what is oral literature research

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oral literature

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• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Oral Literature in English
• Table Of Contents

oral literature , the standard forms (or genres) of literature found in societies without writing. The term oral literature is also used to describe the tradition in written civilizations in which certain genres are transmitted by word of mouth or are confined to the so-called folk (i.e., those who are “unlettered,” or do not use writing).

Oral literature is, arguably, the best phrase available for describing these two senses. The term oral covers both, but these two meanings should be distinguished. While certain forms, such as the folktale, continue to exist, especially among the unlettered component of complex societies, what might also be called oral tradition (or folk literature ) is inevitably influenced by the elite written culture . The term literature also poses problems because it is ultimately derived from the Latin littera , “letter,” essentially a written, indeed alphabetic, concept. Among scholars, the phrases standardized oral forms and oral genres have been suggested in place of oral literature , but, since the word literature is so widely used, it has to be reckoned with, even though it is essential to recall the major differences between the two registers, oral and written, as well as the way in which the latter influences the spoken word.

The relation of speech to writing

Because writing is an additional register to speech , writing’s advent has an important influence on speech. Writing’s effects have been dramatic on society generally, but, for much of the vast span of recorded history, writing and reading were confined to a small, elite minority of a population, while a large proportion of people continued to depend on oral communication alone. In many cases these two traditions existed side by side. Such a combination creates problems for the analysis of the various genres or oral literature, for there is a tendency today to read back the characteristics of literate literature (such as the use of a narrative structure) into purely oral genres. Written literature is never simply a matter of writing down what already exists; a myth or story is always changed in being “transcribed” and takes its place among a set of new genres as well as among modifications of old ones.

The term folklore generally refers to certain of the spoken (or nonwritten) activities of complex literate cultures where only a minority can read and write and where the rest are illiterate, a frequent situation of the peasantry in the post-Bronze Age cultures of Europe and Asia especially. While these activities have some links with parallel ones in purely oral cultures, they are inevitably influenced by the always-dominant literary modes, especially those related to the major (written) religions. (Folklore is largely confined to the exposition of peripheral beliefs.) But even the forms taken by genres such as the epic can influence folklore.

It is clear that, in societies with writing, a great deal of communication—including communication that takes literary forms—is still done by word of mouth. Not only is this an aspect of all human intercourse, but it was inevitably the case until near-universal literacy was achieved in Europe during the last quarter of the 19th century. Until that time, literature had to be oral for the large part of the population. That did not mean oral literature was uninfluenced by the written word. Indeed, some of the oral communication consisted in the repetition of written texts, as when lessons from the Bible were preached to an unlettered populace. A written epic, as was the case with the Hindu Vedas or the works of Homer , might be learned by heart and recited to the population at large, by priests in the former case and by the rhapsodes in the latter. Of course a society with writing might inherit some genres, such as folktales, largely unchanged from an earlier, purely oral culture whereas other genres, such as the epic, would undergo a sea change.

Part of the influence of the written word on speech consisted in the development not of oratory but of its formal counterpart, rhetoric , with its explicit body of rules. Specialists in the spoken word might achieve fame and be rewarded for their appearance in presenting a case at court. More directly in the field of the arts, specialist reciters, especially of praise songs but also of epics and other lengthy recitations, might be recompensed for their contributions, either as freelance performers or as professionals.

Many early written forms, such as the Breton lays , draw their subject matter from spoken genres, though inevitably transformations take place in the face of the new media. There has also been a good deal of exchange between coexistent folk and written (elite) literature. Homer’s poems incorporated “popular” tales, for example, as did the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf , although these transfers are as much between genres as between the registers of speech and writing, akin to when popular melodies, such as the bourrée of rural France, were taken up by those composing elite music in the urban courts of 17th-century Europe.

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Oral Literature

• Last Updated: Aug 7, 2023

Oral literature, as the term implies, refers to the cultural material and tradition transmitted orally from one generation to another [1] . The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form of folktales, ballads, songs, chants, proverbs, or folklores. From an anthropological standpoint, oral literature has been a crucial tool for understanding the cultural, social, and historical contexts of diverse societies.

Understanding Oral Literature

Definition and characteristics.

Oral literature is defined as the art form that uses words to create forms of traditional imaginative culture [2] . This literature comes in many different types, but some general characteristics include:

• Memorability : These narratives typically include repetition, alliteration, and other mnemonic devices to aid in retention.
• Verbal artistry : Oral literature is usually marked by a high degree of verbal artistry.
• Formularity : Oral narratives often have a certain set structure or format they adhere to.
• Performance : They are not merely spoken or recited; they are performed and thus have a theatrical element.

Cultural and Historical Significance

Oral literature plays a crucial role in preserving cultural heritage, traditions, and wisdom. It has been a primary medium of recording history for societies without written language and remains significant even in literate societies for preserving aspects of culture that are not typically written down [3] .

Anthropological Research on Oral Literature

Anthropological research on oral literature involves the study of this form of literature in its cultural context, considering the societal norms, values, and customs in which these narratives are embedded. The oral narratives offer a wealth of knowledge about the past societies’ worldviews and provide insight into the human experience across different cultures and epochs [4] .

Challenges in the Field

Despite its importance, studying oral literature anthropologically poses several challenges:

• Language barriers and translation issues can potentially alter or omit nuances in the narratives [5] .
• Societal biases can be reflected in the researcher’s interpretations.
• The fluidity of oral narratives means that there are often several versions of a single tale, which complicates the study and interpretation.

Methodology

Researching oral literature from an anthropological perspective typically involves:

• Fieldwork : The researcher immerses themselves in the culture being studied. This may involve living among the community and participating in their practices to gain a deep understanding of the context of the oral narratives.
• Recording and Transcription : The researcher records oral narratives, then transcribes them. This might also involve translation if the narratives are in a different language.
• Analysis : The researcher then analyses these narratives, interpreting them in the context of the wider cultural and historical backdrop.

Impact of Technology on Oral Literature

With the advent of technology, the face of oral literature has been radically changing. Here is how:

Digital Archiving

Previously, the transitory nature of oral literature posed significant challenges to its preservation. However, digital archiving offers a solution. Audio and video recordings can capture and store oral narratives, complete with their performance elements. This digital storage allows future generations access to traditional oral narratives in their original performed state.

Accessibility and Dissemination

Technology has not only made oral literature more accessible to a broader audience but also facilitated its wider dissemination. Platforms like YouTube, Podcasts, and other online mediums offer an array of oral literature from various cultures, breaking geographical boundaries.

Influence on Oral Tradition

However, the digitization of oral literature brings a significant change. Oral narratives were traditionally fluid, with each performance differing based on the performer’s interpretation and the audience’s reaction. In contrast, once a performance is recorded and disseminated digitally, it becomes a fixed representation of that narrative, altering the traditional fluidity associated with oral literature.

Oral Literature: A Living Heritage

Even with the modern age’s literacy and digital revolution, oral literature has remained a vital aspect of human culture. It continues to adapt and evolve, finding new life and forms in the contemporary world, all while holding onto the essence of the past. Oral literature’s endurance underlines the human penchant for storytelling and the shared desire to connect with our roots.

In essence, the anthropological study of oral literature opens a window into the human experience’s richness and diversity. By focusing on oral literature, we access a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and tradition that allows us to connect the past with the present, tradition with innovation, and ultimately, humanity with its cultural heritage.

In conclusion, oral literature is a significant repository of societal values, norms, and history, and anthropological research in this field can offer valuable insights into past and present cultures. Despite the associated challenges, this area of research continues to be pivotal in our quest to understand the complexities of human societies through their narratives.

[1] Finnegan, R. (2012). Oral Literature in Africa. Open Book Publishers.

[2] Foley, J. M. (2002). The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Indiana University Press.

[3] Vansina, J. (1985). Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press.

[4] Leavy, P. (2017). Research Design: Quantitative, Qualitative, Mixed Methods, Arts-Based, and Community-Based Participatory Research Approaches. Guilford Publications.

[5] Briggs, C. L. (1988). Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Vasundhra, an anthropologist, embarks on a captivating journey to decode the enigmatic tapestry of human society. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, she unravels the intricacies of social phenomena, immersing herself in the lived experiences of diverse cultures. Armed with an unwavering passion for understanding the very essence of our existence, Vasundhra fearlessly navigates the labyrinth of genetic and social complexities that shape our collective identity. Her recent publication unveils the story of the Ancient DNA field, illuminating the pervasive global North-South divide. With an irresistible blend of eloquence and scientific rigor, Vasundhra effortlessly captivates audiences, transporting them to the frontiers of anthropological exploration.

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Introduction

• Open Book Publishers

Oral Literature in the Digital Age

Ce livre est recensé par

p. XIII-XXIII

Plan détaillé

Texte intégral, collecting, protecting and connecting oral literature.

1 This volume is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

2 For societies in which traditions are conveyed more through speech than through writing, oral literature has long been the mode of communication for spreading ideas, knowledge and history. The term “oral literature” broadly includes ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, folk tales, creation stories, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, recitations and historical narratives. In most cases, such traditions are not translated when a community shifts to using a more dominant language.

3 Oral literatures are in decline as a result of a cultural focus on literacy, combined with the disappearance of minority languages. The Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger , 1 released by UNESCO in early 2009, claims that around a third of the 6,500 languages spoken around the globe today are in danger of disappearing forever. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert particularly complex pressures on smaller communities of speakers, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. Until relatively recently, few indigenous peoples have had easy access to effective tools to document their own cultural knowledge, and there is still little agreement on how collections of oral literature should be responsibly managed, archived and curated for the future.

4 The online archiving of audio and video recordings of oral literature is a technique of cultural preservation that has been widely welcomed by indigenous communities around the world. The World Oral Literature Project, established at the University of Cambridge in 2009 and co-located at Yale University since 2011, has a mission to “collect, protect and connect” endangered traditions. The Project facilitates partnerships between fieldworkers, archivists, performers of oral literature, and community representatives to document oral literature in ways that are ethically and practically appropriate. Our fieldwork grant scheme has funded the collection of audio and video recordings from nine countries in four continents. In addition, Project staff have digitised and archived older collections of oral literature, as well as contemporary recordings that are “born digital” but which were funded by other sources. At present, these collections represent a further twelve countries, amounting to over 400 hours of audio and video recordings of oral traditions now hosted for free on secure servers on the Project website. 2

5 The World Oral Literature Project’s strong focus on cooperation and understanding ensures that source communities retain full copyright and intellectual property over recordings of their traditions. Materials are protected for future posterity through accession to a secure digital archival platform with a commitment to migrating files to future digital formats as new standards emerge. Returning digitised materials to performers and communities frequently helps to protect established living traditions, with materials used for language education as well as programmes that aim to revitalise cultural heritage practices. 3 The inclusion of extensive metadata, including contextual details relating to the specific oral literature performance alongside its history and cultural significance, allows researchers and interested parties from diverse disciplines to connect with and experience the performative power of the collection. For example, while a musicologist might study the instrumental technique of a traditional song, a linguist would focus on grammatical structures in the verse, and an anthropologist might explore the social meaning and cultural values conveyed through the lyrics. Innovative digital archiving techniques support the retrieval of granular metadata that is relevant to specific research interests, alongside providing an easy way to stream or download the audio and video files from the web. In this manner, we have been able to connect recordings of oral literature to a broad community of users and researchers. In turn, this contributes to an appreciation of the beauty and complexity of human cultural diversity.

Coming together, sharing practices

6 The second annual workshop hosted by the World Oral Literature Project at the University of Cambridge in 2010, entitled Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities , brought together more than 60 ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists and librarians. Organised with support from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge; the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge; and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the assembled delegates explored key issues around the dissemination of oral literature through traditional and digital media. Presentations from representatives of institutions in eight countries prompted fieldworkers to consider how best to store and disseminate their recordings and metadata; while archivists and curators were exposed to new methods of managing collections with greater levels of cultural sensitivity and through cooperative partnerships with cultural stakeholders.

7 Workshop panels were focused around a central theme: When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital archival repositories of linguistic and cultural content, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions about access, ownership, and permanence. These issues are reflected in a current trend among funding agencies, including the World Oral Literature Project’s own fieldwork grants programme, to encourage fieldworkers to return copies of their material to source communities, as well as to deposit collections in institutional repositories. Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, wider Internet access and affordable multimedia recording technologies, the locus of dissemination and engagement has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a diverse constituency of global users such as migrant workers, indigenous scholars, policymakers and journalists, to name but a few. Participants at the workshop explored key issues around the dissemination of oral literature, reflecting particularly on the impact of greater digital connectivity in extending the dissemination of fieldworkers’ research and collections beyond traditional audiences.

8 Emerging from some of the most compelling presentations at the workshop, chapters in Part 1 of this volume raise important questions about the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and methods of avoiding fossilisation in the creation of digital documents. Part 2 consists of workshop papers presented by fieldworkers in anthropology and linguistics, all of whom reflect on the processes and outcomes of their own fieldwork and its broader relevance to their respective disciplines.

9 In keeping with our mandate to widen access and explore new modes of disseminating resources and ideas, workshop presentations are now available for online streaming and download through the World Oral Literature Project website. 4 Many of the chapters in this edited volume discuss audio and video recordings of oral traditions. Since a number of contributors have made use of online resources to illustrate their discussions on cultural property and traditional knowledge, it is hoped that readers will interact with this freely available media. URL links for referenced resources are included in a list of Online Sources in the reference section at the end of each chapter. All web resources were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated.

Part I. Principles and Methods of Archiving and Conservation

10 Thomas Widlok’s chapter discusses two aspects of digital archiving: first, he analyses what is actually involved in the process of digitisation and electronic archiving of spoken language documentation; second, he discusses notions of access and property rights in relation to the digital archives that result from such documentation. His emphasis in both cases is on identifying the elements and layers that make up the complex whole of the archive, yet he is quick to point out that there is more to this whole than is covered by his analysis. While Widlok’s evaluation is based on personal experience rather than a sample of projects, he acknowledges that themes of access and property rights in digitisation remain a recurring concern. The concluding argument of his chapter is that by viewing the component parts of the process of digital archiving for just one case study, we can see some of the contradictions and ambivalences of this process in more general terms. Through such a structural analysis, we may also begin to understand the mixed feelings that some field researchers have with regard to electronic archiving and online databasing. Widlok proposes that breaking these complex processes down into their elements may help us to make informed decisions about the extent and type of digital archiving we want to engage in.

11 David Nathan continues with the theme of digital archiving by considering the issue of access in relation to archives that hold documents of, and documentation relating to, endangered languages. Nathan defines access as the means of finding a resource; the availability of the resource; the delivery of the resource to the user; the relevance and accessibility of resource content to the user; and the user’s perceptions of their experience interacting with the archive and its resources. His discussion is centred around the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) and its online catalogue, both based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. The system uses features that have been pioneered in Web 2.0 or social networking applications, and is innovative in applying such techniques to language archiving. Nathan illustrates how ELAR’s access system represents a true departure from conventional archival practices in the field of language documentation.

12 Nathan explains how until recently, access has been thought of as “online resource discovery through querying standardised metadata” (page 23, this volume). Where access control has been applied, it has typically been based on a formal membership criterion, such as a user account on a university’s network. ELAR’s goal is to provide an archive that is more closely tied to the needs of those working with endangered languages, and, of course, the needs of members of speech communities. Nathan reports on how this has emerged as a rich area of exploration, and, coupled with the rise of social networking applications and conventions over the last five years, has yielded a system that highlights the nuanced dynamics of access.

13 Judith Aston and Paul Matthews discuss the outcomes of a collaborative project between the authors and the Oxford-based anthropologist Wendy James. The authors report on their work with James to convert a collection of recordings into an accessible and usable digital archive that has relevance for contemporary users. Aston and Matthews describe James’ fieldwork recordings from the Blue Nile Region of the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands, which consist of spoken memories, interviews, conversations, myths and songs. Most of the original recordings are in the Uduk language, but the collection also contains material in other minority tongues, as well as national languages. The authors highlight how this archive needs to be useful both to academics and to a wider general public, but also, and most particularly, to the people themselves who are now starting to document and recall their own experiences. It is also important that the materials contained within the archive are perceived to be part of a wider set of regional records from north-east Africa, linked to diaspora communities now living in various parts of the world.

14 A key issue that emerges from Aston and Matthews’ collaboration with James is the need to remain true to the fluidity of oral tradition over time, in order to avoid fossilisation and misrepresentation. Their chapter recommends a conversational approach through which the archive can reveal the interactions and silences of informants, both in conversation with each other and with the ethnographer, at different historical periods. In developing such an approach, the authors hope that future users of the archive will be offered an opportunity to enter a sensory-rich world of experiences, one which foregrounds the awareness and agency of the people themselves and allows their voices to be heard in their vernacular language wherever possible.

Part II: Engagements and Reflections from the Field

15 Merolla, Ameka and Dorvlo open this volume’s collection of field reports with a discussion of the scientific and ethical problems regarding the selection, authorship and audience that they encountered during a video-documentation research project on Ewe oral literature in south-eastern Ghana. Their documentation is based on an interview that Dorvlo and Merolla recorded in Accra in 2007. This interview concerns Ewe migration stories and is included in Merolla and Leiden University’s Verba Africana series that includes videos of African oral genres with translations and interpretive commentaries informed by scientific research. The authors illustrate how the documentation and investigation of African oral genres is still largely based on materials provided in written form, although nowadays it is largely accepted that collecting and analysing printed transcriptions and translations only gives a faint portrait of oral poems and tales and their literary and social functions.

16 This chapter offers an insight into the difficulties of selecting video documentation on Ewe migration stories that is suitable to be presented to a broad audience of academics, students, a public interested in African oral genres, and those involved with cultural issues or invested in specific linguistic traditions. Merolla, Ameka and Dorvlo also enter into a larger debate that is active in all disciplines in which fieldwork is a central activity: the relationship between researchers and the researched, and the locus of responsibility for what is produced and published. The authors conclude by reflecting on the yet harder questions of ownership that arise when scholars make use of audio-visual media and when the final video document is available on the Internet. They offer elegant solutions by considering individual as well as collective indigenous peoples’ rights, and advocate for stronger collaborations between researchers, performers and audience. The authors conclude by demonstrating how their own research strategies have resulted in culturally significant video documents that offer a contemporary snapshot of local knowledge.

