_____________________________________________________________ Volume 24 October 2009 Number 2 _____________________________________________________________ Editor John Miles Foley Managing Editor Peter Ramey Associate Editor John Zemke Editorial Assistants IT Manager Sarah Zurhellen Mark Jarvis Dan Stahl EDITORIAL BOARD Mark C. Amodio Thomas DuBois Vassar College University of Wisconsin Old and Middle English Scandinavian Patricia Arant Joseph J. Duggan Brown University Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Russian French, Spanish, comparative Samuel Armistead Alan Dundes (✝) University of California/Davis Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Hispanic, comparative Folklore Richard Bauman Mark W. Edwards Indiana University Stanford University Folklore, Theory Ancient Greek Dan Ben-Amos Ruth Finnegan University of Pennsylvania Open University Folklore African, South Pacific Mark Bender Thomas Hale Ohio State University Penn. State University Chinese 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 Finnish Literature Society 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 EDITORIAL BOARD Martin Jaffee Walter J. Ong (✝) Hebrew Bible St. Louis University (Emeritus) Univ. of Washington Hermeneutics of orality and literacy 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 Karl Reichl Université Stendahl Universität Bonn Ancient Greek Turkic, Old and Middle English Victor Mair John Roberts University of Pennsylvania Ohio State University Chinese African-American Nada Miloševic-Djordjević Joel Sherzer University of Belgrade University of Texas/Austin South Slavic Native American, Anthropology Stephen Mitchell Dennis Tedlock Harvard University SUNY/Buffalo Scandinavian Native American Gregory Nagy J. Barre Toelken Harvard University Utah State University Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Folklore, Native American comparative 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 Sound Effects Neil Rhodes and Chris Jones, Special Editors Contents Editor’s Column ..........................................................................................279 Neil Rhodes and Chris Jones Sound Effects: The Oral/Aural Dimensions of Literature in English: Introduction .................................................................................................281 Andy Orchard The Word Made Flesh: Christianity and Oral Culture in Anglo-Saxon Verse.................................. 293 Alice Jorgensen The Trumpet and the Wolf: Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry............ 319 John Wesley Mulcaster’s Tyrant Sound............................................................................ 337 Patricia Parker Shakespeare’s Sound Government: Sound Defects, Polyglot Sounds, and Sounding Out ..................................359 Neil Rhodes On Speech, Print, and New Media: Thomas Nashe and Marshall McLuhan ......................................................373 James Mulholland James Macpherson’s Ossian Poems, Oral Traditions, and the Invention of Voice ...........................................................................393 Dianne Dugaw Theorizing Orality and Performance in Literary Anecdote and History: Boswell’s Diaries.................................. 415 Tom Pettitt Written Composition and (Mem)oral Decomposition: The Case of “The Suffolk Tragedy” ............................................................429 Bruce Johnson Sites of Sound ..............................................................................................455 Derek Attridge Joyce’s Noises.............................................................................................. 471 Chris Jones Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century............................................ 485 Emily Greenwood Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue’s Acoustic Homer .....................503 About the Authors ........................................................................................519 Editor’s Column Sound Effects traces the history of the relationship between oral conditions and aural effect in English literature from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through to the twenty- first century. Few collections nowadays, other than textbook histories, would attempt a survey of their field from the early middle ages to the present day, and it is not our intention here to offer a continuous narrative. But despite the many centuries covered by this collection, the reader will find that certain themes recur in different contexts and that the individual essays speak to each other, often over long distances of time. It ends where it might have begun, with Homer, though in modern English form. The effect of this pattern is to create an “envelope” structure in which the ancient oral forms of Greek and Anglo-Saxon verse reappear as contexts for understanding how these forms survive and how sound works in the poetry of the modern world. The scope of the volume is also determined by its subject, since we are concerned with tradition as well as with the oral and aural. In particular, we are concerned with how literary production and reception respond to the different waves of media evolution from oral to written, manuscript to print (and the theater), and the later development of machine technology. We are not specifically concerned with the computer and the Internet, though they are an unstated presence behind the project as a whole. A subsidiary theme is the way in which sound, understood in both oral and aural terms, provides the agency through which high and low, elite and popular cultures are brought into conjunction throughout English literature. Neil Rhodes, Special Editor University of St. Andrews Chris Jones, Special Editor University of St. Andrews This page is intentionally left blank. Oral Tradition, 24/2 (2009): 281-292 Sound Effects: The Oral/Aural Dimensions of Literature in English Introduction Neil Rhodes and Chris Jones Sound Effects traces the history of the relationship between oral conditions and aural effect in English literature from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through to the twenty- first century. Few collections nowadays, other than textbook histories, would attempt a survey of their field from the early middle ages to the present day, and it is not our intention here to offer a continuous narrative. But despite the many centuries covered by this collection, the reader will find that certain themes recur in different contexts and that the individual essays speak to each other, often over long distances of time. It ends where it might have begun, with Homer, though in modern English form. The effect of this pattern is to create an “envelope” structure in which the ancient oral forms of Greek and Anglo-Saxon verse reappear as contexts for understanding how these forms survive and how sound works in the poetry of the modern world. The scope of the volume is also determined by its subject, since we are concerned with tradition as well as with the oral and aural. In particular, we are concerned with how literary production and reception respond to the different waves of media evolution from oral to written, manuscript to print (and the theater), and the later development of machine technology. We are not specifically concerned with the computer and the Internet, though they are an unstated presence behind the project as a whole. A subsidiary theme is the way in which sound, understood in both oral and aural terms, provides the agency through which high and low, elite and popular cultures are brought into conjunction throughout English literature. This collection derives from a conference held at the University of St. Andrews in 2006, one of an occasional series on the media in history as a context for literary interpretation.1 The aim of the conference was to extend our discussion of the literary media from printed text and script back to the most basic medium of all: speech. But we also wanted to explore points of 1 Publications from earlier conferences have been Rhodes and Sawday 2000 and Jones and Murphy 2002. In the case of Sound Effects we would like to take this opportunity of thanking Beth Wright for acting as conference secretary and John Wesley for his work as program coordinator; thanks also go to Fiona Benson and Beth Wright for the striking artwork. We are most grateful to John Miles Foley both for delivering one of the plenary papers and for the invitation to prepare this special issue of Oral Tradition, and also to David Crystal for generously offering to record passages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Original Pronunciation for the collection. Thanks are due finally to Michael Bull, Wes Folkerth, and Bruce Smith for their extremely helpful appraisals of the proposal for this collection, and to Kristine Johanson for her indispensable