Oral tradition - Topics

Fieldworkers record who told a story and on what day not just the words Oral epics are taught in heritage classes to children who no longer speak the language Fishermen's own names for the reef are missing from the heritage file Transcribing dialect faithfully or readably is the archive's real dilemma A genealogist can list twenty generations because the names are chained to a rhythm Why does Scottish puirt a beul mouth music exist when instruments are available? Folklore collectors now ask permission before writing down a song someone has just sung for them When a language dies which ceremonies go silent with it Why every saga character is introduced with the name of his grandfather How do you teach Truco without writing the rules down? What a grandmother transmits when she teaches a granddaughter a song What formulaic epithets like swift footed Achilles are doing in the metre Only families holding the old fishing rights may tell the tale of the drowned boat Oral formula: why epic poetry keeps repeating swift-footed and wine-dark A storyteller who gets no response from the audience is judged to have failed How many nights does it take to sing the whole Mahabharata The right to recite certain epics passes down one griot bloodline and no outsider may perform them Talking drums carry a message further than shouting because the tones match the words Why do children's clapping games have rules no adult ever wrote down? Why do many farming villages allow folktales to be told only after the harvest is in? The family story retold every year and how it has quietly changed Vedic students recite thousands of verses backwards as a check on their memory What the Aesopic tradition looked like before anyone wrote it down The same riddle is collected in two counties with one word swapped and that word dates it Winter is telling season across the Arctic because travel stops and the nights run long Local names for plants that vanish when the elders die Homer was performed rather than read — what that does to the Iliad Bards are being recorded now because no young person can hold the full cycle in memory Storytellers in an Irish ceili house were expected to hold the room until the fire burned low What dies along with the last speaker of a language What happens when a diaspora keeps the folk dance but loses its music? A collector's own notebooks are now read as evidence about the collector