17 Margaret Field’s account focuses on the importance of American Indian oral literature for cultural identity and language revitalisation, demonstrated through the analysis of a trickster tale. Taking the position that oral literature such as narrative and song often serve as important cultural resources that retain and reinforce cultural values and group identity, Field demonstrates how American Indian trickster tales — like Aesop’s fables found in Europe — contain moral content, and are typically aimed at child audiences. In this chapter, Field discusses an example of this genre with specific reference to the Kumeyaay community of Baja California, Mexico. She also describes how such stories are an important form of cultural property that index group identity: once through the code that is used, and then again through the content of the narrative itself. Field demonstrates how oral traditions such as trickster tales form an important body of knowledge that not only preserves cultural values and philosophical orientations, but also continues to instill these values in listeners.

18 Considering the uses of her own fieldwork, Field explains that American Indian communities typically view their oral traditions as communal intellectual property. It is therefore incumbent upon researchers who work with traditional texts in oral communities to collaborate to ensure that collected texts are treated in a manner that is appropriate from the perspective of the communities of origin. Field reminds us that it is essential for researchers to bear in mind the relationship between the recording, publication, and archiving of oral literature, community preferences regarding these aspects of research, and considerations relating to language revitalisation. Her message is particularly relevant today in light of the wide availability of multimedia and the ever-expanding capabilities for the archiving of oral literature. Through technological advancements, such recordings may be more available than ever in a range of formats (audio and video in addition to print), and ever more important (and political), as indigenous languages become increasingly endangered. Field concludes by demonstrating how her research materials were repatriated to the Kumayaay community in the form of educational resources and as reminders of cultural identity.

19 Jorge Gómez Rendón continues the discussion on revitalisation practices in the cultural heritage sector through his account of orality and literacy among indigenous cultures in Ecuador, paying close attention to contextual political factors and challenges. While Ecuador is the smallest of the Andean nations, it is linguistically highly diverse. Rendón explains that education programmes have not yet produced written forms of indigenous languages in Ecuador, which are now critically endangered. However, a resurgence of ethnic pride combined with increasing interest shown by governmental agencies in the safeguarding of cultural diversity are bringing native languages and oral practices to the foreground. This greater visibility is opening up new ways for linguistic identities to be politically managed.

20 After a review of the relative vitality of Ecuadorian indigenous languages and an evaluation of twenty years of intercultural bilingual education, Rendón focuses on two alternative approaches to orality in the fields of bilingual education and intangible cultural heritage. In discussing these two approaches, he addresses several ethical and legal issues concerning property rights, the dissemination of documentation outcomes, and the appropriation of intangible cultural heritage for the improvement of indigenous education. He provides a preliminary exploration into best practices in the archiving and management of digital materials for educational and cultural purposes in community contexts, through which Rendón proposes a “new model of intercultural bilingual education” and “safeguarding of intangible heritage […] respecting [performers’] property rights from a collective rather than individual perspective” (page 79, this volume) with the aim of ensuring the survival of endangered languages and cultures.

21 Madan Meena’s field report is based on his archiving experiences as a grantee of the World Oral Literature Project’s fieldwork grants scheme. His focal recording was made in Thikarda village in south-eastern Rajasthan — a region locally known as Hadoti — and was performed in the Hadoti language in a distinct singing style. Geographically, the area is very large (24,923 square kilometers), and there are many variations in the style of performance. Meena offers an account of his experience recording the twenty-hour Hadoti ballad of Tejaji, describing the challenges he faced in capturing the entire ballad in a manner that was as authentic as possible. Meena reports how, in the past, the ballad could only be performed at a shrine in response to a snake bite. Increasingly, however, as the belief systems behind the ballad are being challenged by education and Western medical techniques of treating snake bites, the ballad is becoming divorced from its religious roots and evolving into a distinct musical tradition of its own that can be performed at festivals for entertainment value. Meena describes the use of the project’s resultant digital recordings by community members to popularise their traditional performances, using MP3 players and mobile phone handsets to listen to recordings. He reflects on the invaluable nature of digital technology in preserving oral cultures, alongside the threats posed by these same technological developments to more traditional performance of oral traditions.

22 In the final field report of this volume, Ha Mingzong, Ha Mingzhu and Charles K. Stuart describe their research on the Mongghul (Monguor, Tu) Ha Clan oral history tradition in Qinghai and Gansu provinces, China. The authors provide historical details on the Mongghul ethnic group, and justify the urgency of their fieldwork to record and preserve the cultural heritage and historical knowledge of Mongghul elders. As well as knowing a rich repertoire of songs, folktales and cultural expressions, these elders are the “last group able to repeat generationally transmitted knowledge about clan origins, migration routes, settlement areas, important local figures, […] clan genealogy, […], modes of livelihood, [and] relationships local people had with government” (page 94, this volume). Recognition is given to the importance of documenting such knowledge for the future benefit of younger generations.

23 Mingzong, Mingzhu and Stuart describe their method of recording interviews about family stories told by community members. Local reactions to their recording methods are explained, with the assurance that the fieldworkers were met with hospitality and a shared sense of the importance of the documentation from older community members, despite an initially indifferent attitude from younger members of the community. The authors provide examples of their transcriptions of interviews and demonstrate how the return of digital versions of the recordings to the community has strengthened the sense of clan unity and belonging.

Openness, access and connectivity

24 As editors of this volume, we are delighted to bring together these important contributions that reflect on the ethical practices of anthropological and linguistic fieldwork, digital archiving, and the repatriation of cultural materials. We believe that the widest possible dissemination of such work will help support the propagation of best practices to all who work in these fields. The open access publishing model practiced by our partners in this series, the Cambridge-based Open Book Publishers, is designed to ensure that these chapters are widely and freely accessible for years to come, on a range of different publishing platforms.

25 Open Book Publishers are experimental and innovative, changing the nature of the traditional academic book: publishing in hardback, paperback, PDF and e-book editions, but also offering a free online edition that can be read via their website. 5 Their commitment to open access dovetails with our Project’s mandate to widen the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and access to cultural traditions. Connecting with a broader audience — one that was historically disenfranchised by the exclusivity of print and the restrictive distribution networks that favoured Western readers — allows the protection of cultural knowledge. This is achieved through a better understanding of human diversity, and the return of digitised collections to source communities and countries of origin. The chapters in this volume help us to understand each stage of this journey, from building cooperative relationships with community representatives in the field, designing and using digital tools for cultural documentation, through to the ethical and practical considerations involved in building access models for digital archives.

26 When Edward Morgan Forster ended his 1910 novel Howards End with the powerful epigraph “Only connect...” he could not have imagined how this exhortation would resonate with generations to come and how its meaning would change. 6 For our purposes, both in this edited collection and in our work more generally in the World Oral Literature Project, “only connect” has a powerful, double meaning. First, and perhaps overwhelmingly for young audiences and readers, it implies that one is on the path to being digitally hooked up, wired (although in an increasingly wireless world, even the term “wired” is antiquated), and ready to participate in a virtual, online conversation. Since most of our transactions and communications in the Project are digital — through email, websites, voice-over Internet Protocol, and file share applications — “only connect” reflects our fast changing world and new work practices. Second, and perhaps more profoundly, “only connect” is what we hope to achieve when we share recordings of oral literature in print, on air and online. Connectivity is all: our project would not exist without the technical underpinnings and the philosophical imperative to see information and knowledge shared. We hope that you enjoy reading this volume as much as we have enjoyed editing it and that you will, quite simply, connect.

27 Cambridge, November 2012

Notes de bas de page

1 See http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ [Accessed 19 November 2012].

2 See http://www.oralliterature.org/collections [Accessed 19 November 2012].

3 See the Digital Return research network for more discussion on these issues: http://digitalreturn.wsu.edu [Accessed 19 November 2012].

4 See < http://www.oralliterature.org/research/workshops.html [Accessed 19 November 2012].

5 See http://www.openbookpublishers.com/ [Accessed 22 April 2013].

6 Published in London by Edward Arnold.

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0 . Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Oral Literature in Africa

Ruth Finnegan

Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities

Mark Turin, Claire Wheeler et Eleanor Wilkinson (dir.)

Storytelling in Northern Zambia

Theory, Method, Practice and Other Necessary Fictions

Robert Cancel

How to Read a Folktale

The Ibonia Epic from Madagascar

Lee Haring (éd.)

Stories from Quechan Oral Literature

A. M Halpern et Amy Miller

Searching for Sharing

Heritage and Multimedia in Africa

Daniela Merolla et Mark Turin (dir.)

Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet

Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English

Gerald Roche et Li Dechun (dir.) Li Dechun (trad.)

Tales of Darkness and Light

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What is Oral History?

Oral history is a method of conducting historical research through recorded interviews between a narrator with personal experience of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of adding to the historical record. Because it is a primary source, an oral history is not intended to present a final, verified, or "objective" narrative of events, or a comprehensive history of a place, such as the UCSC campus. It is a spoken account, reflects personal opinion offered by the narrator, and as such it is subjective. Oral histories may be used together with other primary sources as well as secondary sources to gain understanding and insight into history.

Principles and Best Practices

• Principles and Best Practices for Oral History The Oral History Association encourages individuals and institutions involved with the creation and preservation of oral histories to uphold certain principles, professional and technical standards, and obligations.
• Oral History in the Digital Age Oral History in the Digital Age is the go-to place for the latest information on digital technologies pertaining to all phases of the oral history process. This resource is a product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership project and a collaboration among the Michigan State University Digital Humanities Center, Matrix; the American Folklife Center (AFC/LOC), the Library of Congress; the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH); the American Folklore Society (AFS); the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries; and the Oral History Association.

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• Oral History Association The Oral History Association, established in 1966, seeks to bring together all persons interested in oral history as a way of collecting and interpreting human memories to foster knowledge and human dignity. With an international membership, the OHA serves a broad and diverse audience. Local historians, librarians and archivists, students, journalists, teachers, and academic scholars from many fields have found that the OHA provides both professional guidance and a collegial environment for sharing research.
• International Oral History Association A professional association established to provide a forum for oral historians around the world, and a means for cooperation among those concerned with the documentation of human experience. IOHA seeks to stimulate research that uses the techniques of oral history and to promote the development of standards and principles for individuals, institutions and agencies (both public and private) who have the responsibility for the collection and preservation of historical information gathered through the techniques of oral histories, in all forms. Through international conferences, collaborative networks, and support for national oral history organizations, IOHA seeks to foster a better understanding of the democratic nature and value of oral history worldwide.
• Oral History Listserv: H-Oralhist H-Oralhist is a network for scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history. It is affiliated with the Oral History Association.
• Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change An emerging and dynamic network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, community organizers, and documentary artists.
• Oral History Review The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public.
• Words and Silences Words and Silences is the official on-line journal of the International Oral History Association. It is an internationally peer reviewed, high quality forum for oral historians from a wide range of disciplines and a means for the professional community to share projects and current trends of oral history from around the world.

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Oral culture: literacy, religion, performance.

• Cara Anne Kinnally Cara Anne Kinnally Department of Spanish, Purdue University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.437
• Published online: 25 January 2019

While cultural critics and historians have demonstrated that print culture was an essential tool in the development of national, regional, and local communal identities in Latin América, the role of oral culture, as a topic of inquiry and a source itself, has been more fraught. Printed and hand-written texts often leave behind tangible archival evidence of their existence, but it can be more difficult to trace the role of oral culture in the development of such identities. Historically, Western society has deeply undervalued oral cultures, especially those practiced or created by non-Westerners and non-elites. Even before the arrival of the first printing presses to the Americas, starting with the very first encounters between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Americas in the late-15th and early-16th centuries, European conquerors understood and portrayed European alphabetic written script as a more legitimate, and therefore more valuable, form of history and knowledge-making than oral forms. Those cultures without alphabetic writing were deemed barbaric, according to this logic. Despite its undervaluation, oral culture was one of the principal ways in which vast numbers of Latinas/os were exposed to, engaged with, and exchanged ideas about politics, religion, social change, and local and regional community identity during the colonial period. In particular, oral culture often offers the perspective of underrepresented voices, such as those of peasants, indigenous communities, afro-Latinas/os, women, and the urban poor, in Latina/o historical, literary, and cultural studies. During the colonial period especially, many of these communities often did not produce their own European script writing or find their perspectives and experiences illuminated in the writings of the letrados , or lettered elites, and their voices thus remain largely excluded from the print archive. Studies of oral culture offer a corrective to this omission, since it was through oral cultural practices that many of these communities engaged with, contested, and redefined the public discourses of their day.

Oral culture in the colonial period comprised a broad range of rich cultural and artistic practices, including music, various types of poetry and balladry, oral history, legend, performance, religious rituals, ceremonies, festivals, and much more. These practices served as a way to remember and share ideas, values, and experiences both intraculturally and interculturally, as well as across generations. Oral culture also changes how the impact of print culture is understood, since written texts were often disseminated to the masses through oral practices. In the missions of California and the present-day US Southwest, for example, religious plays served as one of the major vehicles for the forced education and indoctrination of indigenous communities during the colonial period. To understand such a play, it is important to consider not just the printed text but also the performance of the play, as well as the ways in which the audience understands and engages with the play and its religious teachings. The study of oral culture in the Latina/o context, therefore, includes an examination of how literate, illiterate, and semi-literate Latinas/os have engaged with, resisted, or repurposed various written forms, such as poetry, letters, theater, testimonios , juridical documents, broadsides, political treatises, religious texts, and the sermon, through oral cultural practices and with various objectives in mind. Oral culture, in all of its many forms, has thus served as an important means for the circulation of knowledge and the expression of diverse world views for Latinas/os throughout the colonial period and into the 21st century.

• oral culture
• indigeneity
• colonial Latin America
• performance

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About : What is Oral Literature?

Definitions and understandings of oral literature

Oral literature is a broad term which may include ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, musical genres, folk tales, creation tales, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, word games, recitations, life histories or historical narratives. Most simply, oral literature refers to any form of verbal art which is transmitted orally or delivered by word of mouth. Orature is a more recent and less widely used term which emphasises the oral character and nature of literary works.

In African Oral Literature for Schools , Jane Nandwa and Austin Bukenya define oral literature as "those utterances, whether spoken, recited or sung, whose composition and performance exhibit to an appreciable degree the artistic character of accurate observation, vivid imagination and ingenious expression" (1983: 1).

The Canadian Encyclopedia suggests that "the term oral literature is sometimes used interchangeably with folklore , but it usually has a broader focus. The expression is self-contradictory: literature, strictly speaking, is that which is written down; but the term is used here to emphasize the imaginative creativity and conventional structures that mark oral discourse too. Oral literature shares with written literature the use of heightened language in various genres (narrative, lyric, epic, etc), but it is set apart by being actualized only in performance and by the fact that the performer can (and sometimes is obliged to) improvise so that oral text constitutes an event."

According to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia , "Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken (oral) word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do. The Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu introduced the term orature in an attempt to avoid an oxymoron, but oral literature remains more common both in academic and popular writing."

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• The Milman Parry Collection, 1933–35
• The Lord Albanian Collection, 1937
• The Lord Collection, 1950–51
• The James A. Notopoulos Collection of Modern Greek Ballads and Songs
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Four Generations of Oral Literary Studies at Harvard University

Child’s legacy enlarged: oral literary studies at harvard since 1856, david e. bynum.

Poetry and storytelling began so long ago in prehistoric time that no one can scientifically even guess how or when they originated. But one thing is certain. Our biological ancestors did not cease to be a mere species of animal and become  mankind  until the capacity for rhythmic language and narration had evolved in them. In myth the world over, these mental powers are said to be god-given and divine. They are at the very least indispensable to any practical definition of humanity.

For many millenia the only instrument of rhythmic words and narrative known in any part of the world was the tongue men were born with, not the stylus or the pen, for writing was not invented until too late in human evolution for it to reveal anything about the origin of speech. So for long ages the only way  any  knowledge could survive from one generation to another was through  oral tradition . Rhythmical speech was the world’s first great medium of communication for complex ideas, and there were certainly media men of astonishing skill long before anyone on earth knew how to write.

In North America the scientific study of oral traditions began at Harvard College just a little more than a century ago. For 116 years, Harvard College has been collecting oral traditions and disseminating knowledge about them to anyone who could use that knowledge to good purpose. Three men of the Harvard faculty launched this brilliant movement in American intellectual life. They were Francis James Child, George Lyman Kittredge, and Milman Parry. The following pages are about those three men, their ideas, and their continuing impact on the life of our own time.

More than any literate men before them, Professors Child, Kittredge, and Parry saw the protean shapes of pre-literate speech at work in the earliest creations of thought and literature. Where others saw only the figures of written or printed words on paper, they had a vision of voices out of the past sounding those words in the ancient rhythms of oral tradition.

What Oral Literature Is

One of the most important developments in this century in both the popular and academic understanding of culture has been the wide growth of awareness that only a tiny percentage of man’s total creative achievement has depended on literacy. Writing is at most a comparatively recent invention, and while it is useful for keeping records of all sorts, it is a cumbersome and inefficient means of cultural communication, even with the help of printing.

Despite their mechanical awkwardness and inefficiency, writing and printing are undeniably two great tools of civilization. But they are not basic assets of human nature. The more fundamental and most distinctive cultural property of men everywhere remains their innate power of speech. Spoken words are the ultimate source of graphic communication, and any decay or diminution of the arts of speech immediately erodes the value of graphic culture. We live in an age when, moreover, other potentially civilizing inventions based on electrical recording and electrical dissemination of speech have only begun to be used and appreciated.

A large part of current speech in any language is ephemeral, and is employed for merely transient purposes. But a certain proportion of spoken communication is enduring, whether or not any record is made of it in writing or otherwise. It expresses ideas of such proven, lasting utility that special,  poetic  modes of speech exist in every language to assure the remembrance and continuation of those vital ideas in  oral traditions .  Oral literature  is the material recorded from oral traditions in every age and in every language.

The Harvard Tradition

Harvard University is today internationally known and respected as a center for the collection and study of oral literature.

The University’s prominence in this field arises partly from the devoted work of its numerous present members who are engaged in oral literary studies, and partly from an older tradition of scholarship on oral literature that goes back more than a hundred years in the history of Harvard College. Much of the best work now being done, whether at Harvard or elsewhere, is only a fulfillment and deepening of the research on oral literature that began at Harvard about the year 1856.

