THE USES OF TRADITION A COMPARATIVE ENQUIRY INTO THE NATURE, USES AND FUNCTIONS OF ORAU POETRY IN THE BALKANS, THE BALTIC, AND AFRICA EDITED BY MICHAEL BRANCH AND CELIA HAWKESWORTH School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki THE USES OF TRADITION A Comparative Enquiry into the Nature, Uses and Functions of Oral Poetry in the Balkans, the Baltic, and Africa Edited by MICHAEL BRANCH and CELIA HAWKESWORTH London 1994 School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London Finnish Literature Society Helsinki Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) https://archive.org/details/SSEES0008 THE USES OF TRADITION A Comparative Enquiry into the Nature, Uses and Functions of Oral Poetry in the Balkans, the Baltic and Africa THE USES OF TRADITION: A COMPARATIVE ENQUIRY INTO THE NATURE, USES AND FUNCTIONS OF ORAL POETRY IN THE BALKANS, THE BALTIC, AND AFRICA Edited by Michael Branch and Celia Hawkesworth The Uses of Tradition A Comparative Enquiry into the Nature, Uses and Functions of Oral Poetry in the Balkans, the Baltic, and Africa © School of Slavonic and East European Studies 1994 SSEES Occasional Papers No. 26 ISBN: 0 903425 38 6 Finland ISBN: 951 111 842 5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any other form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Copies of this publication and others in the School's refereed series of Occasional Papers can be obtained from the Publications and Conferences Office, SSEES, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7EEU. The cover illustration is from a frieze on the main entrance to the University of Helsinki by C. Sjostrand and entitled The Music of Vainamoinen' (1866). Printed by Quom Selective Repro Ltd CONTENTS List of Contributors ix Foreword xi Celia Hawkesworth, Michael Branch The Impact of the South Slav Tradition 1. The impact of Vuk Karadzic on the tradition: 3 the importance for Homer Albert B. Lord 2. Vuk Karadzic and the achievement of his singers 23 Svetozar Koljevic 3. The study of South Slav oral poetry: a select annotated 37 bibliography of works in English (1800-1980) Celia Hawkesworth The Study of Serbo-Croat Tradition 4. The poetics of the Serbian Oral tradition of Vuk Karadzic 51 Nada Milosevic-Djordjevic 5. The collections of oral lyric (women’s songs) arranged 69 and published by Vuk Karadzic: the earliest ritualistic layers Hatidza Krnjevic 6. The classification of Serbo-Croat oral epic songs into 75 cycles: reasons and consequences Marija Kleut 1. Poems and events: historicity in Serbo-Croat oral epics 83 Jovan D ere tic 8. South Slav oral tradition in a comparative context 97 John Miles Foley . LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS RODERICK BEATON is Koraes Professor of Modem Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King’s College, University of London. MICHAEL BRANCH is Professor of Finnish and Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. ROBERT COCKCROFT is Lecturer in English, University of Nottingham. JOVAN DERETIC is Professor of Serbian Literature, University of Belgrade. JOHN MILES FOLEY is Byler Professor of English and Classics, Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, University of Missouri. ELIZABETH GUNNER is Lecturer in African Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. LAURI HARVILAHTI is Research Fellow, Academy of Finland. A.T. HATTO is Emeritus Professor of German, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. CELIA HAWKESWORTH is Senior Lecturer in Serbo-Croat Language and Literature, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. MARIJA KLEUT is Professor of Oral Literature, University of Novi Sad. SEPPO KNUUTTILA is Research Fellow, Finnish Literature Society, Joensuu. SVETOZAR KOLJEVIC is Professor of English Literature, University of Novi Sad. HATID2A KRNJEVIC Is Research Fellow, Institute of Literature, Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade. ALBERT BATES LORD was Emeritus Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, Harvard University. X CONTRIBUTORS NADA MILOSEVIC-DJORDJEVIC is Professor of Oral Literature, University of Belgrade. KARL REICHL is Professor of Anglistik, Rheinische Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universitat, Bonn. SAID SAMATAR is Professor of African History, Rutgers State University of New Jersey. LEEA VIRTANEN is Professor of Folklore, University of Helsinki. VILMOS VOIGT is Professor of Folklore, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest. FOREWORD The momentous developments that we have witnessed in the last four years as first the former Soviet Union and then, more recently, Yugoslavia started the process of fragmentation into groups of smaller independent nation-states, can have left few of us in any doubt about the potency of concepts such as national identity and ethnicity. Fundamental social and