[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: oral traditions

[Tandy, Heidi]

I am sure that there are people who know entire stories by heart - it's
really not so hard to do, especially if you don't have to get the exact
words in the same places every time - as long as you stick to the regular
script. 
I mean, how many of us have the HP books memorized, practically word for
word? And I have a bunch of other stories more or less memorized as well -
give me a copy of any Little House book, or Hitch Hiker's Guide, or a few
from WP Kinsella or Peter Lefcourt, or certain chapters from Pride &
Prejudice, and I can recite it - I can't be *that* unusual.
Or look at librettos from operas and even musicals. Even though I can't sing
well, I can "do" any one of a dozen broadway musicals word for word, start
to finish - even ones, like Les Miserables, which I haven't really listened
to straight through in a while - just from having heard it  a bunch of
times. If I heard the same story as an apprentice storyteller, or even in my
family's village, a dozen times, I could probably recite it too
 
Jen wrote:

> Amber pointed out:
> 
> > I'd say that people who've studied the Odyssey professionally and
> have
> > written loads of papers on it could. Of course, those people are
> > probably few and far inbetween.

Sections of it, certainly.  But most Classicists can't do more than
recite a few favorite parts by memory.  A few (particularly in the
19th c.) actually apparently did have most of Classical literature
from memory, but as far as I'm aware, there aren't any now living who
can do that.  Happy to be corrected on this, though.
> Can one of the classicists on the list (hello Jen F) tell me if I'm
> perpetuating a myth?  Weren't there storytellers in ancient Greece who
> retold entire epics (not, of course, word for word, but with changes,
> omissions and embellishments)?

Indeed there were!  The Homeric epics, in the form we have them, were
the result of centuries (if not millennia...) of oral tradition, of
telling and re-telling, of composition-in-performance.  The poems
which have come down to us under the name of Homer, as well as other
epics which are extant only in small fragments or in later summaries,
were born of a lively oral tradition with Indo-European roots.