The entire faculty of Harvard College in 1856 numbered only fourteen men, including the President of the University, who was then James Walker. Yet within that small company of scholars there were men whose energy and ideas are still felt among the best influences on higher education in America. Benjamin Peirce, to whom the teaching of natural science at Harvard owed so much, was a member of the faculty at that time. So too was Charles William Eliot, the man who would in later years guide Harvard’s development as it grew to be one of the world’s great institutions of learning. But in 1856 Eliot was still only a Tutor in Mathematics who had himself graduated from Harvard College just three years earlier. Another, older member of the faculty of fourteen was Eliot’s forerunner as Tutor in Mathematics, Francis James Child (Harvard 1846). Professor Child had given up teaching numbers to become in 1851 the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and it was while he occupied this chair that he began the study of oral literature at Harvard.

A faculty of fourteen men in a college with an enrollment of 382 undergraduates was not so large that any member of the faculty could give himself exclusively to his own intellectual pursuits. Still, it was large enough for this one man, Francis Child, to begin a forty-year career dedicated to study and publication of the so-called “popular” ballads of Britain.

Francis James Child

Professor Child, the former mathematician, came to his consummate interest in what he variously called “popular,” “primitive,” or “traditional” balladry not by accident but by force of logic. His valedictory address in 1846 to his own graduating class at Harvard College shows how absorbed and how extraordinarily skilled in the arts of expression he was even then. He was a right choice to be Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in later years. Child well understood how indispensable good writing and good speaking are to civilization, or as many would now prefer to say, to society. For him, writing and speaking were not only the practical means by which men share useful information, but also the means whereby they formulate and share values, including the higher order of values that give meaning to life and purpose to human activities of all sorts. Concerned as he thus so greatly was with rhetoric, oratory, and the motives of those mental disciplines, Child was inevitably drawn into pondering the essential differences between speech and writing, and to searching for the origins of thoughtful expression in English.

The obvious sources of well expressed thought in English were of course the classics of English literature. Then as now, an important service which a man like Professor Child could render to the general public was to select and edit for publication works of literature that would encourage his own generation to good thinking, good expression, and good understanding of lasting human values. So Child became the general editor of “The British Poets,” a series of more than a hundred printings and reprintings of classic English poetry issued for the general public by Little, Brown, and Company. His first personal contribution to that series was an edition of the poetry of Edmund Spenser in five small volumes.

But important as such literary poetry was for Professor Child’s aims, he knew that it was only the aftermath of an earlier and more original kind of poetic expression in English. By 1856, he was already at work on his second contribution to “The British Poets,” an edition of more than 300  English and Scottish Ballads , published in eight volumes during the years 1856-1859. Some of the fine poetic narratives which Child put into these volumes were as much the products of writing and of print as the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. But the real meat of the edition, the pieces which Child himself believed were best, belonged to another kind of poetry the poetry of a British oral tradition that had in the course of previous centuries “found its way into writing and into print,” but which was not in fact the product of either writing or printing. Child said about this oral traditional literature that it is

a distinct and very important species of poetry. Its historical and natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art, to which it has formed a step, and by which it has been regularly displaced, and, in some cases, all but extinguished. Whenever a people in the course of its development reaches a certain intellectual and moral stage, it will feel an impulse to express itself, and the form of expression to which it is first impelled is, as is well known, not prose, but verse, and in fact narrative verse. Such poetry . . . is in its essence an expression of our common human nature, and so of universal and indestructible interest. (Walter Morris Hart, “Professor Child and the Ballad,”  PMLA , XXI (1906), 756)

Thus Child discovered in British ballads an original, pre-literary form of intellectual and moral expression. But although Child knew that the “popular” ballads of Britain belonged in principle to an immemorial oral tradition and not at all to written literature, they had nevertheless been the objects of literary tampering and imitation by so many generations of literary collectors, editors, and scribblers that it was hard work indeed to find any pure examples of oral composition, much less to reconstruct the history of oral tradition in Britain. Still, if it were ever going to be possible to understand the sources and content of our primary “literary” legacy the oral literature in our own language then pure examples of it had to be searched out, and a thorough survey of the surviving material had to be made and published, at whatever expense. It was so when Child began his work on British oral traditions in 1856, and it has remained so for scholars of oral literature in every other part of the world ever since.

From 1859 onward, Professor Child did all that he could do in a long lifetime to satisfy these two urgent needs of humanistic science: to secure the best existing evidence of the earlier British oral tradition, and to publish as complete an analytical survey of that evidence as he could compile. George Lyman Kittredge, Child’s successor at Harvard in the same work, has described Child’s great enterprise:

The book [ English and Scottish Ballads ] circulated widely, and was at once admitted to supersede all previous attempts in the same field. To Mr. Child, however, it was but the starting-point for further researches. He soon formed the plan of a much more extensive collection on an altogether different model. This was to include every obtainable version of every extant English or Scottish ballad, with the fullest possible discussion of related songs or stories in the “popular” literature of all nations. To this enterprise be resolved, if need were, to devote the rest of his life. His first care was to secure trustworthy texts. In his earlier collection he had been forced to depend almost entirely on printed books. No progress, he was convinced, could be made till recourse could be had to manuscripts. . . . It was clear to Mr. Child that he could not safely take anything at second hand, and he determined not to print a line of his projected work till he had exhausted every effort to get hold of whatever manuscript material might be in existence. . . . A number of manuscripts were in private hands; of others the existence was not suspected. But Mr. Child was untiring. He was cordially assisted by various scholars, antiquaries, and private gentlemen. . . Plate I. A typical page from the Buchan manuscript, one of professor Child’s main sources of texts, now in the Houghton Library. See full-size image of Plate I . Some manuscripts were secured for the Library of Harvard University, and of others careful copies were made, which became the property of the same library. Gradually . . . the manuscript materials came in, until at last, in 1882, Mr. Child felt justified in beginning to print. Other important documents were, however, discovered or made accessible as time went on. In addition, Mr. Child made an effort to stimulate the collection of such remains of the traditional ballad as still live on the lips of the people in this country and in the British Islands. (G. L. Kittredge, “Francis James Child,” in F. J. Child,  The English and Scotttish Popular Ballads , V, Part X (Boston, 1898), xxvii-xxviii.)

It thus took Professor Child together with his backers and collaborators no less than twenty-two years to locate and gather a bare minimum of the textual evidence of British ballad tradition, and even then the toil of securing the necessary documentation was not over. Such an expense of human and financial resources would seem prodigal if one did not remember that, unlike written literature, oral traditions do not come neatly packaged and ready-to-hand in printed books or other prepared forms. Yet nothing can be known for certain about oral tradition in any language until hundreds of texts have been recorded, collected, and carefully compared. The task of oral literary researchers in this respect has not diminished since Child’s time.

By 1882, Child had been deeply engaged in the study of British oral literature for more than a quarter-century. Even some of his admirers reproached him for being too uncreative in so long a time. But he was the first pioneer of his subject and, while others carped, he wrought the foundations upon which all the principal departments of activity essential to oral literary studies still rest. He did a little collecting of his own, writing down the words and tunes of a few oral ballad performances from living singers, but he was in addition an unequalled collector of other, earlier collectors’ manuscripts. The time, ingenuity, and critical acumen which scholars in simpler fields might expend freely on direct “creativity” Child gave gladly to the inconspicuous but indispensable business of  collecting . Then, when the collecting was thoroughly done, there came the demanding process of  comparative analysis  to establish what relationships various texts had to one another in oral tradition. For as one of Child’s own best students later wrote:

“It is well known that ballad-texts are kittle-cattle to shoe; it is easy to print all the versions, but when selection is attempted, a hundred questions rise.”  Publication  was of course the motive for so much painstaking preliminary work. But when at last in 1882 Child began to publish, what he printed was a monument that both excelled and outlasted the published work of all his contemporaries.

Plate II. Francis James Child. This photograph, apparently taken by Charles Eliot Norton, was found among Kittredge’s papers in the Houghton Library; it shows Child, who was famous for his rose-gardening, in the yard of his home on Kirkland Street.

See full-size image of Plate II .

It is a curious and – in retrospect – an absurd fact that for nearly a hundred years none of Harvard’s great scholars of oral literature ever taught in the curriculum what they spent decades of their mature lives studying in private the texts and facts of oral traditions. Child did not pioneer in the development of formal  instruction  on oral literature. But he was nevertheless the founder of  public education  in this field. Throughout the more than forty years of his publishing career from 1856 to 1898, his editions of ballads were never mere textbooks. He meant his editions to be, and they were, of lasting utility to an educated, reading public at large. His extracurricular lectures both in and away from Cambridge were another influential contribution toward the improvement of common knowledge outside of universities.

All of Professor Child’s accomplishments in founding oral literary studies have endured the passage of time, but none has so increased in value since his era as the Folklore Collection which he created in the Harvard College Library. Decades before men like Archibald Cary Coolidge made fashionable the donation and procurement of large lots of books on specialized subjects for the College Library, Child had already formed the nucleus of the polyglot Folklore Collection. With the help of such supporters as Charles Minot, that collection had grown to more than 7,000 volumes by the end of Child’s career, and many of the books which he gathered in the nineteenth century are today the Collection’s most precious properties.

Professor Child’s interest in developing a  library of printed book resources  was the direct outgrowth of his conviction that the study of oral literature could not be departmentalized by languages or nationalities. British balladry was the focus of his lifelong research on oral traditions, but it was a focus that gathered light from hundreds of sources outside Britain. When at last his collection of British manuscripts had proceeded far enough to give him some confidence in his own understanding of that tradition, he wrote: “There remains the very curious question of the origin of the resemblances which are found in the ballads of different nations, the recurrence of the same incidents or even the same story, among races distinct in blood and history and geographically far separated.” (Hart, op. cit., 758.) For that reason, as G. L. Kittredge later reported, “. . . concurrently with the toil of amassing, collating, and arranging texts, went on the far more arduous labor of comparative study of the ballads of all nations; for, in accordance with Mr. Child’s plan it was requisite to determine, in the fullest manner, the history and foreign relations of every piece included in his collection.” (Kittredge, op. cit., xxviii.) So from his initial studies in British balladry Child found himself obliged by that tradition itself to enlarge the scope of his research and to examine the wider European oral tradition of which the ballads of England and Scotland were only a part. In the end, there was scarcely any language of Europe which Child had not managed in some way to consult for various details of its oral literature. In this too his experience a hundred years ago was typical for scholars of oral literature ever since, whose subject simply cannot be defined by ethnic or linguistic frontiers. The Folklore Collection in the Harvard College Library is today four times the size it was when Child died in 1896, but its polyglot heterogeneity is still its greatest virtue in service to comparative research on oral traditions.

Francis James Child was still working on the tenth and final volume of his definitive edition of  The English and Scottish Popular Ballads  when his death occurred in the autumn of 1896. It was his fiftieth year of continuous service to Harvard College, and the fortieth year of his continuous service to oral literary scholarship as editor, accumulator, and comparativist of British and European balladry

The Kittredge Era

The passage of Child caused no interruption of the work which he had begun. Even before the death of his teacher, George Lyman Kittredge (Harvard 1882), Child’s former student, was already pressing on with the same activities of collecting, publishing, public education, and library improvement.

Kittredge began his long career at Harvard as an Instructor in 1888, and by 1894 he had succeeded to the professorship in English which Child had occupied since its inception in 1876. It was Kittredge who completed the last volume of Child’s great ballad compendium and saw it through to publication.

But that was only the beginning. Child had left behind a wealth of manuscripts, copies, and other material pertaining to his studies in ballad, much of it in the working disarray that is inevitable in the papers of an active scholar. Kittredge spent hundreds of hours organizing this material for the Harvard College Library, and the order which he imposed upon it may still be seen in the thirty-three folio volumes of Child’s papers kept in the Houghton Library.

Plate III. George Lyman Kittredge in 1882.

See full-size image of Plate III.

Like his teacher, Kittredge was an untiring accumulator of data. The Harvard University Archives hold no less than sixty-four volumes of his notes and collectanea, and more than half of these pertain to oral literature and folklore. As would be expected, ballad and other sung verse have the place of honor in these volumes, accounting for twenty of the sixty-four. Under “Kitty’s” constant tending, the Folklore Collection in the Library also grew to more than 20,000 volumes, or thrice the size it had been when he inherited the responsibility for it from Child.

But Kittredge was not content just to continue Child’s various enterprises; his interest in oral traditions was even broader than Child’s had been. The focus of Child’s work was balladry, and Kittredge gathered new material and published on that subject amply. But other genres of oral tradition occupied more of Kittredge’s mind, including such diverse subjects as proverbs, folktales, and the history of witchcraft beliefs. Besides the eight volumes of material he gathered into his notes and scrapbooks relevant to witchcraft beliefs and trials, he published three important monographs on that subject between 1907 and 1917.

Kittredge ranged beyond the scope of Child’s activity in other ways too. More than Child, he was interested in the continuation of British and European oral literature and folklore in America. And he paid particular attention throughout his career to works of ancient and medieval literature which had the stamp of close association with oral tradition. His published works in this department ranged from his edition of Ovid’s  Metamorphoses  to his several writings on Arthurian legends. He kept abreast of the work of other prominent folkiorists of his time such as Andrew Lang, and he was for a time President of The American Folklore Society. Kittredge is perhaps most often remembered for his work in English, but his awareness and his writings on oral literature and folklore extended well beyond the English-speaking peoples to include such diverse materials as Old Norse, Finnish, Russian, and even Japanese folklore.

Those who knew him agree that Kittredge had an unusual capacity for work, and he worked hard on oral literature. But he exerted his most lasting influence on future oral literary studies through his recruitment of disciples for this field and his  encouragement of graduate learning . It is ironic that his greatest success should be measured in the later work of his students when one recalls how many of them remember him for the distinctive acerbity of his public dealings with them. But his sometimes brusque manner was rarely mistaken for malice, and “Kitty” was an able patron when he chose to be. Few American scholars have promoted humanistic learning so decisively in so many fields as he did through his students and protégés.

The recruitment of disciples and sponsoring of graduate work on oral literature was another of the activities inherited from Child. Kittredge himself was a product of it, for the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Child had personally chosen “Kitty” to continue his work, and despite their very different manners, the two men were close friends. Kittredge’s staunchest ally in ballad studies after Child’s death was another of Child’s disciples, Francis Barton Gummere (Harvard 1875), who was for a few years Instructor in English at Harvard before he went permanently to be Professor of English at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. A lifelong scholar of oral literature and patron in turn of other, younger men in the same field, Gummere did not cease to contribute to the welfare of these studies at Harvard when he removed to Pennsylvania. In time he sent his son, Richard Mott Gummere, to study the Classics at Harvard, and Richard Gummere stayed to become the Dean of Admissions at Harvard College, an office which he held for 18 years. It was he who during his long tenure “nationalized” the admissions program of the College, bringing the ablest young men he could find from all parts of the country to study for Harvard’s A.B. degree. More than one young scholar of oral literature in the present generation owes his place in this field, however indirectly, to Richard Gummere’s thorough reform of admissions policy.

Others of Child’s protégeés advanced the cause of oral literary studies in major American institutions besides Harvard. Perhaps the most prominent. of these was a very early disciple indeed, Jeremiah Curtin of the Class of 1863. Curtin was a polymathic personality, and he arguably did more in his time for the “public relations” of oral literary learning than any man before or after him. As collector, translator, and publicist, he was able to gain the interest and even the financial support of such prominent individuals as Charles H. Dana, the famous publisher of the New York  Sun , and of such prominent public institutions as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Curtin was no great interpreter of oral traditions, and his scholarship was no match for his practical enthusiasm. But he travelled indefatigably throughout his entire lifetime of 71 years, motivated mainly by his interest in oral literature. Besides the usual facility in ancient and foreign languages of educated men in his time, he spoke Irish Gaelic and Russian, and knew a good deal of American Indian languages. His principal works of translation and commentary on oral traditions were from American Indians, from Russian and Siberian peoples of the Russian Empire, and from Ireland. He knew all of these peoples at first hand. In Ireland, where with American backing he collected Gaelic oral traditions, Curtin’s advanced collecting procedures set a new standard for fieldwork that was ultimately incorporated into the working methodology of the Irish Folklore Commission, the institution which has the largest single national archive of oral literature in the world today.

During the few years in the early 1890s when Child and Kittredge were together on the faculty of Harvard’s English Department, several young scholars of oral traditions enjoyed the sponsorship of both men. The most eminent of these was Fred Norris Robinson of the Class of 1891. He took his Master’s and Doctor’s degrees at Harvard in quick succession (1892 and 1894), then Child and Kittredge sent him to Freiburg in Germany to learn the principles of Celtic philology in what was the world’s foremost school of Celtic languages in that era. Child and Kittredge both regretted knowing no Celtic, and they were determined that the time had come when the Celtic component of British and other European oral traditions must be scientifically understood. The enthusiastic but inexact work in Celtic of such earlier lights as Curtin could no longer satisfy Harvard’s two doyens of oral literature, and so they delegated Robinson to bring Celtic studies to Cambridge. Robinson’s return to Harvard in the fall of 1896 with an appointment as instructor coincided with the death of Child, but Child like Kittredge would have been delighted with Robinson’s success. From that time until his retirement in 1939 Robinson remained at Harvard, training one generation after another in Celtic. Almost singlehandedly he established Celtic studies as a permanent department of humanistic learning in America.

The study of oral literature had begun at Harvard as the personal preoccupation of one man, and as such it was one of the oldest foci of intellectual effort in the modern University. But after 1890 it became also a major generator of new technical disciplines not only for Harvard but also for higher learning in the nation as a whole. As the drive to learn more about the contents and origins of oral literature gained momentum over the decades, it set in motion many new subsidiary developments and careers like that of Robinson in Celtic. Kittredge loomed as the presiding genius of this new phase.

Child’s followers had for the most part enlisted in his cause one by one, and their careers were mainly independent of each other. But in the years from 1900 to the beginning of the Great Depression, a veritable constellation of diverse personalities and talents formed around Kittredge. Through the force of his persuasion and example, “Kitty” attracted and shaped the first coherent  cadre  of oral literary scholars in America. His students and followers began to specialize in particular  genres  of oral literature, and a vigorous commerce of knowledge and ideas arose among them. Gradually the members of Kittredge’s pleiad dispersed to other centers of learning and education throughout the United States, but the friendships and intellectual alliances formed under his aegis in Cambridge persisted.

