Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Page 54

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The oral-formulaic structure of the Faroese kvæði
Now what Parry and Lord found to be true of Serbocroatian
narrative was that it was totally pervaded by formula: there
was little that was not formulaic. And further investigation
has led to the following theory of oral poetry and the not
obvious or necessary corollary: all oral narrative poetry is
formulaic; all formulaic narrative poetry is oral.
The ramifications of this statement are far reaching. In fact
Parry had originally searched out a living oral tradition for
investigation in order to seek confirmation of his hypothesis
that the peculiar nature of Homeric poetic language was a
function of oral composition. He was thus finally in a position
to say that what he had learned from a living oral poetic
tradition and what he knew of written narrative poetry could
be applied to narrative poetic traditions about which there
was no compositional knowledge. Working backwards from a
poem’s form it became possible to learn how it must have been
composed.
Lord’s book, then, is not simply a study of south Yugo-
slavian narrative: it is a discussion of the general properties of
oral narrative poetry, and along the way he deals not only
with Homer but also with Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland,
the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas, and the Nihelunglied (the
last only in an original and unpublished version of the book).
It has led to a rather large amount of significant work on Old
English poetry, Old French, Old Irish, and some little in Old
Norse, so that, e. g., it is now clear to many scholars that
nearly all of the Old English poetic corpus is formulaic, hence
orally composed.
This long preamble finished, it is my purpose here to turn
press, 1958), p. 109. In a recent thesis (Formula and collocation [Univer-
sity of Sydney (Australia), 1969] — soon to be published [revised] by
the University of Winconsin press), Terry R. Threadgold has sharply
criticized all proposed definitions of ‘oral formula’. But it is in general
true that primitives in any formal system are best loosely and intuitively
defined. It should be added that her ‘collocation’ (out of the London
school of linguistics of Firth and Halliday) is as vacuously defined a
notion as man can find.