political changes in South Africa underline that potency, and throw a stark light on the daunting need to understand national identity and ethnicity: both what they are and what they are perceived to be. Among the myriad of factors that go into the shaping of a sense of identity and ethnicity is oral tradition. To state that is scarcely new. Ever since Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744-1803) work at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the association of identity with a local language, often without a literary form, and the cultural tradition conveyed through that language have been a powerful force in re¬ drawing the map of the world. What is less widely known — though it may seem a commonplace to anthropologists and specialists in the comparative study of early literature — are other uses and functions of oral tradition that date back to times long before Herder and can be strikingly universal in their nature and applicability. Such uses and functions can vary from the accompaniment to ritual activity or the maintenance of kin or village identity to the development of an aesthetic expressiveness reconcilable with the criteria of literature in the great tradition. The aim of the present book is to set out the diversity of uses and functions and to attempt to see them both from the point of view of the creators and performers of oral tradition on the one hand and from that of those who have come from outside the tradition — be they poets, scholars or politicians — on the other. The starting point is the tradition of the South Slavs and the Serbian collector and scholar, Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1 787-1864). The association with Karadzic is both opportune and intentional. Opportune because the chapters in this book were assembled from thirty-four papers presented at a symposium commemorating the bicentenary of Karadzic’s birth, entitled ‘The Study of Oral Tradition and the South Slavs’ and held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the University of London in July 1987 (the remaining papers are appearing in a separate volume concerned with textual study). Intentional because of all the great nineteenth-century folklorist-politicians none exerted so enormous an XI XU FOREWORD influence as Karadzic on the collection and codification of other oral cultures or on the literary tradition of his day. In the twentieth century, his continuing influence can be seen in the way it has set in motion the creation of a powerful school of scholarship associated first and foremost with the names of Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord. Albert Lord was appropriately the patron of the symposium commemorating Karadzic and is himself, fittingly, the subject of this book’s epilogue. The choice of the South Slav tradition and of the persona of Karadzic provides a well-documented context for this enquiry. Collected and published at a critical phase in his country’s liberation from the Ottomans, Karadzic’s work went on to become a touchstone both for art and national identity. A similar phenomenon, though with much variation in detail, occurs in the wake of Karadzic’s work in various other parts of the world. In this book we have considered Finland for the purposes of elaborating certain related features; the Baltic States would offer similar examples. Karadzic’s contemporary and counterpart in Finland, Elias Lonnrot (1802-84), was familiar with Karadzic’s work, and almost certainly influenced by it. Similarly, Lonnrot’s work provided inspiration for art, politics and scholarship. Moreover much of present-day research into oral tradition derives ultimately from the scholarly heritage of these two men. We have looked to Africa for insights into the ways in which oral poetry can function in societies in crisis. In their consideration of formulaic and prosodic affinities the contributors to this book have drawn comparisons not only with literature and tradition in the Balkans but far beyond including Western Europe and Asia. In his important work, The Epic in the Making (1980), Koljevic has given an eloquent account of the way in which the Serbian epic tradition functioned, at a particular historical moment, as a means of a nation’s interpretation of its past. Karadzic made his collections at a time when the Serbs were engaged in an ultimately successful process of liberation from Ottoman rule. On the one hand this gave the songs in Karadzic’s collection a particular coherence, so that they form an aesthetic whole despite their fragmented nature. In addition, it invested them with a consistent point of view, centred on what may be called the ‘myth of Kosovo’. Through the instrument of the oral epic tradition, the defeat of the Serbs by the Ottoman forces on the field of Kosovo in 1389 has become the single most important fact of their history.