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JOHN MILES FOLEY’S
WORLD OF ORALITIES
BORDERLINES
Borderlines welcomes monographs and edited collections that, while firmly rooted
in late antique, medieval, and early modern periods, are “edgy” and may introduce
approaches, methodologies, or theories from the social sciences, health studies, and the
sciences. Typically, volumes are theoretically aware whilst introducing novel approaches
to topics of key interest to scholars of the pre-modern past.
JOHN MILES FOLEY’S
WORLD OF ORALITIES
TEXT, TRADITION, AND
CONTEMPORARY ORAL THEORY
edited by
Mark C. Amodio
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2020, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution
only licence CC BY 4.0.
The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of their part of this work.
Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby
granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is
an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive
(2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright
Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S.
Copy-right Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Publisher’s
permission.
ISBN (HB): 9781641893381

ISBN (PB): 9781641894593
e-ISBN: 9781641893398
www.arc-humanities.org
Printed and bound in the UK (by CPI Group [UK] Ltd), USA (by Bookmasters), and elsewhere
using print-on-demand technology.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Introduction: The Pathway(s) from Oral-formulaic Theory to

Contemporary Oral Theory
MARK C. AMODIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction to the Individual Contributions

MIRANDA VILLESVIK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Orality and Literacy Revisited

GREGORY NAGY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Preserving Traditions of “Them” and the Creation of “Us”:

Formulaic Language, Historiography, Mythology, and Self-Definition
SUSAN NIDITCH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Beyond Books: The Confluence of Influence and the Old English Judith
ANDY ORCHARD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Embodying the Oral Tradition: Performance and Performative Poetics

in and of Beowulf
MARK C. AMODIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Performing Anglo-Saxon Elegies: A Conversation

MARK C. AMODIO and BENJAMIN BAGBY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Notes on the Recordings of Three Anglo-Saxon Elegies

BENJAMIN BAGBY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Healing Charms in the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript

NANCY MASON BRADBURY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
vi Contents
Is the “Formula” the Key to Oral Composition?

EDWARD R. HAYMES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
The Formula: Morphology and Syntax

YURI KLEINER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Old Norse Riddles and other Verbal Contests in Performance

STEPHEN MITCHELL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Performance Archaeology, Eiríksmál, Hákonarmál, and the Study of

Old Nordic Religions
TERRY GUNNELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
“To Surf through the Shared Riches of the Story Hoard”:

The oAgora of the Sigurðr Story
THOMAS A. DUBOIS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
When a Hero Lies

JOSEPH FALAKY NAGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
“The True Nature of the aoidos”: The Kirghiz Singer of Tales

and the Epic of Manas
KARL REICHL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
John Miles Foley: Open Mind, Open Access, Open Tradition, Open Foley
RUTH FINNEGAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Master Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Index of Manuscripts Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
Figure 1. Sigurðr licks his thumb while roasting the heart of Fafnir
in the presence of the sleeping Regin. Hylestad Portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Figure 2. Andreas cross. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Figure 3. Näs baptismal font. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Figure 4. Ramsund slab engraving, originally in

Montelius, Sveriges hednatid: dramatic image of
Sigurd stabbing a text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Figure 5. Sigurðr slaying Fafnir. Hylestad portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Figure 6. Sigurðr slays Regin. Hylestad Portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Figure 7. Gunnar plays the harp in the snake pit. Hylestad Portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Tables
Table 1. The Structure of Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Table 2. Speeches in the Biblical Book of Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Table 3. Speeches in the Old English Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to this volume’s contributors for their steadfast commitment

to this project as it encountered both the usual bumps and some unusual ones on its
overly long journey to print. Collectively and individually, they exhibited patience that
does not rival, but surpasses, that of the saints. I am similarly very grateful to Bob Bjork,
who saw the value of this collection early on and whose support of it never wavered. It
is a pleasure to thank Vassar College for the institutional support, in the form of several
grants from its Research Committee, that this project received, especially the one that
supported the professional recordings Ben Bagby made in Cologne, Germany. Thanks
also are due to the student research assistants who worked on this project at various
stages, with special thanks going to Miranda Villesvik, who, during a summer spent as
a Vassar Ford Fellow, brought her extraordinary editorial skills and exceptionally sharp
eye for detail to bear on this project, much to its lasting benefit. I am once again grateful
to Madeleine P. Amodio for her careful work in compiling the indices. Among my Vassar
colleagues, I would like to single out Jon Chenette for his unfailing personal and profes-
sional support, both during his time as Dean of the Faculty and upon his recent return to
the teaching faculty. Special thanks are also due my departmental colleagues Robert D.
Maria, Jr., Don Foster, Eamon Grennan, Dan Peck, and Paul Russell.
It has been a pleasure to work with Simon Forde and his first-rate staff at Arc
Humanities Press, and I am most grateful to Anna Henderson, as talented and profes-
sional an editor as one could hope to have. The anonymous reader for the press helped
improve the volume with her, her, or their insightful suggestions.
My children, Min and Luc, though off following their own pursuits, continue—as
they always have—to enrich my life daily in ways small and large. Lastly, and most
importantly, I am thankful to Gena Andryshak for gracing my life in ways that are far too
numerous to catalogue here.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ABAG Amsterdamer Beiträge zur álteren Germanistik

AI American Imago
ALC African Languages and Cultures
AM Asia Major
ANF Arkiv för nordisk filologi
ANQ American Notes and Queries
APS Acta Philologica Scandinavica
ASE Anglo-Saxon England
ASPR Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records
BAR Biblical Archaeology Review
BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library
BS Balkan Studies
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
CA Cultural Anthropology
CAJ Central Asiatic Journal
CFQ California Folklore Quarterly
CL Comparative Literature
CMCS Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies
CSAE Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England
DOML Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
EA Etudes Anglaises
EE Ethnologia Europaea
EI Encyclopaedia Iranica
EJA European Journal of Archaeology
ES English Studies
ESA English Studies in Africa
FEJ Folklore, An Electronic Journal
FFC Folklore Fellows Communications
G-RM Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift
HTR Harvard Theological Review
IJHSS International Journal of Humanities and Social Science
JAF Journal of American Folklore
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JDTC Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
JSAS Journal of Southern African Studies
xii List of Abbreviations
LS Language and Style

MA Medieval Archaeology
MED Middle English Dictionary
MGS Michigan Germanic Studies
MLR Modern Language Review
MP Modern Philology
MS Mediaeval Scandinavia
NEJM New England Journal of Medicine
NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
NQ Notes and Queries
OED Oxford English Dictionary
OL Orientalistische Literaturzeitun
OT Oral Tradition
PAPS Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
PT Poetics Today
RES Review of English Studies
SAJFS Southern African Journal of Folklore Studies
SB Studies in Bibliography
SCF Studia Celtica Fennica
SHM Social History of Medicine
SLI Studies in the Literary Imagination
SLSF Svenska landsmål ock svenskt folkliv
SMC Studies in Medieval Culture
SN Studia Neophilologica
SP Studies in Philology
SS Scandinavian Studies
TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association
TPS Transactions of the Philological Society
TS Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek
TSLL Texas Studies in Literature and Language
UF Ugarit Forschungen
VT Vetus Testamentum
VSNR Viking Society for Northern Research
WF Western Folklore
WS Die Welt der Slawen
ZVV Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde
INTRODUCTION:
THE PATHWAY(S) FROM
ORAL-FORMULAIC THEORY TO
CONTEMPORARY ORAL THEORY
MARK C. AMODIO
The comments Albert Bates Lord offers on the back cover of John Miles
Foley’s The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology—that it “is a remark-
able and important book, and [that] its publication will be a landmark in the study
of oral traditional literature”—remain as true today as when the book appeared in
1988. Foley, whose knowledge of the field was unsurpassed even at what was then
still a relatively early stage of his remarkable and unfortunately truncated career,1 was
uniquely positioned to write the definitive history of the field, one that was—despite
the more general term Foley, with his characteristic prescience, opted for in his title—
at the time still largely defined by the theory of oral-formulaic composition, or as it
was and is still known, the Parry–Lord theory, although it is more accurate, and cer-
tainly less dogmatic, to describe it as “the Parry–Lord approach to oral poetics.”2 First
set forth by Milman Parry in his two 1928 French theses,3 this approach was most
fully articulated by Albert B. Lord, who had been Parry’s student and collaborator at
Harvard, in Singer of Tales. Truly ground-breaking, the Parry–Lord approach proved to
be extremely polarizing as well because it posited a view of how literature was com-
posed (and, by extension, received) that was radically at odds with not just decades
but several centuries of received thought predicated upon the practices and habits of
mind that accompany, mark—and limit—literate culture.4
1 Foley’s first contribution to the field appeared in print in 1976, two years after he completed
his 1974 dissertation, “Ritual Nature.” See R. Garner’s valuable and comprehensive annotated
bibliography for a full list of Foley’s published work.
2 The phrase is M. Lord’s in the preface, xii, to her husband’s posthumously published Singer
Resumes. See also G. Nagy, this volume.
3 See Parry, “L’Épithète Traditionnelle” and “Les Formules.”
4 Cf. Hoffman, “Exploring the Literate Blindspot,” and Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition, 1–32.
By way of illustrating just how radical the theory of oral-formulaic composition was when it was
first introduced, Alain Renoir on occasion would tell how Lord’s 1949 dissertation defence, which
was open to interested members of the Harvard community, lasted nearly eight hours because so
many people wanted to question him about his findings. While an effective tale, especially as told
by Renoir, a short time before her death in August 2009 Lord’s wife, Professor Mary Louise Lord,
confirmed, personal communication, that while Lord’s dissertation defence was at times spirited, it
did not last much longer than a typical one.
2 Introduction
Although the Parry–Lord theory was (and in some quarters remains) extremely
influential,5 and although it stands as one of the first truly multidisciplinary theories,6
it was also unintentionally hamstrung from the outset by its structuralist focus, by
its conceiving of oral tradition as a single, monolithic, universal entity, and, perhaps
most importantly, by its insistence that the oral and literate modes of composition
(and, indeed, their underlying modes of thought) were “contradictory and mutually
exclusive.”7 It was on precisely this point—the putatively fundamental incompatibility of
the oral and literate expressive economies—that the theory’s adherents and detractors
found perhaps their only point of agreement: for the former, the presence of such things
as, for example, repeated verbal formulas and typical scenes unquestionably established
the orality of a given work of verbal art, while for the latter that same verbal art’s sur-
vival only in writing pointed just as unquestionably to its situation in the literate world.
As a result, during the hey-day of the Parry–Lord theory,8 the mutual exclusivity of the
oral and literate expressive economies hardened into a largely unexamined first princi-
ple, and scholars positioned themselves on one side or the other of what Ruth Finnegan
aptly described (and just as aptly criticized) as the “Great Divide” between the oral and
the literate.9 Because each side held firmly to its own polemically articulated articles of
faith, the theory of oral-formulaic composition did not benefit from the ideational cross-
fertilization that is the necessary by-product of sustained and productive, if at times
painful, critical debate.10
The widespread adoption of the Parry–Lord theory by scholars in many fields, and
its productive application to the verbal art produced over the course of many centuries
5 Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, 88, notes that the Parry–Lord theory “can be said to be the
currently ruling theory about the nature of oral composition,” a comment that continues to ring true
today in certain quarters. That Singer of Tales has not been out of print since it first appeared in 1960
and went into a third edition fifty-nine years after it was first published are but two indicators of its
continuing importance. While its influence in North America has largely waned, the theory of oral-
formulaic composition remains influential among European scholars. See further, Amodio, review
of Reichl, Medieval Oral Literature, and Amodio, review of Helldén and others, Inclinate Aurem.
6 Oral-formulaic theory encompasses, among other areas, literary studies in many languages and
across many centuries, cultural and linguistic anthropology, folklore, performance studies, and
diachronic and synchronic linguistics, although there has not been as much cross-fertilization among
these fields as one would hope for, or expect. See Amodio, review of Goody, Myth, Ritual and the Oral.
7 Lord, Singer of Tales, 129.
8 Although what would come to be known as the Parry–Lord theory became part of the critical
discourse of classicists from the time of Parry’s initial publications in the late 1920s, and although
Lord had begun developing the theory in a series of publications beginning with his “Homer and
Huso I” in 1936, it was, Foley notes, Oral-Formulaic Theory, 3, not until after Magoun extended
it to Old English literature in his “Oral-Formulaic Character” in 1953 that oral-formulaic theory
gained a wider audience among practitioners of “literary studies, folklore, comparative literature,
linguistics, history, and anthropology.”
9 See Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, 12–14, 86–109, and 139–74. Cf. Stock, Implications, 71, who
observes that “literacy’s rise did not automatically spell the demise of traditional attitudes and tastes.”
10 Foley, Theory of Oral Composition, 57–111, succinctly sketches the contours of the positions
staked out by adherents to and detractors of oral-formulaic theory.
Introduction 3
by cultures spread throughout the world testify eloquently to the theory’s foundational
role in shaping the way we understand the creation and dissemination of traditional oral
verbal art.11 By the 1980s, however, the theory was on the verge of stagnating because
its practitioners continued to focus almost exclusively on applying, not developing, it.12
The reasons for this are too complex to be addressed here, but it is important to note
that this situation was not the result of any conscious effort to keep the theory “pure”;
rather, its failure to evolve can be traced in large part to its radicalness, to, that is, the
degree to which the theory unsettled the accepted orthodoxies of how works of verbal
art were composed and disseminated, to its mapping what had been terra incognita, and
to the failure of its adherents “to concur even on general definitions.”13
That those scholars who embraced and applied the theory of oral-formulaic compo-
sition did so largely unreflectively is not surprising, especially given that the results of
their investigations continually validated the theory and so reinforced its orthodoxies,
including the tacit, a priori assumption that the oral and literate expressive economies
were discrete cultural components that could neither coexist nor intersect. And while
many scholars questioned or simply rejected out of hand the idea that cultures lack-
ing the technology of writing could produce and disseminate verbal art of any complex-
ity, length, or aesthetic value,14 a few, chief among them Finnegan, challenged the stark
binarism upon which so much of the discourse surrounding the theory of oral-formulaic
composition rested by positing that the relationships between the oral and the liter-
ate and between their respective expressive economies were not mutually exclusive
but were rather intertwined and interdependent. Finnegan and others also questioned
the aptness of the Parry–Lord theory’s one-size-fits-all approach, which flattened out,
elided, or simply ignored the many unique features of the traditional verbal art pro-
duced by different cultures (and sometimes even within different genres produced
within the same culture) at different times and in different places. Despite the inher-
ent limitations of its structuralist focus,15 and despite the development of compelling
alternative ways of thinking about the production and dissemination of traditional ver-
bal art,16 the theory of oral-formulaic composition continued to dominate the critical
landscape of oral studies throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s. By the middle
11 As Foley remarks, Oral-Formulaic Theory, 4, his annotated bibliography catalogues “more than
1800 books and articles from more than ninety language areas,” the great majority of which belong
to the Parry–Lord school of thought.
12 See further Foley, Immanent Art, 2–5, and Renoir, Key to Old Poems, 49–63.
13 Foley, Immanent Art, 14.
14 On writing as a technology and on what he labelled “the technologizing of the word,” see Ong,
Orality and Literacy, especially 5–15.
15 As Lord, 17, notes, Singer of Tales “is concerned with the special technique of composition
which makes rapid composing in performance possible.” See Parry, “Epic Technique of Oral Verse-
Making,” 314–22, for a succinct explanation of the theory of oral-formulaic composition’s structural
focus. For Parry, 317, and many who adopted his (and Lord’s) theory over the following decades,
the presence of formulas was the strongest indicator possible of “the necessity of making verses by
the spoken word.”
16 See Foley, Theory of Oral Composition, 94–111.
4 Introduction
of the latter decade, however, some issues that had been consciously or unconsciously
ignored, including the unique features of individual traditions and the equally unique
expressive economies through which they are articulated, the reception of traditional
verbal art (by its intended and other audiences), and the aesthetics of traditional verbal
art, began to receive more scholarly attention. As a result of these and other issues com-
ing to the fore, the field of oral studies, which for so long had been so closely aligned
with the Parry–Lord theory as to be largely synonymous with it, underwent a tectonic
shift. While all oralists remain indebted to the Parry–Lord theory, which continues to be
applied in some quarters as unreflectively as it was during its hey-day (with predictably
similar results), it now figures far less prominently in the broad, rich, complex, and com-
plicated landscape of contemporary oral studies than it for too long had.
Tracing in detail the process by which contemporary oral theory grew out of and
eventually supplanted the theory of oral-formulaic composition is beyond the remit of
this brief and selective overview. Therefore, rather than attempting to map this process
and the attendant development of contemporary oral theory in detail, the focus here
will be on the pivotal role the work of John Miles Foley, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and
Alain Renoir played in moving the field of oral studies beyond the limitations that the
Parry–Lord theory had unintentionally imposed upon it. Working independently, these
three scholars produced in a three-year span four books—Renoir’s A Key to Old Poems:
The Oral-Formulaic Approach to the Interpretation of West-Germanic Verse (1988);
Foley’s Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return
Song (1990); O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse
(1990); and Foley’s Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic
(1991)—that reinvigorated and redefined the field of oral studies, not by rejecting the
then still-dominant theory of oral-formulaic composition (or, for the most part, even
overtly addressing its flaws and limitations17), but by grappling with and ultimately
reconfiguring some of its most closely held orthodoxies. There are other scholars,
including several of this volume’s contributors, whose work was also instrumental in
changing the trajectory of the field, but, especially when considered as a group, the
above cited works by Foley, O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Renoir—all of which are based on
what were at the time the still very much contested assumptions that orality and liter-
acy are not the competing, mutually exclusive cultural forces they had been thought to
be and that the surviving material records witness the persistence of non-performative
oral poetics18—arguably deserve the greatest credit for setting the course contempo-
rary oral theory would follow.
Given its announced focus on the tectonics, or in Foley’s words, “‘the gross anatomy’
of the [...] texts” it examines,19 his Traditional Oral Epic may seem an odd choice for
17 This is especially true of Renoir’s Key to Old Poems, a work in which Renoir, in a remarkable
display of his characteristic savoir faire, deftly redefines and redirects many of Lord’s foundational
principles without ever directly challenging or criticizing them.
18 On the notion of persistence, see Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, especially 60–98.
On non-performative oral poetics, see Amodio, “Re(si)sting the Singer” and Writing the Oral
Tradition, 39–44.
19 Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 20.
Introduction 5
inclusion in this survey since it was at the time of its publication—and remains to this
day—the most thorough articulation of Parry and Lord’s structuralist theory and the
most detailed accounting of the mechanics of the traditions to which it applies. But even
though it should rightly be seen as the most compelling and convincing application of
the Parry–Lord theory yet (or likely) to be produced, and even though its analyses and
critical approach fit comfortably within that theory’s strictly structuralist parameters,
Traditional Oral Epic also stands as one of the cornerstones upon which the contempo-
rary oral theory that would shortly come to supplant it rests.20 Understanding that the
Parry–Lord theory was not the complete, closed, or singular system for understanding
the verbal art produced in oral cultures that it had long been taken to be, Foley posits
that the Parry–Lord theory was instead an essential, integral, and, most importantly,
partial component of the theoretical approach that would come to be known simply as
Oral Theory.
The formula is an important constituent of many (and perhaps most) of the expres-
sive economies of cultures that produced or continue to produce verbal art orally.
However, there is no ur-form against which all instantiations of it can be measured,
for the formula in each culture emanates from and must conform to each culture’s
unique prosodic and metrical features, and, further, it must, and can only, be articu-
lated through each culture’s unique lexicon and through each culture’s equally unique
expressive economy.21 Although he is addressing only the constellation of problems
inherent in comparing texts from ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, Foley’s
contention that the “documents cannot be forced into a single category, any more
than the languages or prosodies involved can be forced into absolute comparability”
is broadly applicable,22 and were we to change his “cannot be forced” to “should not
be forced” and his “can be forced” to “should be forced,” this statement would rise to
the level of an axiom, for, as he was succinctly to remind us years later, “[o]rality isn’t
simple or monolithic.”23
In Traditional Oral Epic, Foley neither elides nor ignores these problems—as so
many before him had done (and as some contemporary oral-formulaicists continue to
do)—but rather considers them directly and, in the process, refines and recalibrates
their underlying premises. As Foley notes in the coda to Traditional Oral Epic’s third
chapter, while “Parry’s theory of the formula was [. . .] based firmly on determining ‘the
same metrical conditions’ that made possible the recurrence of elements of diction,” in
20 Cf. Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 1n1, where he alludes to the then “tentatively titled Immanent
Art,” a work he considered to be the necessary complement to Traditional Oral Epic and alerts the
reader that “the present volume will concentrate on the various levels of structure in comparative
oral epic” because “the reading program” that will be articulated in Immanent Art “can proceed
only after a firm foundation in the comparative philology of oral epic poetry exists.” Developing
and expanding this “reading program” would occupy his attention almost exclusively from the
publication of Immanent Art onward.
21 See Foley, “Tradition-dependent” for an early, concise, and important articulation of thinking
that would find full expression in Traditional Oral Epic.
23 Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 65.
6 Introduction
actuality “each epic tradition has an idiosyncratic, tradition-dependent prosody that we

