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Parry and Lord listened to and recorded Yugoslavian oral epic poetry and
extensively interviewed both Yugoslavian singers and those listening to them.
Reading the results of their fieldwork leaves no doubt about their findings. In
that oral context, every time a story is told it is changed. The “gist” remains pretty much the same (see the previous chapter), but the details get changed.
Often they get changed massively.
Because a singer changes the story every time it is performed, he in effect
composes it each time anew. That means, though, that in oral performance, there
is actually no such thing as the “original” version of a story, or poem, or saying.
Every performance is and always has been different. The idea that there is an
“original” that comes to be later altered derives from written cultures, where
later forms of a text can be compared to earlier forms and there is some kind of
original. But as Lord shows, “In a very real sense every performance is a
separate song; for every performance is unique, and every performance bears the
signature of its poet singer.”6 That last point is very important. Whoever
performs the tradition alters it in light of his own interests, his sense of what the
audience wants to hear, the amount of time he has to tell or sing it, and numerous
other factors. And so, as a result, the one who sings the tales is at one and the
same time the performer of the tradition and the composer.
One striking fact to emerge from Parry and Lord’s extensive interviews is
that the singers of these folk tales consistently and frequently insisted that their
performances were “the same” every time. But when they said so, they did not
mean that it was literally the same. For a singer, the fixity of the song “does not
include the wording, which to him has never been fixed, or the unessential parts
of the story.”7
How different could “the same” song be in different versions? Social
anthropologist Jack Goody has noted that when Milman Parry first met a singer
named Avdo, he took down by dictation a lengthy song that he performed called
“The Wedding of Smailagiæ.” It was 12,323 lines long. Some years later Albert
Lord met up with Avdo again, and took down a performance of “the same” song.
This time it was 8,488 lines.8 Parry himself observed this phenomenon. He one
time had Avdo sing a song performed by another singer, named Mumin. Avdo
strongly insisted it was the same song. His version was nearly three times as
long.
Retard.
