oral literature
oral literature, the standard forms (or genres) of literature found in societies without writing. The term oral literature is also used to describe the tradition in written civilizations in which certain genres are transmitted by word of mouth or are confined to the so-called folk (i.e., those who are “unlettered,” or do not use writing).
Oral literature is, arguably, the best phrase available for describing these two senses. The term oral covers both, but these two meanings should be distinguished. While certain forms, such as the folktale, continue to exist, especially among the unlettered component of complex societies, what might also be called oral tradition (or folk literature) is inevitably influenced by the elite written culture. The term literature also poses problems because it is ultimately derived from the Latin littera, “letter,” essentially a written, indeed alphabetic, concept. Among scholars, the phrases standardized oral forms and oral genres have been suggested in place of oral literature, but, since the word literature is so widely used, it has to be reckoned with, even though it is essential to recall the major differences between the two registers, oral and written, as well as the way in which the latter influences the spoken word.
The relation of speech to writing
Because writing is an additional register to speech, writing’s advent has an important influence on speech. Writing’s effects have been dramatic on society generally, but, for much of the vast span of recorded history, writing and reading were confined to a small, elite minority of a population, while a large proportion of people continued to depend on oral communication alone. In many cases these two traditions existed side by side. Such a combination creates problems for the analysis of the various genres or oral literature, for there is a tendency today to read back the characteristics of literate literature (such as the use of a narrative structure) into purely oral genres. Written literature is never simply a matter of writing down what already exists; a myth or story is always changed in being “transcribed” and takes its place among a set of new genres as well as among modifications of old ones.
The term folklore generally refers to certain of the spoken (or nonwritten) activities of complex literate cultures where only a minority can read and write and where the rest are illiterate, a frequent situation of the peasantry in the post-Bronze Age cultures of Europe and Asia especially. While these activities have some links with parallel ones in purely oral cultures, they are inevitably influenced by the always-dominant literary modes, especially those related to the major (written) religions. (Folklore is largely confined to the exposition of peripheral beliefs.) But even the forms taken by genres such as the epic can influence folklore.
It is clear that, in societies with writing, a great deal of communication—including communication that takes literary forms—is still done by word of mouth. Not only is this an aspect of all human intercourse, but it was inevitably the case until near-universal literacy was achieved in Europe during the last quarter of the 19th century. Until that time, literature had to be oral for the large part of the population. That did not mean oral literature was uninfluenced by the written word. Indeed, some of the oral communication consisted in the repetition of written texts, as when lessons from the Bible were preached to an unlettered populace. A written epic, as was the case with the Hindu Vedas or the works of Homer, might be learned by heart and recited to the population at large, by priests in the former case and by the rhapsodes in the latter. Of course a society with writing might inherit some genres, such as folktales, largely unchanged from an earlier, purely oral culture whereas other genres, such as the epic, would undergo a sea change.
Part of the influence of the written word on speech consisted in the development not of oratory but of its formal counterpart, rhetoric, with its explicit body of rules. Specialists in the spoken word might achieve fame and be rewarded for their appearance in presenting a case at court. More directly in the field of the arts, specialist reciters, especially of praise songs but also of epics and other lengthy recitations, might be recompensed for their contributions, either as freelance performers or as professionals.
Many early written forms, such as the Breton lays, draw their subject matter from spoken genres, though inevitably transformations take place in the face of the new media. There has also been a good deal of exchange between coexistent folk and written (elite) literature. Homer’s poems incorporated “popular” tales, for example, as did the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, although these transfers are as much between genres as between the registers of speech and writing, akin to when popular melodies, such as the bourrée of rural France, were taken up by those composing elite music in the urban courts of 17th-century Europe.
The example of the epic
The Homeric poems are often viewed as oral epics that have been transposed into writing. Commentators have dwelt on the presence of certain features, such as the formulaic expressions (epithets and repeated verses) that they see as typical of oral forms. Yet, while the regular repetition of phrases is found in such forms, some have argued that the precise format of Homer’s formula—as defined by the American scholar Milman Parry, who in the 1930s recorded epics in Yugoslavia performed by guslari—is very likely an early literate device.
The epic itself is a case in point. It is often assumed to be a typical product of oral cultures, being sung by bards at courts or in camps. However, records of epics in purely oral cultures are sparse. Epics tend to be found in early states with important warrior classes that enjoy hearing of the brave exploits of their predecessors. These societies already have writing, but the texts are often committed to memory and reproduced by the speaker rather than read aloud from a written version of the text. These oral texts are recited in gatherings of chiefs and warriors by specialist bards and, in fact, are the works that have been written down at some point. Indeed, only because they have been written down are they known at all. And it is a regular characteristic of early written works, such as Homer’s or the Vedas, that, although written versions exist, these are learned by heart, internalized, and reproduced through the spoken word alone, just as is often the case with religious texts such as the Qurʾān and the Bible. At the very moment in history when writing allows one to dispose of verbal memory as a means of recalling such works, the role of verbal memory is in fact enhanced—hence part of the difficulty in deciding whether these works are both orally composed and orally reproduced. They are typical of societies where only the few can read and where mnemonic skills and devices that encourage the perfect oral reproduction of written texts are therefore encouraged.
The way that purely oral forms have been changed under the influence of written cultures is illustrated by the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, a final version of which was published in 1849 by Elias Lönnrot. A systematic collector of folk poetry, Lönnrot concluded that what had been recorded as distinct poems could be conflated into a continuous folk epic. He joined a number of shorter compositions together with material of his own and imposed on the whole a unifying plot. Its publication had an enormous influence on Finnish culture. It has been suggested that the Gilgamesh epic may have been constructed in a similar way; other cases have been reported from Africa. In North America stories that centre on particular characters such as Coyote or Raven (see Raven cycle) are sometimes grouped together by scholars into cycles, but it seems doubtful whether these cycles represent a meaningful category for the Native Americans who created these tales.
Differences between oral and written literatures
Oral and written literatures differ in their authorship and audience. In oral cultures the memory of authorship, though never entirely absent, is of little general importance—occasionally with songs but not with myths, folktales, and, rarely, epics. That is not to say that these genres do not become the subjects of intellectual property rights. Songs may be associated with particular clans, recitations with specific groups or gatherings. But usually no individual author is traced. That absence, however, does not imply that there is a process of collective composition. Each reciter will introduce variations of his own, some of which will be taken up by succeeding speakers for whom the previous version will have been the (or a) model. In this way changes are constantly being introduced by individuals but anonymously, in a syntagmatic (contextual) chain, without looking back to any fixed original. Only with writing and with oral recitations in literate societies, as in the case of Homer or the Vedas, is the oral transmission of an original possible, partly because writing introduces a new dimension to verbal memory and partly because reference can then always be made back to the “correct” version. As a result, it seems to be in these early literate societies that the development of mnemonic skills and aide-mémoire is first found.
