Oral and Epic

Epic poetry is often seen as characteristic of orally based cultures, but Jack Goody argues that epic more normally appears at the beginning of literate cultures rather than in purely oral cultures. Referring to the research of Parry and Lord on Yugoslav oral poets, he comments “Yugoslavia was by no means a purely oral culture, and its verbal forms were strongly influenced by the presence of writing, and especially of written religions . . . .

“Some of the recitations actually appeared as texts in songbooks that were available to the ‘singers of tales’ and there was reference back and forth. It is also the case more generally that the societies of the Heroic Age during which the epic flourished were ones where early literacy was present. By contrast, in the purely oral cultures of Africa, the epic is a rarity, except on the southern fringes of the Sahara, which have been much influenced by Islam and its literary forms.”

Goody cites Ruth Finnegan’s studies of African oral literature: “Epic is often assumed to be the typical poetic form of non-literate peoples . . . . Surprisingly, however, this does not seem to be borne out by the African evidence. At least in the more obvious sense of a ‘relatively long narrative poem,’ epic hardly seems to occur in sub-Saharan Africa apart from forms like the [written] Swahili utenzi which are directly attributable to Arabic literary influence.” African “epic” is often prose rather than poetry. And the most famous African epic, the Lianja epic, appears to be (in Finnegan’s words) “a very loosely related bundle of separate episodes, told on separate occasions and not necessarily thought of as one single work of art.” Goody concludes that Africa evidence suggests that “a similar type of amalgamation of short tales may have taken place under the impact of writing, as apparently occurred with the Gilgamesh epic of Mesopotamia.”