Editor’s Column

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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“It Has Not Yet Become Pacified”

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

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

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

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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About the Authors

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

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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