In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics
  • Galit Hasan-Rokem (bio)
The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics. Studia Fennica Folkloristica. Edited by Lauri Honko . Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002.

When a folk-literary scholar, not herself an expert in epic poetry, digs into the thick texture of this substantial volume on the Kalevala and traditional epics, she is very soon enveloped in a rhetoric quite rare elsewhere in folk-literary scholarship. Not only do epic scholars proudly proclaim the elitism of their object of research, but they also imply that the research of epics is an elite branch among the varieties of folk-literary study. Most of them situate their research across the boundary of literature and oral tradition. Their study is thus most pertinent to all who want to critically examine the constructed dimension of the category of folk literature in general, and specifically oral literature.

One need only read a few stanzas or lines of any piece of epic poetry to sense the poetic refinement and skill invested in the creation of epic poetry. Only seldom does one encounter that level of sophistication in folk prose, and then only in specific forms of the folktale that tend to straddle the written-oral divide. I am reminded of a discussion I had with the late editor of this volume, Lauri Honko, after we had been listening to a brilliant paper on urban legends delivered by one of our colleagues. Honko congratulated himself on having access to such textual riches as Finnish laments or South Indian epics, which he rated much higher than the somewhat—in his eyes—banal oral narratives of modern urban cultures.

The volume encompasses twenty-eight essays by twenty-seven authors. Honko himself contributed both a theoretical introductory essay and a more traditional comparative study of epics in the eastern Baltic region. The essays break down thematically as follows: Kalevala across the borders (five essays); European traditional epics (six essays); American and African traditional epics [End Page 308] (two essays); Asian epics (six essays); and traditional epics of the eastern Baltic region (nine essays). On the whole they reflect the intensified interest and common work done by epic scholars in the last two decades, led and inspired by Honko himself through the "epic network" he initiated within the framework of Folklore Fellows International. Another important and leading figure in the field is his close colleague John Miles Foley, founder and editor of Oral Tradition, who has contributed to the volume an article that deals with the metonymic character of the oral epic with reference to an assumed "pool of tradition" (113; cf. Honko, Textualizing the Siri Epic [Folklore Fellows Communications 264], 1998; Textualization of Oral Epics, 2000). Although the dynamics between the "persistence of traditional forms as textual rhetoric" (120) and the "performance arena" (121) may seem to be yet another refinement of the competence-performance complex (e.g., Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art, 1998), Foley formulates astutely what seems to be at present a dominant intuition in epic studies: "the old model of the Great Divide between orality and literacy has entirely given way in most quarters, pointing toward the accompanying demise of the absolutist dichotomy of performance versus document" (121). That may also provide the generalizing perspective that makes this volume as a whole worthwhile reading for all folk-literary scholars and probably textual scholars, without distinguishing between genre and mode.

Thus the good or bad news, depending on one's point of view, or maybe no news at all, is the fact that the so-called Homeric question has definitely not disappeared or been rendered irrelevant by recent scholarship. In this sense the assumption that A. B. Lord laid down in his Singer of Tales (1960), whereby the oral-formulaic theory was to put an end to the debate whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were the textual culmination of an oral tradition of generations or rather the stroke of a unique genius, Homer, has been disproved. Honko's introductory essay on the composition of Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala almost seems to ignore the existence of the oral-formulaic theory...

pdf

Share