Volume 33 December 2019 Number 1 ______
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Volume 33 / No. 1, December 2019 __________________________________________________________________ Volume 33 December 2019 Number 1 __________________________________________________________________ Founding Editor John Miles Foley (†) Editors Managing Editor David F. Elmer Daniel J. Frim John Zemke Please direct inquiries to: Oral Tradition Department of the Classics 204 Boylston Hall Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 USA +617.495.4019 (ph) [email protected] E-ISSN: 1542-4308 Each contribution copyright © 2019 by its author. All rights reserved. Oral Tradition is published by the Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University. The editors and the publisher assume no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion by the authors. Oral Tradition (http://journal.oraltradition.org) is an open-access journal devoted to the study of the world’s oral traditions, past and present. The journal welcomes contributions that explore the creation, transmission, and interpretation of all forms of oral traditional expression, as well as investigations of relations between oral and written traditions, brief accounts of important fieldwork, and editions of oral texts. Submissions should be formatted according to the journal’s style sheet (available on the journal’s website, under “About”), and may be sent via e-mail ([email protected]). Contributions must be in English; all quotations of primary materials must be made in the original language(s) with following English translations. If appropriate, please describe any supporting materials that could be used to illustrate the article, such as photographs, audio recordings, or video recordings. Oral Tradition publishes such materials online. Submissions accepted by the editor for review will be refereed by at least two readers. Oral Tradition appears once or twice yearly. The current issue and all back issues from 1986 onward are available open-access and free-of-charge at http:// journal.oraltradition.org. EDITORIAL BOARD Mark C. Amodio Ruth Finnegan Nada Miloševic-Đorđević Patricia Arant Joxerra Garzía Stephen Mitchell Samuel Armistead (†) Andrew Gerstle Gregory Nagy Richard Bauman Terry Gunnell Joseph Falaky Nagy Margaret H. Beissinger Thomas Hale Susan Niditch Dan Ben-Amos Lee Haring Walter J. Ong (†) Mark Bender Joseph Harris Tom Pettitt Mary Ellen Brown Lauri Harvilahti Shelley Quinn Jonathan Burgess Galit Hasan-Rokem Burton Raffel (†) Chogjin Holly Hearon Karl Reichl Bridget Connelly Lauri Honko (†) John Roberts Robert P. Creed (†) Dell Hymes (†) Joel Sherzer Robert Culley (†) Bonnie Irwin Joseph Sobol Thomas DuBois Martin Jaffee Timothy Tangherlini Casey Dué Minna Skafte Jensen Dennis Tedlock (†) Joseph J. Duggan (†) Werner Kelber J. Barre Toelken (†) Alan Dundes (†) Françoise Létoublon Ronald J. Turner Mark W. Edwards (†) Victor Mair Andrew Wiget Larry Evers Peter Middleton Paulu Zedda This page is intentionally left blank. Contents Editors’ Column ..............................................................................................1 Shem Miller Oral Tradition and the Dead Sea Scrolls .......................................................3 Timothy Thurston An Examination of the Poetics of Tibetan Secular Oratory: An A mdo Tibetan Wedding Speech ..............................................................23 Milan Vidaković Magic Questions: The Rhetoric of Authority in South Slavic Epic Song ...................................51 Richard Hughes Gibson Does Hector’s Helmet Flash? The Fate of the Fixed Epithet in the Modern English Homer ......................89 Steve Reece The Myth of Milman Parry: Ajax or Elpenor?............................................115 About the Authors .......................................................................................143 This page is intentionally left blank. Editors’ Column Volume 33 marks a major transition for Oral Tradition. After thirty-two fruitful years at the University of Missouri, the journal has now found a new home at Harvard University. In the “Editor’s Column” that prefaced the first issue of Oral Tradition in 1986, John Miles Foley justified the creation of the new journal by speaking of the need for a periodical “devoted exclusively to the study of oral tradition in its many forms,” one which would “inform specialists of parallel developments in their own and different areas” and “build and maintain bridges among disciplines in order to promote the healthy growth of the field as a whole.” Thirty-three years after its inception, one can say not only that the journal created by John Foley has lived up to the goals of its founder, having done much to promote the growth of the field, but also that the need for such a clearing-house and meeting-place remains as keenly