Oral tradition

• 1. Introduction

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  Oral tradition is the form of human communication in which knowledge, art, beliefs, ideas and culture pass from one generation to the next by speech or song. The people who hold this knowledge are sometimes called walking libraries. They are mentally recorded repositories, and they are usually performers too. Folktales, ballads, chants, prose and poetry all travel this way. It is, according to the article, the most widespread medium of human communication. The scholar John Foley argued that oral tradition was never the primitive, preliminary technology of communication that observers once accused it of being. He called it the single most dominant communicative technology of our species. How does a society carry a sacred text, a code of law, or a thousand-year-old memory of a volcanic eruption without writing a single word down? Who is entrusted to remember, and what happens to the truth when no page can be checked? This is the story of the spoken word as a system for preserving everything that matters.

• 2. Walking Libraries Of West Africa

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  The west African griot may be the most famous repository of oral tradition anywhere. The role is hereditary, and it appears across Dyula, Soninke, Fula, Hausa, Songhai, Wolof, Serer and Mossi societies, though it is most famously associated with the Mandinka. Griots form a caste and carry many roles at once. They are historian and library, musician, poet, mediator of family and tribal disputes, spokesperson, and a presence in the king's court. The article likens them to the European bard. They keep the records of births, deaths and marriages across the generations of a village or family. When Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire, he was offered Balla Fasséké as his griot, an advisor for his reign. That gift gave rise to the Kouyate line of griots. A griot's telling is rarely silent. The Epic of Sundiata is accompanied by the balafon, while the kora carries other traditions. In modern times some griots and their descendants have set aside the historian's role to focus on music, and many have found success, yet many still keep the older duties intact.

• 3. Engines Of Exact Memory

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  The verses of an epic are often built so that a mistake exposes itself. Long and short syllables repeat by certain rules, and an internal examination of the verse reveals any inadvertent change. Oral cultures lean on heavily rhythmic speech and mnemonic devices to lock knowledge in place. Alliteration, repetition, assonance and proverbial sayings all sharpen recall. The article notes that verse is often metrically composed with an exact number of syllables or morae, as in Greek and Latin prosody and in the Chandas of Hindu and Buddhist texts. Ancient Indians built whole techniques for listening, memorization and recitation in schools called Gurukul. Many forms of recitation, called pathas, were designed to guard accuracy as the Vedas passed from one generation to the next. All 1,028 hymns of the Rigveda, with their 10,600 verses, were preserved this way. Each text was recited in several styles so that one method cross-checked another. The Samhita-patha is a continuous recitation bound by the phonetic rules of euphonic combination. The Pada-patha inserts a conscious pause after every word, restoring each word to its original form. The Krama-patha pairs words successively, so word1word2, then word2word3, then word3word4. The Hindu tradition credits this step-by-step method to the Vedic sages Gargya and Sakalya, and the grammarian Panini mentions it. Michael Witzel described Vedic transmission as something like a tape-recording. Not just the words survived, he wrote, but even the long-lost musical tonal accent.

• 4. Improvising The Ancient Song

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  Milman Parry and Albert Lord showed that Homer's verse was not passed down by rote memorization at all, but by oral-formulaic composition. A singer composes on the spot, helped by stock phrases or formulas that fit the meter. The article gives the examples eos rhododaktylos, rosy fingered dawn, and oinops pontos, winedark sea, which slot into the six-colon Greek hexameter. Steve Reece argued that all ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature, and that the earliest literature was completely so. As singers performed for distant audiences, they would swap the names in a story for local characters or rulers, giving each telling a local flavor. That habit makes the historicity embedded in such traditions unreliable. The model spread far. According to John Miles Foley, the idea of oral-formulaic composition has touched on more than a hundred ancient, medieval and modern traditions. Albanian epic poetry has been studied by Homeric scholars to better understand Homer himself, and the theory of oral-formulaic composition was developed in part through Albanian verse. The Albanian singing of epic from memory is described as one of the last survivors of its kind in modern Europe, and the last survivor of the Balkan traditions.

