Author: Noel Spencer

A Pebble Smoothed by Tradition: Lines 607-61 of Beowulf as a Formulaic Set-piece

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

In this essay Drout and Smith use new “lexomic” methods of computer-assisted statistical analysis to identify a concentration of unusual lexical, metrical, grammatical, and formulaic features in lines 607-61 of Beowulf, a scene in which Queen Wealhtheow passes the cup of friendship to the assembled warriors. Although the passage contains a number of proper names, […]

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Oral Features of the Qur’ān Detected in Public Recitation

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

This essay examines textual features of the Qur’ān that may emerge more prominently as a result of listening to it, features that might enhance insight gained during slow or silent reading sessions. Comparison with ancient Greek oral works, such as Homer, and an examination of Classical memory methodologies provide support for some of the oral […]

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The Fairy-Seers of Eastern Serbia: Seeing Fairies—Speaking through Trance

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

The fairy-seers of Southeastern Europe are generally women who are able to communicate with the invisible world. They claim to see women-like creatures and transmit messages from them. Sometimes they fell into a trance-like state in order to establish a communication. During this process the fairy-seers can prophesy future events. They bring messages to the […]

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Between the Oral and the Literary: The Case of the Naxi Dongba Texts

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

This essay considers the orality of ritual texts written in the Naxi dongba script from southwest China. Historically, the inherent orality of these texts has been largely ignored in favor of seeing them as a kind of visual “hieroglyphics.” Here, a case will be made that the Naxi texts represent an intermediary stage between the […]

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Eall-feala Ealde Sæge: Poetic Performance and “The Scop’s Repertoire” in Old English Verse

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

This essay identifies “The Scop’s Repertoire” as an Old English traditional theme. The theme associates the making of verse with three motifs: copiousness, orality, and antiquity. With close analogues in Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old Norse poetry, “The Scop’s Repertoire” originates in an oral Germanic tradition of versification. The theme thus […]

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Temporal Patterning and “Degrees of Orality” in Occitan and French Oral Narrative

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):91-122 Introduction This article explores tense usage and tense-switching in the temporal structuring of Occitan and French oral narratives, drawing on theoretical frameworks in linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as perspectives from anthropology and folklore studies.1 It forms part of a larger project, ExpressioNarration, financed by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship, incorporating […]

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Editor’s Column

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

This latest issue of Oral Tradition arrives somewhat later than the editors had hoped. It took us some time to regroup after producing our last volume, a monumental special issue on the oral traditions of religious communities in the Iranian-speaking world. We hope, however, that the wait will prove to have been worth it, since […]

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Type-Token Ratio and Entropy as Measures to Characterize a Forgery of Oral-Formulaic Epics

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):37-62  The Queen’s Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts (Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský, together abbreviated “RKZ” in Czech) present an unusually successful case of literary forgery. These pseudo-medieval Czech manuscripts, presenting folk lyrics, ballads, and epic songs seemingly recorded in the late-thirteenth and in the ninth to tenth centuries, respectively, were taken by […]

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Driva Qele / Stealing Earth: Oral Accounts of the Volcanic Eruption of Nabukelevu (Mt. Washington), Kadavu Island (Fiji), ~2,500 Years Ago

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):63-90  Introduction Over the past two decades, it has become clear that culturally grounded stories, once uncritically dismissed as myth or legend, often contain information suggesting that they are informed by observations of memorable events, such as coastal inundation, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and meteorite falls (Nunn and Reid 2016; Nunn 2014; Masse […]

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“It Has Not Yet Become Pacified”

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):3-36 The Mahābhārata and Ramāyaṇa present us with eight primary and embedded narratives in which an archer (usually a royal member of the kṣatriya, or warrior, class) causes the unintended death of a person in animal form while hunting, and for which the killer generally pays an offspring-related penalty with profound and […]

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About the Authors

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition Volume 36, Number 1 Taniela Bolea Born and bred in Ravitaki Village on the main island of Kadavu, Taniela Bolea graduated in management studies and rose to become the founding publisher of Fiji’s Daily Post newspaper. He was later appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Fiji Audio Visual Commission and today remains interested in […]

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Ethnopoetic Transcription and Multimodal Archives

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 36/1 (2023):123-48 Slam is a relatively young genre of poetry, created in 1985 by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith, who sought to challenge ivory tower ideas about creating and evaluating poetry (Woods 2008:18). Extant slam poetry scholarship is neither as prolific nor as comprehensive as that on some of its performance […]