Walter Morris Hart was one of Kittredge’s early disciples who became a considerable figure in the West as Professor of English at the University of California. Hart’s specialty was the still-debated relationship between ballads and epic poetry, and in his search for solutions to that problem he developed and taught a method in the philology of medieval English which helped many generations of students to read the epic and romance literature of England. Another of Kittredge’s students who went west was Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, a second-generation Norwegian-American from the Mid-West who worked under Kittredge during the years 1912-1915. He went afterwards as Professor of English to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught until 1949. His book  Ballad Books and Ballad Men  is still a landmark.

Another senior member of the Kittredge constellation was Archer Taylor, who specialized in Germanic traditions and studied closely some of the basic forms of wisdom literature, such as the poetry of proverbs. Taylor followed Hart to the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained active into the closing years of the 19605. Taylor and Stith Thompson of Indiana University are generally regarded as the founders of modern folklore scholarship in America. They met at Harvard in 1912, later travelled together overseas, and thus struck up a friendship that has continued ever since – they vying amicably with each other throughout their lives as to which of them would live longest and do most for folklore studies. At this writing, both are still living and their contest is undecided. (Between the writing and publication of this paper, Archer Taylor died, 30 September 1973.)

Some of Kittredge’s disciples, like Taylor and Thompson, have been great codifiers of oral literature, whose major energies have gone toward establishing typologies and classifications for the various kinds of texts derived from oral traditions. They have also tried to determine how the contents of oral tradition have spread or diffused from place to place and people to people in the course of history.

Others of the Kittredge constellation, such as Newman Ivey White of North Carolina, became great editors of oral literature, continuing the Child tradition of publishing definitive compendiums to make the various forms of oral tradition besides ballad available in print.

The field of musicology is especially indebted to the Kittredge constellation for a whole series of outstanding specialists in folk music -the musical component of many forms of oral literature. After William Weld Newell, who began work in Child’s era, came Phillips Barry, Helen Hartness Flanders, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, Bertrand Harris Bronson, and Samuel Bayard, to name but a few exceptionally prominent musicologists of oral tradition from the Age of Kittredge. But to name only a few is misleading. D. K. Wilgus, Sigurd Hustvedt’s continuator at the University of California in Los Angeles, has best described how the example of Child and the active encouragement of Kittredge created a national movement of folksong collecting and research:

The most important single fact of American collection has been its close relationship to educational institutions. The institutions themselves have not always officially approved and supported folksong collection; but academic folklore interest encouraged teachers to take advantage of the American emphasis on universal education, which brought into the classroom informants and contacts with traditional culture. In the early years of the century the work of Professors Child and Kittredge had made Harvard University an unofficial center of folksong study. . . . The direct and indirect influence of Harvard University produced results which, when archives and theses are eventually surveyed, will be truly staggering. (D. K. Wilgus,  Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898  (New Brunswick, 1959), pp.173-174.)

Not all of Kittredge’s disciples in folksong research were professional scholars and academics. John Avery Lomax and his son Alan James represent another kind of following that added a distinctive lustre of its own to the Kittredge constellation. John Lomax was a Mississippian who got his A.M. degree under Kittredge in 1907. As a boy John had lived on the Chisholm trail in Texas, and after finishing his preparatory work on ballad for his degree at Harvard, he was eager to collect the oral traditional singing of the cattlemen in the country where he had been raised. Kittredge got him three summer fellowships from Harvard for that purpose, and Lomax used them to discover and record on his portable phonograph innumerable pieces of American song tradition including such now-famous songs as “Home on the Range,” “Git Along, Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and “The Boll Weevil.” John Lomax’s vocation for folksong remained the dominant purpose in his life from then on. He continued to collect until his death in 1948 at the age of 8o, and eventually extended his range to include all parts of the United States where oral traditions of song could be found. His son Alan, who came to Harvard College in 1931, inherited his father’s same engrossment with the collection and popularization of folksong, with the difference that whereas John Lomax confined his activity to North America, Alan has undertaken to popularize folksong from all corners of the world for Anglo-American audiences.

Professor Kittredge launched one productive career after another by securing a little fellowship money for the right student at the right moment. His aim was ever to improve oral literary studies in some facet where he sensed a deficiency, but the accomplishments that rewarded his patronage usually far outran the limited goals which he set for his prote’ge’s. A case in point was Ernest J. Simmons, ’25. As earlier he had regretted knowing no Celtic, so too Kittredge regretted that he knew no Russian, because Russian oral narrative had come to interest him greatly in his later years. He promised Ernest Simmons that if Ernest would learn Russian, he would find a way to send him to Russia, and in 1928 he kept that promise. The experience of a year in Russia was decisive for Simmons, who thereafter turned entirely to Slavic studies. In the years after 1945, Simmons was the guiding force in the rapid growth of Russian and Soviet studies at Columbia University, which was the hotbed from which the scions of this new field were transplanted to Harvard and subsequently to other academic centers throughout the United States. Perhaps too often, Kittredge’s prote’ge’s were, like Simmons, carried so far afield by the impetus which “Kitty” imparted to them that the originally intended service to oral literary studies never materialized. Russian oral narrative, which is among the most richly attested in all of Europe and Asia, remains today a virgin field for comparative study in the Harvard tradition.

In an age rife with literary ethnocentricity, Kittredge was as readily and as genuinely interested in Russian ballads or American Indian folktales as in the plays of Shakespeare. There was, moreover, within the broad circle of his influence no great chasm between literary populists and élitists such as afflicts contemporary literary scholarship. Kittredge’s intellectual hospitality toward “foreign” traditions and his equanimity toward “vulgar” ones appear in retrospect as perhaps the most important sources of his influence.

Not all the students who responded to Kittredge’s philoxenia were catapulted as suddenly into foreign studies as were F. N. Robinson and Ernest Simmons. Some reacted to it more gradually, while others who withstood its effects in their own careers nevertheless fostered it in those who in turn came under their tutelage.

Two of Kittredge’s disciples who stayed at Harvard continued his tradition of oral literary studies in English after his retirement in 1936.

One of these was Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (Harvard 1916). A specialist in Anglo-Saxon and Old English literature, Professor Magoun was later to be the first influential figure in his field who recognized the applicability of Parry’s Oral Theory to such works of Anglo-Saxon poetry as  Beowulf . His understanding of oral literature was thus a unique fusion of the early Kittred ge and later Parry legacies. Together with Alexander Krappe, he was the first scholarly English translator of the Grimm Brothers’ German folktales. While looking among Britain’s neighbors in Europe for possible modern analogues to old English epic poetry, Magoun also became interested in the oral poetry of Finland which the Finn Elias Lönnrot had collected and published in the nineteenth century under the title  The Kalevala .

So in middle age Magoun set about learning Finnish, for he retained throughout his life the same willingness that Kittredge had to work in whatever materials would best serve the enlargement of knowledge about oral traditions. Gradually books in Finnish began to displace the volumes on medieval English in the library at Magoun’s home on Reservoir Street. His studies and translations of  The Kalevala  won him singular recognition not only in the English-speaking world but also in Finland itself. Long after his retirement in 1961, Magoun was still publishing new work in the field of Finnish oral literature.

Plate IV. George Lyman Kitteredge in 1926, portrait by Charles S. Hopkinson, reproduced by permission of Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

See full-size image of Plate IV .

A decade younger than Magoun, Bartlett Jere Whiting came to Harvard College as a freshman in 1921. First as student and then as teacher, he remained in the English Department continuously from that time until his retirement in 1975. Whiting first attracted Kittredge ‘s attention with an undergraduate paper on traditional wisdom – the lore of proverbs – in Chaucer. The same unusual fidelity which those who later knew Whiting experienced in his personal friendship, expressed itself also in his intellectual activities. He remained true to both Chaucer and the English proverb throughout his long subsequent professional career of fifty years. Shortly after graduating, Whiting became F. N. Robinson’s assistant in the English Department’s large undergraduate course on Chaucer, and when Robinson retired, Whiting became and remained head of that course until 1975.

Another form of English literature that was oral or depended heavily on oral tradition was the Middle English romances – the long metrical and prose tales in Middle English about such legendary figures as Sir Gawain, Havelok the Dane, and Bevis of Hamtoun. These were a central personal interest of Kittredge, who taught this subject in the English Department until 1928, when he relinquished it to Whiting. Here again Whiting was tenaciously faithful to his commission, continuing to teach and propagate research on the romances without interruption for the next forty-six years.

Meanwhile, in his own research, Whiting worked steadily on proverbs and traditional wisdom, painstakingly compiling piece by piece his definitive reconstruction of English oral wisdom from the period between the Norman Conquest and 1500. The book resulting from this life-long work,  Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500  (Cambridge, 1968), is a unique accomplishment in oral literary historiography.

In no other single career was Child’s and Kittredge’s legacy so directly enlarged as in that of B. J. Whiting. Several times chairman of the English Department, Whiting not only sustained Child’s, Kittredge’s, and Robinson’s tradition of English oral literary studies for half a century, but also freely used his considerable influence to help and encourage the work of innumerable other scholars in this field. More than anything else, this spirit of collaboration and mutual encouragement, so apparent in the Kittredge constellation, created the tradition of oral literary studies at Harvard.

Kittredge, his students, and his associates collaborated in every development of knowledge that might improve understanding of oral literature and popular culture. As a devoted member and sometimes President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Kittredge promoted awareness of folklore as a force in the local history of New England. In addition to languages, literature, folklore,musicology, and regional history, he and his allies took a lively interest also in the history of religions. From its beginning about 1899, Kittredge, W. W. Newell, and F. N. Robinson were faithful members of the Harvard Religions Club, a group of about a dozen Harvard faculty members who met on one evening a month during term-time to dine together and hear accounts of each other’s work on topics in religion. Subsequently renamed the History of Religions Club, this unofficial alliance of faculty members for the promotion of religious studies still functions at Harvard. Clifford Herschel Moore (Harvard 1889), another early member of the Club, later shared with his fellow classicist C. N. Jackson the initiative that brought Milman Parry to Harvard’s Department of the Classics.

By the time of his retirement in 1936, Kittredge, like Child before him, had given forty years of his energy and thought to oral tradition and its various cognates in both written literature and unwritten popular culture. From the very beginning, he had grasped the essential object of oral literary studies. As early as 1898 he wrote in connection with his own and Francis Child’s work on balladry:

Few persons understand the difficulties of ballad investigation. . . . What is needed is . . . a complete understanding of the “popular” genius, a sympathetic recognition of the traits that characterize oral literature wherever and in whatever degree they exist. (Kittredge, op. cit., xxx.)

Since “the traits that characterize oral literature” were neither confined to any one place or people nor necessarily the same from one people to another, the man who would know those traits would have to transcend conventional limits of nationality in his quest for “a complete understanding of the ‘popular’ genius.

Milman Parry

While Kittredge discerned perfectly what should be the goal of oral literary studies, he also knew that no one in his day, not even the most cosmopolitan of literary scholars, possessed any such complete understanding of oral literature as he had specified. There was no lack of the will to understand in Kittredge or in other men like him. But in spite of the tireless effort of Child to accumulate all the texts of oral poetry that he could obtain from Britain, and the heartening growth of the Harvard Library’s Folklore Collection, there was still a crippling lack of essential information. Wherever in the world writing had come into use for literary purposes and some form of belles lettres had been developed, there had been some writing down of texts from oral tradition; the amount was more or less, depending upon local factors such as the intrinsic ease or difficulty of particular writing systems, or the attitude of local religions toward oral tradition. In some parts of the world, like Britain, there had been a lot of random collecting of this kind for centuries, and it might well take a lifetime, as it had taken Child, to accumulate a substantial amount of that  sporadic  evidence of oral literature. Nevertheless, as late as 1930, there had still never been anyone who had systematically collected a  whole  oral tradition anywhere in the world – or, if there had been, his collections had not survived intact to inform literate and educated men in Europe and America.

Thus it was one thing to know, as Child and Kittredge knew from the many dismembered bits and pieces of oral poetries, that oral traditions existed in various languages, but it was something else again to know first-hand how such literature came into being in the traditional, unwritten poetic performances of oral bards. Without being able to consult the full record of an oral tradition, one could never know with even approximate certainty the origins of anything in it, or distinguish between the effects of precedent and the effects of individual invention in traditional compositions. And without the direct, personal experience of oral poetic performances, it was not possible to formulate an exact discrimination between literature created by writing on the one hand, and literature created by traditional modes of poetic speech on the other. Those accomplishments in “recognition of the traits that characterize oral literature” had to await the coming of some great collector with a methodical turn of mind who would investigate not only the fossilized texts of dead oral traditions, but also the live acts of oral traditional composition performed by living oral poets. The primary focus of oral literary studies had to be shifted from research on the static contents of oral traditions to research on the dynamic processes that gave life to a tradition. The contemplation of dead literary specimens had to give way to observation of living poetries in their natural settings.

So the vision of a general theory of oral literature which Kittredge had glimpsed in 1898 could not even begin to be realized at that time. It fell to the lot of another, younger man to be America’s first great collector of oral traditions in Europe, and to formulate the first principles of what has since become known as the Oral Theory.

That younger man was the classicist Milman Parry, and he represented the third generation in the growth of oral literary scholarship at Harvard.

Milman Parry’s early intellectual development paralleled Child’s in several fateful ways. The similarity of their minds had roots in the similar circumstances of their childhood. Child’s father, a sailmaker, and Parry’s father, a carpenter, were both independent artisans whose modest incomes afforded no material luxury or educational advantage for their children. Born to the idea of reliance on their own talent and work, both Child and Parry were practical men as well as extraordinary scholars. Both men had also a constitutional appreciation of custom and usage that revealed itself in their personalities at an early age. By the time they had finished their college studies, each had developed a keen awareness of the power of tradition in shaping not only literature but also the patterns of real experience which literature symbolized. Imbued with this strong consciousness of tradition, Child and Parry both went to great European centers of learning soon after the conclusion of their college studies to gain more knowledge about the mechanisms of literary language. The difference of eighty years between the careers of Child and Parry was not so great as the likeness of their motivation to the study of languages and literature.

Child went to Germany in 1849 his first journey to Europe to meet the famous Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and to hear their lectures at the University of Berlin. Germanic philology and classical antiquity were the subjects which Child followed for two years at Berlin and in the lectures of the Grimms’ close associates at the older University of Göttingen. The comparison of ancient and modern European culture implicit in this combination of interests was no accident; such historicism was a cardinal principle with the Grimm brothers and informed all their learned work in the various fields of medieval literature, historical linguistics, legal history, comparative mythology, and folklore. The stimulation which Child derived in those two years from the Grimms and their circle remained by his own admission the dominant force in his intellectual activity from that time on. Kittredge tells us that for the rest of his life Child kept a portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm on the mantel over the fireplace in his study.

In regard to higher literary learning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1851 was still a wilderness, and Child had found in the Brothers Grimm and in their circle of like-minded German scholars a true Mecca for comparative study of literary traditions. But it was not just the example of their historicism or their comparative studies of literature that Child esteemed so much, for he had known about that before he went to Germany. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm exercised a lifelong influence on him because they were the first great modern collectors of oral traditions in Europe. Through their famous collection of German folktales, which had already been published in three successive editions by 1849, and in their related scholarly writings, the Grimms had taught the world how much of European culture owed nothing to literacy, and how much literature itself might be indebted for its best traditions to Volkspoesie – the unwritten poetic compositions of ordinary, unlettered people. (The Grimm brothers in turn owed their first knowledge of oral tradition to their professor of law at Marburg University, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who introduced them in 1803 to the two momentous, cognate ideas: the importance of unwritten custom in the history of law, and of unwritten poetry – Volkspoesie -in the formation of literature.) Francis Child went to Germany with the idea that tradition was responsible for what was best in European literature. He came home to Cambridge with the more specific idea that oral tradition was an older and more fertile constituent of European culture than even literature. In this sense Kittredge’s judgment was correct, that Child’s own greatest contribution to learning, his ten-volume edition of  The English and Scottish Popular Ballads , was the fruit of his two-year stay in Germany.

The Brothers Grimm gave Child all the inspiration he needed for a lifetime, but another man, a Danish ballad collector named Svend Grundtv’ig, later taught him other things which he could not do without. The eminent Dane was a source of invaluable practical advice on the whereabouts of texts, and Grundtvig taught Child most of the working methodology he ever knew.

Eighty years later, Milman Parry similarly went to Paris to study philology at the Sorbonne under Jacob Grimm’s intellectual descendant, the renowned historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist, Antoine Meillet. Parry was a Hellenist whose interest in literary tradition came to a focus in his study of Homer. But like Child, he saw tradition at work most plainly in those mechanisms of literary language that distinguish literature from common discourse. Parry was in Paris for three years, from 1925 to 1928. He described the evolution of his own ideas during those years in these words:

My first studies were on the style of the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to understand as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due to the remarks of my teacher M. Antoine Meillet that I came to see, dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. It happened that a week or so before I defended my theses for the doctorate at the Sorbonne that Professor Mathias Murko of the University of Prague delivered in Paris the series of conferences which later appeared as his book “La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle.” I had seen the poster for these lectures but at the time I saw in them no great meaning for myself. However, Professor Murko, doubtless due to some remark of M. Meillet, was present at my soutenance and at that time M. Meillet as a member of my jury pointed out with his usual ease and clarity this failing in my two books. It was the writings of Professor Murko more than those of any other which in the following years led me to the study of oral poetry in itself and to the heroic poems of the South Slavs. (Milman Parry’s unpublished autograph typescript in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature in the Harvard College Library, quoted in A. B. Lord,  The Singer of Tales  (Cambridge, 196o), pp. 11-12.)

So Paris was to Parry what Berlin and Göttingen had been to Child, and Parry’s Jacob Grimm and Svend Grundtvig were Antoine Meillet and Mathias Murko. Parry returned to the United States in 1928 as Child had in 1851 with the new idea of  orality  firmly wedded in his mind to the old idea of  tradition  which he had taken with him to Europe. In both cases, a prominent European collector of oral literature and an eminent philologist had together catalyzed the fusion of those two ideas in the Americans’ thinking. Jacob Grimm, Svend Grundtvig, and Mathias Murko were all men who had personally seen and heard oral traditional poetry performed, and collected the performances with their own hands. Neither Child nor Parry shared the experience of collecting during their student years in Europe, but their indirect knowledge of it gave decisive new direction to their careers. In the end, the two Americans excelled even their European teachers in putting that knowledge to use.

