Oral epic does not stand alone in any culture. It occupies a major place, but only one place among many, in a composite ecology or ecosystem of living, interactive oral genres. Among such species fieldworkers have regularly tended to privilege the epic, along with such other widespread forms as lyric, panegyric, and, as a rule, all those genres that have won cultural validation as literary forms in the contemporary West. In other words, they have tended to look for and then to record, analyze, and publish what canonically qualifies as poetry for us, in turn applying such derogatory terms as ‘‘minor genres’’ to riddles, charms, proverbs, and the host of other more menial, functional types of oral poetry that for the most part fall below the collector’s scholarly radar. This textually induced myopia is unfortunate for at least two reasons. First, the practice effectively blinds us to the forest for the sake of a few privileged trees; concentrating on just a few of the existing species leaves us unaware of the overall environment. Second, in many milieus there is an active interplay between the grand charter of identity that is epic and the smaller genres, with more modest but still significant individual roles, that one often finds both as freestanding forms and as parts embedded in the larger epic matrix. Cross-culturally, the epic is often an ‘‘omnibus’’ genre (see Foley 2004a: 181-2). In order to show how such ecologies work, and further to suggest that oral-derived ancient epics may well have participated in just such verbal ecosystems, I will briefly summon two instances to illustrate the interactive dynamics of oral epic in its macro-environment.
Beginning with the Iliad-length Siri Epic sung by the Tulu possession priest Gopala Naika, we note that the epic proper is preceded by three substantial invocations (563 lines in all) to gods, lesser deities, chieftains, and epic personages (see Honko 1998a; Foley 1999c). The bard felt these invocations to be crucial enough to the religious context of his narrative that he offered to complete an existing oral-dictated transcription of an earlier epic performance after the fact by singing these preliminaries for the Finnish-Tulu research team (Honko 1998b: 271). In addition to this ritually preparatory subgenre, however, the team also uncovered both a wider variety of five non-epic categories in Tulu verbal art as a whole (long, multi-episode and short, single-episode narrative poems, work songs, ritual songs, and dance songs) and, yet more interestingly, a constellation of generic species that directly participate in the Siri mythology. Along with place-names, Honko identifies ‘‘belief legends, aetiological narratives, historical legends, prayers and incantations, proverbs and phrases, omens and taboos, rituals and customs’’ (1998b: 322) as part of the epic universe or ecology. We understand the Siri Epic most faithfully, field reports and analyses show, when we realize that it is caught in and supported by a web of other traditional oral activities. To forcibly remove it from this web of meaning may bring it more comfortably into our text-centered orbit, but by doing so we compromise its ecology and (unavoidably) misread it.
South Slavic epic provides us another model for epic’s place within an ecosystem populated by various oral traditional species. In the same region where our fieldwork team discovered and recorded Christian epic through the early 1980s, we also found a larger ecology that included genealogy (emically called pricanje or ‘‘telling, declaring’’), magical charms (bajanje), funeral laments (tuzbalice), women’s songs (zenske pjesme), folktales (bajke), and other genres. (Audio and textual examples of many of these various genres, with English translations, are available at Www. oraltradition. org/hrop/ eighth_word. asp.) That is, along with, for instance, the epic story of‘‘The Widow Jana’’ as performed by Aleksandr Jakovljevic, the team was able to collect a cross-section of the oral traditions that typified Serbian culture in that place and time: spells that cured skin disease and other ailments, thirteen-generation accounts of lineage histories, dirges that aimed at healing the community after the loss of a loved one, and various other kinds of functions including, of course, instruction and entertainment. Some genres were the exclusive province of women and were composed in octosyllables (charms, laments, women’s songs) while others were performed by men in decasyllable format (epic, genealogy); folktales were told by men in prose, with occasional interspersed verse-lines. Within the boundaries of prosodic structure and subject to the uniqueness of the performance arena in which each speech-act takes place, some traditional phraseology apparently does ‘‘leak’’ among genres, though minimally (see Foley 2003). Overall, what this situation exemplifies is an economical division of verbal labor between genders and among individuals, as well as what amounts to the semi-independence of oral epic within the Serbian village ecology. Nonetheless, even the endemic singularity of the supporting but mostly non-cognate species helps to highlight the position of epic in the larger ecological sphere.
World History