felt as ever. We and our colleagues who have helped find a new home for Oral Tradition are proud to have secured what we hope will be an equally fruitful future for the journal at Harvard. A transition of this scale presents many challenges. The biggest challenge we have faced has been the building of a new online platform for the delivery of the journal. The new website has a substantially different design from the one with which long-time readers are familiar, but it retains most of the essential features of the former website. Most importantly, all of the journal’s back issues, including their eCompanions, remain freely available. There have been other challenges as well: practices that had become routine for the journal’s former stewards had to be re-learned or re-imagined, a new cover was designed, and a new editor had to find his footing. As a consequence of the effort required to meet these challenges, there has been an unavoidable delay in the publication of this latest issue, which we have designated as Issue 1 of Volume 33, even though the next issue, in 2020, will belong to Volume 34. Going forward, we anticipate publishing only one regular issue each year, reserving the second issue for special, guest-edited issues (for which we are happy to entertain proposals). The present issue contains five essays that illustrate individually the vitality of the study of oral tradition, and collectively its scope. The issue opens with an essay on the Dead Sea Scrolls by Shem Miller, who demonstrates the power of John Miles Foley’s methodology to recover traces of oral performance even from texts of the distant past. Timothy Thurston, applying related methodologies to contemporary Tibetan wedding speeches, explores ways in which auspiciousness can be created in performance by forms of traditional referentiality. There follows a sequence of three essays, each of which engages with the legacy of Milman Parry, the Harvard scholar whose work on Homeric poetry and South Slavic epic song laid the foundation for so much contemporary research on oral traditions. Texts collected by Parry in the former Yugoslavia provide the primary evidence for Milan Vidaković, who examines the quasi-magical power of questions—an otherwise unassuming class of utterances—to assert power over others. Richard Hughes Gibson assesses the effect of Parry’s ideas about Homeric style on the translation of the Homeric poems into English. Finally, Steve Reece considers accounts of Parry’s own life and tragic death as instances of a contemporary oral-and-written tradition, which he tests against documentary evidence. It seems fitting that the first issue of Oral Tradition published from its new home at Harvard should include these explorations of aspects of Parry’s legacy. The coming of Oral Tradition to Harvard, which is also the home of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, has something of the feel of a family reunion. It is a reunion, however, that is not without a twinge of regret for the fact that the journal has had to leave an institution that for so long supported its growth and enabled it flourish. It is our hope that the move to Harvard will enable the journal to continue to grow and flourish. With the support of you, our readers, we are certain that it will. David F. Elmer John Zemke Editors, Oral Tradition * * * It has been my honor and privilege to guide Oral Tradition since the death of John Miles Foley. I express my gratitude to the many colleagues, members of the editorial board and others, who shared their expertise and advice during these seven years. Similarly, I want to thank the authors who entrusted their essays to Oral Tradition. Finally, my thanks to all of the editorial staff who made publication possible, and especially to Mr. Mark Jarvis, who ensured everything went according to plan. Secure in the knowledge the David Elmer will continue building on this legacy, it is timely to announce my retirement as editor, and congratulate David on the occasion of his assuming the duty. John Zemke Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):3-22 Oral Tradition and the Dead Sea Scrolls Shem Miller The Dead Sea Scrolls are a cache of ancient manuscripts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek discovered in eleven caves from 1947-1956. Most scholars associate the Dead Sea Scrolls with an ancient Jewish community who lived in a complex of ruins on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea known as Khirbet Qumran. Early on scholars identified this “Qumran Community” with the Essenes, a well-known Jewish group discussed by Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder. As pointed out by Géza Vermes, the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is due to their great antiquity compared with our previously oldest copies of biblical books: “Before 1947, the oldest Hebrew