But putting the knowledge to use was not easy. It meant a serious deflection of thought and energy from the customary preoccupations of academic literary studies, and such deflections were then, as they are now, professionally very perilous for the young scholar who was not yet established in the eyes of his academic elders.

For five years from 1851 to 1856, Child’s new awareness of the oral traditional component in European culture lay hidden from view, with no notable consequences in his teaching or publication. In a similar manner, Parry returned to the United States in 1928 to the beginning of what seemed at first an unexceptional career as a teacher of the Latin and Greek classics. For five years from 1928 to 1933, Parry’s teaching and publication revealed nothing of the new enterprise to which he was privately committed: a concerted program of field-collecting in the Old World. After a year of teaching at Drake University in Iowa, Parry joined the faculty of Harvard’s Department of the Classics in the autumn of 1929 with the rank of Instructor. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1932, and then in the summer of 1933, after years of quietly preparing himself, he set out on a brief journey that was to have remarkable consequences not only for his own field of Homeric studies but also for the whole of humanistic science in the twentieth century.

Parry’s path to his first knowledge of oral tradition was the same as Child’s, but once he had that knowledge, his response to it was quite different. Child became a great editor and accumulator of old books, manuscripts, and broadsides relating to oral tradition. Parry too accumulated material of that kind, but he was not satisfied with merely collecting other peoples’ collections. To some extent Child had always remained subject to the nineteenth-century bourgeois prejudice that rural or agrarian life was incompatible with culture of high quality. Parry, who had been a poultry farmer for a year before he went to Paris, had no such prejudice. So although he set out along the same path that Child had followed, he soon went much further along that path than Child had. Parry knew how radical his procedure had to be if he was to break through the charmed circle of scholarly ignorance about the mechanisms of oral tradition that had persisted for centuries in Europe and America. Though a Classicist by profession, he preferred to think of himself as a professional hybrid – a “literary anthropologist.” It was an apt expression.

Plate V. Milman Parry. From a photograph in the Herbert Weir Smyth Classical Library, Harvard University.

See full-size image of Plate V .

As a scholar of Homeric poetry, Parry was initially interested in the problem of how the author of the ancient Greek  Iliad  and  Odyssey  had composed those two great narrative poems at the very beginning of European literary tradition. His study of that problem led him to the hypothesis that the  Iliad  and  Odyssey  were not originally literary at all, but rather the products of an archaic Greek oral tradition that was older than any written literature in Europe. In order to test that theory, and to learn the distinctive traits of oral literature from a living oral tradition, Parry went in 1933 into the hinterland of Yugoslavia where he had heard five years previously from Meillet and Murko that an oral tradition of heroic poetry still persisted. There he observed and recorded in writing numerous live performances by illiterate masters of the traditional epic mode of speech in South Slavic dialects. By analogy with this evidence from a modern Balkan culture, Professor Parry was convinced that indeed Homer had been an oral poet whose superb knowledge of archaic Greek oral tradition made any dependence on writing not only unnecessary but even impossible in the original composition of the  Iliad  and the  Odyssey . This hypothesis, which Parry argued with masterly technical precision, quickly became known among the international brotherhood of classical scholars as the Oral Theory. It is today widely recognized as the single most important theoretical advance in classical studies in this century. But its effects were not confined to classical learning.

Parry’s discovery of an analogy between modern South Slavic and ancient Greek oral epos, and his corollary suggestion that literature began in Europe with the writing down of an oral tradition, amazed and stimulated scholars of the humanities everywhere. For centuries it had been common knowledge among educated men that oral traditions existed among the illiterate classes in Europe and elsewhere. Child, Kittredge, and all of their wide circle of students and allies had thrived on that knowledge. But if oral traditions were ever capable of producing such masterpieces as the  Iliad  and  Odyssey , then it was suddenly very important to understand exactly how such traditions worked, and what kinds of “literature” belonged to them. Parry knew that he would need more detailed proof than he had brought from Yugoslavia in 1933 to sustain his theory, and to demonstrate all the mechanics of oral literature literature totally without writing. A momentous shift of emphasis was taking place in the fundamental direction of oral literary research from the study of content to the study of process in oral traditions.

So with the financial backing of Harvard and the American Council of Learned Societies, Parry returned in 1934 to the outlying mountain districts of Yugoslavia with a specially designed sound-recording apparatus, determined to make a thorough collection of the South Slavic oral literature. Using the new technology of recording sound on aluminum discs, he devoted fifteen months in 1934 and 1935 to a complete exploration of the modern oral epic tradition throughout the Slavic-speaking region of the western Balkans. The collection which he thus formed was not only the most complete that had ever been made in terms of that region, but also the first large, durable collection of sound-recordings in the entire history of oral literary studies.

Parry’s monumental collection from the years 1933-1935 is the nucleus of the present Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature in the Harvard College Library.

That nucleus is, of course, unique and irreplaceable, because nothing in it, if lost, could ever be duplicated from any other source whatsoever. It contains more than 12,000 individual texts, and more than 3,500 recorded twelve-inch aluminum discs. The longest epic songs ever recorded in sound anywhere in the world are in this collection, alive and complete; the longest of these exceeds 13,000 verses in length.

The Present Generation

Since Parry’s death in 1935 there have been a number of important additions to his collection, with the result that it is now several times its original size.

In 1937, the Honorary Curator, Albert B. Lord, added more than a hundred epic and ballad texts from northern Albania. They are invaluable for studying the processes by which stories pass from one language to another. After World War II, Lord returned to Yugoslavia to revisit in 1950 and 1951 most of the places where Parry had collected; this was in accord with the plan of further field work which Parry himself had envisaged. During these two years Lord added to the Collection many new texts by recording on magnetic wire. Later, in 1958 and 1959, he also added texts from field recording in Bulgaria, so that the evidence of Balkan oral tradition in the Parry Collection now reaches from the Adriatic to the Black Sea.

The decade of the sixties saw the greatest additions to the Collection in number of texts recorded, in areas covered, and in chronological depth. The present curators of the Collection, Albert B. Lord and David Bynum, made an intensive effort during the five years 1962-1967 to acquire evidence of oral tradition from localities and singers which Parry had not been able to study in the 1930s [Note:  Oral Literature at Harvard Since 1856  was originally published in 1974. The current curators of the Parry Collection are Steven Mitchell and Gregory Nagy.]. Some of these were in areas that were inaccessible to Parry; in more than one Balkan village which they visited in 1963 and 1964, Lord and Bynum were the only foreigners who had come there within living memory. A number of the epic singers collected in these years had been raw youths in Parry’s time, but matured into good oral traditional poets in the thirty-year interval. Several had learned their traditions from Parry’s singers, and so represented the rare and invaluable opportunity to study the direct passage of oral literary tradition from one generation to another. The five years of carefully planned field-work in 1962-1967 brought in a rich harvest of new recordings from Serbia, Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Montenegro. Whole new tracts of territory were closely surveyed, linking together for the first time such prominent centers of Parry’s original collecting as Novi Pazar and Bijelo Polje.

Parry chose to make his field study of oral literature in the mountains of the western Balkans because, of all places in the world where oral epic tradition was known to persist in this century, the Balkans promised the surest immediate results for use in his analogical study of Homeric poetry. He fully intended to make similar field studies elsewhere at a later time; Africa and the Middle Last were uppermost in his mind. The Balkans were thus only the first of several regions where he wanted to gather texts and facts about oral literature.

But having made the western Balkans his first choice, he quickly became the most methodical and comprehensive collector of oral tradition who ever worked there. He was not the first or only collector; scores of others before and after him made more limited manuscript collections from the same tradition. A majority of these manuscripts had by 1960 been gathered into State archives in the two principal metropolitan centers of Yugoslavia: Belgrade and Zagreb. During the period from 1963 to 1972, microfilm copies of these holdings were acquired for the Parry Collection, thus extending its coverage of the western Balkan tradition to include most of the existing manuscripts from the very beginnings of collecting in the Napoleonic era down to the present day. With the financial backing of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, much of this material has been electro-printed to facilitate its use, and the prints bound in durable volumes.

With the microfilms from Yugoslavia and the earlier recordings from the thirties, fifties, and sixties, the Milman Parry Collection is by far the finest collection of any one oral poetic tradition anywhere in the world.

Milman Parry’s untimely death in a tragic accident with a firearm in December of 1935 prevented his using his own collection for the intended purpose. He lived long enough to write only a few pages of general observations on his epoch-making first-hand experience with a living tradition of oral epic poetry. Those pages have been published, reprinted, and quoted numerous times since 1935.

Parry also left a typescript of about 275 pages consisting of eight short South Slavic texts with his own detailed commentary on them. Extensive excerpts from this typescript have been published; a verbatim edition of it is to be published soon by the Parry Collection and the Harvard University Press.

Luckily, Parry did not go alone to collect in the Balkans in 1934-1935. He took with him one of his former students just graduated from Harvard College, Albert B. Lord, ’34, as a technical assistant and bookkeeper. As an honors student of the Classics under Parry, Lord had learned at first-hand about his teacher’s aims in cultural exploration of the Balkans. When Parry was killed, Lord was the obvious choice to carry out Parry’s intended exposition of the dynamics of oral literature from the Parry Collection.

A number of time-consuming preliminary clerical operations had to be performed before the collection could be put to systematic use. First, the Slavic texts had to be written down, or  transcribed , word for word from the aluminum records. Next, the rough transcriptions needed to be  typed  to provide fair working copies. Then the stenography transcription and typing had to be  checked  for accuracy; the language was often difficult and mistakes easily crept into even the most conscientious stenography. All this preliminary work had to be done for the total content of the aluminum records, which was more than 360,000 typed lines in various South Slavic dialects. After that, each of the nearly 13,000 texts in the collection required cataloguing. And when that was done, Lord next made complete inventories of all the oral poets and all the individual narratives represented in the collection. Even with expert stenographic help in this labor it naturally took Lord many months to put the collection into usable form. All this archival processing and analysis was a new department of activity added to the more familiar ones of collecting, publishing, library improvement, and public education established by Child.

Even before the archival chores were done, Lord began to collaborate with the Hungarian composer and musicologist Béla Bartók on a joint volume of music, texts, and translations from the Parry Collection. After years of work by both men, and after the disruption of World War II, that book was published by the Columbia University Press: Béla Bartók and Albert B. Lord,  Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs; Texts and Transcriptions of Seventy-Five Folk Songs from the Milman Parry Collection and a Morphology of Serbo-Croatian Folk Melodies  (New York, 1951). The appearance of this book marked a new stage in the growth of the musicological branch of oral traditional studies at Harvard. For the first time, an important tradition of sung oral poetry outside the Anglo-American world had been studied and published. In this respect too, Parry and his followers accomplished what Kittredge had been unable to do, expanding Harvard’s tradition of oral literary studies to include discovery and research on materials from all parts of the world, not just Britain and America. Child’s habit, continued by Kittredge, of relying entirely on foreign scholars for information about foreign oral traditions, had now to be abandoned. Oral literary studies at Harvard had advanced to a point where foreign scholars were no longer able to supply the necessary data, and henceforth the men from Cambridge would themselves range the globe in search of oral poets and composers. The reason for the quest was as universal as the quest itself, for as Parry had written in 1934 about the purpose of his collection:

… the present collection of oral texts has . . . been made . . . with the thought of obtaining evidence on the basis of which could be drawn a series of generalities applicable to all oral poetries; which would allow me, in the case of a poetrv for which there was not enough evidence outside the poems themselves of the way in which they were made, to say whether that poetry was oral or not, and how it should be understood if it was oral. In other words the study of the South Slavic poetry was meant to provide me an exact knowledge of the characteristics of oral style, in the hope that when such characteristics were known exactly their presence or absence could definitely be ascertained in other poetries. . . (Milman Parry, op. cit., quoted in Parry and Lord,  Serbocroatian Heroic Songs , I (Cambridge and Belgrade, 1954), 4.)

In short, the Parry Collection was meant to benefit the study of oral literature in all languages, not just Slavic. Like Child and Kittredge before him, Parry perceived from the outset that oral literary studies had to be comparative in character.

Plate VI. Three modern oral poets whose works are recorded in the Milman Parry Collection.

See full-size image of Plate VI .

There were two ways to render Parry’s intended contribution to comparative studies, and both ways were equally essential. One way was to publish a series of representative texts and translations. Through a consistent program of publication covering the whole tradition in all its regions, a knowledgeable editor could in some twenty volumes reconstitute the anatomy of South Slavic oral tradition in book form. Other scholars who could read English or Slavic could then see for themselves what an oral literature was in its entirety and reach their own conclusions about it. Lord had already made a good beginning in this task through his collaboration with Bartók. In 1953 and 1954 he issued a further installment in two volumes of his own editing and translation:  SerboCroatian Heroic Songs , volume one (Novi Pazar: English Translations) and volume two (Novi Pazar: SerboCroatian Texts) published simultaneously in Cambridge and Belgrade. A third and fourth volume of texts and translations, this time from Montenegro, are at this writing also about to be published by the Harvard University Press. A fifth and sixth volume, representing the oral epic tradition of northern Bosnia, are in preparation.

Besides publishing, the other way to make the benefits of the Parry Collection broadly available was, as Parry had said, by “drawing a series of generalities applicable to all oral poetries.” This meant a major work of research and textual analysis in the Parry Collection, with some supplementary study of other possibly oral poetry in other languages. Lord began to meet this responsibility too with the publication of his book  The Singer of Tales  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

But Parry’s legacy at Harvard was not limited to his Collection nor to those who continued the particular work that he had intended to do with it. A rich treasure of rare books passed from his personal library to the College Library’s Folklore Collection at the time of his death. Moreover, a number of distinguished senior professors in the present Faculty of Arts and Sciences were associates or students of Parry during the five years that he taught at Harvard. Joining a faculty where such lights from the Kittredge constellation as Bartlett Jere Whiting still shone, the new men of the Parry era have been greatly instrumental in the continuing infusion of oral literary studies throughout Harvard’s humanistic curriculum. Among these influential continuators of Parry’s purpose are Reuben A. Brower, Cabot Professor of English Literature, John H. Finley, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Wales Professor of Sanskrit, and Harry T. Levin, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature. Another of this number is Robert S. Fitzgerald, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, the man who now occupies that same professorial chair upon which Child began Harvard’s great tradition of oral literary studies more than a hundred years ago.

The total influence of this century-old scholarly tradition is difficult to appraise exactly, because it has been so profound and far-reaching. The initial effects at each new stage of the tradition were felt most keenly in the world of higher learning, which was as it should be, for it was preeminently an  academic  tradition. But few academic traditions at Harvard or at any other American university have palpably influenced  common culture  in the English-speaking world to such a degree as this one has. In the twentieth century, one does not need to be a student or a professional academic to feel the influence of Harvard’s oral literary scholarship. That influence touches the daily lives of ordinary Americans in numerous ways.

Leaving aside the professorial personalities who have given their genius and energy to oral literary studies at Harvard, it is possible to describe the academic tradition which they have created as a tradition of successful research a series of basic discoveries, each discovery laying the ground for the next one. Child discovered the common denominator of myriad English poetic fragments, which was the fact that they all derived from an oral tradition. Kittredge discovered the co-existence in the same oral tradition of other poetry and other ideas besides the poetry and ideas found in ballads. Parry discovered how the minds of traditional oral poets work to create simultaneously a great poetry and a great understanding of the life which those poets share with their audiences. The worldwide impact on learning of just the latest phase of Harvard’s oral literary studies can be measured exactly in another of the Milman Parry Collection’s publications, the  Haymes Bibliography of the Oral Theory , which is Number One in the  Planning and Documentation Series  of the Milman Parry Collection. Thus the study of oral literature at Harvard has been one hundred and twenty years of constant research that has constantly spawned other research in the same directions at other locations and in other institutions throughout the world.

But basic research in the humanities is like any other basic research – the dividends are always exponentially greater than the investment, and they accrue in unpredictable ways. Child’s research on the ballad was highly esoteric when he performed it in the nineteenth century. Yet in the twentieth century it was the mother of the so-called Ballad Revival that has done so much to enrich popuhr musical life throughout the western world. The fusion of local historiography and folklore study which Kittredge pioneered academically has entered into popular awareness and continues today to do as it has done for more than fifty years, shaping the attitudes of millions in America toward their ancestral past and their own identities. Parry’s and Lord’s technical research on oral tradition has had a similar unexpected impact outside academic life. The publication in 1962 of Herbert Marshall McLuhan’s book,  The Gutenberg Galaxy , marked the beginning of a widespread popular interest in the implications of oral traditions for modern communications. Thus the professional cinema and television script-writer who recently wanted to attend a popular Harvard course on oral narrative is only one of many people who have realized that as the visual effects and spoken words of electronic media increasingly displace printed matter in everyday cultural communication, there is much of practical utility to be learned from a previous age when  all  cultural expression was necessarily oral.

Nor is it surprising that the academic study of oral tradition should incidentally enrich cultural life outside as well as within the colleges and universities of America. The study of oral tradition is ultimately a study of common culture. The only thing esoteric about such a study is the uncommon application of rigorous intellectual discipline to the analysis of common culture in a humanistic curriculum such as Harvard’s, which is otherwise devoted mostly to esoteric art and literature.

If four consecutive generations of oral literary studies at Harvard have proven anything conclusive about the relationship between literature and oral traditions, it is that neither form of expression can be properly understood without the other. The study of oral literature must continue at Harvard, because it continues to be needed. It is especially necessary at a time when young people are so much concerned as they are in the present era with witnessing and achieving “authentic experience,” and when books are too often thought to be artificial and dehumanizingly impersonal. It is necessary at such a time as this to go on discovering in our academic research and to teach in our programs of humanistic education how living men’s facility with oral traditions has been the foundation of philosophy and the arts throughout cultural history. The contemporary eagerness of the young to understand every cultural achievement in personal terms makes this an ideal time to learn and to teach more fully than we have the content and the mechanics of those cultural traditions that have sustained men solely by word of mouth for longer than writing has been in existence.

©1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Bibliography

Editorial and production teams, the mast project, five essays, ready for newer annotations, centering on theories about oral traditions: orality and literacy – essay one.

Five essays, ready for newer annotations, centering on theories about oral traditions

Essay 1. Orality and literacy.