may expect to exist in symbiosis with a correspondingly idiosyncratic and tradition-
dependent phraseology.”24
Even though Traditional Oral Epic is not chronologically the earliest of the four works
on which we are here focusing, its status as the culminating articulation of the theory
of oral-formulaic composition makes it both a monument (and thorough guide) to that
theory and a convenient and fitting point of departure for understanding the develop-
ment of the oral theory that would grow out of and come to supplant the Parry–Lord
approach. As Foley himself argues by way of justifying Traditional Oral Epic’s structural
focus, creating the sorts of “philologically sound profile[s]” it does provides “a founda-
tion for aesthetic inquiry that is firm because it is faithful to the language and poetics” of
the traditions being investigated.25
Trumpeting as it does its embrace of oral-formulaic theory, not only in its title but
in a foreword in which Lord attests (perhaps overly so) to its oral-formulaic bona fides,
Renoir’s Key to Old Poems may also seem to be an unlikely candidate for inclusion among
the works most responsible for reinvigorating and redirecting the field of oral studies.
Yet while its title announces its fealty to the Parry–Lord approach, the word “interpre-
tation” subtly signals that this study will most decidedly not fit comfortably within the
school of oral-formulaic criticism. Rather than challenging the structuralist principles
of oral-formulaic theory, Renoir simply and deftly offers answers to questions the field
had not yet posed and that, indeed, oral-formulaic theory would prove unable to for-
mulate, let alone answer. Other scholars had touched on issues related to the ones that
occupy Renoir’s attention in Key to Old Poems,26 but his is the first full-length study to
explore the reception aesthetics, or to use his phrase, the “affective dynamics” of tradi-
tional verbal art as he focuses on neither its modes of production nor dissemination, but
on how it conveys meaning and on how that meaning was received by its intended and
subsequent audiences. Arguing “that certain poems of the past which exhibit all kinds
of oral-formulaic features could actually have been composed in writing within the con-
text of a society in which preliterate and literate culture could still interact with each
other,”27 Renoir shifts attention from the formal, mechanical aspects of traditional verbal
art to its reception aesthetics, a strategy that allows him to avoid becoming entangled in
the one issue that more than any other was responsible for bringing the field to a near
impasse by the early 1980s: the belief in the mutual exclusivity of orality and literacy
foundational to the theory of oral-formulaic composition.28 However, by exploring the
24 Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 120; emphasis his.

26 Cf., Foley, “Literary Art”; “Tradition and the Collective Talent”; and “Reading the Oral Traditional
Text”; and Finnegan, Oral Poetry and Literacy and Orality.
27 Renoir, Key to Old Poems, 63. His reliance here on “preliterate” rather than the broader and
more applicable “oral” is another sign of his working—with limited success—to stay within the
theoretical paradigm Lord initially established.
28 Lord, in what would prove to be an extremely—and unfortunately—influential assertion,
argues, Singer of Tales, 137, that the arrival of literate habits of mind, especially the notion of the
“set, ‘correct’ text,” sounded “the death knell of the oral process.”
Introduction 7
affective dynamics of traditional oral poetics in medieval West-Germanic verse, he con-

