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_____________________________________________________________ Volume 19 October 2004 Number 2 _____________________________________________________________ Editor Managing Editor John Miles Foley Heather Maring Associate Editor Senior Editorial Assistants John Zemke Michael Barnes Editorial Assistant Andrew Porter Slavica Publishers, Inc. For a complete catalog of books from Slavica, with prices and ordering information, write to: Slavica Publishers, Inc. Indiana University 2611 E. 10th St. Bloomington, IN 47408-2603 ISSN: 0883-5365 Each contribution copyright 2004 by its author. All rights reserved. The editor and the publisher assume no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion by the authors. Oral Tradition seeks to provide a comparative and interdisciplinary focus for studies in oral literature and related fields by publishing research and scholarship on the creation, transmission, and interpretation of all forms of oral traditional expression. As well as essays treating certifiably oral traditions, OT presents investigations of the relationships between oral and written traditions, as well as brief accounts of important fieldwork, a Symposium section (in which scholars may reply at some length to prior essays), review articles, occasional transcriptions and translations of oral texts, a digest of work in progress, and a regular column for notices of conferences and other matters of interest. In addition, occasional issues will include an ongoing annotated bibliography of relevant research and the annual Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lectures on Oral Tradition. OT welcomes contributions on all oral literatures, on all literatures directly influenced by oral traditions, and on non-literary oral traditions. Submissions must follow the list-of reference format (style sheet available on request) and must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope for return or for mailing of proofs; all quotations of primary materials must be made in the original language(s) with following English translations. Authors should submit two copies of all manuscripts. Most contributions will be reviewed by at least one specialist reader and one member of the editorial board before a final decision is reached. Review essays, announcements, and contributions to the Symposium section will be evaluated by the editor in consultation with the board. Oral Tradition appears twice per year, in March and October. To enter a subscription, please contact Slavica Publishers at the address given above. All manuscripts, books for review, items for the bibliography updates, and editorial correspondence, as well as subscriptions and related inquiries should be addressed to the editor, John Miles Foley, Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, 21 Parker Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211. Printed in the United States of America. EDITORIAL BOARD Mark C. Amodio Joseph J. Duggan Vassar College Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Old and Middle English French, Spanish, comparative Patricia Arant Alan Dundes Brown University Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Russian Folklore Samuel Armistead Mark W. Edwards University of California/Davis Stanford University Hispanic, comparative Ancient Greek Richard Bauman Ruth Finnegan Indiana University Open University Folklore, Theory African, South Pacific Dan Ben-Amos Thomas Hale University of Pennsylvania Penn. State University Folklore African Mary Ellen Brown Lee Haring Indiana University Brooklyn College, CUNY Folklore, Balladry African Chogjin Joseph Harris Chinese Academy Harvard University of Social Sciences Old Norse Mongolian, Chinese Bridget Connelly Lauri Harvilahti University of Cal./Berkeley University of Helsinki Arabic Russian, Finnish, Altai Robert P. Creed Lauri Honko () Univ. of Mass./Amherst Turku University Old English, Comparative Comparative Epic Robert Culley Dell Hymes McGill University University of Virginia Biblical Studies Native American, Linguistics Thomas DuBois Martin Jaffee University of Wisconsin Hebrew Bible Scandinavian Univ. of Washington EDITORIAL BOARD Minna Skafte Jensen Shelly Fenno Quinn Odense University Ohio State University Ancient Greek, Latin Japanese Werner Kelber Burton Raffel Rice University Univ. of Southwestern Biblical Studies Louisiana Translation Françoise Létoublon Université Stendahl Karl Reichl Ancient Greek Universität Bonn Turkic, Old and Middle English Victor Mair University of Pennsylvania John Roberts Chinese Ohio State University African-American Nada Milošević-Djordjević University of Belgrade Joel Sherzer South Slavic University of Texas/Austin Native American, Anthropology Stephen Mitchell Harvard University Dennis Tedlock Scandinavian SUNY/Buffalo Native American Gregory Nagy Harvard University J. Barre Toelken Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Utah State University comparative Folklore, Native American Joseph Falaky Nagy Ronald J. Turner Univ. of Cal./Los Angeles Univ. of Missouri/Columbia Old Irish Storytelling Susan Niditch Andrew Wiget Amherst College University of New Mexico Hebrew Bible Native American Walter J. Ong () St. Louis University (Emeritus) Hermeneutics of orality and literacy Contents Editor’s Column...................................................................................... 