Eleven
Conclusion

Whether for good or for ill, the present studies do not easily submit to a general, encyclopedic summary. But perhaps that is only to be expected, given their comparative nature and the current state of affairs in the field of studies in oral tradition. A pessimist might well be disappointed that the past few years have seen the partial crumbling of certain orthodoxies, the questioning of many of the initial premises put forth by Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and others, and the call for a rethinking of positions that were once considered unassailable. While far the greater part of the early research stands firm, certain areas have been shown to be in need of modification or even wholesale recasting.

However, as not only an optimist in these matters but also one who believes that we shall continue to progress in oral literature studies only when we confront the richness and complexity of the heterogeneous mass of materials we too often force into a single category, I welcome the call for new perspectives, and in fact welcome the chance to take part in their fashioning. It is my hope that the ideas presented in this volume contribute to the ongoing dialogue and debate over the multiform nature of oral poetry (and particularly oral epic poetry), for only if the conversation both continues and continues to develop can we move toward the kind of understanding that this vast subject deserves. Thus it is that these studies are offered equally as a response to what has gone before and as an exordium to future research.

In this spirit, chapter 1 is intended as a kind of map for the volume's explorations. With attention to the differentiating qualities of tradition-dependence, genre-dependence, and text-dependence, it points the way toward an informed comparison that takes account of divergences as well as convergences, that places observed similarities between and among traditions against the background of individual profiles of those traditions. This chapter also makes the

case for proceeding from the best tenable hypothesis about a text's orality; if, in short, a demonstrably traditional text cannot be shown unambiguously to have been oral, then with proper care and caution we should assign it to the "oral-derived" category. This conservative approach not only avoids an unsupportable hypothesis of orality for many of our manuscript texts, but it also saves them from being treated as written (and non-traditional) texts by default. Through a series of examples from the three traditions considered in these studies, I have tried to illustrate how the generalization "oral literature" requires further articulation—or, in effect, complication—in order to differentiate among the myriad forms we presently group together. Just as "written literature" would not serve well as a blanket concept for a canon that included Shakespeare's sonnets, the novels of Proust, and the Japanese Noh drama, so we need to enlarge and complicate our conception of "oral literature."

The remainder of the book has thus considered the similarities and differences among texts from what I take to be a single genre, that of oral or oral-derived epic as represented in three traditions: the ancient Greek Odyssey , the Old English Beowulf , and the Serbo-Croatian "Return Song." The first calibration to be set was that of the documents themselves, an aspect of comparison that, somewhat curiously, has heretofore been largely ignored. We found that the tenth-century Codex Marcianus 454 and its fellows were quite different sorts of witnesses than either the unique Cotton Vitellius A. xv. or the actual Return Song performance-texts collected from Yugoslav guslari , and that these incongruencies translated into basic differences in how we approach comparison of the works that the documents encode. For example, the formulaic-density test cannot prove orality if without further qualification we implicitly equate the Homeric texts, some two millennia and many stages of editing removed from their proposed date of creation in that form, and the Serbo-Croatian texts recorded directly from singers by Parry and Lord. And this, of course, is to say nothing about the problems that tradition- and genre-dependence present for such analysis.

Since scholars have shown that the phraseology of these texts was formed in symbiosis with their various meters and general prosodies, I turned next to a discussion of comparative prosody in the three epic traditions. By measuring the Homeric hexameter, alliterative line, and epski deseterac against the reconstructed Indo-European precursor, it was possible to illustrate how each prosody diverged from that source into its own identity as a partner in the formation and maintenance of traditional diction. In the course of this investigation we discovered not only that the three prosodies cannot be simplistically equated, but also that one must look most closely at the "inner metric" of each line in order to understand its structure and its contribution to the compositional process.

Chapters 4-6 then applied the lessons learned about tradition-dependent prosody to the study of tradition-dependent phraseology in each tradition.

