The Prose Narrator in Turkish Folk Stories and the Formula in the Story

Oral repetition is a distinctive feature of orally transmitted literature, prose, and poetry. However, due to the strong influence of the oral formula theory based on examining the epic in verse, a disproportionate emphasis was placed on verse in formula research and prose expression was ignored. This study is an attempt to systematically examine the formula in Turkish prose narrative (story), which is a mixture of prose and poetry. Prose, which is the dominant part of the story, is told by a minstrel, and the poems sung by the same artist accompanied by saz are sprinkled between them. The data used in this article mainly covers the repertoire of a famous storyteller named Müdami (d. 1968). His stories were recorded on several occasions during his thirty-year career. The first collection was made in 1942, when the treasurer was a young soldier and writer Pertev Boratav. Back then, stories were told and written to a group of officers during the show. In 1956, a few stories of Müdami were recorded by İlhan Başgöz in a room where there was no other audience. The last recording was made in 1967, a year before Müdami's death, in his hometown of Poshof. There the same story was recorded in two real cases: one being read to the town's people in a coffeehouse, the other being told to the town's intellectuals at the Teachers' Association the next evening. Various compiling methods and different mediums gave the opportunity to examine the interaction of the formula with the personality of the narrator, the audience and the social environment. I then checked the preliminary findings with collections of stories recorded by other narrators, story booklets published in Turkey since 1930, and other folklore genres. Among these, there are some written sources such as epics, folk tales, shadow plays, meddah stories, folk poems and early Ottoman history, anecdotes and legends. The study is a compilation study and contains examples of Turkish Minstrel tradition. The stories told by Aşık Müdami were conveyed in both Turkish and English. The formulas Müdami used while telling stories were identified and summarized

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Turkish · Cultural and Sociopolitical Studies · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Philosophy