vincingly demonstrates that orality and literacy, far from being situated on either side
of the cultural fissure that is the so-called Great Divide, were rather intertwined compo-
nents existing on a cultural continuum, the same continuum on which they continue to
exist—as ineluctably and as complicatedly intertwined as ever—today.29
Although he does not explicitly address the specifics of how traditional oral poetics
survives the transition from being articulated exclusively through the mouth to being
articulated chiefly (and perhaps solely) through the pen,30 Renoir nonetheless demon-
strates that the traditional oral expressive economy that survives in written records
dating as far back as to when English as verse was first committed to the page is not
vestigial, but dynamic.31 By carefully mapping the specialized, dedicated register of tra-
ditional oral poetics, a register that preserves the most concrete evidence we are likely
ever to have regarding that expressive economy’s existence, oral-formulaic theory devel-
oped a clear picture of the architectonics of traditional verbal art, but in concentrating
solely upon that art’s formal, structural components, oral-formulaicists mistook what is
just a component, albeit an important one, of traditional verbal art for that art’s total-
ity. We can perhaps best understand the approach oral-formulaicists adopted and the
limits the theory imposed upon the developing field of oral studies by comparing them
to palaeontologists who, after discovering the fossilized bones of dinosaurs, remain
focused only on those remains and never attempt to flesh out (or realize that they need
to flesh out) the entirety of the complex organism of which the bones are but partial, if
the most concrete, evidence.32
Not long after the appearance of Key to Old Poems, O’Brien O’Keeffe published Visible
Song, a volume that, like Key to Old Poems, grapples directly with matters with which
oral-formulaicists had proved unwilling or unable to engage, including, most notably,
that all the evidence we have of ancient and medieval oral poetics is undeniably textual
and, as such, is unequivocally situated in and a product of the literate world. O’Brien
O’Keeffe neither ignores nor attempts to explain away the textuality of verbal art that
oral-formulaicists confidently, if paradoxically, labelled “oral,” a label that others just as
confidently, and based upon the same evidence, rejected. At a time when textuality thus
continued to be routinely cast in absolutist, and chiefly abstract, terms, O’Brien O’Keeffe
adopts a significantly different approach. Far from seeing textuality as demarcating the
29 See further Foley’s posthumous Oral Tradition and the Internet, and Donoghue, How the Anglo-
Saxons Read.
30 Cf. Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, especially 1–98, and Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition.
31 The expressive economy of oral poetics is thoroughly attested in the version of Cædmon’s Hymn
preserved in the margins of folio 107r of St Petersburg, M. E. Saltykov-Schedrin Public Library,
lat. Q.v.I.18. This version of the Hymn is one of the earliest specimens of the written vernacular to
survive, in a manuscript Ker, Catalogue, 158, dates to “s. viii.”
32 Lord, Singer of Tales, 4, was well aware that those features of the traditional oral expressive
economy upon which he concentrates, namely the “formula,” “formulaic expression,” and “theme”
are “but the bare bones of the living organism which is oral epic,” but he never articulated a theory
of the entire “organism” or, as Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 188, puts it, of the “ecology of verbal
art” that “oral poems inhabit.”
8 Introduction
division between the oral and the literate worlds, she rather looks to entexted verbal
art and asks critical—and crucial—questions that had hitherto gone largely unasked,
among which are what does the materiality of the manuscripts in which the extant Old
English poetic corpus survives tell us about the oral-literate nexus in Anglo-Saxon Eng-
land and what does it tell us about the situation within that nexus of those who entexted
the verbal art contained in the manuscript records? Her interrogation, from multiple
perspectives, of the ways in which the physical materiality of entexted verbal art wit-
nesses the complex intersections of orality and literacy in the period demonstrates
that far from being an uncomfortable, or perhaps even disqualifying, impediment to
our understanding of medieval English oral poetics, textuality (in both the abstract and
concrete senses of the term) is central to understanding that poetics, since it is only
the mute, static surfaces of manuscript pages that witness the expressive economy oral
theory is devoted to exploring.33
O’Brien O’Keeffe’s argument that the “higher the degree of conventional spatializa-
tion in the manuscripts, the less oral and more literate” an individual or group is likely
to be not only establishes that the graphic practices witnessed in the manuscripts con-
stitute the most compelling evidence we have, and are likely to have, of an individual’s
(or group’s) situation along the oral-literate continuum,34 but it also addresses—and
in the process, obviates—one of oral-formulaic theory’s major weaknesses: its failure
to account for the physicality of the written records that preserve the evidence upon
which the theory necessarily had to rest.35 Texts figured in oral-formulaic theory only
as abstractions in part because the technology of writing was long viewed as being anti-
thetical to the verbal art the theory explored. Composed and received in the crucible of
performance, the traditional oral verbal art hypothesized by the Parry–Lord approach
existed in the world only as long as it took for the reverberations of the words the poet
was articulating in any given moment to die, and it existed only in the minds of those
present when it was performed and only for as long as they retained a recollection of
it. But in so imaging texts, or, following O’Brien O’Keeffe, what we should perhaps more
properly designate “texts” to signify their abstractness,36 oral-formulaicists neglected to
see that understanding verbal art “in its fullest historical dimensions requires not only
study of the circumstances of its composition but study as well of those means by which
it acts in the world, its realized texts.”37
The final work in this brief overview, Foley’s Immanent Art, was published in 1991
and stands, arguably, as the single-most important volume in oral studies since the publi-
cation of Parry’s French PhD theses in 1928 and the publication in 1960 of Lord’s Singer
33 It is important, however, to keep in mind that the poetics entexted on the manuscript page is not
the strictly performative poetics central to oral-formulaic theory, but is rather non-performative.
See Amodio, “Res(is)ting the Singer” and Writing the Oral Tradition, 39–44.
34 O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, 25.
35 But see Donoghue, How the Anglo-Saxons Read, 83, who argues against adopting “certain march-
of-progress assumptions about the historical development of reading and writing.”
36 Cf. O’Brien O’Keeffe’s discussion of this point, Visible Song, 150.
37 O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, 95.
Introduction 9
of Tales, a revision of his similarly titled 1949 dissertation. Foley modestly describes
Immanent Art as the “companion” to Traditional Oral Epic.38 While this description is
certainly apt, it also—and this will not surprise anyone who knew Foley—understates
the aims of a volume that was to revolutionize our understanding of how oral tradi-
tions function by uncovering and exploring the specialized channels through which
traditional oral verbal art was received and the equally specialized channels through
which its meaning was transmitted. As its subtitle, From Structure to Meaning in Tradi-
tional Oral Epic,39 announces, the impulse driving Immanent Art is transitive; while built
upon insights derived from the Parry–Lord theory’s structuralist approach, Immanent
Art also acknowledges that that approach led ultimately only to an imperfect, because
partial, understanding of traditional oral verbal art. While Renoir and O’Brien O’Keeffe
explore territory that lay beyond oral-formulaic theory’s self-imposed borders, they do
so by taking metaphorical leaps over those borders. It was Foley who discovered and
unlocked the “wealldor” (gateway) to that territory, and it was he who began charting
the pathway(s)—to use the metaphor that came to dominate his conception of oral tra-
dition in the later years of his life—connecting the mechanics of traditional oral verbal
art to its aesthetics.40 In doing so, Foley was to provide us, more than sixty years after
the publication of Parry’s ground-breaking theses, with the first full exploration of oral
aesthetics, a long neglected but essential component of the architectonics of traditional
oral verbal art. Foley was to spend the remainder of his career refining and expanding
our understanding of the full complexity of oral tradition by concentrating, in a series of
articles and books, on how traditional oral verbal art means, both in its originally perfor-
mative context and in the non-performative one in which it is preserved. These investi-
gations led him to explore the even larger issues he was to make the subject of his final,
most ambitious project, one that traces the ways in which the structure and functioning
of the internet mimic that of oral tradition.
As we saw above, one of the Parry–Lord approach’s most important and enduring
findings is that the literate expressive economy that has dominated the ways in which
verbal art has been articulated and disseminated in the West for at least the last mil-
lennium is not the only means through which such art can be produced and circulated.
While this view has informed the critical discourse of oral studies from its earliest days,
its equally important corollary, namely that the same holds for the interpretive strate-
gies brought to bear upon verbal art, did not receive much, if any, concerted attention,
until Renoir and O’Brien O’Keeffe indirectly took it up and until Foley made it central to
Immanent Art.
The array of critical interpretive strategies that have evolved over the past millen-
nium have proved to be apt and useful tools for investigating verbal art produced by the
culture in which those strategies developed, one that is dominated by the rich, complex
constellation of literate practices and habits of mind that remain culturally central today.
However, when applied to verbal art produced within a different cultural framework,
38 Foley, Immanent Art, xi.

39 Emphasis mine.
40 See Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet.
10 Introduction
one in which the traditional oral expressive economy continued to play a role in the
composition and reception of verbal art, these interpretive strategies proved largely
inapt, and their (mis)application to texts grounded in traditional oral poetics resulted
in inquiries that were based on inappropriate—and so faulty—sets of assumptions
that, consequently, led to unproductive, and often impertinent, conclusions.41 While
Renoir’s and O’Brien O’Keeffe’s works illustrate the value and utility of not impos-
ing solely literate-based interpretive strategies on texts composed under the ambit of
performative or non-performative oral poetics and while they both explore the ways
in which traditional oral verbal art means,42 Foley offers the most detailed and impor-
tant examination of this issue. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Foley was aware
that without a pertinent interpretive strategy, one that enables us to gain a clear sense
of how traditional oral verb art means, investigations into what it means would be
severely handicapped.
Of the many contributions to our understanding of the expressive economy of oral
poetics Foley made prior to the publication of Immanent Art and that he was to make
in the remaining twenty-five or so years of his life following its publication,43 the most
important may well be the one central to Immanent Art: “traditional referentiality.”44
As he explains, in traditional oral verbal art, the meaning of structures, “whether phra-
seological or narrative, [. . .] derive[s] not from the kind of denotation or conferred
connotation with which we are familiar in literary texts but [. . .] from the natural and
41 The tendency to assume myopically that current practices, be they interpretive, cultural, etc.,
are universally applicable is a characteristic not just of the present moment, where it runs fairly
rampant, but of most and perhaps all cultures, all of which are, in the moment, modern. Cf. Swift’s
send-up in Tale of a Tub, 329, of critics who, to cite but one example, criticise Homer for being
ignorant of modern material culture: “[Homer’s] Failings are not less prominent in several Parts
of the Mechanicks. For, having read his Writings with the utmost Application usual among Modern
Wits, I could never yet discover the least Direction about the Structure of that useful Instrument a
Save-all.” See also Swift’s scathing “A Digression Concerning Criticks,” 311–17.
42 For Renoir, this entails focusing on, Key to Old Poems, 18, the “five categories of context which
[. . .] most often interact supportively or contrastively with the oral-formulaic context.” Of these,
the most pertinent to the current discussion are the “intrinsic context” and the “extrinsic context”
(emphasis his). He defines the former as “the context provided by the text proper” and the latter
as “the context drawn from outside” it. For O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, 6, it entails arguing “that
the manuscript records of Old English poetry witness a particular mode of literacy” and that the
“significant variants” and “developing graphic cues for presentation” discovered within them
“provide strong evidence of persisting residual orality in the reading and copying of poetry in Old
English.” Cf. Parkes, Pause and Effect, 20–29, on the “grammar of legibility.”
43 Although his major contributions are far too numerous to be listed here, a brief and highly
selective list of them would include the notion of the sêmata developed in Homer’s Traditional
Art, especially 13–34; that, “Individual Poet”, 152, the traditional register draws from “both the
singular talent of an individual aoidos and the collective bequest of tradition”; that, How to Read
an Oral Poem, 188–218, oral and literate culture exist within an “ecology” whose borders are
permeable; and, Oral Tradition and the Internet, that oral tradition and the internet mirror each
other.
44 Foley, Immanent Art, xiv; emphasis his. For a useful and concise introduction to this concept, see
Bradbury, “Traditional Referentiality.”
Introduction 11
inherent associations encoded in them and accessible to the informed audience.”45 Via
“a mode of signification wherein the part stands for the whole,” a process Foley “call[s]
metonymy,” the constituent elements of traditional expressive economies “reach out of
the immediate instance in which they appear to the fecund totality of the entire tradi-
tion, defined synchronically and diachronically and they bear meanings as wide and
deep as the tradition they encode.”46 Although the pathways through which the mean-
ing of traditional verbal art is transmitted and received differ, sometimes significantly,
from those utilized by literary texts, there is nonetheless considerable overlap among
them. Just as orality and literacy are not mutually exclusive cultural components but
are inextricably interconnected ones, so, too, is the specialized way of speaking that is
oral poetics fundamentally inseparable from a given culture’s quotidian, non-special-
ized ways of speaking because both are intertwined elements of a culture’s broad and
idiosyncratic communicative landscape.
It is on the idiosyncratic nature of cultures’ communicative landscapes that this
brief survey will close because while it is taken up most fully by Foley in Immanent
Art, this pivotal notion is woven as well into the fabric of the other three works con-
sidered above. Beyond serving as a convenient through-line connecting these works,
this notion speaks to the heart of what distinguishes contemporary oral theory from
the theory of oral-formulaic composition. Parry and Lord’s working in what was then
Yugoslavia with a living oral tradition that supported in so many ways what Parry had
theorized regarding ancient Greek oral epic was fortuitous in that they were able to
test, refine, and develop many of their hypotheses within what they considered (and
what in many ways was) a living laboratory, but it was also crippling in that it rein-
forced their contention that orality was a pure, isolated state. In contrast, contempo-
rary oral theory sees orality as being a deeply interconnected component of all cul-
tures, one that exists in productive symbiosis with literacy in those cultures possess-
ing the technology of writing. And where the Parry–Lord theory sees oral tradition
as a singular, monolithic entity that functions similarly in all cultures, contemporary
oral theory understands that it is not universal, but is rather contingent and tradition-
dependent. To put matters telegraphically, where the Parry–Lord theory sees an Oral
Tradition writ large, one that conformed to and was defined and characterized by a
singular, invariable mode of expression, composition, and reception, contemporary
oral theory sees instead a world of oralities transmitted through a multitude of expres-
sive economies (some oral, some written) that, on the surface, frequently have little or
nothing in common. Certain mechanical, formal features may be shared between or
among some oral traditions, as is the case with the ancient Greek and South Slavic
ones upon which Parry and Lord concentrated, but such instances are rare because
oral traditions are articulated through expressive economies that are culture-specific
and, as a result, exhibit few, if any, correspondences with the expressive economies
of other cultures. Only when we shift our gaze from traditions’ concrete, lexical real-
izations to their more abstract features do significant correspondences between and
45 Foley, Immanent Art, 39.

