Manas and Homer

The world’s great epics, including Gilgamesh , the Iliad , the Odyssey , and Beowolf , certainly existed as oral literature before they were committed to writing. There is controversy, however, regarding just how closely the written texts we have correspond to what ancient audiences heard in performance. An analysis of the known pre-Soviet and Soviet performance practice of the Kyrgyz epic Manas , however, allows us to guess that the written versions of ancient epics we possess today are not transcribed “command performances” by oral bards but rather the careful work of brilliant, literate editors who created well-structured wholes out of a myriad of messy oral parts