Oral-formulaic composition is a theory that originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry and was developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It seeks to explain two related issues:
The reasons why orally improvised poetry has the characteristics it does.
The key idea of the theory is that poets have a store of formulas and that by linking the formulas in conventionalised ways, poets can rapidly compose verse. In the hands of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the approach transformed the study of ancient and medieval poetry and oral poetry generally. The main exponent and developer of their approaches was John Miles Foley.
Homeric verse
In Homeric verse, a phrase like eos rhododaktylos or oinops pontos occupies a certain metrical pattern that fits, in modular fashion, into the six-colon Greekhexameter, which aids the aoidos or bard in extemporaneous composition. Moreover, such phrases would be subject to internal substitutions and adaptations, permitting flexibility in response to narrative and grammatical needs: podas okus axilleus is metrically equivalent to koruthaiolos ektor. Formulas can also be combined into type-scenes, longer, conventionalised depictions of generic actions in epic like the steps taken to arm oneself or to prepare a ship for sea.
Work of Parry and successors
Oral-formulaic theory was originally developed, principally by Parry in the 1920s, to explain how the Homeric epics could have been passed down through many generations purely through word of mouth and why its formulas appeared as they did. His work was influential. The locus classicus for oral-formulaic poetry, however, was established by the work of Parry and his student Lord on the Serbian oral epic poetry of what was then of Yugoslavia, where oral-formulaic composition could be observed and recordedethnographically. Formulaic variation is apparent, for example, in the following lines: Lord, and more prominently Francis Peabody Magoun, also applied the theory to Old English poetry in which formulaic variation such as the following is prominent: Magoun thought that formulaic poetry was necessarily oral in origin. That sparked a major and ongoing debate over the extent to which Old English poetry, which survives only in written form, should be seen as, in some sense, oral poetry. The oral-formulaic theory of composition has now been applied to a wide variety of languages and works. A provocative new application of oral-formulaic theory is its use in explaining the origin of at least some parts of the Quran. Oral-Formulaic theory has also been applied to early Japanese works The oral-formulaic theory has also been helpfully applied to the Olonko epic of the Sakha people of Siberia.
Precursors of Parry
Before Parry, at least two other folklorists also noted the use of formulas among the epic tale singers of Yugoslavian, :
Friedrich Salomon Krauss, a specialist in Yugoslavian folklore, who had done fieldwork with guslars, believed these storytellers depended on "the fixed formulas from which he neither can nor wishes to vary".
Arnold van Gennep, suggested that "the poems of the guslars consist of a juxtaposition of cliches relatively few in number and with which it suffices merely to be conversant … A fine guslar is one who handles these cliches as we play with cards, who orders them differently according to the use he wishes to make of them".
