Oral Poets of South India

The Todas

Bibliographic Data

ID2815451
AuthorsM B Emeneau (corresponding author)
Year1958
Volume71
Issue281
Pages312
Publication date1958-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American Folklore (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8715 • E-ISSN: 1535-1882
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/538564
OpenAlexW2318199844
LanguageEN
Citations received13

The student of the earliest literary works of our Western culture, those of Greece, soon learns that not all of them are literature in the strict sense. The Homeric poems are not works that were composed with the aid of writing materials. They bear within themselves very patently the marks of oral composition and recitation, and the Greek traditions about them are hardly intelligible on any other interpretation. European poetry, however, soon exchanged oral composition for that based on the use of writing materials, and our literatures in the Western world are to the present day predicated in an extraordinarily intimate fashion on this newer technique and its consequences. So much is this so, that for many scholars over many centuries the implications of oral composition for the understanding of Homer were forgotten. Not all had been oblivious, to be sure-one need mention only Gilbert Murray and the Chadwicks to refute that-but there was a need for some new impulse to make the matter vivid enough to be vital in Homeric studies. This new impulse was external and analogous, as it turned out. An American classical scholar originally of the University of California, Milman Parry, knew well enough the method of composition of the Homeric poems and knew too that there existed in the modern world and in a geographical area not far removed from Greece an oral epic. In the comparatively peaceful period between the two World Wars he went to Yugoslavia and in the mountains of the southern part of that country and of Albania he recorded and investigated the South Slav epic. He and his collaborators and pupils found there a technique remarkably similar in many details to that which had been postulated for Homer. It was possible to go on and to apply profitably to Homeric interpretation other details of the technique of the South Slav epic singers. Much of the needed reexamining of several of these literatures based on oral composition has been done by Maurice Bowra in his masterly and suggestive

Art · Geography · Literature · Oral poetry · Poetry · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Translation Studies and Practices

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