46 Foley, Immanent Art, 7; emphasis his.
12 Introduction
among them begin to emerge with any consistency, with the similarities becoming
steadily more pronounced the higher the level of abstraction becomes.47
Along with illustrating the richness, breadth, and vitality of contemporary oral the-
ory, the essays and performances gathered here also honour the memory of the late John
Miles Foley, a prolific scholar to whom oral theorists of all persuasions owe a lasting debt
of gratitude for his many and varied contributions. Of the many scholars who have helped
shape the field of oral studies over the past ninety or so years, few have been as influ-
ential as Foley. As the author of “nearly 200 essays, books, and other types of scholarly
contributions,”48 and as the founding editor of the field’s central journal, Oral Tradition,
he left an indelible mark upon the field, where his thinking continues to be a central com-
ponent of its vibrant and continually evolving critical discourse. John also, and perhaps
more importantly, left an indelible mark not only upon those fortunate enough to have
been numbered among his friends and associates, but also upon all those who had the
good fortune to cross paths with such a gentle, generous, kind, humble, and brilliant man.
47 For example, the ancient Greek epic formula shares little with the Anglo-Saxon formula, but at
the higher level of thematics, we discover a number of correspondences, and it is at the even higher
level of the story-pattern that we find correspondences between and among not only a wide variety
of Indo-European oral traditions but those from other cultures as well.
48 R. Garner, “Annotated Bibliography,” 677.
INTRODUCTION TO THE INDIVIDUAL
CONTRIBUTIONS
MIRANDA VILLESVIK
The collection opens with essays by Gregory Nagy and Susan Niditch focusing,
respectively, on the ancient Greek and biblical traditions. Nagy, in “Orality and Literacy
Revisited,” turns to examples drawn from the ancient Greek, classical Persian, and medi-
eval Irish traditions to demonstrate the compatibility of orality and literacy. After citing
instances within these oral traditions that refer directly or indirectly to the presence of
texts, he points to the still unresolved question of how observations derived from living
oral traditions can best be applied to oral-traditional texts. In “Preserving Traditions of
‘Them’ and the Creation of ‘Us’: Formulaic Language, Historiography, Mythology, and
Self-Definition,” Niditch examines the interwoven relationship between the two fields
of oral literature and biblical studies and interrogates the ways in which misconcep-
tions have shaped biblicists’ approaches to oral literature. Considering the bible as a
“transitional work” straddling the line between oral and written texts, Niditch asks how
do these formulas, as remnants of the oral tradition of the bible, interact with its written
and translated versions? Shedding light on the use of formulas in the bible, Niditch dem-
onstrates how the perception of the Israelites and Ishmaelites has led to misconceptions
of the bible in translation and rewrites our understanding of the formulas as employed
by Israelite authors with a vested interest in furthering Israelite history.
The collection then turns, in essays by Andy Orchard, Mark C. Amodio, and Nancy
Mason Bradbury and in a conversation with and performances by Benjamin Bagby, to
medieval England. Orchard, in “Beyond Books: The Confluence of Influence and the Old
English Judith,” examines the intertextuality of Judith, concentrating on the poet’s idio-
syncratic handling of his biblical source material and on his unusual vocabulary and
creative use of Anglo-Saxon metrics. Looking both back to the oral tradition out of which
Judith emerged and forward to the ways in which later poets remember and repurpose
elements of the poem, Orchard argues that the poem witnesses the lively interaction of a
living (textual) and inherited (oral) tradition. In “Embodying the Oral Tradition: Perfor-
mance and Performative Poetics in and of Beowulf,” Amodio draws a contrast between
the mediated artistic productions of text, film, and/or sound recording and the embodied
artistic productions of cultures without access to the technology of writing. After identi-
fying and exploring the dynamics of several “embedded” performances within Beowulf,
he turns to consider contemporary performances of the poem and argues that they, too,
have much to reveal about the poem’s traditional expressive economy. In “Performing
Anglo-Saxon Elegies: A Conversation,” Amodio and Bagby discuss the strategies Bagby
has developed (and is continuing to develop) when performing Anglo-Saxon elegies.
The topics they touch on include: Bagby’s use of a special six-stringed harp which was
often used by Anglo-Saxon performers for both heroic and monastic texts and which he
employs to accentuate the mood of a scene’s performance; musicology; the performa-
tive poetics of Anglo-Saxon texts; and the degree to which modern-day performances of
14 Miranda Villesvik
texts rooted in oral tradition can reveal elements, but not the whole, of the original per-
formative process. The performances Amodio and Bagby discuss are freely available to
all readers of this volume.1 Bagby’s “Notes on the Recordings of Three Anglo-Saxon Ele-
gies” provides context for the performances he recorded for this volume, and includes
information on the specialized harps that he uses. In the final essay focusing exclusively
on the medieval English oral tradition, Bradbury, in “Healing Charms in the Lincoln
Thornton Manuscript,” acknowledges that while the performance settings for the medi-
eval charms she explores are largely unrecoverable, the charms and their manuscript
contexts nonetheless provide valuable keys to their performance. Bradbury focuses on
Robert Thornton’s fifteenth-century English household book in an attempt to uncover
what it can teach us about its compiler’s involvement with charming and about the per-
formance and perceived efficacy of the many charms recorded within its pages.
In the two essays that follow, Edward R. Haymes and Yuri Kleiner turn their atten-
tion to the formula, an essential and still not fully understood—or easily or univer-
sally—defined feature of oral traditions. Haymes’s “Is the ‘Formula’ the Key to Oral Com-
position?” questions the foundational position the school of oral-formulaic composition
ascribed to the formula. He challenges the notion that formulaic density reliably indexes
a text’s orality by offering a metrical analysis of the Nibelungenlied that reveals that it
is not very formulaic and by arguing that German medieval epics are largely “imitation
oral” and that their authors consciously used the oral style because it had some signifi-
cance to the poet. In “The Formula: Morphology and Syntax,” Kleiner traces the diver-
gent sources informing our modern idea of the “formula” and examines how interpreta-
tions of the formula challenge our understanding of texts and their incorporations of the
formula. Along with charting the history of the word “formula” and touching on the ways
in which varying definitions across disciplines inform our understanding of what a for-
mula is and how it works, Kleiner also argues that substitutions are not mechanical, but
have aesthetics and hierarchies and can uncover the role of the poet in creating the lines.
The three following essays, Stephen Mitchell’s, “Old Norse Riddles and Other Ver-
bal Contests in Performance,” Terry Gunnell’s, “Performance Archaeology, Eiríksmál,
Hákonarmál, and the Study of Old Nordic Religions,” and Thomas A. DuBois’s, “‘To Surf
through the Shared Riches of the Story Hoard’: The oAgora of the Sigurðr Story,” focus
on various aspects of the oral traditions of the Northern Germanic world. By re-contex-
tualizing the Old Norse riddles within their performative contexts, Mitchell argues that
the Norse riddling contests are not the clean, dignified events that we perceive them to
be in the texts. Rather, they are loud, aggressive, and overtly confrontational moments,
similar in many ways to the contemporary verbal competitions Mitchell turns to as
comparands. In an essay informed by performance studies, Gunnell, too, calls atten-
tion to the performative contexts of medieval texts, particularly those of Eiríksmál and
Hákonarmál. Resituating these texts in their original performative contexts, he argues,
brings into sharp focus the ways in which the texts bring the past to life and signal to
the audience that a new phase of life is beginning, one in which the hall is transformed
1 These performances can be change to; found in the folder Bagby at https://drive.google.com/
drive/folders/0B__DdIKm_nVgTkpzZUVsbWV6a1U.
Introduction to the Individual Contributions 15
into a religious space in which men momentarily become gods or heroes. DuBois traces
the appearances of the Sigurðr story in Norse and Anglo-Saxon texts and argues that the
separate references to the story can best be seen as pathways connecting its different
versions and performances. Following the approach Foley takes in Oral Tradition and
the Internet, DuBois catalogues the numerous appearances of the Sigurðr story in texts
such as Beowulf, Grípisspá, and Sturlunga Saga under headings to which the reader can
refer back in a manner similar to clicking on a weblink. Presenting these materials in
this way, DuBois argues, aligns them with the way in which a contemporary audience,
who would have seen the Sigurðr story as points of reference threaded through other
familiar stories and not as a unified, linear narrative, would have received it.
In “When a Hero Lies,” Joseph Falaky Nagy discusses heroic lies within a narrative
and how they relate to instances of multiformity in the texts of Táin Bó Fróech. Nagy
argues that the author was aware of the multiformity witnessed in different versions of
the text and made use of it, as seen most clearly when Fróech tells lies or when narrative
contradictions arise. Unlike other scholars who attribute narrative variations among
versions to scribal error, Nagy sees these moments as witnessing the storyteller’s
unwillingness to choose between versions of the narrative, even at the cost of confusing
the reader. In “‘The True Nature of the aoidos’: The Kirghiz Singer of Tales and the Epic of
Manas,” Karl Reichl examines the formulaic qualities of Manas as a means of explicating
the similarities between the art of the ancient Greek aoidos and the Kirghiz oral poet. In
looking at the distribution and diction of formulas, he demonstrates that while Kirghiz
epics have many traits common to oral epics they also have traits, like rhyme-strings,
that set them apart from other oral epics.
The collection closes with Ruth Finnegan’s graceful, insightful, and touching, “John
Miles Foley: Open Mind, Open Access, Open Tradition, Open Foley,” in which she chron-
icles her decades-long friendship with Foley, candidly documenting everything from
their early scholarly disagreements to their mutual and lasting influence on one anoth-
er’s work. Unlike Foley, who early in his career was a vocal (and from her perspective
at times strident) advocate of the Parry–Lord approach, Finnegan remained sceptical
of it because, as her own fieldwork in Africa revealed, there were many oral traditions
for which the theory of oral-formulaic composition simply could not account. She aptly
highlights, in a way that few others could, the generosity of spirit with which Foley was
infused as well as the extraordinary range and capaciousness of his mind. Her elegant
final words will resonate with all who knew Foley.
16 Miranda Villesvik
Author Biography Miranda Villesvik currently works as an archivist at WGBH in Boston,

where she is also studying for her master’s degree in Library and Information Science at
Simmons University. She added her contributions during her time as a student at Vassar
College, where she was a double major in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Greek
and Roman Studies. Under the auspices of Vassar’s Ford Scholars program, she spent
a summer helping to copy-edit drafts of articles in the volume and writing the intro-
duction to the individual contributions therein. Her senior thesis, supervised by Mark
Amodio, explores the relationships between the riddles of Symphosius’s Aenigmata and
those found in the Exeter Book.
ORALITY AND LITERACY REVISITED
GREGORY NAGY
I am surprised that I have never been asked the question: since Albert Lord was
your mentor, and since you count yourself among those who claim to be his followers,
how come you think that orality and literacy are not incompatible? I have asked myself
that question many times, and I thought I had answered it, at least for myself, in “Orality
and Literacy,” an article I published in 2001. In that article, I thought I answered the
question adequately by saying, in effect, that Lord did not think that orality and literacy
were universally incompatible. Lord recognized that there were indeed some incompat-
ibilities between oral and literate aspects of verbal expression in some societies, but
he resisted, especially in his later publications, any kind of universalizing formulation
about some grand incompatibility between orality and literacy.1 I already said all this—
and more—in “Orality and Literacy,” but I now sense, so many years later, that still more
needs to be said about the general question of orality and literacy. That is the reason for
my revisiting the question here, though I am fully aware that whatever I say now is a far
cry from the last word.2
The occasion for my renewed visit is my current reading of a 2016 book by Peter
Grossardt about the Life of Homer traditions, Praeconia Maeonidae magni: Studien zur
Entwicklung der Homer-Vita in archaischer und klassischer Zeit. The book offers a use-
ful review of relevant facts about those traditions. Of particular interest to me are his
remarks about Aeolian populations in the general region of ancient Troy (especially
with reference to the island of Tenedos and to mainland cities like Sigeion on the south
side of the Hellespont as well as Sestos and Ainos on the north side).3 But I focus here
on something else. It is what Grossardt has to say about a myth, transmitted in Vita 6
of Homer—the so-called Vita Romana.4 This myth is about the blinding of Homer by
Helen, who appears to him in an epiphany and demands that he destroy what he has
said about the love story of Helen and Paris=Alexandros (Vita 6, lines 51–57). Grossardt
draws attention to a detail in the story as told here: in the context of her epiphany, Helen
demands that Homer burn his poiēseis (poetic creations). Accordingly, the story presup-
poses the existence of a text, and it is the refusal of Homer to burn this text that leads to
his blinding by an angry Helen. Grossardt argues that such a prototypical text of Homer
was the possession of a guild of singers in the Ionian island state of Chios, the Homēridai,
who claimed genealogical or at least notional descent from Homēros (Homer), and it was
1 See, for example, Lord, “Merging of Two Worlds” and Singer Resumes the Tale, 212–37.
2 The present essay, as published in this volume honouring John Miles Foley, derives from an
earlier online version, G. Nagy, 2017.02.03.
3 Grossardt, Praeconia Maeonidae magni, 133–34.
4 I cite Vita 6 throughout from Allen, Homeri Opera V, 250–53.
18 Gregory Nagy
these Homēridai who supposedly mythologized such a text as the original possession of
an original Homer.5
This myth, which Grossardt traces back to the Ionian island of Chios, was in com-
petition with another myth about the blinding of Homer. In this case, Grossardt traces
the competing myth back to the Aeolian island of Lesbos.6 Again, the source of the myth
is Vita 6 of Homer. According to this competing myth (Vita 6, lines 45–51), Homer is a
herdsman who visits the tomb of Achilles, where he prays that he may see a vision of
Achilles armed with the second set of armour made for the hero by Hephaistos. Homer’s
prayerful wish is granted, but he is struck blind by the mere sight of Achilles, who makes
his epiphany by appearing in all his martial glory, enveloped in the blinding radiance
of his armour. As compensation for Homer’s blindness, Thetis and the Muses bestow
upon Homer the gift of poetry. This myth about Homer’s validation as poet—his Dichter-
weihe—is then compared by Grossardt with various examples of Irish and other north-
European myths about Dichterweihe. In these myths as well, poets or would-be poets
visit the tombs of heroes and, in some versions, the dead heroes respond by coming
alive and directly narrating to their visitors the content of the poetry that will thereafter
be mediated by the poets.7
Grossardt refers to such myths about a poet’s validation at the tomb of a hero by
using the more specific term charter myth,8 developed by anthropologists in describing
a kind of myth that aetiologizes the overall identity of whatever social group transmits
such a myth.9 Grossardt also uses the same term in referring to the story about the blind-
ing of Homer at the tomb of Achilles, since this blinding becomes a validation of his
identity as poet.10
I suggest that we can go one step further and apply the same term charter myth
to the story about the blinding of Homer by Helen. In that story, the detail about the
refusal of Homer to destroy a prototypical text of his poetry corresponds to simi-
lar details found in Irish myths. A most striking example, analyzed by Joseph Nagy,
is a myth about a book of heroic deeds, named the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle-Raid of
Cooley),11 the prototype of which had supposedly disintegrated but was then reinte-
grated when a visitor at the tomb of a hero experienced an apparition by that hero,
who then retold for him the entire narrative content of the disintegrated book: this
way, the formerly disintegrated book was reintegrated. The retelling of the story by
the hero is evidently represented here as an oral tradition that is foundational for the
ultimate existence of the book, the textual reality of which is, of course, a given. What
5 Grossardt, Praeconia Maeonidae magni, 157.

