Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 247

ANDMÆLARÆÐUR
245
In this book the nature of oral composition and tradition was explained in
an entirely new way, very different from that of, for example, Liestpl, Heusler
or other Freeprose theorists. According to Lord and his teacher Milman Parry,
who had both closely studied the transmission of long epic songs still
circulating in Yugoslavia, oral texts, unlike literary texts, were always com-
posed in actual performance with the help of ready-made epic formulas and
traditional action pattems. The texts changed from performance to perfor-
mance but could always, according to Lord, be recognized as oral if they
contained a sufficient number of formulas and stereotyped narrative pattems.
This new way of looking at oral tradition was later severely criticized by other
scholars but it was soon adopted, fírst by American and later by European
medievalists and students of epic literature. As a result of the critical discus-
sion, Lord’s methodology was often taken over in revised or modified form by
other scholars but it did lead to a renewed belief that works such as the Iliad,
Beowulfor Chanson de Roland were indeed oral texts or at least very strongly
influenced by oral traditions. The Icelandic sagas, on the other hand, were
never considered formulaic enough to be regarded as tmly oral-formulaic texts
but the presense in saga texts of certain recurring formulaic pattems was still
considered indications of a fairly strong element of orality.
The oral-formulaic theory of Parry and Lord was not the only reason,
however, why oral tradition again, from the sixties and onwards, became
regarded as a crucial and important factor in the development of sagas, par-
ticularly Islendingasögur. Other influences came from a new breed of
folklorists with structuralist ideas inherited from Vladimir Propp, the famous
Russian formalist who tried to introduce a sort of “narrative grammar” for the
study of oral folktales. Still other influences came from students of rhetoric,
speech and mass communication or from historians, linguists and anthro-
pologists interested in the development of literacy in nonliterate societies.
Important new contributions were made, for example, by Frances Yates in The
Art of Memory (1966), Jack Goody in Literacy in Traditionai Societies
(1968), and Michael Clanchy in From Memory to Written Record (1979).
Several new ideas and approaches to oral texts introduced by these scholars
and by followers of Parry and Lord were later incorporated by Walter Ong in
his extremely influential book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word (1982), a work that soon became used as a textbook in many parts
of the world and in many different subjects — from Comparative Literature to
Linguistics and Social Anthropology.