2022.12.19 | By Gregory Nagy

Originally published 2001 in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric , ed. T. O. Sloane, 532–538; Oxford. In this online version, the original page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{532|533}” indicates where p. 532 of the printed version ends and p. 533 begins.

§1. The concept of orality stems from ethnographic descriptions of oral poetry in particular and of oral traditions in general. A foundational work is The Singer of Tales , by Albert B. Lord (1960; posthumous 2 nd ed. 2000, with new introduction by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy; 3 rd ed. 2019 by David F. Elmer). This book documents the pioneering research of Milman Parry on oral traditions in the former Yugoslavia, 1933-35 (collected papers, Parry 1971). Parry died in 1935, at the beginning of his academic career, before he could publish the results of his research on living oral traditions. His publications are limited almost entirely to his earlier research, which was based on the textual evidence of Homeric poetry. Parry was a professor of ancient Greek, seeking new answers to the so-called “Homeric Question,” which centered on the historical circumstances that led to the composition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey . Basically, the “question” came down to this: were the Homeric poems composed with or without the aid of writing? Parry’s project, the comparing of Homeric poetry with the living oral traditions of South Slavic heroic poetry, led him to conclude that the Homeric texts were indeed the products of oral composition. Parry’s research was continued after his death by his student, Albert Lord, who conducted his own fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia (especially 1950-51). Lord’s Singer of Tales represents the legacy of their combined efforts.

§2. The cumulative work of Parry and Lord is generally considered to be the single most successful solution to the “Homeric Question,” though the debate among Classicists continues concerning the historical contingencies of Homeric composition. The ultimate success of Parry and Lord, however, can best be measured by tracking the applicability {532|533} of their methods to a wide range of literatures and pre-literatures beyond the original focus on ancient Greek literature.

§3. In the case of pre-literatures, Lord’s Singer of Tales has become a foundational work for the ethnographic study of oral traditions in all their many varieties, and the range of living oral traditions is world-wide: Scottish ballads, folk-preaching in the American South, Xhosa praise poetry, and the list can be extended to hundreds of other examples (bibliography in Foley 1985; the journal Oral Tradition , founded by John M. Foley in 1986, gives an idea of the vast range: see the representative entries in the Bibliography below).

§4. In the case of literatures, the application of the Parry-Lord method to ancient Greek traditions was extended by Lord to medieval traditions in Old English and Old French, and it has been further extended by other scholars to Old Norse, Middle English, Middle High German, Irish, Welsh, and other medieval European traditions. Even further, the Parry-Lord method has been applied to a vast variety of non-European literatures, including classical Arabic and Persian, Indic, and Chinese traditions (again, see the representative entries in the Bibliography below).

§5. In effect, then, the methodology of Parry and Lord has transcended the “Homeric Question.” Their work has led to an essential idea that goes far beyond the historical context of Homeric poetry or of any other tradition. That idea, as formulated by Parry and Lord, is that oral traditions formed the basis of literary traditions.

§6. This is not to say that such thinking was without precedent. In fact, it did evolve ultimately from far earlier phases of debate among Classicists focusing on the “Homeric Question.” Prototypical versions of the idea can be found in the Homeric theorizing of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac (already as of 1664; posthumous publication 1715), Thomas Blackwell (1735), Giambattista Vico (1744), and Robert Wood (private publication 1767; posthumous edition 1769). The evolving idea reached a decisive phase in the work of two of history’s most influential editors of Homer, Jean Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison ( Prolegomena to his edition of the codex “ Venetus A ” of the Iliad , 1788) and Friedrich August Wolf ( Prolegomena , 1795, to his editions of the Iliad , 1804, and Odyssey , 1807). Both of these Classicists posited a prehistory of oral poetry in the evolution of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey . The notion of such a preliterate phase in the history of ancient Greek epic is also at work in the 1802 Iliad commentary of another major figure in the Classics, Christian Gottlob Heyne. The impact of such notions encouraged a romantic view of oral poetry, as exemplified most prominently by Johann Gottfried Herder, who compared the preliterate phases of Homeric poetry with Germanic folk traditions (Homer, ein Günstling der Zeit , 1795). Romantic views of oral poetry led to the creation of literary folkloristic syntheses like Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1849; first ed. 1835), based on genuine Finnish oral traditions. The romantic literary appropriation of oral traditions could easily lead to abuses: some such literary productions were of dubious ethnographic value, as in the case of James Macpherson’s re-creations of Scottish highlands folklore in The Complete Works of Ossian (1765).

§7. Given all these precedents, we may well ask: why, then, is it Parry and Lord who are primarily credited with the definitive formulation of the general idea that oral traditions formed the basis of literary traditions? The answer is straightforward: Parry and Lord were the first to perfect a systematic way of comparing the internal evidence of living oral traditions, as observed in their “fieldwork,” with the internal evidence of literary traditions. It is primarily their methodology that we see reflected in the ongoing academic usage of such terms as orality and oral theory . (On the pitfalls of using the term oral theory , see Nagy 1996.19-20).

§8. The systematic comparatism of Parry and Lord required rigorous empiricism in analyzing the internal evidence of the living oral traditions – in their case, the South Slavic evidence – which was to be compared with the textual evidence of Homer. To be sure, there have also been other models of internal analysis: an outstanding example is the ethnographic research of Matija Murko on the epics of South Slavic Muslim peoples in the regions of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1913; see especially Lord 1960.280-281n1). Another distinguished forerunner was Wilhelm Radloff, who investigated the Kara Kirghiz oral {533|534} poetic traditions of Central Asia (1887; see Lord 1960.281n4). Such projects, however, were primarily descriptive, not comparative. In the case of Central Asian epics, for example, the systematic application of comparative methodology, as evident in the work of Karl Reichl (2000), is founded directly on the work of Parry and Lord.

§9. What primarily distinguishes Parry and Lord from their predecessors, then, is their development of a systematic comparative approach to the study of oral traditions. The point of departure for their comparative work, which happened to be primarily the Muslim epic traditions of the former Yugoslavia, gave them an opportunity to test the living interactions of oral and literary traditions. They observed that the prestige of writing as a technology, and of the culture of literacy that it fostered, tended to destabilize the culture of oral traditions – in the historical context that they were studying. What they observed, however, was strictly a point of comparison with other possible test cases, not some kind of universalizing formulation (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiii; pace Finnegan 1976). For example, Lord himself makes it clear in his later work that there exist many cultures where literary traditions do not cause the destabilization of oral traditions and can even coexist with them (Lord 1991; see also especially Lord 1986b). In general, the textualization or Verschriftung of any given oral tradition needs to be distinguished from Verschriftlichung – that is, from the evolution of any given culture of literacy, any given Schriftlichkeit (Oesterreicher 1993).

§10. For Parry and Lord, the opposition of literacy and orality – of Schriftlichkeit and Mündlichkeit – is a cultural variable, not a universal. Further, their fieldwork experiments led them to think of literacy and orality as cognitive variables as well (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiv). Even further, just as orality defies universalization, so also does literacy. The mechanics and even the concepts of reading and writing vary from culture to culture (Nagy 1998; cf. Svenbro 1993). A striking case in point is the cultural variability of such phenomena as scriptio continua and “silent reading” (Nagy 2000, Gavrilov 1997).

§11. For Parry and Lord, the histories of literary and oral traditions, of literatures and pre-literatures, were interrelated. To underline his observation that the mechanics and esthetics of oral and literary traditions are historically linked, Lord would even speak of “oral literature” (see Lord 1995, especially chapter 8). Further, Lord developed the comparative study of oral and literary traditions into a new branch of Comparative Literature (Guillén 1993.173-179). It is no accident that Lord’s Singer of Tales was originally published in a Comparative Literature monograph series, and that the author of the Preface of 1960 was Harry Levin, who at the time figured as the doyen of the new field of Comparative Literature – and who had actually taken part in Lord’s thesis defense (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xvii).

§12. Despite this stance of Parry and Lord, it has been claimed – many times and in many ways – that the Parry-Lord “theory” is founded on a hard-and-fast distinction between orality and literacy. These claims stem from unfamiliarity with the ethnographic dimension of Parry’s and Lord’s work, and, more generally, from ignorance about the observable mechanics and esthetics of oral traditions. Such unfamiliarity fuels prejudices, as reflected in the criticism directed at Lord for even attempting to undertake a comparison of South Slavic oral traditions with the literary traditions represented by the high cultures of the Classical and medieval civilizations of Western Europe. The implicit presupposition, that oral traditions are inferior to the esthetic standards of Western literature, is tied to romanticized notions about distinctions between literacy and orality (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiv):

Much of this kind of criticism, as Lord documents in his later books [1991 and 1995], has been shaped also by an overall ignorance of the historical facts concerning literacy and its cultural implications in the Balkans. Besides this additional obstacle, there is yet another closely related one: many Western scholars romanticize literacy itself as if it were some kind of uniform and even universal phenomenon – exempt from the historical contingencies of cultural and even cognitive variations. Such romanticism, combined with an ignorance of the ideological implications of literacy in the South Slavic world, have led to a variety of deadly prejudices against any and all kinds of oral traditions. In some cases, these prejudices have gone hand in hand with a resolute {534|535} blindness to the potential ideological agenda of literacy in its historical contexts.

§13. Thus the danger of romanticism is two-sided: much as some humanists of the nineteenth century romanticized oral tradition as if it were some kind of universal phenomenon in and of itself, humanists today may be tempted to romanticize literacy as the key to “literature,” often equated with “high” culture (on empirical approaches to distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, as occasionally formalized in distinctions between oral and written traditions, see Bausinger 1980).

§14. And yet, the only universal distinction between oral and literary traditions is the historical anteriority of the first to the second. Beyond this obvious observation, it is pointless to insist on any universalizing definitions for the “oral” of “oral tradition.” “Oral tradition” and “oral poetry” are terms that depend on the concepts of “written tradition” and “written poetry.” In cultures that do not depend on the technology of writing, the concept of orality is meaningless (Lord 1995.105n26). From the standpoint of comparative ethnography, “Written is not something that is not oral; rather it is something in addition to being oral, and that additional something varies from society to society” (Nagy 1990.8). The absence of this technology has nothing to do with whether there can or cannot be poetics or rhetoric. Poetics and rhetoric exist without writing.

§15. A common misconception about oral traditions is that they are marked by a lack of organization, cohesiveness, unity. The problem here, again, is a general unfamiliarity with the ethnographic evidence from living oral traditions, which can be used to document a wide variety of poetics and rhetoric (see especially Lord 1995). The verbal art or Kunstsprache of oral traditions can reach levels of virtuosity that are indirectly or sometimes even directly comparable to what is admired in the classics of script and print cultures. In some cultural contexts, the Kunstsprache of oral traditions can be even more precise than that of counterparts in literary traditions, because the genres of oral poetics and rhetoric tend to be more regularly observed (Smith 1974, Ben Amos 1976, Slatkin 1987). In the history of literature, genres can become irregular through a striving for individual greatness: if we follow the perspective of Benedetto Croce (1902), a literary work is great because it defies genres, because it is sui generis .

§16. By contrast, the forms of genres in oral traditions are sustained by the forms of everyday speech in everyday life. Thus the Kunstsprache of oral tradition allows its participants to “connect,” even in modern times (Martin 1993.227): “Modern hearers of a traditional epic in cultures where the song making survives are observed to comment appreciatively on the smallest verbal changes, not in the way a three-year-old demands the exact words of a bedtime text, but with a full knowledge of the dozens of ways the teller could have spun out a line at a given point in the narrative. In a living oral tradition, people are exposed to verbal art constantly, not just on specific entertainment occasions, which can happen every night in certain seasons. When they work, eat, drink, and do other social small-group activities, myth, song, and saying are always woven into their talk. Consequently, it is not inaccurate to describe them as bilingual, fluent in their natural language but also in the Kunstsprache of their local verbal art forms.”

Bibliography, with comments, dating up to 2001

Bakker, E. J. 1997. Poetry in Speech. Orality and Homeric Discourse . Ithaca. An empirical study of syntactical patterns typical of oral traditions and even of “everyday” speech, as preserved in the text of the Homeric poems.

Bauman, R. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance . Prospect Heights, IL. A sophisticated analysis of various types and degrees of interaction between performance and composition as combined aspects of oral traditions.

Bausinger, H. 1980. Formen der “Volkspoesie. ” 2nd ed. Berlin. A historical study of culturally and ideologically determined distinctions between “high art” and “low art,” as associated respectively with literary and oral traditions.

Ben-Amos, D. 1976. “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” Folklore Genres,  ed. D. Ben-Amos, 215-242. Austin. A wide-ranging survey of variations in the forms and functions of genres in oral traditions.

Blackburn, S. H., P. J. Claus, J. B. Flueckiger, and S. S. Wadley, eds. 1989. Oral Epics in India . Berkeley and Los Angeles. Ethnographic approaches to oral traditions as analyzed {535|536} in their historical contexts, with special attention to the mechanics of diffusion (and the changes related to the widening or narrowing of the radius of diffusion). A striking example of the potential coextensiveness of oral and written traditions: oral traditions can aetiologize themselves in terms of written traditions (p. 32 n. 25).

Croce, B. 1902. Estetica . 2nd ed. Bari. A foundational meditation on creative tensions between great works of literature and the genres to which they are supposed to belong.

Davidson, O. M. 2000. Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry . Bibliotheca Iranica: Intellectual Traditions Series no. 4. Costa Mesa CA. Explores the intellectual history of expanding the methodology of comparative literature by including the study of oral poetics, especially with reference to classical literary forms that stem ultimately from oral traditions.

Finnegan, R. 1976. “What is Oral Literature Anyway? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material.” Oral Literature and the Formula , ed. B. A. Stolz and R. S. Shannon, 127-166. Ann Arbor. Disputes any universalizing distinction between orality and literacy, claiming that Parry and Lord had sought to establish such a distinction. An underlying assumption in the book: that the concept of “oral” can be equated with anything that is performed. Both the claim and the assumption are disputed by Lord 1995.

Foley, J. M. 1985. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography . New York. The editor’s Introduction offers a general survey of a wide range of oral traditions throughout the world, with extensive bibliography of ongoing research applying the methods of Parry, Lord, and others.

Gavrilov, A. K. 1997. “Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.” Classical Quarterly 47:56-73. Investigates the cultural and cognitive variables of “silent reading” and reading out loud; concludes that a mutually exclusive dichotomy is untenable.

Goody, J., and Watt, I. 1968. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Literacy in Traditional Societies,  ed. J. Goody, 27-68 . Cambridge. Argues that literacy produces measurable differences in cognitive capacity; the argument is weakened by a lack of descriptive specificity in considering the forms of oral traditions in any given historical context.

Guillén, C. 1985. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura comparada . Barcelona. = 1993. The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 42. Cambridge, MA. Situates the study of oral traditions within the academic discipline of Comparative Literature.

Johnson, J. W. 1980. “Yes, Virginia, There Is an Epic in Africa.” Research in African Literatures 11:308-326. A spirited polemic concerning the application of universalizing criteria in describing the genres of oral traditions.

Lord, A. B. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 94:124-134. Rewritten, with minimal changes, in Lord 1991.38-48 (with an “Addendum 1990” at pp. 47-48). An engaging attempt to reconcile the transmitted text of the Homeric poems, as a historical given, with empirical observations about the process of composition-in-performance as found in living oral traditions.

Lord, A. B. 1960 / 2000 [/ 2019]. The Singer of Tales . Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, MA; 2 nd  ed., with new Introduction, by S. Mitchell and G. Nagy 2000[; 3 rd ed. 2019 by D. F. Elmer, Hellenic Studies 77, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature 4]. This book remains the most definitive introduction to the pioneering research of Parry and Lord. The first part documents their findings in the course of their ethnographic research on the living oral traditions that they recorded in the former Yugoslavia; the second part applies these findings as points of comparison with the {536|537} textual evidence of ancient Greek and medieval European epic.

Lord, A. B. 1974. “Perspectives on Recent Work on Oral Literature.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 10:1-21. A bibliographical essay surveying the ongoing research on oral traditions throughout the world. A vital supplement to the abbreviated bibliography given here.

Lord, A. B. 1986a. “Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula.” Oral Tradition 1:467-503. Continuation of the bibliographical survey in Lord 1974. Another vital supplement.

Lord, A. B. 1986b. “The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient Values.” Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context , ed. J. M. Foley, 19-64. Columbia, MO. A seminal study of historical coextensiveness between the poetry performed in the coffee houses, as observed by Parry and Lord, and the poetry of the court poets in the “good old days” of Ottoman rule.

Lord, A. B. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition . Ithaca. Explores oral “lyric” as well as “epic.” In-depth reassessments of debates over orality and literacy .

Lord, A. B. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale (ed. M. L. Lord). Ithaca. A posthumous publication, originally intended as a direct continuation of Singer of Tales. Sustained rebuttal of critics who insist on the inferiority of “orality” to literacy.

Martin, R. P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca. A case study of oral poetic sub-genres embedded within the “super-genre” of epic, with special attention to applications of “speech-act” theory.

Martin, R. P. 1993. “Telemachus and the Last Hero Song.” Colby Quarterly 29:222-240. A critical reassessment of epic as the essential genre of “heroic” poetry.

Mitchell, S., and G. Nagy. 2000. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” In: Lord 2000:vii-xxix. Offers historical background on the evolution of Lord’s work and on its connections to the earlier work of Parry. Summarizes the impact of Parry’s and Lord’s combined legacy on such fields as Classics, Comparative Literature, and folklore studies.

Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past . Baltimore. Revised paperback version 1994. Examines the interactions of theme / formula / meter in both “epic” and “lyric” traditions, with special reference to the historical context of archaic Greece.

Nagy, G. 1996. Homeric Questions . Austin. Addresses ten basic “misreadings” of Parry and Lord; provides explanatory models for the historical contingencies of transition from oral to written traditions.

Nagy, G. 1998. “Homer as ‘Text’ and the Poetics of Cross-Reference.” Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung: Aspekte des Medienwechsels in verschiedenen Kulturen und Epochen,  ed. C. Ehler and U. Schaefer, 78-87. ScriptOralia 94. Tübingen.

Nagy, G. 2000. “Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Evidence from the Bacchylides Papyri.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 64:7-28. Examines phenomena of literacy that defy universalization, such as the practice of scriptio continua in archaic, classical, and post-classical Greek, to be contrasted with the practice of leaving spaces for word-boundaries, as in the traditions of writing Hebrew.