6 Grossardt, Praeconia Maeonidae magni, 165–66, 175–86.
7 On the subject of narrations as performed by dead heroes in Irish traditions, I cite especially J.
Nagy, “How the Táin was Lost.”
9 For more on working definitions of the same term charter myth, see G. Nagy, Poetry as Perfor
mance, 202, and G. Nagy, Homeric Questions, 132.
11 J. Nagy, “How the Táin was Lost.”
Orality and Literacy Revisited 19
makes the story a charter myth, however, is the fact that the existing text, which is
considered to be integral, is a metaphor for the integrative power of oral traditions,
which are considered to be the source of the text. In other words, the text that tells
about the charter myth becomes a charter text, and the reality of that text becomes
a metaphor for the reality of the myth. So the text of the Táin Bó Cúailnge is not only
a reality, it is also a metaphor for the oral traditions from which that reality evolved.
Without the integrative power of oral tradition, the myth is saying, there cannot exist
an integral book.
This Irish myth is duly mentioned by Grossardt,12 citing some of the relevant work of
J. Nagy,13 who shows clearly the compatibility of oral and written traditions in medieval
Ireland, but Grossardt does not cite the related work of the same Nagy, “How the Táin
was Lost,” already mentioned above, which explores further the metaphorization of oral
traditions as an integral text.
In my own work,14 I highlighted this Irish example as analyzed by J. Nagy in his
“Orality and Medieval Irish Narrative,” together with an analogous Iranian example. I
turn now to that Iranian example, attested in the classical Persian epic known as the
Shāhnāma or Book of Kings, composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the late tenth and early
eleventh century ce. This epic features a myth about the making of the Book of Kings in
the classical Persian epic tradition. I will quote here a summary of the myth—a sum-
mary that I had put together in Homeric Questions based on work done by Olga M. David-
son in Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings.15 Here, then, is my summary:16
According to Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma I 21.126–136, a noble vizier assembles mōbad-s,
wise men who are experts in the Law of Zoroaster, from all over the Empire, and each
of these mōbad-s brings with him a “fragment” of a long-lost book of Book of Kings that
had been scattered to the winds; each of the experts is called upon to recite, in turn, his
respective “fragment,” and the vizier composes a book out of these recitations […] The
vizier reassembles the old book that had been disassembled, which in turn becomes the
model for the Shāhnāma “Book of Kings” of Ferdowsi (Shāhnāma I 21.156–61). We see
here paradoxically a myth about the synthesis of oral traditions that is articulated in
terms of written traditions.
In this Iranian example, as in the Irish example, the text is not only a reality: it is also a
metaphor for the oral traditions from which that reality evolved. Once again the formu-
lation applies: without the integrative power of oral tradition, the myth is saying, there
cannot exist an integral book.
Grossardt makes reference to this myth about a disintegrated and then reintegrated
Book of Kings,17 but he does not refer to the relevant work of O. Davidson, who has
argued in Poet and Hero that

13 J. Nagy, “Orality in Medieval Irish Narrative.”
14 See G. Nagy, Homeric Questions, 70.
15 G. Nagy, Homeric Questions, 70. See O. Davidson, Poet and Hero, 29–53.
16 This is also quoted in G. Nagy, 2017.01.26.
20 Gregory Nagy
1. this myth shows the compatibility of oral and written traditions in classical Per
sian poetry
and
2. classical Persian poetry is in fact an ideal example of a situation where oral and
written traditions are compatible—and coexist smoothly with each other.18
By contrast with O. Davidson, Grossardt assumes that the oral and the written traditions
of Persian poetry were incompatible with each other, and he questions whether it can
even be said that oral poetry was a source for the text of the Book of Kings. If oral poetry
was not a source, then written poetry would have to be the only source.
I see here a missed opportunity for Grossardt. If he had not assumed that oral and
written traditions were incompatible, he could have easily argued that the Persian idea of
a prototypical Book of Kings was parallel to the Greek idea of a prototypical text of Homer
as we see it mentioned in the myth about the blinding of Homer by Helen. Further, Gros-
sardt could also have argued that the myth about the blinding of Homer by Helen was
a charter myth, just like the myth about the blinding of Homer by the gleam emanating
from the armour of Achilles.19 But why is Grossardt reluctant to think in terms of a char-
ter myth when he considers the story about the text that Homer refused to burn? It has
to do with what he thinks about another story that features a text of Homer. Grossardt
thinks that the Homeric text of the so-called “Peisistratean recension” was primarily that,
a text,20 and he doubts my argument that such a text was primarily a metaphor (as I infer
from his remark at 201n319). Although I allow for the existence of a Homeric text in the
era of Peisistratos, my central argument is that the mythologized prototype of such a text
could be seen as a metaphor for the collecting of oral traditions—just like the mytholo-
gized prototypes of the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge and of the Persian Shāhnāma.
To summarize as briefly as possible my own views on the so-called Peisistratean
recension, I quote what I published in Classical Inquiries 2017.01.26, Part 9:
[The quotation starts with a reference to an epigram in Greek Anthology 11.442.] This
epigram is attributed to Peisistratos, who ruled Athens during the sixth century BCE.
This ruler was later demonized as a tyrant after his dynasty (known as the Peisistratidai)
was replaced by the prototypically democratic régime installed in Athens by Cleisthenes
toward the end of the sixth century. Back in his glory days, however, as we see in the
wording of this epigram, Peisistratos was boasting that he had reassembled what are
described as fragments of a body of poetry that had once been composed by Homer—and
that we know today as the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. And this body of poetry is imagined
here as a corpus that had disintegrated, fallen to pieces, which were then scattered all
over the region of Asia Minor. In terms of the myth propagated by Peisistratos, however,
he as ruler of Athens took the initiative of reassembling the pieces and thus bringing the
body of Homer back to life, as it were, every time the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey were
performed “live” at the festival of the goddess Athena in Athens.
18 On this point about compatibility, I recommend especially O. Davidson, “Written Text as a

Metaphor.”
19 In this connection, I take note of two essays I have published in Classical Inquiries about the two
separate stories about the blinding of Homer. See G. Nagy 2016.02.18 and 2016.02.25.
Orality and Literacy Revisited 21
This formulation as I quoted it here goes further back to my book Homer the Preclassic,21
which in turn goes even further back to an argument I was already developing in my
book Homeric Questions.22 In work that is forthcoming, I hope to elaborate on my for-
mulation as quoted here, linking it with the following further argument: if the written
word can be used to metaphorize oral poetry in the history of Homeric reception, then it
follows that the oral tradition of Homeric poetry was basically not incompatible with the
written tradition designed to record it.
Such an argument is relevant to the title of my book Homeric Questions, published in
1996, where I already challenged the tired old use of the singular in the course of count-
less tedious references to “the Homeric Question.” I also have to address a related mat-
ter: it has to do with the tired old use of the word “theory” with reference to the findings
of Parry and Lord about living oral traditions. How to apply those findings to the textual
traditions of, say, Homer is a question of theory, yes, but the findings themselves are a
matter of fact. The distinction I am making here eludes, I think, some users of such terms
as “the Parry–Lord theory” or “the oral-formulaic theory.”23 For further background, I
recommend especially O. Davidson, “On the Sources of the Shāhnāma.”24
For me, in any case, the unifying question is simply this: how to apply empirical
descriptions of living oral traditions to written texts that may have originated from such
oral traditions?
21 See, G. Nagy, Homer the Preclassic, 314–16.

22 See, G. Nagy, Homeric Questions, chap. 3, “Homer and the Evolution of a Homeric Text,” 65–112.
23 G. Nagy, Homeric Questions, 19–20.
24 Additionally, see O. Davidson, Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetics; O.
Davidson, “Haft K̲ vān”; O. Davidson, “Some Iranian poetic tropes”; O. Davidson, “Parallel Heroic
Themes”; O. Davidson, “Persian/Iranian Epic”; O. Davidson, Poet and Hero; O. Davidson, review of
Yamamoto; O. Davidson, Oral Background; O. Davidson, “Testing of the Shāhnāma”; O. Davidson,
“Text of Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma”; O. Davidson, “Written Text as a Metaphor”; Davis, “Problem of
Ferdowsi’s Sources”; Foley, Oral-Formulaic Theory; Lord, “Perspectives on Recent Work”; Lord,
Epic Singers; G. Nagy, Homer the Preclassic; Reichl, Medieval Oral Literature; and Reichl, “Memory
and Textuality.”
22 Gregory Nagy
Author Biography Gregory Nagy is the author of The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts
of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (1979), which won the Goodwin Award of Merit,
American Philological Association, in 1982. Other books include Pindar's Homer: The
Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (1990), Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (1996),
Homeric Questions (1996), Homeric Responses (2003), Homer’s Text and Language
(2004), Homer the Classic (online 2008, print 2009), Homer the Preclassic (2010), and
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (2013). He co-edited with Stephen Mitchell the 40th
anniversary second edition of Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales (2000), co-authoring
with Mitchell a new Introduction. Recent articles include: “Ancient Greek Elegy.” There
are also weekly articles published by Nagy in Classical Inquiries, see http://classical-
inquiries.chs.harvard.edu; to date, there are over two hundred such articles. Since 2000,
Nagy has been the Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington
DC, while continuing to teach at the Harvard campus in Cambridge as the Francis Jones
Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature.
PRESERVING TRADITIONS OF “THEM”
AND THE CREATION OF “US”:
FORMULAIC LANGUAGE, HISTORIOGRAPHY,
MYTHOLOGY, AND SELF-DEFINITION*
SUSAN NIDITCH
In many ways, the course of John Miles Foley’s scholarly interests parallels devel-
opments in the field of biblical studies concerning the relationship of ancient Israelite
writings to oral-traditional literature. As his earliest published work closely analyzed
the formulaic qualities of Beowulf,1 grappling with questions about modes of compo-
sition, earlier work in biblical studies explored the possibility of formulaic composi-
tion in biblical texts. At the heart of Foley’s larger career, however, are deeper questions
about meaning, message, and worldview, an engagement with matters of reception, and
thoughtful explorations of the nature of cultural traditions.2 This essay briefly explores
the way in which the field of oral literature has interwoven with the field of biblical stud-
ies in the past and some of the misconceptions and misapplications that have shaped
biblicists’ approaches to and attitudes towards oral literature and oral literary stud-
ies. We then turn to a set of case studies that point to the continued relevance of oral-
traditional studies to an appreciation and interpretation of the culture and literature of
ancient Israel.
The traditional biblical texts explored below describe ancestor heroes of one of
Israel’s neighbouring peoples and key events in their history. These texts curiously
claim not to preserve a thread in the history of ancient Israel itself but a piece of tradi-
tion pertaining to an adversary. Some of these peoples are said to be related to Israel in
ancient genealogical traditions, and all of them are said to be encountered by Israel in its
own earliest history, a part of its foundation myth. I hope to show how and why modern
translations sometimes misrepresent or obscure the surprisingly positive nuances of
the texts’ representations of enemies. I will examine the relationship between formu-
licity, historiography, and mythology and explore how attention to the qualities of for-
mulaic language and the matters of genre and context that engaged Foley enriches our
understanding of the literature as a source and reflection of certain aspects of ancient
Israelite worldview and identity.
*
A shorter version of this essay was presented at conference at Harvard University, held in
December 2010 in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lord’s Singer of Tales. The
last time I saw my friend John Miles Foley was at this event. As always, I learned much from him and
dedicate this article to his memory.
1 Foley, “Scansion of Beowulf."
2 Foley, Immanent Art; Singer of Tales in Performance; How to Read an Oral Poem; and Oral Tradition
and the Internet.
24 Susan Niditch
Albert Bates Lord, one of Foley’s mentors and his most influential precursor, grap-
pled with the style, content, and contexts of traditional literatures in nuanced and com-
plex ways. He noted that the formula is not a mechanical device used to create lines
of proper length and rhythm but a formative component of characterization, tone, and
message, a means of thematic emphasis and a reflection of aesthetics. Repetition is rich-
ness if one understands the register, as Foley has also emphasized,3 nor is there just one
oral register. Switches of register create and reflect content and meaning. The choices
made in the use of these flexible compositional devices matter. Lord pointed to formula
patterns that could be filled in various ways. He was attuned to the artistry of compos-
ers, some of whom were more aesthetically gifted than others. Variations matter and
what is not repeated is as important as what is. Lord’s work has often been misrepre-
sented by his critics and inflexibly applied to various works of traditional literature by
his fans.
In Homeric Questions, classicist Gregory Nagy provides a list of the ten most misun-
derstood things about Lord’s theory of oral composition, some of which we have alluded
to above. Nagy notes that oral works can become quite fixed and written works can be
quite open to variation, while scribes engage in performance-like activity in the very act
of writing—what Paul Zumthor calls “composition-in-performance”—as a work, quot-
ing Nagy, “is regenerated in each act of copying.”4
Lord’s work has led to a host of searches for “oral roots” of biblical works. The
authors, however, express disappointment with their results, for the degree of formulic-
ity is not high enough to “prove” oral composition. The contributions of all these excel-
lent scholars, including Robert Culley, John Kselman, and David Gunn, are nevertheless
very valuable in revealing the traditional style textures of Israelite literature.5 The aes-
thetic to which these colleagues point is integrally related to matters of worldview and
cultural context. It turns out that questions about provable oral composition may not be
the most useful questions. Lord himself later wrote of “transitional works” somewhat
refining the notion of a “Great Divide” between oral worlds and literate worlds, oral
composition and works created in writing.6
Biblicists have offered their own view of the “Great Divide,” insisting upon an evolu-
tion of written from oral works. The form-critical approach is grounded in the notion
that early, oral, simpler works are eventually written down and complicated by more
sophisticated, literate writers. In fact, orally composed works can be long or short, cre-
ated by people who can read and write or by those who can read but not write. Writ-
ten traditional-style literature can be meant to be read aloud while orally composed
works are set in writing by means of dictation or recreated in writing through memory.
Writers can imitate oral style. Once writing and reading are available to some, even if
3 Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, 15–17, 49–53.

4 G. Nagy, Homeric Questions, 69.
5 See Culley, “Oral-Formulaic Language”; Kselman, “Recovery of Poetic Fragments”; Gunn, “‘Battle
Report’”; Gunn, “Narrative Patterns”; and Gunn, “Threading the Labyrinth.”
6 Lord, Singer Resumes the Tale, 105, 212–37; see also the comments, 113–16, 183–86, of Mary
Louise Lord, the skilful and scholarly editor of this posthumous volume.
Preserving Traditions of “Them” and the Creation of “Us” 25
only practised by elites, the two ways of imagining and creating literature influence one
another and belong on a sliding scale or continuum as Ruth Finnegan has shown.7 Oral
style, moreover, is not an unequivocal indicator of relative chronology. Oral works and
oral-style works are created and re-created even when writing is common. It is, in fact,
no easy matter to distinguish between orally composed works and written works that
imitate orally composed works. Indeed, in the Hebrew Bible it is impossible to do so.
The Hebrew Bible is now written, and yet the compositions therein partake of varying
traditional-style registers.
If one reads Foley’s many works or the essays published in the last decade in the
journal Oral Tradition, one finds scholarly attention to the interplay between oral and
written. Increasingly, one also finds an emphasis on the role of memory in the oral-lit-
erate interplay as it affects the composition, preservation, and reception of traditional-
style literatures, topics explored by biblicist David Carr. A number of excellent recent
works wrestle in various original and complex ways with the relationship between the
oral and the written in the genesis of the biblical tradition. Books by Carr, Raymond Per-
son, William Schniedewind, and Martin Jaffee, and essays in volume 18 of Oral Tradition
all point to this complex interplay.8
Emphasizing the ways in which traditional-style works create meaning, Foley points
to the “metonymic” quality of certain recurring phrases or images. These parts invoke a
whole. That is, a simple recurring phrase or motif has the capacity to bring to bear on a
scene or characterization a full range of associations invoked by it. Such traditional ele-
ments have this capacity because the composers and receivers of the narrative, scene, or
description are familiar with the wider range of associations invoked by the epithet or
formula, the colour, or the image.9 They share the wider tradition of which it is a constit-
uent part. An Israelite example of such an “aesthetic of traditional referentiality,”10 to use
a phrase of Foley’s, is provided by the epithet for Yahweh, “the bull of Jacob.”11 It brings
to bear on a Psalm or a legal text the full range of notions of Yahweh as virile, macho,
fecund creator. The victory-enthronement pattern is implicit in the phrase with all that
it implies. Traditional-style literatures in this sense are quintessentially economical and
telegraphic in communication. Thus Foley entitles one of his books Immanent Art.
Having explored the theoretical approaches of Lord and Foley, older ideas about
orality and the Bible and new approaches that emphasize the interplay between oral
and written and concepts of metonymy and register, we come to applications. In trans-
lating and interpreting biblical texts—their textures, content, and contexts—do we
notice, appreciate, and emphasize certain features because we are sensitive to the oral-
7 Finnegan, Literacy and Orality.