• 5. Scripture Without A Page

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  Islam claims two major sources of divine revelation, the Quran and the hadith. The word Quran means recitation in Arabic. Muslims believe it was revealed to the prophet Muhammad from 610 CE until his death in 632 CE, and compiled into a standardized written form, the mushaf, about two decades after the last verse. The decision to create a standard written work is said to have followed the death in battle at Yamama of many Muslims who had memorized the work. For centuries copies were transcribed by hand, never printed, and their scarcity made reciting from memory the main way of teaching. To this day the Quran is memorized by millions. Scholars have examined whether the Quran was not just recited orally but composed orally. Andrew Bannister points to the seven re-tellings of the story of Iblis and Adam, and the repeated line in sura 55, which of the favours of your Lord will you deny, as phrasing that makes more sense to listeners than readers. The most common formulas are the attributes of Allah, such as all-mighty, all-wise and all-knowing, often paired at the end of a verse. The phrase Allah created the heavens and the earth appears 19 times. Alan Dundes estimated that as much as one third of the Quran is made of oral formulas. The hadith took a different path. Meaning narrative or report, it records Muhammad's words, actions and silent approval, and was carried by oral preachers and storytellers for roughly 150 to 250 years. Each hadith carries an isnad, the chain of human transmitters, sorted by accuracy before being written down. Other faiths walked similar roads. The Catholic Church holds that the teachings of Jesus were first passed on by the Apostles through oral preaching, example and observance, a transmission it says continues through bishops by apostolic succession. In Eastern Orthodoxy there is one Tradition, the deposit of faith given by Jesus to the Apostles and passed on without addition, alteration or subtraction.

• 6. Memory As Deep History

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  A basalt stone axe found beneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already shown that humans lived in south-western Victoria before a volcano erupted. In February 2020, a study reported new evidence that the Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago. That figure is a minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria. It can also be read as support for the oral histories of the Gunditjmara people, whose accounts of volcanic eruptions may be among the oldest oral traditions in existence. Across the Pacific, Native oral traditions in the Pacific Northwest describe earthquakes and tsunamis. Cultures from Vancouver Island and Washington tell of a struggle between a Thunderbird and a Whale. In one version the Thunderbird, able to make thunder by moving a single feather, sinks its talons into the Whale and is dragged to the ocean floor. The Suquamish Tribe tells that Agate Pass was created when an earthquake widened the channel during an underwater battle between a serpent and a bird. Some regional stories have been used to identify and date earthquakes from 900 CE and 1700. Arikara origin stories of emergence from an underworld of persistent darkness may preserve a memory of life inside the Arctic Circle during the last ice age. Stories of a deep crevice may point to the Grand Canyon. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act treats oral traditions as a viable source of evidence for linking cultural objects to Native Nations.

• 7. Storytelling As Social Law

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  Inuit parents, rather than yelling, might keep a child away from the water by telling of a sea monster with a pouch for children within reach. Native American storytelling is collaborative, shared between teller and listeners. Tribes generally had no professional storytellers marked by social status, and a story could be told by anyone, each teller choosing their own inflection, words, content and form. One rendition was often a response to another, its altered plot a way of applying old ideas to present conditions. Listeners might have heard a story many times, or told it themselves, because curiosity about what came next mattered less than fresh perspective on familiar themes. The 19th century Oglala Lakota member Four Guns was known for defending the oral tradition and criticizing the written word. In oral cultures the law itself is enshrined in formulaic sayings and proverbs, which are not decoration but the law. Walter Ong wrote that a judge in such a culture is often called on to articulate sets of relevant proverbs from which to make equitable decisions. The article points to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and its Law of the Jungle as a demonstration of oral governance. Because these rules are not static and shift slightly with each telling, the article observes that the rules governing a people are modified by the whole and not authored by a single entity.

• 8. Building A Science Of The Spoken

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  Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, who lived from 1787 to 1864, was a contemporary and friend of the Brothers Grimm. He pursued salvage folklore in the South Slavic regions that would later become Yugoslavia, mixing romantic and nationalistic interests. The turcologist Vasily Radlov, who lived from 1837 to 1918, studied the songs of the Kara-Kirghiz. Karadžić and Radloff would provide models for the work of Parry. A separate thread ran through media theory. Marshall McLuhan, who lived from 1911 to 1980, focused on how communicative media shape what they convey, and he mentored the Jesuit Walter Ong, who lived from 1912 to 2003. Ong's Orality and Literacy, published in 1980, drew the contrast between primary orality, writing, print and the secondary orality of the electronic age. He defined primary orality as the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, and secondary orality as a new orality sustained by telephone, radio and television. John Miles Foley consolidated the field when he compiled Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research in 1985. He founded the journal Oral Tradition and, in 1986, the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri. His Pathways Project, running from 2005 to 2012, draws parallels between oral traditions and the Internet. The discipline was not built without dispute. Geoffrey Kirk's The Songs of Homer questioned Lord's extension of Serbian and Croatian models to Homer, pointing to Homer's metrical strictness and creativity. Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato argued that the oral-formulas preserved cultural knowledge across generations. Jan Vansina's 1961 book Oral Tradition made the case for oral sources as historical sources, and it is regarded as one of the most influential works on African history. Because oral tradition rarely carries chronological devices, historians have leaned on lists of rulers and on generational averaging, with the most common generation length chosen as 27 years.