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Reviewed by:
  • Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing
  • John D. Niles
Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing. Edited by Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008. Pp. vi + 241. $54.

One of the ways in which literary scholarship has been energized during the past fifty years is through fieldwork investigating how oral art forms function in traditional societies. Another way has been through research into the residual impression of oral art forms in literature that is preserved in script or print. Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing carries the second of these discussions into new ground, highlighting many points of interest as it does so.

Edited with care by Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, the volume developed out of a conference held at Bergen in 2004. Since most of the contributors are specialists in Scandinavian Studies, that part of the world is well represented. There are four essays on the Icelandic sagas (by Theodore M. Andersson, Gísli Sigurðsson, Tommy Danielsson, and Guðrun Nordal), two on eddic poetry (by Bernt Øyvind Thorvaldsen and Else Mundal), and two on Scandinavian ballad tradition (by Olav Solberg and Jonas Wellendorf). These are supplemented by an essay (by Bergsveinn Birgisson) on skaldic poetry and its arresting visual imagery. The literature of regions outside Scandinavia is touched on in passing. There is one study (by Graham D. Caie) of the Beowulf poet's fictive representation of oral performances, one chapter each on medieval Serbian poetry (by Sonja Petrović) and on the medieval literature of East Central Europe (by Anna Adamska), and one very interesting chapter (by Lars Boje Mortensen) on medieval Latin prose and its possible reliance on what might be called "oral history interviews." Geographically, the focus of the collection is thus northern Europe; temporally, the "extended Middle Ages" is favored over other historical periods; and in terms of genre, most of the studies deal with narrative literature rather than the lyric or other forms. The volume therefore has greater unity than its title might suggest, though at the cost of neglecting such topics as the ancient world, contemporary folkloristics, the digital revolution, and continents other than Europe.

It is worth observing that only two chapters deal with oral theory in general. One of these is a discerning chapter by Minna Skafte Jensen on "The Oral-Formulaic Theory Revisited." The other is a chapter by Ljubiša Rajić on the odd mixture of direct and indirect discourse that one sometimes finds in medieval narratives — a phenomenon that may reflect the oral style of storytelling. The book's implicit emphasis is thus on pragmatic knowledge built up from culturally-specific problems or case studies, rather than on grandiose claims about orality and textuality to be applied across the board. This is in keeping with the trend of scholarship in this field, as specialists have become increasingly wary of categorical pronouncements regarding, for example, the nature and importance of the formula, or a supposed dichotomy between oral and written literature, or the oral versus literary character of noteworthy texts that have come down to us from the past.

If a common thread runs through this volume, it is that there is no hard and fast [End Page 378] line between oral communication and its written counterpart. The contributors seem to share a confidence that oral cultures are efficacious in their own terms, so that when literacy is introduced to an oral culture it tends at first to supplement oral art forms, not to replace them. The volume's emphasis is on the changes of form and style that ensue when the materials of oral tradition are transmuted into script or print, or when learned authors or scribes draw on their familiarity with oral sources when crafting written compositions.

Since space does not permit a summary of each of the fifteen essays included in the anthology, the following remarks will be directed to five studies that strike the present reviewer as especially rewarding.

In her revisiting of the Parry/Lord theory of oral composition, Minna Skafte Jensen shows that recent fieldwork in India and North...

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