Preface

Agnes Lyle’s heroes and heroines have been a source of strength and courage. I am grateful to them, to her, and to her Adam Scrivener (as he called himself), William Motherwell. The staff of the Paisley Public Library, the School of Scottish Studies, the University of Glasgow Library, the Indiana University Library, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University were generous with time, books, documents, and permissions. Hamish Henderson and Sheilah Douglas introduced me to contemporary Scots ballad singers. The National Endowment for the Humanities and John Miles Foley provided a summer of reading, talking, and fellowship. And many others along the way provided a needed bit of information or a needed bit of encouragement. To all, thanks.

Some readers will be unfamiliar with oral-formulaic theory. Although fuller explanations are contained in the introduction, a word on that subject is in order here.

What is now called oral-formulaic theory was first formulated by the classicist Milman Parry and subsequently developed and refined by his student Albert Lord. Seeking to understand how an epic poet can keep a long poem or series of poems in his head, Parry was elated to discover that the art of epic poetry was still being practiced in Yugoslavia in the years before World War II. The element which gives the theory its name is the idea that oral epic poets, whether in ancient Greece or in modern Yugoslavia, use not words but metrical phrases (the oral formulas) to compose the lines of their songs. Since meter is built into these phrases and phrase patterns in a way analogous to the way grammar is built into the ordinary vocabulary of conversation and storytelling, the poet has a special metrical vocabulary of epic song. Hence it is no more strange for the epic poet to speak in meter—whether the Homeric hexameter or the South Slavic decasyllable—than it is for the storyteller to speak in sentences. Just as moulding words (or morphemes) into sentences involves a higher order of linguistic organization than moulding sounds (or phonemes) into words, so moulding metrical phrases into hexameters involves a still higher level of linguistic organization but not an unnatural level. Lord’s most significant addition to the theory was the suggestion that conceptual narrative elements called “themes” form plots in a way analogous to the way the linguistic metrical elements called formulas form lines. These “themes,” which are the building blocks of plot, include such typical actions and scenes as summoning an assembly, quarreling, arming the hero, fighting hand-to-hand, lamenting, and burying the dead. Because the poet has this stock of formulas and “themes,” this epic vocabulary on both the metrical and narrative levels, he does not need to memorize a poem blindly. Once he knows how a poem is put together he can recreate it himself, at greater or lesser length, by drawing on his own metrical and narrative resources, much as a storyteller does not memorize a story but recreates it afresh each time he tells it.

I see the oral-formulaic theory as an important contribution to charting the mechanism of oral composition and performance. Having now completed this survey, I not only accept the essential Parry-Lord insight, I affirm that what epic singers do, ballad singers also do, mutatis mutandis. Mutanda, autem, valde mutata. This survey of the ballad, an oral genre so different from epic, offers the opportunity to articulate connections between the Parry-Lord insight and the insights of a number of other oral scholars both before and (especially) since. Of course, of articulating these relationships this work is barely a beginning. I have passed over important and pertinent contributors to the study of orality and poetry (Dennis Tedlock is only one obvious example). But, since we’re already speaking Latin, non possumus omnes omnia. On the other hand, however, as a distinguished Latinist of an earlier century put it: “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

DuBois, Pennsylvania
October 10, 1989