Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Page 53

The oral-formulaic structure of the Faroese kvæði
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manuscript tradition. This seems to have been the case with
the Chanson de Roland.1 And it is possibly the case with some
of the texts of the kvæði. Problems of this sort are peculiar to
certain, mostly Western and European, oral traditions and not
characteristic of them all.
New and significant ways of looking at oral poetry grew
up in the late twenties and early thirties of this century, be-
coming generally available with the publication of A. B. Lord’s
Singer of tales in 1960. Professor Lord, building on the work
of his teacher and predecessor, the late Milman Parry, has in
this very valuable study provided us with a great deal of
insight into the nature of the oral poetic language of Serbo-
croatian narrative poetry. Thus it seems clear that each recom-
position of a poem is a unique bringing together of the abstract
tale and the poetic grammar of Serbocroatian. The formula,
the oral formula, is the most striking characteristic of this
poetic grammar. It is the basic semantic unit out of which the
poem is built.
It is certainly unfortunate that Parry and Lord chose to use
the term ‘formula’, for they mean it to cover more than the
traditional epithet like ‘bright-eyed Athene’, etc. or the set
phrase like ‘Beowulf mafjelode, bearn Ecgfjeowes’, etc., though
these are certainly included in their expanded sense of the
term. Still it is a useful term and can be well-defined to mean
more than a verbal handle onto which the poet grasps while
he tries valiantly to remember what he should be doing with
the story. Formulas are the tiles out of which the poet creates
his entire verbal mozaic. More precisely, using Cedric H. Whit-
man’s definition which leaves enough open so that it can be
accomodated to a wide variety of oral poetic traditions:
»a formula .. .. is a group af words, a semantic unit, identi-
fied with a metric demand and which has a nonanalytic
meaning in a way that an idiom does.«2
*) See A. B. Lord, Singer of tales (Cambridge: Harvard University
press, 1960) for discussion of this matter.
2) Homer and, the Homeric tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University