eastern epics - emerged in various ways from oral traditions (see the Chapter 10, by Haslam, and Chapter 4, by Jensen; also Chapters 2123, 14-19 by Edwards, Slatkin, Nelson, Sasson, Noegel, Wyatt, Beckman, Davidson, and Niditch respectively). Just how did that evolution from performance to encoding and the various stages of transmission take place? Can we piece together our few shards of once-thriving traditions to yield some idea of the now-lost larger whole? Most fundamentally of all, what difference does it make that an oral tradition informed the Iliad, Odyssey., Gilgamesh, Shahndma, and perhaps other works that our text - and print-centered ideology has taught us to understand merely as books? These and many related and equally tantalizing questions have presented themselves in recent years, as scholars have begun to address the unwritten origins of some ancient epic texts. The modern rediscovery of ancient oral traditions has given new shape to the Homeric Question, and, we might say, the Near Eastern Question as well.

Of course, such questions (and Questions) cannot always be easily and forthrightly answered. In most cases we lack the critical information - the very documentation on which conventional literary history is characteristically based - to pronounce with absolute confidence on the origins, evolution, and interpretation of oral-derived works fTom the ancient world. Indeed, the ebb and flow of scholarship has shown just how dangerous overreaching can prove: to assume too much, to oversimplify, or to extrapolate too enthusiastically from fragmentary evidence, is to invite refutation. Too parochial or positivistic an opinion is quickly challenged and discarded, and many times the potentially important perspective from oral tradition dies with that overstatement.

It is precisely at this point that modern oral epic traditions can offer help by providing an analogy - or better, a group of diverse analogies. Consulting epic traditions that have been or in some cases still can be experienced on a firsthand basis can prompt possible answers to the questions (and Questions) posed above, potential answers that can be glimpsed in no other way. In this respect the results of present-day fieldwork on living oral epic traditions can inform our understanding of the fragmentary remains of long-vanished epic traditions, potentially helping to fill in some of the blanks that have

Necessarily been left unaddressed. The gains made by philology, history, archaeology, and comparative mythology have obviously been enormous (see the Chapters 5, 9, 3, by Raaflaub, Sherratt, and Edmunds respectively), but there are some areas that these document - and item-based approaches simply cannot effectively or completely treat. For such areas, comparative studies in oral tradition - in this case, the analogy with modern oral epics - are the most promising option. (See Honko 1998b: 169-217 for far the most complete survey of contemporary oral epic traditions and the fieldwork and textualization that has brought them to prominence; the traditions treated therein are the Finnish Kalevala, the central Asian Manas, the Native American Mohave epic, the South Slavic epske pjesme, the Sunjiata or Son-Jara epic from Mali, the West Sumatran epic of Anggun Nan Tungga, the Tamil Annanmaar Epic, the Epic ofPalnaadu fTom Andhra Pradesh, the Bani Hilal cycle from Egypt, and the Pabuji Epic from Rajasthan. Cf. also Oinas 1978, Hatto and Hainsworth 1980, 1989; Clover 1986; Foley 1998d, Beissinger et al. 1999; Chao 2001a; and McCarthy 2001.)

But with opportunities come sobering responsibilities, so let me immediately add two caveats to calibrate this initiative and the remarks made below. First, analogy is never the same thing as proof. No matter how suggestive this or that observation made on the basis of living oral epic may seem, it will always remain at the level of a heuristic. That is, comparative work along these lines (almost always non-genetic) will prompt us to construct certain kinds of responses to ancient works, but cannot by its very nature constitute the same sort of evidence that direct experience of the ancient epics would yield. Second, and correspondingly, investigation by analogy will work best when we involve as large and diverse a selection of comparisons as possible. Focusing exclusively on one or two selected parallels will unfairly bias the procedure by limiting the possibilities for understanding oral-derived ancient texts; only by surveying (at least to some degree) the vast horizon of modern oral epics, performed today on six of seven continents in hundreds of languages, can we be confident that our analogy is suitably flexible and multifaceted.

With these observations in mind, then, I propose to examine modern analogues to ancient oral-derived epics by considering a series of nine linked topics: (1) terminology and comparative ‘‘epic,’’ (2) bards or singers, (3) performance and audience, (4) epic language, (5) transmission, (6) ‘‘new’’ epics, (7) the role of literacy and texts, (8) collection, textualization, and edition, and (9) epic within the ecology of oral poetry. None of these topics can be exhaustively treated in the present format, and throughout this chapter I will be citing supplemental resources to which readers can turn for more extended and in-depth discussion. Nevertheless, some attention to the international genre of oral epic - in all of its remarkable diversity - may assist us in coming to terms with the inevitably partial picture we have inherited of the emergence and context of oral-derived epics in the ancient world.