Literary Formulae

[Mark F. Heiman]

>Tangwystyl is as always well informed and well informing. Everything I know
>about storytelling suggests that she is on firm ground when speaking of the
>value placed on exact word-for-word replication in what we regard as
>storytelling, but what our forebears more likely regarded as history.

This emphasis on "word-for-word" replication may be misleading.  One of the
best resources on the dynamics of oral tradition is Albert Lord's _The
Singer of Tales_, which explores what was probably the last true oral
culture in Europe.  I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in oral
tradition.

Lord finds that each performance of an individual tale is unique, but that
both performer and audience consider it to be the same tale.  Our modern
concepts of word-for-word accuracy don't apply.  Rather, each time a tale
is told, it is recreated using a stock set of descriptions and phrases.
The identity of the tale lies not in the specific wording, but in how these
story "atoms" are combined.  It's somewhat analogous to a jazz
improvisation -- each performance is different, but we still call it the
same tune.

I think you can see remnants of a similar tradition in the alternate
versions of ballads that Child collected.

What this may mean for the period storyteller is that he or she would be
best served by committing to heart all of the stock elements of a
tradition, and then practicing stringing them together on the framework of
various tales.  If the society studied in _The Singer of Tales_ is at all
representative of medieval oral tradition (and that's the big IF), that
would be the period approach.


mfh