Nagy, J. F. 1986. “Orality in Medieval Irish Narrative.” Oral Tradition 1:272-301. A detailed survey of evidence provided by the contents and the conventions of the narratives themselves.

Niditch, S. 1996. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature. Library of ancient Israel. Louisville, KY. A lively confrontation of scripture, as the ultimate written word, with the rhetoric of the spoken word.

Oesterreicher, W. 1993. “Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung im Kontext medialer und konzeptioneller Schriftlichkeit.” Schriftlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter,  ed. U. Schaefer, 267-292. Tübingen. Shows that the historical circumstances of transformations from non-literate to literate societies are notable for their diversity.

Okpewho, I. 1979. The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance . New York. A sound ethnographic and literary survey, leading to a critical reassessment of epic as a genre.

Opland, J. 1989. “Xhosa: The Structure of Xhosa Eulogy and the Relation of Eulogy to Epic.” Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry II: Characteristics and Techniques , ed. J. B. Hainsworth and A. T. Hatto, 121-143. London. This study describes a distinct genre, the praise poetry of the Xhosa, and then proceeds to compare it with the ancient Greek genre of epic. By recognizing praise poetry as distinct from epic, this work avoids the imposition of external models on the internal evidence of the oral tradition being examined.

Parry, M. [1971]. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (ed. A. Parry). Oxford. The first part contains Parry’s work on the Homeric texts, before he undertook his fieldwork research in the former Yugoslavia. The second part combines his experience in fieldwork with his expertise in the organization of Homeric poetry.

Parry, M. 1928a. L’épithète traditionnelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. Translation in Parry 1971:1–190. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Parry.LEpithete_Traditionnelle_dans_Homere.1928 .

Parry, M. 1928b. Les formules et la métrique d’Homère . Paris. Translation in Parry 1971:191–234. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ParryM.Les_Formules_et_la_Metrique_d_Homere.1928 .

Parry, M. 1930. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style.”  Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41:73–148. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ParryM.Studies_in_the_Epic_Technique_of_Oral_Verse-Making1.1930 .

Parry, M. 1932. “Studies in the epic technique of oral verse-making. II: The Homeric language as the language of an oral poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology  43:1–50. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ParryM.Studies_in_the_Epic_Technique_of_Oral_Verse-Making2.1932 .

Radloff, W. 1885. Proben der Volksliteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme V: Der Dialekt der Kara-Kirgisen . St. Petersburg. A distinguished prototype of research in the “field,” with a focus on the oral traditions of Central Asia.

Reichl, K. 2000. Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Poetry. Ithaca. Continues where Radloff left off, a century later. Centers on typological parallels to the oral traditions studied by Parry and Lord.

Slatkin, L. M. 1987. “Genre and Generation in the Odyssey.” METIS: Revue d’Anthropologie du Monde Grec Ancien 1:259-268. Views genres in oral traditions as neatly complementary to each other, diachronically as well as synchronically.

Smith, P. 1974. “Des genres et des hommes.” Poétique 19:294-312. Acute synchronic perspectives on the complementarity of genres in oral traditions.

Svenbro, J. 1988. Phrasikleia: Anthropologie de la lecture en Grèce ancienne. Paris. = 1993. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Translation by J. Lloyd. Ithaca. Disputes universalist definitions of reading as a cognitive activity. Examines the mentality of equating the activity of reading out loud with the act of lending one’s voice to the letters being processed by one’s eyes.

Toelken, J. B. 1967. “An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads: Construction and Application.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5:75-101. Vigorous application of comparative ethnographic evidence to the text of a collection shaped by Child’s text-bound criteria.

Zumthor, P. 1984. La Poésie de la Voix dans la civilisation médiévale . Paris. Uses the textual evidence of medieval literature to highlight the dynamics of oral traditions as revealed by the variability or mouvance inherent in the textual transmission.

Zwettler, M. J. 1978. The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry . Columbus, OH. Studies the rich documentation of variant readings in the textual history of Arabic poetry as a reflex of variations in oral poetry.

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Definitions and understandings of oral literature

Oral literature is a broad term which may include ritual texts,

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• > A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature

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A review of african oral traditions and literature.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art forms, from interacting oral genres to such literary productions as the novel and poetry. The strength of the oral tradition seems not to have abated; through three literary periods, a reciprocal linkage has worked these media into a unique art form against which potent influences from East and West have proved unequal. Vital to African literature is the relationship between the oral and written word; in seemingly insignificant interstices have flourished such shadowy literary figures as Egyptian scribes, Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas, all playing crucial transitional roles in their respective literatures. The oral tale is not “the childhood of fiction” (Macculloch, 1905), but the early literary traditions were beneficiaries of the oral genres, and there is no doubt that the epic and its hero are the predecessors of the African novel and its central characters.

The African oral tradition distills the essences of human experiences, shaping them into rememberable, readily retrievable images of broad applicability with an extraordinary potential for eliciting emotional responses. These are removed from their historical contexts so that performers may recontextualize them in artistic forms. The oral arts, containing this sensory residue of past cultural life and the wisdom so engendered, constitute a medium for organizing, examining, and interpreting an audience's experiences of the images of the present. The tradition is a venerable one.

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• Volume 28, Issue 2-3
• Harold Scheub
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/524603

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• DOI: 10.51826/jelpa.v2i1.970
• Corpus ID: 270651700

The Structure of Lanny Oral Literature: A Critical View

• Manase H Halitopo , Napius Kogoya
• Published in Journal of English Language… 31 May 2024

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THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF ORAL LITERATURE

Oral literature is the repository of the critical knowledge, philosophy, and wisdom for non-literate societies. This literature through narrative, poetry, song, dance, myths and fables, and texts for religious rituals provides a portrait of the meaning of life as experienced by the society at its particular time and place with its unique existential challenges. It encapsulates the traditional knowledge, beliefs and values about the environment and the nature of the society itself. It arises in response to the universal aesthetic impulse to provide narratives that explains the nature of life and describes human responses to challenges. This literature portrays how one is to live a moral life and explains the nature of one’s relationships to divinity. It thus retains the society’s knowledge to be passed on to succeeding generations. It contains the history of the society and its experiences. In various forms this oral literature portrays the society’s belief systems that makes sense of life. It provides a guide to human behavior and how to live one’s life. With the arrival of literacy, the core of this literature and its art rapidly disappears.

It is also the repository of artistic expression in a society. Its beauty resonates across cultural frontiers . As such this literature is a response to the universal human instinct to find balance, harmony, and beauty in the world and the need to understand pain, suffering, and evil. It explains the causes of human suffering, justifies them, and suggests ways of mediation and the healing of suffering. Oral literature also functions to fulfill the need for religious belief and spiritual fulfillment necessary for human existence. This universal human realm, peopled by spiritual beings and their personalities, is revealed through stories, tales, songs, myths, legends, prayers, and ritual texts. Such literature recounts the work of the gods, explains how the world and human existence came about, and reveals the nature of human frailty. Oral literature serves to communicate ideas, emotions, beliefs and appreciation of life. This literature defines, interprets, and elaborates on the society’s vision of reality and the dangers in the world. It deals with the human adventure and achievements against odds. Through the texts of the society’s rituals and ceremonies the ecological elements that are critical to the society’s livelihood are portrayed and their functions sanctified.

Oral literature is also a form of entertainment and fosters feelings of solidarity with others who have had similar experiences. In sum, oral literature may encompass many genres of linguistic expression and may perform many different functions for the society.

What is oral literature?  

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Oral expression is a fundamental communication skill that involves interaction, bidirectionality, and negotiation of meanings within a shared context . It plays a crucial role in human society by allowing the transmission of cultural information, customs, and behaviors through stories and oral traditions . Effective oral expression is essential for language development, as seen in studies focusing on programs aimed at improving oral skills in languages like English and French, demonstrating significant improvements in pronunciation, grammar, lexical precision, interaction, and communicative comprehension . Through scenarios like role-playing, simulations, debates, and metacognitive strategies, oral expression can be enhanced in educational settings, leading to increased proficiency levels and improved performance in language activities . In essence, oral expression is a dynamic process that underpins effective communication and language acquisition.

Oral communication refers to the process of expressing information verbally, either through spoken words or nonverbal cues. It plays a vital role in various aspects of life, including education, professional settings, and language learning. Effective oral communication involves clear articulation, confidence, and the ability to convey messages accurately. In the realm of advertising, transforming text information into oral expression can enhance message comprehension, especially when incorporating rhythmic elements or fixed modes. Both written and oral communication are essential forms of interaction, with oral communication being particularly crucial for language learners to develop proficiency in expressing themselves confidently and overcoming stage fright. Overall, oral communication is a fundamental skill that enables individuals to convey ideas, emotions, and information effectively through spoken language.

Dramatic reading or oral interpretation involves the expressive vocalization of text to bring characters and narratives to life. This approach enhances various skills like prosody, fluency, and comprehension, particularly beneficial for students with dyslexia. Through readers' theater, students engage in experiential learning, exploring complex levels of thinking and creativity while performing literary works. By incorporating gestures and group dynamics, students can delve deeper into the meaning of words and senses, making reading a performative art. Authors emphasize the significance of sound in understanding their work, highlighting the oral nature of language as a bridge between author and reader. Overall, dramatic reading serves as a powerful tool for literary engagement, comprehension, and creative expression across various educational backgrounds and age groups.

Oral tradition and folklore shape the ways in which people understand the world by serving as a medium for cultural renaissance and education of values, morals, and aesthetics . Folklore also played a role in nation building and perpetuated violence against minority groups through negative stereotypes in folktales . Traditional tales, like genes and languages, are products of descent with modification and are entangled with other patterns of ancestry, providing insights into the cultural success and stability of these stories . Oral traditions form the basis for establishing roots of life within a community and conceptualizing relationships with others, emphasizing the importance of idiom, metaphor, and simile in tracing origins and conceptions of life . The study of oral tradition and cultural expression in non-literate tribes helps understand and interpret their worldview, highlighting the need for interdisciplinary methods to accurately capture their cultural manifestations .

Oral traditions are cultural practices that are passed down from one generation to another through spoken words, songs, folktales, and other forms of oral communication. They serve as a means for communities to preserve their history, knowledge, and values. Oral traditions are found in various cultures around the world, such as the Simalungun community in Indonesia , local people establishing their roots and authority within a society , the diverse culture of Tamil Nadu in India , the Balinese-Hindu community in Lombok , and African dramaturgy . These traditions play a significant role in shaping identity, transmitting cultural heritage, and communicating important messages. They are a reflection of the customs, beliefs, and practices of a society, providing insights into its daily life and worldview.

Trending Questions

Art in primary education plays a crucial role in fostering creativity, cognitive development, and overall well-being in children. Integrating art into school curricula from primary to higher education levels is essential for enhancing students' academic performance, self-esteem, and artistic sensibilities . Research indicates that visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli in arts education significantly contribute to the development of creative thinking in children, leading to improved creative abilities . Additionally, immersive methods in art education help students think creatively, become active citizens, and enhance their communication skills, ultimately encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving through visual expression . Furthermore, art lessons in preschool and primary schools are fundamental for forming well-rounded personalities, nurturing creativity, and developing abstract thinking and artistic taste in children, which are vital for their future growth and success .

Social media has a significant impact on college students' time management, affecting their academic pursuits and overall well-being. Research studies have shown that students spend excessive amounts of time on social media platforms, leading to a decrease in commitment to academic activities, inefficient time management abilities, and mood swings . Additionally, the fear of missing out on social media content drives students to engage in multitasking, which further hampers their academic performance . Conversely, some studies suggest that social media can positively influence students' academic achievements by enhancing their focus and investment in studies . However, the excessive use of social media can also consume a significant portion of students' free time, diverting their attention from more productive activities and impacting their overall time management skills .

Stylistics plays a crucial role in creating an immersive and engaging narrative experience by utilizing various linguistic and narratological features to draw readers or viewers into the storyworld . Through stylistic analysis, critical language awareness can be developed, enabling readers to assess ideologies transmitted in discourse and fostering critical thinking by helping them understand the interpretative nature of text meanings . Additionally, in the realm of advertising, narratives that are more relevant and vivid can enhance advertising persuasiveness by increasing emotional engagement and decreasing skepticism, ultimately leading to more positive attitudes towards the ad and brand . Moreover, in cinematic virtual reality, the choice of point of view (POV) significantly impacts narrative engagement, with the first-person perspective (1-PP) potentially offering a more immersive experience than the external perspective (EP) if effectively utilized .

Work from home, also known as telework or telecommuting, has a long history that dates back to the 1970s in the United States . However, the concept of working from home has evolved significantly over time, with the post-industrial era witnessing a notable trend towards the home becoming a central hub for work activities, blurring the traditional boundaries between work and home environments . The rise of teleworking, enabled by advancements in information and communication technologies, has been a key driver in the increasing prevalence of remote work arrangements, with a substantial portion of the workforce, around 11%, reported to be working mainly from home as of 2005 . This shift towards remote work has been further accelerated by external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reshaped traditional work settings and highlighted the importance of flexible work arrangements that include working from home .

Mental imagery plays a crucial role in shaping human-robot interaction by influencing various aspects of the interaction process. Research suggests that humans form mental images of 3D scenes to support counterfactual imagination, planning, and motor control, which can aid in manipulation tasks and action planning . Additionally, mental models provide a formal mechanism for achieving fluent and effective teamwork during human-robot interaction, enabling awareness between teammates and coordinated action . Imagined contact with a robot, similar to real interactions, can improve human-robot interaction quality and elicit more positive behaviors towards the robot, showcasing the impact of mental simulations on interaction perception and behavior . Furthermore, human mental models of robot agents can affect decision-making and subjective assessment during interactions, with participants' action choices revealing information about their mental models of virtual agents, highlighting the potential for improving human-robot interactions through inferred human models of robot agents .

What Exactly Is the Science of Reading?

• Posted June 25, 2024
• By Elizabeth M. Ross
• Language and Literacy Development

Last summer Nonie Lesaux , a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who leads a research program that seeks to improve literacy outcomes for children and youth, was approached with a problem. The New York State Education Department (NYSED) needed to help the 600-plus school districts that the state agency serves better understand what scientific research had to say about how children learn strong reading and writing skills. Their query came at a time when powerful public advocacy for bringing the science of reading to classrooms, which had been steadily gaining momentum, had reached a fever pitch.

Over roughly the past decade, 38 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or introduced policies that aim to bring literacy instruction in line with decades of interdisciplinary research on the science of reading. In New York, in fact, Governor Kathy Hochul introduced a plan earlier this year to have schools in the state adopt science-based methods to improve reading instruction by September 2025.

When they approached her last summer, administrators at NYSED told Lesaux that many school district leaders and educators across the state felt “angst, confusion, and worry about the science of reading.” They weren’t sure what the term meant exactly — they had lots of questions, and they needed clarity and resources, she says, to help them “cut through a lot of noise,” including some misconceptions. 

So Lesaux produced a series of seven briefs to help the educators better understand the research, as well as the work that is needed. The briefs explore key ideas and myths about the science of reading, and leadership strategies for those in New York’s preK–12 systems who are working to improve literacy and provide professional learning supports.

Lesaux recently discussed the briefs, as well as how they have been received.

You worked with NYSED on a series of literacy briefs back in 2017. How did you build on that previous work with this new set of briefs?

Literacy is still the multifaceted, complex construct that it always has been, and the demands on the learner and the citizen today, in this global knowledge-based economy, are significant. You have to develop literacy skills to a level that is much higher than might have been necessary even 25 years ago, for entry into the workforce and for a good wage and income and lifestyle — that hasn't changed. … There is some overlap [in the briefs] because the knowledge base didn't change much. I think what changed, which was super important for the field, is the public became much clearer that there are effective and ineffective ways to teach early word reading.

In your first brief, you say that the science of reading reflects more than 50 years of research across multiple disciplines about how children successfully learn to read and write. If there is so much research and evidence, why has there been so much confusion about effective literacy instruction?

I think what has created some of the confusion is that there are a couple curricula and approaches that took hold at large scale — this kind of “leveled reader” approach, “balanced literacy” —  and the field took that up and the research was not there. In fact, it's deleterious for some kids because it's not the right approach. It's true that phonics instruction should be very explicit and direct, and that is not the same as teaching language and comprehension. And we need the language and comprehension teaching, but we can't confuse the two. And I think for far too long there was sort of this text-based approach to teaching phonics that wasn't actually the explicit direct instruction that a very significant number of children both need and respond so well to. But I think the danger is that we then swing the pendulum and pit the two ideas against each other, ideologically, and create this thing called “the reading wars,” when in fact we know we need a strong plan for phonics, and we need a strong plan for language and comprehension. It sounds so basic, and yet the politics and some of the ideologies of what it feels like to educate in developmentally appropriate ways got in the way of all of this. You know, rote explicit phonics instruction only needs to be about 20 minutes a day, but if you overdo it and it becomes synonymous with your reading instruction, you don't have a very engaging academic environment. When you do it really well and in the short burst that every first and second grader needs, it becomes very reinforcing and exciting because kids see their growth.

In one of your briefs, you set out to debunk common myths about the science of reading and you point out that learning to read and reading to learn should not be two distinct stages. You say effective teaching aims to teach all skills simultaneously from the earliest years?

Yeah, we need to stop pitting the two and we need to do both really well…. [and be] honest about the fact that there are lots of kids who don't have a vulnerability in the phonics area and don’t need more than the standard foundational instruction in this area, but who have very underdeveloped vocabulary and comprehension skills, you know, à la achievement opportunity gaps, and need a lot of content building knowledge. So, if we turn around and only do structured rote phonics programs, ad nauseum, they’re no better off for the long run.

What you mentioned about building up students’ background knowledge, to assist with reading comprehension, makes me think about the work of HGSE’s Jimmy Kim , correct?

Definitely. Jimmy’s portfolio of research has shed light on the effective strategies and the complexity of building up knowledge and comprehension skills. The same is true for Meredith Rowe's vocabulary work . There are others at HGSE, like Nadine Gaab with her [dyslexia] screening work , whose research is equally important. We’re all in the same fight together, contributing in specific ways for the same outcomes, but we're all looking at different pieces.