153 H. Wakefield Foster Jazz Musicians and South Slavic Oral Epic Bards ...............................155 Robert Cochran Oblique Performance: Snapshots of Oral Tradition in Action .............177 Lillis Ó Laoire The Right Words: Conflict and Resolution in an Oral Gaelic Song Text ...................................................................187 Marie Nelson From The Book of Margery Kempe: The Trials and Triumphs of a Homeward Journey .........................................................................214 Margalit Finkelberg Oral Theory and the Limits of Formulaic Diction .................................236 Sabir Badalkhan “Lord of the Iron Bow”: The Return Pattern Motif in the Fifteenth-century Baloch Epic Hero ‹ey Mur|d............................ 253 About the Authors...................................................................................299 Editor’s Column With this issue of Oral Tradition we offer our readership perspectives on a cornucopia of traditions from around the world and from ancient times to the present day, and at the same time we inaugurate the new feature of E-Companions that will become a staple of our publication program. Wakefield Foster begins the discussion with a highly suggestive comparison between two superficially quite different kinds of traditional performers: the South Slavic guslari, or bards, from the Former Yugoslavia who are widely known for their oral epic narratives, and contemporary jazz musicians from the United States. Drawing on what investigators have reported about the training and practice of the guslari and on his own fieldwork with jazz performers (consult the E-Companion at www.oraltradition.org for actual conversations with informants), Foster engages the important issues of memory, composition, creativity, and multiformity. His comparative observations will be useful for specialists in myriad different areas, as will Robert Cochran’s study of three moments—again, superficially quite disparate—that share the quality of having been inspired by oral tradition. Looking at a young woman’s burning of love-letters behind her family’s farmhouse in northwest Arkansas, the intersection of a newsreel film and a joke tradition in Romania, and a custodians’ retirement party at the University of Arkansas, he cleverly illustrates how implied traditions of folksong, jokes, and the web of cultural predispositions associated with retirement rituals act as supporting frames for the performance and reception of everyday events. Next comes Lillis Ó Laoire’s fieldwork-based study of the modern Gaelic song tradition in Tory Island, off the northwest coast of Ireland. Taking into account both comparative theory and the real-life experience gained over twenty years of in situ collection and analysis, he considers the topics of orality and literacy, formulaic structure and variation, ethnic (emic) terminology for the composition of oral songs, and the nexus of individual performance and the larger tradition. Ó Laoire’s text is augmented by an E- Companion ( w w w.oraltradition.org ) that lets the reader become an audience by making available the audio recordings of the very song-performances discussed in the article. Marie Nelson concerns herself not with a contemporary oral tradition but rather with a medieval document, The Book of Margery Kempe, whose probably non-literate author engaged scribes to write down oral accounts of her revelations twenty years after the fact. Using speech-act theory, Nelson explicates the power and resourcefulness of Kempe’s verbal duel with the clergy and in particular the transparently oral aspects of her rhetoric. Margalit Finkelberg continues this issue’s discussion with a penetrating look at the conjunction of orality and formulaic structure in the Homeric epics. Observing that the patterned phraseology of the Iliad and Odyssey is not uniform in texture, she posits a continuum of diction from the formulaic to the nonformulaic, contending that the latter kind of diction is complementary to the former and therefore not at all an argument against the oral (or oral-derived) nature of the Homeric poems. Finally, Sabir Badalkhan closes the present symposium by opening a window onto the little-studied but fascinating oral traditions of the Balochi people of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. His