We found that the most fundamental level of structure in the diction was to be attributed to individual sets of traditional rules , unique to each tradition, which formed the basis for formulaic language. Additionally, it soon became apparent that, even within the same epic tradition, no single model would suit the entire phraseological spectrum encountered during analysis, and that the best, most faithful characterization of the diction had to be as a heterogeneous collection of both formulaic and not demonstrably formulaic language —all overseen by traditional rules. In the case of the Odyssey , for example, the investigations of epea pteroenta and Book 5.424-44 led us to recognize phraseological units as short as a single colon and as long as a number of hexameters, with variability at all levels; since no one single length or form could be understood as primary, we advocated viewing the diction as a collection of unequal parts rationalized by traditional rules.

Many of the same observations were made about traditional phraseology in Serbo-Croatian in chapter 5. The guslar's diction resembles that of Homer in a number of ways (colonic "words," for instance), and it too shows a spectrum of phraseological units that co-exist under the aegis of a separate set of traditional rules. Analyses of material from recorded Return Songs ballasted the argument. In contrast, we discovered that the diction of Beowulf shares very few of the features that characterize the language of the other two poetries: the Old English alliterative line relies for its structure not on cola and caesuras but rather on stress and alliteration. While there is thus little compositional pressure for the encapsulated phrases typical of Homeric and Serbo-Croatian epic, Anglo-Saxon does follow its own set of traditional rules. And, as the analysis of Grendel's approach to Heorot helped to illustrate, what results is once again a spectrum of phraseology that resists reduction to a single formulaic model.

The natural heterogeneity of traditional structure was studied at the level of the narrative unit of "theme" or "typical scene" in chapters 7 through 9-Analysis of the Odyssey focused on instances of three such units—Bath, Greeting, and Feast—in an effort to determine the role of narrative pattern and verbal correspondence. We found that the theme can consist of a tightly knit series of discrete actions or of a looser aggregation that leaves more room for individual, situation-specific variation, and likewise that the amount of verbal correspondence among instances varies from one theme to the next.

Chapter 8, on narrative themes in Yugoslav epic, showed how the definition of thematic structure rests not only on tradition-dependent features but also on the analytical perspective employed. There will be closer agreement among instances of a unit within a single guslar's recorded repertoire (idiolect) than within his local tradition (dialect) or the larger tradition as a synchronic and diachronic whole (language). While the discussion of the Serbo-Croatian theme rested on the Shouting in Prison multiform so typical of the Return Song, that of the Old English theme drew on analyses of Sea Voyage in

Beowulf and of Scourging in the poetic hagiography Andreas . In Anglo-Saxon, it was discovered, the kind of verbal correspondence typical of some themes in ancient Greek and Yugoslav epic is quite rare, the principal reason being the Old English tradition's lack of colonic phraseology. In the process of treating the Scourging multiform in Andreas , it proved possible to illustrate how another theme, that of Exile, was employed by the poet to explain his foreign source to an audience steeped in the native tradition.

Chapter 10 offered an analysis of the most extensive of traditional structures—the "story-pattern" that governs the action of the tale as a whole. By taking advantage of the well-collected Serbo-Croatian tradition of Return Songs, it proved possible to observe the multiformity of this ubiquitous tale-type in simplex patterns (Absence through Wedding), in double-cycle forms (two heroes, with conditional elements and substitution), and in composite songs (with a final conditional element leading to a sequel story). The most telling part of the demonstration was the observation of wide and yet limited variation on this fundamental pattern, the same sort of controlled multiformity one finds in both phraseology and thematics. Additionally, examination of the songs of Mujo Kukuruzovic^[*] afforded an example of the creation of a "new," composite song or "amalgam"; one of the two songs was in fact shown to exist separately and individually within his repertoire.

Studies such as these, which concentrate on establishing the structure of oral (or oral-derived) epic poetry, hopefully provide a first step toward a faithful poetics. In the end, the question must be one of contextualization: to what extent are the Odyssey, Beowulf , and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song really comparable? The last two decades have seen this and similar questions prove increasingly complex, and if the scholarship has been unanimous on any one point, it is that such questions cannot be answered without taking the many dimensions of comparability into account and considering each issue carefully. To the extent that these studies have prompted that kind of consideration, and thus assisted in clearing the way for an aesthetics that recognizes the full measure of the role of oral tradition in these great epic poetries, they have accomplished their purpose.