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The Religious Textual Heritage of the Yārsān (Ahl-e Haqq)

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):141-50  The Yārsān This paper will discuss the complex “textual” heritage of the Yārsān of western Iran and northern Iraq, which is mainly transmitted orally but has partly been made available in writing in recent decades. The Yārsān (“Group of Friends”), also known as Ahl-e Haqq (“People of Truth”), and in Iraq […]

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The Village Chronotope in the Genre of Iraqi Yezidi Wedding Songs

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):103-18 Introduction Among the world’s roughly one million Yezidis, adherents of a monotheistic faith that does not accept converts or allow marriage with outsiders, as many as half are living in exile, with the highest concentration of refugees outside the homeland living in Germany. Yezidis, originally from parts of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, […]

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The Yezidi Religious Music

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):119-40  1. Introduction: Types of Performances and Learning Techniques While the Yezidi religious textual tradition, including its collection, translation, and analysis, has already become a separate subject of investigation in the field of Yezidi Studies,1 its religious music remains largely unstudied. Based on the analysis of Yezidi religious vocal performances, this contribution […]

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Editors’ Column

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):1-2  The contribution that various branches of “Oral Studies” could make to the study of non Western scriptural religions is as yet largely unexplored. In the Iranian cultural sphere—where languages are spoken that belong to the Iranian branch of Indo-European, such as Persian and Kurdish—we find a number of religious traditions that […]

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Early Zoroastrianism and Orality

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):9-20  Most readers of Oral Tradition may not be overly concerned with the oral transmission of premodern compositions. Those who study the religious texts of the ancient Zoroastrian religion, however, must now take the long period of oral transmission of these texts, and its implications for our understanding of its contents, very […]

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On the Edge between Literacy and Orality

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):21-60  1. Today’s Performance of the Long Liturgy The Long Liturgy (later LL) is the main Zoroastrian ritual. The central part1 consists of the recitation of the Gāϑās and the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, a series of texts in Old Avestan, an Iranian language older than the one of the rest of the liturgy. […]

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On the Problems of Studying Modern Zoroastrianism

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):61-76  Arguably, the problems of studying modern Zoroastrianism are not dissimilar to those associated with the study of Zoroastrianism in the ancient world. In both cases, the idea of orality and how to deal with it is an issue that demands attention. And in both cases, one of the problems concerns exegesis; […]

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Singing the Pain: Yezidi Oral Tradition and Sinjari Laments after ISIS1

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):77-102  Our girls fell into the hands of the kafirThey sold our girls to strange countriesThis girl ran to the mountain to flee the kafir and she fellHadiya escaped the kafir, but she fell, she threw herselfIt is a Great Holiday,2 but those in the hands of the kafir have no oneThe […]

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Mîrza Mihemed / Mirza Pamat

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):419-40 The field studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects that have proliferated recently have yielded many folklore texts.1 During the author’s fieldwork (together with Christina Benyaminova) with one speaker of Neo-Aramaic, the sophisticated plot of a folk story with a hero named Mirza Pamat attracted his attention. A comparison of this story with other […]

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Men of Speech

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):407-18 A group of dervishes known as ʿAjam belonged originally to the dervishes without an order (bi-selsele). They are closely related to the Khāksāriyya and are considered as one lineage of this order today. The Khāksār order, as one of the three Shiʿi dervish orders of today’s Iran, used to have three […]

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Religious Musical Knowledge and Modes of Transmission among the Kurdish Ahl-e Haqq of Gurān1

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Introduction The great astronomer and social commentator Adam Frank says: “We are fundamentally storytellers . . . . Every society . . . has had a system of myths, a constellation of stories that provide a basic sense of meaning and context” (2018:8). So what is this constellation of stories for the Ahl-e Haqq (AH) […]

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Introduction

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):3-8 Whilst the study of “oral verbal art” in the literary sphere is now receiving a certain amount of academic interest, much less attention has so far been paid to the dynamics of orality in the sphere of religion, not least in non-Western traditions.1 Many specialists in such fields as religious studies and […]

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Coast Miwok Oral Tradition

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 35/1 (2021):67-86  Little has been published on the oral traditions of the Coast Miwok that provides any information on the original language and linguistic verbal art of this group.1 The Coast Miwok language was spoken north of San Francisco Bay, largely in an area corresponding to modern Marin County and parts of Sonoma County, […]

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