The Epic Voice

Abstract

The Epic Voice. Edited by Alan D. Hodder and Robert E. Meagher. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Pp. 157, introduction, illustrations, maps, notes, index. $54.95 cloth, $15.00 paper); How to Read an Oral Poem. By John Miles Foley. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp xviii + 256, prologue, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper); Myth: A New Symposium. Edited by Gregory Schrempp and William Hansen. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 262, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliographies, index. $49.95 cloth) All three of these books, like ancient lamps, light familiar, well-worn paths to guide us to new comprehension of myth (or-to borrow a term used by Barre Toelken in his contribution to the third of the volumes under discussion-of "fictional traditional narrative" [88]). The Epic Voice sets a thoughtful tone for the discussion. Here the editors have assembled essays written by five senior scholars, in which "decades of learning and thought [are used] to open the reader's mind to the fullness of the work at hand" (1). The five works discussed are from five different venues of the ancient world: Mesopotamia (The Epic of Gilgamesh), Israel (stories of David), Greece (The Odyssey), India (The Ramayana), and Ireland (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley [Tain Bo Cuailnge]). Taken as a whole, these essays bring the reader to dramatic new levels of understanding through use of multiple examples to illustrate the cross-fertilization of oral and written narrative. The volume is a "course-in-a-text." How to Read an Oral Poem, by John Miles Foley, is an engaging work based on both fieldwork and archival research, whose playful title announces a discussion of relations between orality and literacy. The volume illuminates words, meanings, and usage in the work of four different oral poets representing four different oral poetic traditions both ancient and contemporary: a Tibetan paper-singer, a North American slam poet, a South African praise poet, and an ancient Greek poet. As Foley suggests, "Our challenge is to fashion a model for oral poetry that realistically portrays, in both its unity and its diversity, a kind of biology that allows for species differentiation within the composite genus" (38). He proposes a system of media categories (38) and discusses them. Foley's well-informed book carries the reader through eight chapters addressing, respectively, oral poetry; contexts and reading; performance theory; ethnopoetics; traditional implications; types of proverbs; examples of readings; and South Slavic oral poetry-an extended discussion in which he draws parallels to other examples in the text. Foley's afterword engages the reader in a fascinating comparative discussion of oral poetry and electronic media, specifically the Internet. "The key to these possibilities," he says, "is to recognize that-like the Internet we browse, learn from, and purchase on-oral poetry amounts to a linked series of pathways. Manifold destinations await us [. . .]" (221). Myth: A New Symposium, the last of the three volumes under review, is a valuable interdisciplinary collection that both updates the contemporary study of myth and reconsiders its namesake, Myth: A Symposium, the groundbreaking interdisciplinary issue of the Journal of American Folklore (1955, simultaneously published as an independent anthology) that was based upon an Indiana University symposium on myth and famously edited by Thomas A. …