8 Carr, Writing on the Tablet; Person, Deuteronomic School; Schniedewind, How the Bible Became
a Book; Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth. See also Horsley, “Oral Tradition”; Jaffe, “Oral Tradition”; Kelber,
“Oral Tradition”; and Niditch, “Oral Tradition.”
9 Foley, Immanent Art, 11, 13, 33.
10 To use a phrase of Foley’s from Immanent Art, 95.
11 See also Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 15–17, for a further discussion on the bull of
Jacob.
26 Susan Niditch
traditional qualities of these written works? How do we interpret and what do we see
that we might have otherwise missed were we unaware of oral-literary studies?
Judges 5, a victory song, clearly displays qualities of an Israelite oral-traditional regis-
ter. Lord’s studies of formula patterns and compositional technique and Foley’s emphasis
on metonymy provide a theoretical framework in which to assess the recurring vocabu-
lary in this beautiful ancient piece, the role of refrains, and more specifically to re-assess
the catalogue in 5:16–17 which has been misunderstood. Judges 5 has a chiastic structure
of content that juxtaposes the activities of the divine warrior and his heavenly host with
the conduct of human heroes. At the centre of the piece is a catalogue of Israelite warriors
somewhat reminiscent of Iliad 3:160–244 where Helen describes to Priam the Achaian
warriors on the field of battle.12 Translators have tended to offer forced translations of
Judges 5:16–17 that do not take into account the traditional qualities of the material.
The opening phrase of 5:16 begins with a word of three letters, lamed, mem, heh that
is usually translated “why,” the typical meaning of this term in the Hebrew Bible. This
usual understanding of the word, however, leads most translators to render the verbs
that follow in awkward and forced ways, describing some tribes as cowardly, unwill-
ing to fight. The New Revised Standard Version (henceforth NRSV) translation pictures
the singer asking Reuben, the tribe mentioned in v. 15, “Why did you tarry among the
sheepfolds to hear the piping for flocks?” (Judg. 5:16 [NRSV]). The translator continues
at v. 17, “Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan, and Dan, why did he abide with the ships.
Asher sat still at the coast of the sea, settling down by the landings” (Judg. 5:17 [NRSV]).
The verbs in vv. 16 and 17, however, most commonly do not convey delaying or tarrying
or sitting still but rather residing, dwelling, and literally “plying one’s tent.” The NRSV
translation suits the final entry in the description of warriors poorly at v. 18 in which
Zebulon’s and Naphtali’s bravery is described and upsets the structure of the surround-
ing song in which a condemnatory cursing of those who do not participate in the battle
appears at v. 23, a later point in the passage.
The seminal biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross suggested, however, that lmh is best
read in this context not as “why,” albeit a common meaning in biblical Hebrew, but as an
example of the “emphatic lamed extended by -ma known from Ugaritic,”13 and so trans-
lates it as “verily.” Cross’s innovative idea was followed by biblicist Baruch Halpern,14
and was further developed by Cross himself.15 The many scholarly discussions explain-
ing why Reuben, Gilead, Dan, and Asher supposedly hold back from the fighting16 and
the forced translations that accompany them become unnecessary.17 Cross’s elegant
solution to this translation issue is informed by sensitivity to traditional-style media.
The catalogue in Judges 5 partakes of a traditional form found several times in
ancient Hebrew literature in genealogies, testaments, and other settings. Brief, for-
12 Fitzgerald, Iliad.
13 Cross, Canaanite Myth, 235n74.
14 Baruch Halpern, “Resourceful Israelite Historian,” 383.
15 Cross, From Epic to Canon, 54–55n7.
16 Stager, “Song of Deborah.”
17 Cf. Zobel, Stammesspruch und Geschichte, 62–63.
Preserving Traditions of “Them” and the Creation of “Us” 27
mulaic notices about heroes or groups make critical assertions about cultural identity,
essentially declaring how we are constituted and who our ancestor heroes are. The
material functions as a “charter,”18 a self-defining slice of shared group history. In Judges
5, various tribal entities are described, where they live, what their occupations are, and
how courageous they are:
Verily you dwell between the settlements
to hear the whistling for the flocks.
Concerning the divisions in Reuben,
great are the stout of heart.19
Gilead in the Transjordan plies his tent,
and Dan, verily, he resides in ships.
Asher dwells on the shore of the sea
and on its promontories, he plies his tent.
Zebulon is a people whose soul taunts Death
and Naphtali on the heights of the open country.20
(Judg. 5:16–18)
Comparisons can be drawn between Judges 5:16–17 and Genesis 49:13 and 16:12. A
traditional formula pattern “tribe + location + tenting/residing” characterizes heroes
in Genesis as it does Gilead, Dan, and Asher in Judges 5:17. These descriptive formulas
function as building blocks of tradition.
This formula leads to a set of case studies concerning portrayals of “the Other.” The
first involves Ishmael, the brother of Isaac, son of Abraham, and ancestor hero of the
Ishmaelites. Hagar, Ishmael’s mother-to-be, has fled from her abusive mistress Sarah.
The latter resents the concubine who has gained new status by conceiving Abraham’s
child in an ancient version of surrogate motherhood. The deity speaks to Hagar, who is
marginalized and alone, and declares in traditional-style language that her son will be a
hero. As listeners to this story know, such tales about unusual conception or infancy are
typical in the biographies of heroes:
He will be a wild ass of a man,
his hand will be in everything
and everyone’s hand will be in his,21
and next to his kin he will ply his tent.
(Gen. 16:12)
Once again, Genesis 16:12 has generally been translated to create a forced and negative
portrait of Ishmael, but the verse simply refers to his whereabouts and occupation, as is
usual in this formula pattern. NRSV is typical of such translations: “He shall be a wild ass
18 Michalowski, “History as Charter,” 237–48.

