Charms, Change and Memory
Some Principles Underlying Variation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7774459 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Roper (0000-0001-8807-2276, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 09 |
| Pages | 51-70 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Folklore Electronic Journal of Folklore (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1406-0957 • E-ISSN: 1406-0949 |
| Publisher | Estonian Literary Museum of Scholarly Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.7592/fejf1998.09.charm |
| OpenAlex | W2324667690 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
The following paper takes as its starting point the fact that renditions of the ‘same’ verbal charm may differ on separate occasions. It will suggest that this phenomenon, observed especially in longer charms, arises because non-literate charmers, even when they were particularly concerned with producing a verbatim repetition of longish charms, possessed no failsafe way of telling if they had produced a verbatim repetition or not. It argues that they, especially in former non-literary times, possessed a somewhat different nonliteral sense, of what constituted the identity of a certain charm, and thus of the permissibility of variations between different performances of that ‘same’ charm. It reviews a series of first attempts1 to examine differences between sets of renditions; and the paper then proceeds to elucidate what principles (if any) lie behind this phenomonen and to provide names for them. But I should first like to begin with a cautionary tale
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |