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_____________________________________________________________ Volume 23 March 2008 Number 1 _____________________________________________________________ Editor John Miles Foley Managing Editor Holly Hobbs Associate Editor John Zemke Editorial Assistants IT Manager Peter Ramey Mark Jarvis 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 Miloševic-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 This page is intentionally left blank. Contents John Miles Foley Editor’s Column………………………………………………………………………………..1 Fatos Tarifa Of Time, Honor, and Memory: Oral Law in Albania…………………………………………..3 Florence Goyet Narrative Structure and Political Construction: The Epic at Work…………………………..15 Marie Nelson The Authority of the Spoken Word: Speech Acts in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court………………………………………………..28 Nancy Stork A Spanish Bishop Remembers the Future: Oral Traditions and Purgatory in Julian of Toledo…………………………………………..43 Susan Gorman When the Text Becomes the Teller: Apuleius and the Metamorphoses……………………….71 Tom Pettitt From Journalism to Gypsy Folk Song: The Road to Orality of an English Ballad…………..87 Lene Petersen De-composition in Popular Elizabethan Playtexts: A Revalidation of the Multiple Versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet................................................................118 Owain Edwards Welsh Saints’ Lives as Legendary Propaganda……………………………………………...148 Thérèse de Vet Context and the Emerging Story: Improvised Performance in Oral and Literate Societies…………………………………….159 About the Authors……………………………………………………………………………180 This page is intentionally left blank. Editor’s Column With the present issue, Oral Tradition begins its twenty-third year of publication. We are happy to report that the entire run of the journal, from the inaugural issue in 1986 through the present number, is now available as an open-access, searchable, and free-of-charge online resource. In other words, scholars and students from anywhere in the world can read or download any of approximately 500 articles on the world’s oral traditions, amounting to some 10,000 pages––all without subscription fees of any sort. And the tracking software on our server strongly indicates that they have been doing just that: people from 109 different countries, using browsers in nearly 50 languages, have visited the site. Just as importantly, we are now receiving submissions from a much wider range of potential authors, many of them based in areas where they have firsthand experience of thriving oral traditions. We look forward to helping more people join the international conversation that Oral Tradition was long ago established to support. Fatos Tarifa begins this issue with a fascinating account of the roots of Albanian “customary law” in oral tradition. Purportedly formulated by the fifteenth-century Prince Dukagjini, this body of law was passed down orally for many generations and “shaped and dominated the lives of northern Albanians until well into the mid-twentieth century.” Next, Florence Goyet proposes a new theory of what oral and oral-derived epic actually do for a society: namely, they compare contemporary visions of the world, offering audiences an instrument for thinking about and evaluating alternatives. Her essay considers the ancient Greek Iliad, the Old French Song of Roland, and the Japanese Hôgen and Heiji monogatari. Next comes an essay on Mark Twain’s (highly literate and literary) novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which Marie Nelson explores the author Clemens’ use of simulated oral speech-acts to trigger certain kinds of realities and hoped-for responses. In a similar vein if also in a very different kind of work, Nancy P. Stork finds “traditions of oral memory and composition” operative even in as thoroughly textual a document as Julian of Toledo’s Prognosticon, written in seventh-century Visigothic Spain. The next five articles show a similar variety in subject and breadth of approach. Susan Gorman studies Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, in the context of second-century Roman public readings, called recitationes, arguing that this work creates a new kind of politically valenced storytelling. As a counterweight to the prevailing evolutionary notion of oral-to-written, Tom Pettitt examines the evidence for the source and transmission of a Gypsy folk ballad that had its origin in a printed broadside and was subsequently absorbed into the vibrant oral tradition of English folk song. Lene Petersen likewise productively problematizes oral and written in her analysis of Elizabethan playtexts, specifically Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, arguing that laws of variation governing folk narrative are also applicable in playtext transmission. Narrative strategies––methods for effective storytelling, in short––are the focus of Owain Edwards’ treatment of the legend of St. David, the Welsh patron saint, in versions of which he locates certain propagandistic motives. Finally, Thérèse de Vet reports on her fieldwork on performances of Balinese oral epic, comparing what she has uncovered with the oral-derived poems of Homer from ancient Greece. Let me close this column with a special invitation to those of you who have discovered Oral Tradition via the internet, which in many ways I take to be its most natural home.1 Please share your research and ideas by sending us your contributions for possible publication. We can offer prompt evaluation (usually 60-90 days), the opportunity to include multimedia illustrations (audio, video, photographs, etc.) to accompany your text, and not least an increasingly large and extremely diverse international audience. John Miles Foley Editor, Oral Tradition http://journal.oraltradition.org 1 See further Foley, “Navigating Pathways: Oral Tradition and the Internet,” Academic Intersections, 2 (Spring 2008): http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=13163 . Oral Tradition, 23/1 (2008): 3-14 Of Time, Honor, and Memory: Oral Law in Albania Fatos Tarifa This essay provides a historical account of the role of oral tradition in passing on from generation to generation an ancient code of customary law that has shaped and dominated the lives of northern Albanians until well into the mid-twentieth century. This traditional body of customary law is known as the Kode of Lekë Dukagjini. It represents a series of norms, mores, and injunctions that were passed down by word of mouth for generations and reputedly originally formulated by Lekë Dukagjini, an Albanian prince and companion-in-arms to Albania’s national hero, George Kastriot Skanderbeg (1405-68). Lekë Dukagjini ruled the territories of Pulati, Puka, Mirdita, Lura, and Luma in northern Albania—known today as the region of Dukagjini—until the Ottoman armies seized Albania’s northernmost city of Shkodër in 1479. Throughout the past five to six centuries this corpus of customary law has been referred to as Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, Kanuni i Malsisë (the Code of the Highlands), or Kanuni i maleve (the Code of the Mountains). The “Code” is an inexact term, since Kanun, deriving from the Greek kanon, simultaneously signifies “norm,” “rule,” and “measure.” The Kanun, but most particularly the norm of vengeance, or blood taking, as its standard punitive apparatus, continue to this day to be a subject of historical, sociological, anthropological, and juridical interest involving

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