19 MT (Masoretic Text) Judg. 5:16 reads the root ḥqr, “searchings of heart” (so Vatican, Codex
Vaticanus 1209, and Old Latin). Given the refraining style of the poem, it seems likely that the same
phrase appears here as in v. 15.
20 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
21 When “hand” is used with a verb of motion, for example “to send a hand,” the preposition “in”
means “against” as in Gen. 37:22 and 1 Sam. 24:11. Minus the verb of motion, the neutral and literal
translation is appropriate.
28 Susan Niditch
of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall
live at odds with his kin” (Gen. 16:12 [NRSV]). Implied is that being like a “wild ass” is
bad, that Ishmael and his kin are violent, anti-social aggressors and troublemakers. The
modern translators expect the ancient Israelite writers to frame Ishmaelites in nega-
tive ways in order to draw differences between themselves as good citizens and their
neighbours as marauding wildmen, the dangerous “Other.” Biblical heroes, however, are
regularly compared to fecund, wild animals such as bulls, strong donkeys,22 and raven-
ous wolves.23 Such metaphors are meant to be positive.
The word “wild ass” connotes fertility and sexual liveliness. In an admittedly nega-
tive context, the prophet Jeremiah uses the female wild ass to develop the metaphor of
Israel as a loose woman who deserts her husband Yahweh to seek lovers, that is, other
gods. She never tires.24 In the message to Hagar about her son, however, such sexual con-
notations imply machismo, a positive trait from the composer and the culture’s perspec-
tives. The deity himself is known by the epithet “the bull of Jacob,” frequently translated
“the Mighty One of Jacob” (Gen. 49:24 [NRSV]). As Patrick D. Miller has shown, however,
Yahweh as divine warrior, like his Canaanite counterpart Baal, is iconically pictured as a
horned, virile bull.25 In Deuteronomy 33:17, Joseph is also positively compared to a first-
born bull/a horned wild ox in images of warrior prowess. Similarly, in the Blessing of
Jacob, the tribe/hero Issachar is described as a strong or bony donkey.26 The catalogue
concerning Issachar is similar in content and structure to Genesis 16:12, describing his
manly quality via an animal metaphor, the location where he dwells, and the kind of
work he does.
The manly Ishmael and hence future Ishmaelites are traders and make their dwell-
ing place nearby Israel. In biblical material, the Ishmaelites are portrayed as traders
par excellence; hence their role in the tale of Joseph. The imagery of Genesis 16:12 thus
belongs to a wider tradition about Ishmaelites and comports with the descriptions of
the heroes/tribes in Judges 5:15–17 that contain expected constituent components: the
hero’s name/ethnic identity, location, and occupation. Variations upon this formula may
be a part of a catalogue of heroes as in Judges 5, serve as an annunciation of a hero to
be born as in Genesis 16, or belong to a prophetic testament. In his testament scene,
the patriarch Jacob is said to bless his sons before his death and thereby predict and
describe the future roles of the groups descended from them. Such works have signifi-
cance for political outlook and worldview. Those who deploy these formula patterns
reveal views of Israelite identity and share conventions of pan-Israelite traditional liter-
ature. In short, the founding hero of the Ishmaelites is presented positively. Here and in
Genesis 21, another scene of divine rescue for the future hero and his mother, it appears
that the national literature of Israel preserves another group’s foundation myth. Before
offering some suggestions as to why this material was included in the Hebrew Scrip-
22 Gen. 49:14.
23 Gen. 49:27.
24 Jer. 2:24.
25 P. Miller, “Animal Names.”
26 Gen. 49:14–15.
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aware, he was still in the room below in total ignorance of what had
happened.
Shivering as if in the throes of fever, she sat on the edge of her
narrow bed. The treasure was hers still. She held it to her bosom as
a mother holds a child; yet the simple act gave rise at once to the
problem of problems: What must be done with the thing now? There
could be no security for it under that roof. And not to the picture
alone did this apply, but also to herself. Anything might happen as
soon as the old man found out that the Van Roon was not, after all,
to be his. Meanwhile, the future hardly bore thinking about; it was
like a precipice beyond whose edge she dare not look.
One act, however, did not admit of a moment’s delay: there and
then the treasure must be smuggled out of the house and put in a
place of safety. Rowelled by this thought, June rose from the bed,
took a piece of brown paper and some string from her box, and
proceeded to transform the picture into a neat parcel. She then
slipped off her dress, which was considerably the worse for contact
with the dusty interior of the Hoodoo, performed a hasty toilette, put
on her walking-out coat and skirt and changed her shoes. Finally,
she put on the better of the only two hats she possessed, slipped her
mother’s battered old leather purse into her coat pocket, and then,
umbrella in one hand, parcel in the other, she turned to the hazard of
stealing downstairs and making good her escape.
In the middle of the twisty stairs, just before their sharpest bend
would bring her into the view of persons below, she stopped to listen.
The voices had ceased; she could not hear a sound. Two ways lay
before her of reaching the street: one via the parlour to the kitchen
and out along the side entry, the other through the front door of the
shop. Either route might be commanded at the moment by the
enemy. With nothing to guide her, June felt that the only safe course
just then was to stay where she was. In the strategic position she
had taken up on the stairs she could not be seen from below, yet a
quick ear might hope to gain a clue to what was going on.
She had not to wait long. From the inner room, whose door
opposite the foot of the stairs was still half open, although its
occupant was no more seen, there suddenly came the strident tones
of Uncle Si. They were directed unmistakably kitchenward. “Boy,
you’d better get the tea ready. Seemin’ly that gell ain’t home.”
“Very good, sir,” came a prompt and cheerful response from the
back premises.
June decided at once that the signs were favourable. Now was
her chance; the way through the front shop was evidently clear.
Deftly as a cat she came down the remaining stairs and stole past
the half-open door of what was known as “the lumber room,” where,
however, old chairs were sometimes fitted with new legs and old
chests with new panels.
Uncle Si was undoubtedly there. June could hear him moving
about as she passed the door; indeed she was hardly clear of it
when she received a most unwelcome reminder of this fact. Either
he chanced to turn round as she crept by, or he caught a glimpse of
her passing in one of the numerous mirrors that surrounded him. For
just as she reached the shop threshold she heard his irascible bark:
“That you, niece?”
The road clear ahead, June did not pause to weigh
consequences. She simply bolted. Even if the old man was not likely
to guess what her neat parcel contained, it would surely be the
height of folly to give him the chance.
Never in her life had she been quite so thankful as when she
found herself in the street with the treasure safely under her arm.
XXXI
June went swiftly down New Cross Street to the Strand. Until she
reached that garish sea of traffic she dare not look back lest hot on
her heels should be Uncle Si. Such a discovery was not at all likely
she well knew; the feeling was therefore illogical, yet she could not
rid herself of it until she was merged in the ever-flowing tide.
Taking refuge at last in a jeweller’s doorway from the maelstrom
of passers by, June had now another problem to face. The Van Roon
must find a home. But the question of questions was—where?
Apart from William and Uncle Si, and her chance acquaintance,
Mr. Keller, she did not know a soul in London. Mr. Keller, however,
sprang at once to her mind. Yet more than one reservation promptly
arose in regard to him. She knew really nothing about him beyond
the fact that he was a man of obviously good address, belonging to a
class superior to her own. He was a man of the world, of a certain
breeding and education, but whether it would be wise to trust a
comparative stranger in such a matter seemed exceedingly doubtful
to a girl of June’s horse sense. Still there was no one else to whom
she could turn. And recalling the circumstances of their first meeting,
if one could ignore the means by which it had come about, there was
something oddly compelling, something oddly attractive, about this
Mr. Keller.
In the total absence of other alternatives, June found her mind
drawn so far in the direction of this man of mystery that at last she
took from her purse a slip of paper on which he had written his name
and address: “Adolph Keller, No. 4, Haliburton Studios, Manning
Square, Soho.”
Could she trust him with the care of a Van Roon? Now that she
had been a witness of its terrible effect on Uncle Si, she was forced
to ask whether it would be right to trust any man with such a
talisman. Luckily, the world was not peopled exclusively with Uncle
Sis. She would have to trust somebody with her treasure, that was
certain; and, after all, there was no reason to suspect that Mr. Keller
was not an honest man.
She was still in the jeweller’s doorway, wrestling with the pros
and cons of the tough matter, when a passing bus displaying the
name Victoria Station caught her eye. In a flash came the solution of
the problem.
Again she entered the sea of traffic, to be borne slowly along by
the slow tide as far as Charing Cross. Here she waited for another
bus to Victoria. The solving of the riddle was absurdly simple after
all. What place for her treasure could be safer, more accessible than
a railway station cloak room?
She boarded Bus 23. But hardly had it turned the corner into
Whitehall when a thin flicker of elation was dashed by the salutary
thought that her brain was giving out. The cloak room at Charing
Cross, from the precincts of whose station she had just driven away,
was equally adapted to her need. Along the entire length of Whitehall
and Victoria Street she was haunted by the idea that she was losing
her wits. A prolonged scrutiny of her pale but now collected self in a
confectioner’s window on the threshold of the London and Brighton
terminus was called for to reassure her. And even then, for a girl so
shrewd and so practical, there remained the scar of a distressing
mental lapse.
It did not take long to deposit the parcel in the cloak room on the
main line down platform. But in the act of doing so, occurred a slight
incident which was destined to have a bearing on certain events to
follow. When a ticket was handed to her, she could only meet the
charge of three pence with a ten shilling note.
“Nothing smaller, Miss?” asked the clerk.
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said June, searching her purse, and then
carefully placing the ticket in its middle compartment.
“You’ll have to wait while I get change then.”
“Sorry to trouble you,” June murmured, as the clerk went out
through a door into an inner office. Ever observant and alert, she
noticed that the clerk was a tallish young man, whose freely curling
fair hair put her in mind of William, and that he wore a new suit of
green corduroy.
The likeness to William gave bouquet to her politeness, when the
young man returned with the change. “Sorry to give you so much
trouble,” she said again.
“No trouble, miss.” And Green Corduroy handed the change
across the cloak room counter with a frank smile that was not
unworthy of William himself.
XXXII
The treasure in a safe place, June had to consider what to do next.
One fact stood out clear in her mind. She must leave at once the
sheltering roof of S. Gedge Antiques. There was no saying what
would happen when the Old Crocodile discovered that the Van Roon
was missing.
The sooner she collected her box and her gear, and found
another lodging the better. Her best plan would be to go back to New
Cross Street and get them now. Uncle Si was hardly likely as yet to
have made the discovery. It would be wise, therefore, to take
advantage of this lull, for at the most it was only a matter of a few
hours before the truth was known. And when known it was, Number
Forty-six New Cross Street was the very last place in London in
which she would choose to be.
There was a chance, of course, that “the murder” was out
already. But she would have to take the risk of that. All that she had
in the world beyond the six paper pounds, nine shillings and
ninepence in her purse, was in the box in the garret. Her entire
resources were about seventeen pounds in money, a scanty
wardrobe, and a few odds and ends of jewellery of little value, but if
she could get hold of these they might suffice to tide her over a
sorely anxious time.
In the present state of her nerves, courage was needed to return
to New Cross Street. But it had to be. And it was now or never. If her
box was to be got away, she must go boldly back at once and claim
it. How this was to be done without arousing suspicion she did not
quite know, but the most hopeful method was to announce that she
had been able to find a job, and also good lodgings, and that she did
not care to lay the burden of her presence upon Uncle Si one hour
longer than was necessary.
She had been brought up with a strict regard for the truth, but fate
was driving her so hard that she could not afford to have scruples.
Hanging by a strap on the Underground to Charing Cross, which
seemed the quickest route, and time was the essence of the matter,
she rehearsed the part she had now to play. Certainly the playing
itself would not lack gusto. Nothing life so far had given her would
yield quite so much pleasure as saying good-bye to the Old
Crocodile, and ironically thanking him for all his kindness. At the
same time, the job and lodgings story must be pitched in just the
right key, or his suspicions would be aroused, and then something
horribly unpleasant might occur.
By the time June had turned out of the Strand into New Cross
Street, a heavy autumnal dusk had fallen upon that bleak
thoroughfare. Somehow the dark pall struck at her heart. In a sense
it was symbolical of the business upon which she was engaged. She
felt like a thief whose instinct welcomes darkness, and whose
conscience fears it.
Never in her life had she needed such courage as to turn up that
gloomy and dismal street and accost the forbidding threshold of S.
Gedge Antiques. The shop was still open, for it was hardly more than
six o’clock, and two gas jets lit the interior in a way that added to its
dolour.
She stood a moment with the knob of the shop door in her hand.
All the nerve she could muster was wanted to venture within. But she
did go in, and she felt a keen relief when a hasty glance told her that
Uncle Si was not there.
XXXIII
June had a further moment of indecision while she thought out
what her line must be. She resolved to go direct to her room and
pack her box. Afterwards she must find William and enlist his help in
bringing it downstairs, and then she would get a taxi and drive off
with her things before Uncle Si discovered his loss. Otherwise...!
Her mind had not time to shape the grisly alternative, before the
immediate course of events shaped it for her. Suddenly she was
aware of a presence lurking in the dark shadows of the shop interior.
It was couchant, vengeful, hostile. Almost before June could guess
what was happening it had sprung upon her.
With astounding force her right wrist was grasped and twisted
behind her back. She gave a little yelp of pain. A second yelp
followed, as she struggled to free herself, only to find that she was
locked in a vice, and that to fight against it would be agony.
“Now, where is it?” The low voice hissing in her ear was surely
that of a maniac. “Where’s the picture?” The grip upon her had the
strength of ten. “Where is it—eh?” As the question was put, her
captor shook her fiercely. “Tell me.” He shook her again. “Oh, you
won’t—won’t you?” And then she realized that there was something
in his hand.
She called wildly for William, but there was no response.
“No use lifting up your voice. The boy’s out.”
She fought to get free, but with a wrist still locked, she was at his
mercy. “Now then, where’s that picture? Won’t tell me—eh?” There
was madness in that depth of rage.
Quite suddenly there came a sickening crash upon her
shoulders. She let out with her heels and found the shin of the
enemy, she fought and screamed, yet pinned like that, she felt her
wrist must break and her arm be wrenched from its socket.
“Where is it—you thief?” The stick crashed again, this time in a
series of horrible blows. So severe was the pain that it seemed to
drive through her whole being. She began to fear that he meant to
kill her; and as the stick continued to descend she felt sure that he
would.
She was a strong, determined girl, but her captor had her at a
hopeless disadvantage. His strength, besides, was that of one
possessed. Her cries and struggles merely added to his savagery.
“Tell me where it is or I’ll knock the life out of you.”
Utterly desperate, she contrived at last to break away; and
though with the force of a maniac he tried to prevent her escape,
somehow she managed to get into the street. He followed her as far
as the shop door, brandishing the stick, hurling imprecations upon
her, and threatening what he would do if she didn’t bring the picture
back at once.
Bruised and gasping, June reeled into the darkness. Feeling
more dead than alive, she lingered nearby after the old man had
gone in, trying to pull her battered self together. She badly wanted
her box, yet the only hope of getting it now was by means of the
police. As things were, however, it would not be wise to ask their
help. The old wretch was so clever he might be able to make her out
a thief; besides, for the time being she had had more than enough of
this horrible affair.
Cruelly hurt she moved at last with slow pain towards the Strand.
By now she had decided that her most imperative need was a night’s
lodging. Before starting to look for one, however, the enticing doors
of a teashop gave her a renewed sense of weakness. Gratefully she
went in and sat down, ordering a pot of tea and a little bread and
butter which she felt too ill to eat.
Nearly half an hour she sat in the company of her thoughts. Hard,
unhappy thoughts they were. Without one friend to whom in this
crisis she could turn, the world which confronted her now was an
abyss. The feeling of loneliness was desolating, yet, after all, far less
so than it would have been were she not fortified by the memory of a
certain slip of paper in her purse.
A slow return of fighting power revived a spark of natural
resolution within her. After all, a potent weapon was in her hands.
She must think out a careful plan of turning it to full account. And at
the worst she was now beyond the reach of Uncle Si. Even if he kept
her box and all its contents, weighed in the scale of the picture’s
fabulous worth, her modest possessions amounted to very little.
Stimulated by this conclusion, she began to forget her aches.
When a waitress came June asked for her bill. It was sixpence. She
put her hand in the pocket of her coat. Her purse was not there.
With a little thrill of fear, she felt in the pocket on the other side.
The purse was not there either. She was stunned. This was a blow
far worse than those she had just received. She grew so dazed that
as she got up she swayed against the table, and had to hold on by it
to save herself from falling.
The waitress who had written out the bill caught a glimpse of
scared eyes set in a face of chalk.
“Aren’t you well?” she asked.
“I—I’ve lost my purse,” June stammered. “It’s fallen out of my
pocket, I think.” As with frantic futility she plunged her hand in again,
she was raked by the true meaning of such a fact in all its horror.
Unless her purse had been stolen on the Underground, and it was
not very likely, it had almost certainly fallen out of her pocket in the
course of the struggle with Uncle Si.
It was lying now on the shop floor unless the old wretch had
found it already. And if he had he would lose no time in examining its
contents. He had only to do so for the cloak-room ticket to tell him
where the Van Roon was deposited, and to provide him with a sure
means of obtaining it.
“You may have had your pocket picked.”
June did not think so. Yet, being unable to take the girl into her
confidence, she did not choose to disclose her doubts.
“Perhaps I have,” she gasped. And then face to face with the
extreme peril of the case, her overdriven nerves broke out in mutiny.
She burst into tears. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she sobbed.
The waitress was full of sympathy. “Your bill is only sixpence.
Come in and pay to-morrow.”
Through her tears June thanked her.
“’Tisn’t my bill, although it’s very kind of you. There was
something very important in my purse.”
“Where did you have it last?”
“In the booking hall, when I took a ticket from Victoria to Charing
Cross.”
“Your pocket’s been picked,” said the waitress with conviction.
“There’s a warning in all the Tubes.”
The comfort was cold, yet comfort it was of a kind. June saw a
wan ray of hope. After all, there was a bare possibility that inexorable
Fate was not the thief.
“I’d go to Scotland Yard if I were you,” said the waitress. “The
police often get back stolen property. Last year my sister’s house
was burgled, and they recovered nearly everything for her.”
June began to pull herself together. It was not hope, however,
that braced her faculties, but an effort of will. Hope there was none of
recovering the purse, but she was now faced by the stern necessity
of getting back the picture. In the light of this tragedy it was in most
serious peril. Delay might be fatal, if indeed it had not already proved
to be so. She must go at once and get possession of the treasure
lest it be too late.
The waitress was a good Samaritan. Not only could the bill wait
until the next day, but she went even further: “Is your home far from
here?” she asked.
“My home—far?” said June, dazedly. For the moment she did not
understand all that was implied by the question.
“If you live on the District, and you haven’t a season, I don’t mind
lending you a shilling to get you home.”
June accepted a shilling with earnest thanks. In the
circumstances, it might be worth untold gold: “You can give it me
back any time you are passing,” said the waitress, as June thanked
her again and made her way unsteadily out into the street.
The chill air of the Strand revived her a little. She had decided
already that she must go at once to Victoria. Every minute would
count, and it now occurred to her that if she took the Underground,
several might be saved.
To the Underground in Trafalgar Square she went. It was the hour
of the evening rush. Queues were lining up at all the booking office
windows. And at the first window she came to, some three persons
or so ahead of her, was a figure oddly familiar, which, however, in
her present state of disintegration she did not recognize at once. It
was clad in a sombre tail coat of prehistoric design, jemima boots,
frayed shepherd’s plaid trousers braced high and a hard square felt
hat which gave a crowning touch of oppressive respectability.
Moreover, its progress was assisted by a heavy knotted walking
stick, at the sight of which June gave an involuntary shiver.
An instant later the shiver had developed into a long and
paralyzing shudder. Uncle Si was just ahead of her; in fact she was
near enough to hear a harsh voice demand almost with menace a
ticket to Victoria.
June’s worst fears were realized. The purse had fallen from her
pocket to the shop floor in the struggle; the old wretch had found it,
deciphered the precious ticket, put two and two together, and was
now on his way to claim the parcel. All this was crystal clear to her
swift mind. She felt a strong desire to faint, but she fought her
weakness. She must go on. Everything was as good as lost—but
she must go on.
She took her ticket. And then in the long subway to the platform
she raced on ahead of Uncle Si. He was so near-sighted that even
had he been less absorbed in his own affairs he would not have
been likely to notice her.
June reached the platform well in front of the old man. But the
train to Victoria was not in. It arrived two minutes later; by then,
Uncle Si had appeared, and they boarded it together. She was
careful, however, not to enter the same compartment as the enemy.
Short as the journey was, June had ample time to appreciate that
the odds were heavily against her. The mere fact that the cloak-room
receipt for the parcel was in the custody of Uncle Si would confer
possession upon him; it had only to be presented for the Van Roon
to be handed over without a question.
The one chance she had now was to get on well ahead of the old
beast, and convince the clerk that in spite of the absence of the
ticket the parcel was hers. She knew, however, only too well that the
hope of being able to do this was frail indeed—at all events before
the holder of the ticket arrived on the scene to claim it.
At Victoria, June dashed out of the train even before it stopped.
Running past the ticket collector at the barrier and along the subway
she reached the escalator yards in front of Uncle Si, and, in spite of
being unused to this trap for the unwary, for Blackhampton’s more
primitive civilization knew escalators not, she ascended to the street
at a pace far beyond the powers of the Old Crocodile. By this means,
indeed, she counted on gaining an advantage of several minutes,
since it was hardly likely that Uncle Si would trust himself to such a
contrivance, and in ignorance of the fact that she was just ahead,
would choose the dignified safety of the lift.
So far as it went the thought was reassuring. Alas, it did not go
far. As June ran through the long station to the cloak-room at its
farthest end, she had but a very slender hope of being able to
recover the parcel. She had no intention, however, of submitting
tamely to fate. In this predicament, whatever the cost, she must
make one last and final effort to get back her treasure.
At the cloak-room counter she took her courage in both hands. A
man sour and elderly had replaced the wearer of the green corduroy,
who was nowhere to be seen. This was a piece of bad luck, for she
had hoped that the nice-looking young man might remember her.
Happily, no other passengers besieged the counter at the moment,
so that without loss of time June was able to describe the parcel and
to announce the fact that the ticket she had received for it was
missing.
Exactly as she had foreseen the clerk raised an objection.
Without a ticket she couldn’t have the parcel. “But I simply must have
it,” said June. And spurred by the knowledge that there was not one
moment to lose in arguing the case, she boldly lifted the flap of the
counter and entered the cloak-room itself.
“No use coming in here,” said the Clerk, crustily. “You can’t take
nothing away without a ticket.”
“But my purse has been stolen, I tell you,” said June.
“Then I should advise you to go and see the station-master.”
“I can’t wait to do that.” And with the defiance of despair,
expecting each moment to hear the voice of Uncle Si at her back,
June ignored the Clerk, and proceeded to gaze up and down the
numerous and heavily burdened luggage racks for her property.
XXXIV
“Not a bit o’ use, don’t I tell you.” The Clerk was growing angry.
June pretended not to hear. Her heart beating fast she went on
with her search for the parcel; yet in the midst of it she grew aware
that somebody was approaching the counter. She dare not pause to
look who it was, for she knew only too well that it was almost bound
to be Uncle Si.
The Clerk uttered another snarl of protest as he turned away to
attend to the new comer. As he did so, June breathed a prayer that
her eye might fall on the parcel in that instant, for her only hope now
was to seize it and fly. That, however, was not to be. She had
omitted to notice the place in which it had been put, and do as she
would she could not find it now.
At this crucial moment, there emerged from the inner office her
friend of the green corduroy. She simply leapt at what was now her
one remaining chance.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come,” cried June, in a voice that was a
little frantic: “You remember my bringing a brown paper parcel here,
don’t you—about two hours ago?”
The tone, tinged as it was with hysteria, caused Green Corduroy
to look at June with mild astonishment. “I’ve lost the ticket you gave
me for it, but I’m sure you remember my bringing it.” Her brain
seemed on fire. “Don’t you remember my giving you a ten shilling
note? And you had to go and get the change.”
Green Corduroy was a slow-brained youth, but a knitting of the
brow seemed to induce a hazy recollection of the incident. But while
the process was going on, June gave a glance over her shoulder,
and behold there was Uncle Si the other side of the counter. A
second glance told her, moreover, that Crusty Sides already had the
fatal ticket in his hand.
What must she do? It was not a moment for half measures. While
she was stirring the memory of Green Corduroy, the treasure would
be gone. She did not hesitate. Observing Crusty Sides wheel, paper
in hand, with the slow austerity of one of the Company’s oldest and
most respected servants towards a luggage rack near by, June
seized the clue. Of a sudden her eyes lit on the parcel at the top of
the pile. Already the responsible fingers of Crusty Sides were
straying upwards, yet before they could enclose the Van Roon, June
made a dash for it, and managed to whisk it away from under his
nose.
Her brain was like quicksilver now. She had a mad impulse to
rush off with the treasure without further explanation; all the same
she was able to resist it, for she realized that such a course would be
too full of peril.
“Yes—this is it,” she said in an urgent whisper to Green Corduroy.
And as she spoke, with a presence of mind, which in the
circumstances was a little uncanny, she slipped behind a large pile of
boxes out of view of Uncle Si.
“Surely you remember my bringing it?”
Green Corduroy seemed to think that he did remember. At this
point Crusty Sides, with an air of outrage, sternly interposed. “But a
pawty claims it. And here’s his ticket.”
“The ticket’s mine,” said June, in a fierce whisper. “It’s been taken
from my purse.”
“Nothin’ to do with us, that ain’t,” said Crusty Sides.
“But you do remember my bringing it, don’t you?” Beseechingly
June turned to Green Corduroy. And he, that nice-looking young
man, with a frown of ever-deepening perplexity, slowly affirmed that
he thought he did remember.
“The ticket’s what we’ve got to go by,” said Crusty Sides, sternly.
“Nothin’ else matters to us.”
“If you’ll look at it,” said June to Green Corduroy, “you’ll see that
it’s made out in your writing.”
Green Corduroy looked and saw that it was. As far as he was
concerned, that seemed to clinch the argument. And even Crusty
Sides, a born bureaucrat, was rather impressed by it. “You say this
here ticket’s been taken off on you?” he asked.
“Yes,” said June in an excited whisper. “By my wicked thief of an
uncle.”
Instantly she regretted the imprudence of her words.
“Uncle a thief, eh?” proclaimed Crusty Sides, in a voice of such
carrying power that to June it seemed that the Old Crocodile could
hardly fail to hear him.
“Anyhow, this gentleman knows that it was I who brought the
parcel,” she said, determinedly to Green Corduroy.
That young man looked her straight in the eye, and then declared
that he did know. Further, like many minds “slow in the uptake,”
when once in motion they are prone to deep conclusions. “Seems to
me, Nobby,” he weightily affirmed, under the stimulus no doubt of
being addressed as a gentleman, in the Company’s time, by such a
good-looking girl, “that as this lady has got the parcel, and we have
got the ticket for it, she and Uncle had better fight it out between
’em.”
“I don’t know about that,” growled Nobby.
Green Corduroy, however, stimulated by the fiery anguish of
June’s glance, and no doubt still in thrall to the fact that she
considered him a gentleman, was not to be moved from the
statesmanlike attitude he had taken up. “You let ’em fight it out,
Nobby. This lady was the one as brought it here.”
“I gave you a ten shilling note, didn’t I?” The voice of June was as
honeyed as the state of her feelings would permit.
“Yes, and I fetched the change for you, didn’t I?”
Crusty Sides shook a head of confirmed misogyny. “Very
irregular, that’s all I’ve got to say about it.”
“Maybe it is, Nobby. But it’s nothing to do with you and me.”
Green Corduroy, with almost the air of a knight errant, took the
all-important slip of paper from his colleague. Flaunting it in gallant
fingers, he moved up slowly to the counter.
S. Gedge Antiques, buying spectacles on nose, knotted cudgel in
hand, was impatiently waiting. “The parcel is claimed by the lady
who brought it,” June heard Green Corduroy announce.
She waited for no more. Following close behind Crusty Sides,
who also moved up to the counter, she slipped quietly through an
adjacent door to the main line platform before Uncle Si grew fully
alive to the situation.
Clasping the parcel to her bosom, she glided swiftly down the
platform, and out by the booking hall, travelling as fast as her legs
would take her, without breaking into a run, which would have looked
like guilt, and might have attracted public notice. She did not dare to
glance back, for she was possessed by a fear that the old man and
his stick were at her heels.
Once clear of the station itself, she yielded to the need of putting
as much distance between Uncle Si and herself as a start so short
would permit. There was now hope of throwing him off the track.
Thus, as soon as she reached the Victoria Street corner, she
scrambled on to a bus that was in the act of moving away.
One seat only was vacant and, as in a state of imminent collapse
she sank down upon it, she ventured for the first time to look behind
her. She quite expected to find Uncle Si at her elbow already, but
with a gasp of relief she learned that the old man was nowhere in
sight.
XXXV
June did not know in which direction the bus was going. And when
the conductor came for her fare, which he did as soon as the
vehicle began to move, she was quite at a loss for a destination.
There was nothing for it but to draw a bow at a venture. She asked
for Oxford Circus, the only nodal point of the metropolis, besides
Charing Cross, with which she was familiar. By a rare piece of luck,
Oxford Circus was included in its route, and what remained of the
shilling the girl at the teashop had given her was sufficient to get her
there, and leave four pence in hand.
Alighting at Oxford Circus, she stood under a lamp to consider
what she should do now. There was nowhere she could go, there
was not one friend to whom she could turn. Battered and spent in
body and spirit by all that had happened to her during the last few
hours she was now in a flux of terror to which she dare not yield.
At first she thought of seeking advice of a policeman, but it would
have been extremely difficult just then to tell her strange story. Its
complications were many and fantastic; besides, and she trembled
at the idea, it was by no means clear that she would be able to
establish her claim to the Van Roon in the eye of the law.
Still, something would have to be done. She must find a home of
some kind not only for her treasure, but for herself. Feeling
desperately in need of help, she decided as a preliminary measure
to spend three of her four remaining pence on a cup of tea. She had
a vague hope that in that magic beverage inspiration might lurk.
The hope, as it chanced, was not vain. Near by was an A.B.C.
shop; and she had hardly sat down at one of its marble-topped
tables when, by an association of ideas, her mysterious
acquaintance, Mr. Adolph Keller, sprang again into her mind. He had
given her his address. Alas, the slip of paper on which it was written
was in her purse, but she had a particularly good memory, and by
raking it fiercely she was able to recall the fact that his place of
domicile was Haliburton Studios, Manning Square.
She did not like trusting any man on an acquaintance so slight,
especially as it had come about in so odd a fashion, but Mr. Keller
had shown himself very friendly, and there was no one else to whom
she could turn. Sipping her cup of tea, in slow and grateful
weariness, she began to develop this idea. Horse sense, Mr. Boultby
had always said, was her long suit; therefore she well understood
the peril of taking a comparative stranger into her confidence. But
very cogently she put to herself the question: What else could she
do?
Of sundry policemen, who were very obliging, June asked the
way to Manning Square. It was in Soho, not so very far from Oxford
Circus, as she remembered Mr. Keller saying, and, in spite of a local
fog which had come on in the last twenty minutes, the police were so
helpful that she had no great difficulty in getting there. During the
short journey her mind was much engaged in settling just what she
would and would not say to Mr. Keller. She decided that as far as
might be practicable she would leave the picture out of the case. It
might not be possible to exclude it, but at any rate she would begin
by offering to sit to him as a model, in accordance with his
suggestion; and with that the pretext of her visit she would see if she
could get him to lend her a little money to tide over immediate needs.
By the time she had come to Manning Square it was a few
minutes past seven. Two complete circuits had to be made of this
dingy, ill-smelling gap in the heart of Soho, before she came upon
Haliburton Studios, which were not in the Square itself, but in a
dismal by-street debouching from it. The tall block of buildings which
comprised the studios was equally dismal, and as June entered a
vestibule that shewed no light, she felt a sudden chill strike at her
heart.
This, however, was not a moment to quail. It was a case, if ever
there was one, of any port in a storm. The hazard of her errand fell
upon her like a pall, but the knowledge that she had only a penny left

