Within oral epic traditions stories travel easily from one individual to another, both within local or linguistically defined groups and, perhaps surprisingly, across such perceived barriers. Person-to-person contact is, however, often mythologized, just as the identity of the Greatest Singer is characteristically more legend than verifiable biographical fact. Thus the narrator of the Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga, She-Karisi Candi Rureke, tells of learning his tale from an unnamed member of the Babtiya people, while he indicates that his colleague Kanyangara received the story from a certain Bishusha whose identity remains indistinct (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969: 15-18). In the case of Gopala Naika, the bard who performed the Siri Epic, the question of transmission proved subjective enough that Lauri Honko rephrased it as a process not of attribution to an individual but of the bard’s authorization of his performance by reference to respected resources. Thus the Tulu epic singer invokes not only Mallanna Shetty, a leading ritualist in the region, but also his teacher Soomayya Naika, several female Siri acolytes who sang him various parts of the mythology, and divine intervention. The South Slavic guslari characteristically provide unstable accounts of the sources of their epics, in one interview attributing a given tale to a certain relative or colleague and in a second interview claiming to have heard it elsewhere. Honko effectively speaks of many modern oral epic traditions when he observes (1998b: 527) that ‘‘the secret of Gopala Naika’s learning the Siri epic is that he never acquired it as a whole from anyone. Instead, the sources were multiple and the process of composition and mental editing long.’’ Seeing the ancient epics only as singular, always fossilized artifacts or items may lead us to expect prior transmission processes that, while comfortably familiar in the modern western world of fixity and print, amount to untenable impositions. Single-item transmission from one individual to another may be as much a mythology as the Greatest Singer.
The analogy with modern-day oral epics also illuminates the thorny problems of transmission across languages and of the individual versus the tradition. Regarding the former, we have the incontrovertible evidence of Salih Ugljanin, a guslar who sang heroic songs in both South Slavic and Albanian although he was literate in neither tongue (Kolsti 1990; cf. Skendi 1954). What Ugljanin seems to have been able to do was to compose fluently in either of these specialized epic registers - wholly unrelated branches of the Indo-European family tree - in an act not of direct translation but of bardic bilingualism. This model should suggest a great deal about the transmissibility of ancient epic stories from one tradition to another (see Chapter 20, by Burkert; also Rinchindorji 2001 on Mongolian and Turkic epic interchange). Likewise, the reality of a flexible language rather than a fixed item goes a long way toward explaining the joint importance of individual bard and epic tradition without diminishing either side of the equation. Time and again scholars have struggled with the terms improvisation, creativity, tradition, innovation, and the like because they raise the question of whether the composer or the inheritance is the more determinative factor in any given oral or oral-derived work. But such quandaries emerge only if we reduce a long-term, multiform process to a fixed, singular product. What the analogy from living oral epics suggests is that bards operate creatively within a set of compositional rules, just as any speaker of any language deploys a grammar and a lexicon idiolectally. Reports from central Asia (Reichl 1992: 219-61), the Altay (Harvi-lahti 2003: 95-6), India (Honko 1998b: 506-13), and many other areas reflect the same interdependence of bard and tradition.
One final aspect of transmission is the basic question of what exactly gets transmitted. Internationally, the common practice in oral epic is for bards to perform ‘‘part’’ of what we would consider the ‘‘whole’’ tale. That is, whether the people involved construe their tradition as a series of linked but freestanding stories or as a composite cycle (on which, more below), the usual situation is that described by Biebuyck in reference to the typical practice among the Banyanga (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969: 14):
The narrator would never recite the entire story in immediate sequence, but would intermittently perform various select passages of it. Mr. Rureke, whose [Mwindo epic] is presented here, repeatedly asserted that never before had he performed the whole story within a continuous span of days.
Similarly, as John D. Smith (1977: 144f., 1979: 349f., 1991: 17-18) has demonstrated for the Pabuji epic in rural Rajasthan, the bhopa will sing and dance only one section of the epic story at a time, aided by a helper who points to a visual representation of that action in a panel on the tapestry hung behind them. John William Johnson explains that Mandekan-speaking bards customarily perform what we would call excerpts of the Son-Jara epic ‘‘according to the specific needs of the moment’’ (2000: 245). Correspondingly, the Kpelle of Liberia attest that the bard can begin and end at any point, and that this nonlinearity “underscores the very continuity of the event’’ (Stone 1988: 6). In these and so many other cases, the bard performs pars pro toto, the part implying the whole, without rehearsing the entire linear compass of the implied traditional context. Thus “traditional referentiality,’’ as I have called it elsewhere (1991, 1995; see Bradbury 1998), affects transmission as well as composition, two aspects of a larger process that are after all not neatly separable in oral epic. Both the idiomatic meaning of the epic language and the notional, part-for-the-whole texture of performance make considerable demands on the audience’s as well as the singer’s fluency. We would do well to remember this analogy when we seek to understand the interrelationships among ancient epics.