_____________________________________________________________ Volume 26 March 2011 Number 1 _____________________________________________________________ Editor Associate Editor for OT John Miles Foley John Zemke IT Manager Managing Editor Mark Jarvis Justin Arft Associate Editor for ISSOT Editorial Assistants Darcy Holtgrave Morgan Grey Peter Ramey Sarah Zurhellen Please direct inquiries to: Center for Studies in Oral Tradition University of Missouri 243 Walter Williams Hall Columbia, MO 65211 USA +573.882.9720 (ph) +573.884.0291 (fax) [email protected] E-ISSN: 1542-4308 Each contribution copyright © 2011 by its author. All rights reserved. The editors and the publisher assume no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion by the authors. Oral Tradition (http://journal.oraltradition.org) seeks to provide a comparative and interdisciplinary focus for studies in oral tradition and related fields by publishing research and scholarship on the creation, transmission, and interpretation of all forms of oral traditional expression. In addition to essays treating certifiably oral traditions, OT presents investigations of the relationships between oral and written traditions, as well as brief accounts of important fieldwork, and occasional transcriptions and translations of oral texts. In addition, issues will include the annual Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lecture on Oral Tradition. Submissions should follow the list-of-reference format (http:// journal.oraltradition.org/files/misc/oral_tradition_formatting_guide.pdf) and may be sent via e-mail ([email protected]); 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 in an eCompanion designed to supplement the texts of articles. Most contributions will be reviewed by at least one specialist reader and one generalist reader before a final decision is reached. Oral Tradition appears twice per year, in March and October. 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 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 David Elmer University of Pennsylvania Harvard University Folklore South Slavic, Ancient Greek Mark Bender Ruth Finnegan Ohio State University Open University Chinese African, South Pacific Mary Ellen Brown Joxerra Garzía Indiana University University of the Basque Country Folklore, Balladry Basque Chogjin Andrew Gerstle Chinese Academy University of London of Social Sciences Japanese Theater, Mongolian, Chinese Performance Literature Bridget Connelly Terry Gunnell University of Cal./Berkeley University of Iceland Arabic Old Norse, Drama Robert P. Creed Thomas Hale Univ. of Mass./Amherst Penn. State University Old English, Comparative African Robert Culley Lee Haring McGill University Brooklyn College, CUNY Biblical Studies African Joseph Harris Gregory Nagy Harvard University Harvard University Old Norse Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Comparative Lauri Harvilahti Finnish Literature Society Joseph Falaky Nagy Russian, Finnish, Altai Univ. of Cal./Los Angeles Old Irish Lauri Honko (✝) Turku University Susan Niditch Comparative Epic Amherst College Hebrew Bible Dell Hymes (✝) University of Virginia Walter J. Ong (✝) Native American, Linguistics St. Louis University Hermeneutics of orality and Martin Jaffee literacy Hebrew Bible Univ. of Washington Shelly Fenno Quinn Ohio State University Minna Skafte Jensen Japanese Odense University Ancient Greek, Latin Burton Raffel Univ. of Southwestern Werner Kelber Louisiana Rice University Translation Biblical Studies Karl Reichl Françoise Létoublon Universität Bonn Université Stendahl Turkic, Old and Middle English Ancient Greek John Roberts Victor Mair Ohio State University University of Pennsylvania African-American Chinese Joel Sherzer Peter Middleton University of Texas/Austin University of Southampton Native American, Anthropology Contemporary Poetry Performance Joseph Sobol East Tennessee State University Nada Milošević-Djordjević Storytelling University of Belgrade South Slavic Dennis Tedlock SUNY/Buffalo Stephen Mitchell Native American Harvard University Scandinavian J. Barre Toelken Andrew Wiget Utah State University University of New Mexico Folklore, Native American Native American Ronald J. Turner Paulu Zedda Univ. of Missouri/Columbia Università di Cagliari Storytelling Sardinian This page is intentionally left blank. Contents Editor’s Column ..............................................................................................1 Moradewun Adejunmobi Revenge of the Spoken Word?: Writing, Performance, and New Media in Urban West Africa........................ 3 Eric Shepherd Singing Dead Tales to Life: Rhetorical Strategies in Shandong Fast Tales ..............................................27 Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Raushan Sharshenova Crossing Boundaries, Breaking Rules:Continuity and Social Transformation in Trickster Tales from Central Asia.................. 71 Christopher Livanos A Case Study in Byzantine Dragon-Slaying: Digenes and the Serpent ......125 Robert Mann The Forgotten Text of Nikolai Golovin: New Light on the Igor Tale ..........145 Aaron Phillip Tate Collecting South Slavic Oral Epic in 1864: Luka Marjanović’s Earliest Account ...........................................................159 Minako Sakata Possibilities of Reality, Variety of Versions: The Historical Consciousness of Ainu Folktales .........................................175 Paul Koerbin Pir Sultan Abdal: Encounters with Persona in Alevi Lyric Song................ 191 Margo Kitts Ritual Scenes in the Iliad: Rote, Hallowed, or Encrypted as Ancient Art? ...........................................221 About the Authors ........................................................................................247 This page is intentionally left blank. Editor’s Column With issue 26, i, Oral Tradition delves into a wide variety of traditions and media in multiple cultural contexts, seeking as always to chart new territory and to expand the horizons of our joint, interdisciplinary field. We see this emphasis on diversity as perhaps the most important role our journal can serve: to report on the international panoply of both longstanding and emerging forms of traditional verbal art. Moradewun Adejunmobi begins the discussion with her examination of writing, performance, and new media in urban West Africa, explaining that verbal artists often portray themselves as writers despite their primary engagement with performance and digital technologies. Next in succession is Eric Shepherd’s richly illustrated overview of Shandong “fast tales,” a Chinese performance tradition over four centuries old; be sure to spend some time with the video and photographic content of the attached eCompanion to this article. From Africa and China, we move to central Asia, with Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Raushan Sharshenova describing how tales recounting the adventures of the folk hero Kuyruchuk depend on the different political worlds–tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet society–in which the continuously recontextualized tales have been told and received. The Byzantine epic Digenes Akrites existed on the cusp of oral tradition and manuscript culture, and Christopher Livanos examines the titular hero’s encounter with the dragon and the Amazon Maximou from a Freudian perspective, as well as in a broad Indo-European frame of reference. Robert Mann draws together new evidence from various redactions of related texts to argue that the Russian Tale of Igor was an oral epic within an active tradition that continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, highlighting the performer’s dependence on (and fluency in) traditional poetic phraseology. Also within the Slavic realm, Aaron Tate provides a translation of the famous nineteenth-century collector Luka Marjanović’s first report on his massive fieldwork expeditions in Croatia and Bosnia, along with commentary that places Marjanović’s ideas in historical perspective. Minako Sakata then offers a rare account of the structure and dynamics of folktales told by the Ainu, an indigenous people living in present-day Japan and Russia; she concentrates on shared motifs and the interactivity of individual tales within the tradition. Paul Koerbin’s contribution treats the Turkish Alevi lyric songs associated with Pir Sultan Abdal, focusing on this figure’s persona and the large body of lyrics, commentary, and texts that have accumulated since the early twentieth century. The final article in this issue, by Margo Kitts, addresses oath- sacrifice and commensal sacrifice scenes in the ancient Greek epics of Homer, maintaining that these scenes draw their structure from ritual paradigms as well as from Homeric poetics. As the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition and the journal emerge from their twenty-fifth anniversary year, it seems timely to emphasize