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John Miles Foley's World of

Contemporary Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 7th Edition

Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous

Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition Michael C.

Oral Pathology: A Comprehensive Atlas and Text 2nd

Contemporary Strategy Analysis and Cases: Text and

The John Also Called Mark: Reception and Transformation

Handbook of Oral Pathology and Oral Medicine S. R.

Sacred Sites and Sacred Stories Across Cultures:

© 2020, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

ISBN (HB): 9781641893381

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Introduction: The Pathway(s) from Oral-formulaic Theory to

Introduction to the Individual Contributions

Orality and Literacy Revisited

Preserving Traditions of “Them” and the Creation of “Us”:

Embodying the Oral Tradition: Performance and Performative Poetics

Performing Anglo-Saxon Elegies: A Conversation

Notes on the Recordings of Three Anglo-Saxon Elegies

Healing Charms in the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript

Is the “Formula” the Key to Oral Composition?

The Formula: Morphology and Syntax

Old Norse Riddles and other Verbal Contests in Performance

Performance Archaeology, Eiríksmál, Hákonarmál, and the Study of

“To Surf through the Shared Riches of the Story Hoard”:

When a Hero Lies

“The True Nature of the aoidos”: The Kirghiz Singer of Tales

Master Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Index of Manuscripts Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Figure 2. Andreas cross. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

Figure 3. Näs baptismal font. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Figure 4. Ramsund slab engraving, originally in

Figure 5. Sigurðr slaying Fafnir. Hylestad portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

Figure 6. Sigurðr slays Regin. Hylestad Portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

Table 1. The Structure of Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Table 2. Speeches in the Biblical Book of Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Table 3. Speeches in the Old English Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

I am deeply grateful to this volume’s contributors for their steadfast commitment

ABAG Amsterdamer Beiträge zur álteren Germanistik

LS Language and Style

actuality “each epic tradition has an idiosyncratic, tradition-dependent prosody that we

24 Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 120; emphasis his.

affective dynamics of traditional oral poetics in medieval West-Germanic verse, he con-

38 Foley, Immanent Art, xi.

45 Foley, Immanent Art, 39.

Author Biography Miranda Villesvik currently works as an archivist at WGBH in Boston,

5 Grossardt, Praeconia Maeonidae magni, 157.

12 Grossardt, Praeconia Maeonidae magni, 200.

18 On this point about compatibility, I recommend especially O. Davidson, “Written Text as a

21 See, G. Nagy, Homer the Preclassic, 314–16.

3 Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, 15–17, 49–53.

7 Finnegan, Literacy and Orality.

18 Michalowski, “History as Charter,” 237–48.

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