Regardless of which pieces we’re each focused on, some of the feedback that I get repeatedly [from school districts] is that it's so helpful that we step back and look at the policy and practice landscape and look at what the research really tells us about where we are, and then craft guidance in the form of resources and tools.

Additional resources

• American Public Radio's Sold a Story podcast

Separating Fact from Fiction About the Science of Reading

• The Science of Reading Literacy Briefs, NYSED
• Harvard Ed. magazine explores the next phase of the Reach Every Reader initiative
• Professor Catherine Snow puts the "literacy crisis" in context on the Harvard EdCast

Usable Knowledge

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Related Articles

Phase Two: The Reach

Reach Every Reader on its impact and the project’s next phase

New literacy briefs correct common myths and misconceptions 

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Recommended steps for backing up bibliographic data will vary depending on your software of choice (Zotero, EndNote or RefWorks) - more information can be found on the guide for Data Management Planning - Storage & Backup . 

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Covidence works with reference managers (e.g.,EndNote, Zotero, Refworks, Mendeley) to screen results for the purposes of systematic reviews and other research projects.

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Tutorials: Exporting Records from Databases into Covidence

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PRISMA - Checklist & Diagram

PRISMA ( P referred R eporting I tems for S ystematic R eviews and M eta- A nalyses) is an evidence-based set of minimum items for reporting information in systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Specific PRISMA resources include:

Prisma checklist.

• A 27 item checklist whose items refer to the preferred content of a for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including suggested content for the title, abstract, methods, results, discussion and funding.

PRISMA Extensions

• Extensions to the PRISMA Checklist to facilitate the reporting of different types or aspects of systematic reviews/meta-analyses (e.g., checklists for reporting scoping reviews, individual patient data)

PRISMA Diagram Templates

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PRISMA Data Table

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Example PRISMA Diagram 

Source: 

Stotz, S. A., McNealy, K., Begay, R. L., DeSanto, K., Manson, S. M., & Moore, K. R. (2021). Multi-level diabetes prevention and treatment interventions for Native people in the USA and Canada: A scoping review.  Current Diabetes Reports, 2 (11), 46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11892-021-01414-3

Video Overview: Filling Out a PRISMA Flow Diagram (2020 Version; 8 minutes, 32 seconds)

Still have questions about constructing a PRISMA diagram using the 2020 template? 

This article, published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association, answers some frequently asked questions about using the PRISMA 2020 format. 

Rethlefsen, M. L., & Page, M. J. (2022). PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-S: common questions on tracking records and the flow diagram.  Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA ,  110 (2), 253–257. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2022.1449 

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Octavio A. Gonzalez: 2024-25 University Research Professor Q&A

UKNow is highlighting the University of Kentucky’s 2024-25 University Research Professors.   Established by the Board of Trustees in 1976, the professorship program recognizes excellence across the full spectrum of research at UK and is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research.   

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 27, 2024) —  Octavio A. Gonzalez, D.D.S., Ph.D., a professor in the Center for Oral Health Research and Division of Periodontology in the UK College of Dentistry with a secondary appointment in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics in the College of Medicine , has been honored as a 2024-25 University Research Professor.

Gonzalez joined UK in 2010. His research focuses on identifying cellular and molecular mechanisms through which oral pathogenic bacteria and aging affect the gum’s tissue responses. These responses can lead to oral inflammation and loss of the tissues that support the teeth, like gum disease, also known as periodontitis.

His research has been continuously funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) since 2004.    

Gonzalez spoke with UKNow about his latest honor as a University Research Professor in this Q&A.

UKNow: What does it mean to you to be recognized as a University Research Professor?

Gonzalez: It represents a tremendous honor for me. Being recognized as a University Research Professor reminds me that the teamwork in our lab every day is serving to strengthen research as one of the fundamental pillars of our university. It’s also having a positive impact in our colleagues, students and the overall UK community. 

UKNow: How will the professorships program advance your research?

Gonzalez: The professorships program will advance our research by significantly raising the bar of motivation to continue working in oral health research and supporting the development of new experimental work for future grant proposals. It will also help us to recruit and work with new students showing interest in our research. 

UKNow: How does your research address challenges facing Kentucky?

Gonzalez: Periodontitis affects about 50% of the U.S. and Kentucky adult population. This number increases with aging, affecting 65% of people over the age of 65. Importantly, periodontitis not only has local effects — destruction of gum and bone tissues leading to tooth loss — but it has also systemic impact as risk factor for diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. All these are chronic diseases whose prevalence increases with aging and are affecting a high number of Kentuckians. Therefore, the identification of new potential preventive and therapeutic possibilities to control periodontitis more efficiently will contribute to improving oral health as well as systemic health of Kentuckians.

UKNow: What impact will your research have on Kentucky?

Gonzalez: Our research will provide the foundation for the development of new preventive and therapeutic alternatives to control periodontitis more efficiently in adult and elderly patients in Kentucky and the U.S. Such alternatives will be based on specific or personalized host modulation of inflammation and/or specific control of oral pathogenic bacteria as adjunctive therapies to currently approved mechanical cleaning or debridement treatments.

In addition, our research will have a positive impact in the education of future generations of dentists and scientists in Kentucky who would take forward the important task of improving oral health through research.

About the University Research Professors Each year, the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees approves a cohort of faculty as University Research Professors . The distinction recognizes excellence in work that addresses scientific, social, cultural and economic challenges in Kentucky and the world.

College leadership developed criteria for excellence within their area of expertise and then nominated faculty who excelled at these criteria. Each University Research Professor receives a one-year award of $10,000 and participates in other events planned around the program.

UK HealthCare is the hospitals and clinics of the University of Kentucky. But it is so much more. It is more than 10,000 dedicated health care professionals committed to providing advanced subspecialty care for the most critically injured and ill patients from the Commonwealth and beyond. It also is the home of the state’s only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, a Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit that cares for the tiniest and sickest newborns, the region’s only Level 1 trauma center and Kentucky’s top hospital ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

As an academic research institution, we are continuously pursuing the next generation of cures, treatments, protocols and policies. Our discoveries have the potential to change what’s medically possible within our lifetimes. Our educators and thought leaders are transforming the health care landscape as our six health professions colleges teach the next generation of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health care professionals, spreading the highest standards of care. UK HealthCare is the power of advanced medicine committed to creating a healthier Kentucky, now and for generations to come. 

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Exploring the Mouth’s Microbial Wonders

Scientific expeditions into the oral cavity reveal how microbes shape health  .

To microbes, our mouth is an entire world unto itself — the gums, tongue, and teeth are habitats as distinct as the earth’s jungles, deserts, and Arctic. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms that live in and on us — collectively known as our microbiome, or microbiota — inhabit nooks and crannies throughout the oral cavity, like animals and insects finding their homes in trees, sand dunes, and snow.

Some of these microbes cause oral diseases such as tooth decay, gum disease, lesions, and oral cancer, or are associated to systemic conditions like diabetes, dementia, and heart disease. An unhealthy microbiome can even drive formation of harmful viruses in the oral cavity. Yet most microbes promote health. They crowd out disease-causing germs to protect their turf, train the immune system to recognize harmful bugs, and spew tiny molecules that fight foes. Knowing which organisms are where, how they interact with each other, and why they behave the way they do is crucial for maintaining our oral and overall health and well-being.

For over 65 years, NIDCR-supported scientists have explored the oral cavity to understand this microbial world. In past decades, scientists at the institute demonstrated that the bacteria that cause tooth decay are transmissible and infectious and that certain bacteria cause gum disease, pushing the relationships between microbes and health into the spotlight. These early studies were the first to establish the concept of the microbiome, and they laid the groundwork for later research on the microbiome in other parts of the body. Multiple NIDCR-supported projects, including the Human Microbiome Project and the Human Oral Microbiome Database, enabled scientists to take detailed censuses of these tiny players, producing comprehensive maps of microbial communities across the body.

Today, building on decades of knowledge, oral microbiome research continues to flourish. Some NIDCR-supported scientists are investigating how microbes populate the oral landscape and, like miniscule city planners, build tiny towns. Other researchers are studying molecules that nourish health-promoting microbes and suppress disease-driving ones to identify prebiotics that could improve oral health. Scientists have studied relationships between the oral microbiome and multiple systemic diseases. Still others are exploring oral microbial “dark matter,” the microbes that scientists know exist, based on genomic studies, but cannot be grown and studied in petri dishes. These mysterious microorganisms are also sometimes called “uncultivables.”

“Because of the mouth’s accessibility, it was the first and remains one of the most-studied body sites in human microbiome research,” said NIDCR Deputy Director Jennifer Webster-Cyriaque, D.D.S., Ph.D. “The oral microbiome has provided insights into microbial ecology and host-immune responses and disease within the mouth and throughout the body. It is a crucial component of both oral and systemic health.”

Fantastic Microbes and Where to Find Them

While the microbial communities in the mouth are exposed to the same temperatures, saliva, and immune factors, they’re not just random groupings of cells and organisms. By growing bacteria in the lab and sequencing their DNA, scientists have discovered that the microbial composition of the cheek linings, roof of the mouth, and even above and below the gumline are distinct. However, these methods only reveal the general region where microbes live. It’s like knowing a zip code but not an address.

To pinpoint the exact locations of the bacteria in these microbial communities, senior scientist Jessica Mark Welch, Ph.D., and senior investigator Gary Borisy, Ph.D., of the ADA Forsyth Institute, designed a new imaging method that color-labels eight to 10 groups of bacteria at once. Peering into scrapings from dental plaque and tongues of healthy participants with this new method, the scientists were able to visualize microbial towns in rainbow hues.

In the dental plaque samples, the town center was composed of a magenta-stained bacterial species called Corynebacterium , with long filaments that anchor to teeth. Bordering these filaments, making up the outskirts of the town, were tiny green spheres of oxygen- and sugar-consuming Streptococcus . Orange Aggregatibacter often neighbored Streptococcus , feeding off the acidic molecules they produce. Below this initial layer of microbes resided carbon-dioxide-loving, oxygen-averse bacteria like Capnocytophaga and Fusobacterium , stained in red and yellow, respectively.

“These microbial structures function in much the same way that an oak tree provides a habitat for birds, squirrels, and other creatures,” said Dr. Mark Welch. “We haven’t seen any microbial organization as complex as what we see in the human mouth.”

The NIDCR-supported study, published in 2016, offered a new perspective on the oral microbiome, revealing functions and microbial relationships that couldn’t be gleaned from genomics alone. Drs. Mark Welch and Borisy continue to map other oral sites using imaging and DNA sequencing. They believe learning where bacteria live and what they do can reveal strategies to encourage growth of health-promoting bacteria in the mouth.

“This world of bacteria is just so amazing — they build bacterial high rises and microbial apartment buildings in your mouth,” said Dr. Mark Welch. “It’s been right there forever, and yet we’re only just now seeing it.”

Friend or Foe?

Residents of these oral microbial towns are deeply interconnected. In some cases, they work together to drive disease. In other cases, they compete for turf and resources. These microbial interplays can sway our health in one direction or the other.

S. sputigena cells (red) form a honeycomb-like structure (left) that encapsulates S. mutans (green, right) to increase and concentrate the acid that boosts cavity development. | Hyun (Michel) Koo, University of Pennsylvania

A recent NIDCR-supported study found that the bacterium Streptococcus mutans , a major driver of tooth decay, has a partner in crime — Selenomonas sputigena . The team found that S. sputigena forms a honeycomb-like structure that encases S. mutans to increase and concentrate the production of tooth-damaging acid, which boosted tooth decay in mice. Breaking up this bacterial duo, which is linked to tooth decay in children, could be a caries prevention strategy. The study was led by Kimon Divaris, D.D.S., Ph.D., and Di Wu, Ph.D., at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Hyun (Michel) Koo, D.D.S., Ph.D., from the University of Pennsylvania.

S. mutans can even form cross-kingdom partnerships to promote tooth decay. Dr. Koo and collaborators recently discovered that S. mutans can hitch a piggyback ride on oral fungi. In lab experiments, the bacteria and fungi formed a superorganism that “walked” and “lunged” across tooth-like surfaces by using the fungi’s fiber-like hyphae as legs. These movements allow the microbes to spread faster and farther than either organism alone, shedding light on the interplay between microbes and disease.

Recent studies from Jessica Scoffield, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham showed that a friendly bacterium found in healthy microbiomes called Streptococcus parasanguinis is a gatekeeper of oral health. This bacterium can help turn nitrite, a byproduct of dietary nitrate abundant in leafy greens like spinach and lettuce, into antimicrobial molecules. In 2019, Dr. Scoffield’s team showed that rats that had been colonized with S. parasanguinis and drank nitrite-laced water had less tooth decay after being infected with disease-driving S. mutans than those that did not receive nitrite.

“The presence of nitrite or nitrate reduces the ability of tooth-decay-causing pathogens to eat sugar,” said Dr. Scoffield. “The findings also highlight the importance of a healthy diet — eat your leafy green vegetables.”

More recently, her team found that nitrite aids S. parasanguinis in suppressing the growth of oral pathogens, assuring the healthy bacterium’s dominance. Nitrite triggers the bacterium to produce unique metabolic signals that kill pathogens while protecting itself, a previously unknown phenomenon.

The NIDCR-supported study suggests that nitrite might be useful as a prebiotic to foster oral health. It also opens a door to new research on how metabolic signals alter the structure and function of oral microbial communities, which may lead to potential therapeutics.

Oral Microbial “Dark Matter”

While the mouth is arguably the most well-studied microbial habitat in our body, out of the 774 known oral bacterial species, one-third are considered microbial “dark matter.” Scientists know these microbes exist because they can detect their DNA, but they struggle to grow them in labs. For this reason, these elusive bacteria are also sometimes called “uncultivables.”

Many dark matter species belong to a group of ultra-tiny bacteria called candidate phyla radiation (CPR). The family was first described in 1981 and is found almost everywhere: in soil, seawater, hot springs, termite guts, and humans. But no one had successfully isolated them, and they had remained elusive until 2015, when senior scientist Xuesong He, D.D.S., Ph.D., of the ADA Forsyth Institute, first grew a CPR bacterium called Nanosynbacter lyticus strain TM7x (TM7x for short) in the lab.

Sphere-shaped TM7x bacteria (light gray) are physically bound to the rod-like S. odontolytica . The two microbes live a symbiotic lifestyle. | Xuesong He, ADA Forsyth Institute

As it turns out, it was impossible to isolate and grow TM7x bacteria on their own because these nano-sized spherical cells are physically bound to their rod-shaped host, Schaalia odontolytica .

“TM7x is missing a lot of genes that allow it to exist as a free-living bacterium,” said Dr. He. “For example, they cannot produce many of the amino acids that are building blocks for life. They must suck up nutrients from the host, and that explains their reliance.”

Dr. He’s team dove into studying the relationship between TM7x and S. odontolytica . In an NIDCR-supported study, they found that although TM7x is parasitic, which hampers the growth of its host and can even kill the host, there are benefits to the relationship. TM7x protects the host from predators called phages that hunt and kill bacteria. It does this by influencing gene expression in the host, causing changes to the structure of molecules on the host’s surface, which helps prevent phages from attaching to and destroying the bacterium.

Previous research has revealed links among TM7x, gum disease, and other inflammatory diseases. However, Dr. He and his long-time collaborator Batbileg Bor, Ph.D., at ADA Forsyth Institute say the disease connection is complex. In their lab experiments, introducing the host, S. odontolytica , by itself into mice triggered gum inflammation. But colonizing mice with S. odontolytica along with TM7x caused inflammation to subside, pointing to TM7x’s potential as a health-protective organism.

“All the knowledge we’ve gained can be a roadmap to understand other uncultivable bugs,” Dr. He said. “In addition, it is estimated that over 25% of Earth's microbial species have a symbiotic lifestyle similar to TM7x.”

What the Future Holds

Today, multiple NIDCR-supported projects continue to build on the foundation of microbial knowledge gained to date, aiming to turn lab discoveries into better health and well-being. One group of researchers is identifying health-promoting oral bacteria to develop probiotics to maintain oral health. Others are exploring an innovative dental filling that can fight disease-causing bacteria through small pulses of electricity. Many more are characterizing the microbial communities that contribute to certain diseases, and more importantly, how to restore balance to the oral microbiome and shift disease to health.

“As we unravel the intricate relationships among microbes, disease, and health, we open up opportunities for innovative treatments and preventative strategies,” said Tamara McNealy, Ph.D., Director of NIDCR’s Oral Microbiota and Bacterial Disease Program. “Understanding the oral microbiome is important not just for the teeth and gums; it’s about the health of the entire body.”

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Related Links

• Big Hopes for Little Teeth
• Creepy Crawlies on the Teeth
• A Microbial World on the Top of Your Tongue
• Mark Welch JL, Rossetti BJ, Rieken CW, Dewhirst FE, Borisy GG. Biogeography of a human oral microbiome at the micron scale . Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Feb 9;113(6):E791-800. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1522149113. Epub 2016 Jan 25. 
• Cho H, Ren Z, Divaris K, Roach J, Lin BM, Liu C, et al. Selenomonas sputigena acts as a pathobiont mediating spatial structure and biofilm virulence in early childhood caries . Nat Commun. 2023 May 22;14(1):2919. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-38346-3.
• Scoffield J, Michalek S, Harber G, Eipers P, Morrow C, Wu H. Dietary Nitrite Drives Disease Outcomes in Oral Polymicrobial Infections . J Dent Res. 2019 Aug;98(9):1020-1026. doi: 10.1177/0022034519855348. Epub 2019 Jun 20.
• Huffines JT, Stoner SN, Baty JJ, Scoffield JA. Nitrite Triggers Reprogramming of the Oral Polymicrobial Metabolome by a Commensal Streptococcus . Front Cell Infect Microbiol. 2022 Mar 1;12:833339. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2022.833339.
• He X, McLean JS, Edlund A, Yooseph S, Hall AP, Liu SY, et al. Cultivation of a human-associated TM7 phylotype reveals a reduced genome and epibiotic parasitic lifestyle . Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Jan 6;112(1):244-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1419038112.
• Zhong Q, Liao B, Liu J, Shen W, Wang J, Wei L, et al. Episymbiotic Saccharibacteria TM7x modulates the susceptibility of its host bacteria to phage infection and promotes their coexistence . Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Apr 16;121(16):e2319790121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2319790121. Epub 2024 Apr 9.

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