New Catholic Encyclopeidia, 7
828 LITERATURE, ORAL TRANSMISSION OF
literature taken as a whole, and not merely this or that
piece of literature, is a symbolical construct. Though the
"rules" of writing as a fine art are self-contained and do
not depend on the "rules" of ethics or religion, the works
of art that result from following ·these literary rules do
not and cannot merely look inward, as it were. The liter-
ary product is not narcissistic (though it has significance
in its own right) , but suggests something beyond itself.
This is the essential function of the *symbol, and the
contemplation to which literature leads arises from the
necessarily symbolic nature of the informing image.
A consideration of literature (and indeed of all art)
under these philosophical and theological dimensions
lays the foundation for a hope for a *world literature
far more profound and meaningful than the one Goethe
dreamed of. For even though one does not accept the
Trinitarian basis of this line of thought, certainly the
perceptive reader of literature, in whatever language or
culture, from time to time at least, comes face to face
with a conviction that the great poem, drama, or novel
touches the realm of the mysterious and the d_ivine.This
does not mean that all the disciplines of literary scholar-
ship can be foregone in favor of such a basic philosoph-
ical and theological approach, but it does mean that if
study of literature and appreciation of it is con.fined
merely to an explication of texts, a construction of bio-
graphical, social, or economic backgrounds, and so on,
the deep woods of literature c3.n easily be lost in fixation
on technical trees. Indeed, the final purpose of this
article is to suggest that this seminal approach to liter-
ature can truly enrich specialized and technical study.
See also ART (PHILOSOPHY); POETICS (ARISTOTE-
LIAN); ART, 1. ART AND RELIGION.
Bibliography: G. VANDERLEEUW, Sacred and Profane Beauty:
The Holy in Art, tr. D. E. GREEN (New York 1963). S. K.
LANGER,Philosophy in a New Key (3d ed. Cambridge, Mass.
1957). N. A. SCOTT, ed., The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a
Christum Poetic (New York 1964), extensive bibliog. R. WELLEK
and A. WARREN,Theory of Literature (New York 1949; 5th ed.,
pa. 1964). G. LoNGHAYE,Theorte des belles-lettres (Paris 1885).
W. K. WIMSATTand C. BROOKS,Literary Criticism: A Short His-
tory (New York 1957). D. L. SAYERS,The Mind of the Maker
(New York 1941). W. F. LYNCH,Christ and Apollo (New York
1960). N. A. SCOTT,Modern Literature and the Religious Fron-
tier (New York 1958). S. R. HOPPER, ed., Spiritual Problems in
Contemporary Literature (New York 1952). D.S. SAVAGE,The
Withered.Branch (New York 1952). J. MARITAIN,Creative In-
tuition in Art and Poetry (New York 1953). A. N. WILDER,
Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition (New York 1952).
V. BUCKLEY,Poetry and Morality (London 1959). T. S. ELIOT,
Essays, Ancient and Modern (New York 1936). W. K. WIMSATT,
The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington,
Ky. 1954; pa. New York 1958). E. Gilson, The Arts of the
Beautiful (New York 1965),
[H. C. GARDINER]
LITERATURE, ORAL TRANSMISSION OF
In oral literature, ideas and a technique, not texts,
are transmitted from one individual to another, from
one generation to another. A song is always being re-
sung, a story retold, in somewhat different words each
time even by the same singer or storyteller. Oral lit-
erature concentrates on the ideas first and on the word-
ing second. The concept of a textually fixed original
does not exist. Oral tradition is more acutely aware
than written tradition of the stability of an idea under
a variety of outward forms. Multiformity is character-
istic of this literature. In addition to the songs and
stories themselves, the art of telling and performing
them is handed on from one age to the next. Oral lit-
erature lives at those moments when som
his place before an audience and comm eo~e tak_q
it what he has learned from the past. Urucatesto
CHARACTERISTIC STYLE
The necessities of the practice of oral tra ..
literature produce a characteristic style. Fro dttionaJ
for rapid composition during performancem the need
repeated phrases, half lines, lines, and evencome the
that are typical elements of this branch of l' coupleta
Familiar examples are the Homeric "fair-hair t~erature,
laus," "when they had put aside desire for ~ Mene,.
drink," and "well-greaved Achaeans." The ;~d and
verbal elements are called formulas. Their distipe~ted
ness comes from the fact that they are neces nctive,.
the singer under the demands of oral performasary for
not, as 1s. sometimes
. t houg ht, f or the pleasure nceand
0
venience of the audience. r con.
Form'":ads. Thefseharered~~y-madehwaysof fitting the
common 1 eas o t e tra 1t1on to t e varying met •
1
an~ other formal restrictions of the genre style. W~~i:
a given culture there may be more than one way of .
pressing an idea within these limits. In any tradit:x
the multiforms for a given idea may be greater tha:
~he. ~umber of multiforms ~own to or used by an
md1v1dual. When a performer 1s an apprentice, he may
hear alternatives, but as his style matures, he acquires
only those multiforms that are most useful and con~
venient or even pleasing to him. After he has attained
maturity, he does not change them much, if at all. He
can express an idea in many ways: in a half line, a •
whole line, or even in a couplet. Usually each artist
has one set of words and only one for each metrical
requirement. This is what Milman Parry called the
"thrift" of the oral style. To a degree, formulas have
a life of their own and are transmitted orally with the
kind of independence that words have in everyday
speech.
Formulaic analysis is the most reliable method for
determining whether poetry from the past is oral. A
high percentage of formulas in any given passage iodi~
cates that the text is oral. In the following verses from
a Serbo-Croatian oral epic, a solid underlining is used
for lines and half lines repeated at least once in the
analyzed material of the same singer. The broken under~
lining indicates that the phrase was not repeated exac~Y
but that there were other phrases with the same basic
syntactical and metrical patterns having _at least o~e
word in the same position in the line. Both the _who~
line and the two halves of the line have been conSidere
as units.
Uze djadu ka Kajnidji gradu,
Pa siljeZe planinama redom,
Pa ga eto strmom niz planinu
-------------
I kad polju sljeZC kajniCkome,
-------------
·----- -------
Kame stati polje pogljedati,

such analysis has been applied extensively to poetry,
put the study of formulas in oral prose narrative is
still a virgin field. There is, however, some reason to
believe that oral tradition has been responsible not only
.. for the content but also for the form of much of the
11
arrative prose that has come anonymously- from
earlier penods.
'• The Theme. The next largest element of composi-
tion, more extensive than the formula, is the theme.
The calling of an assembly, the gathering of an army,
•' .
the equipping of a hero, a hero's dressing for a journey
... or arming for a battle, a combat or contest, all these
. •' are themes in oral narrative. They are repeated actions.
When Telemachus is provided with a ship by Athena
..
for his journey to Pyles, the theme is that of the
.
equipping of a'hero, just as when Thetis equips Achilles
' with his armor or when Marduk is given special weap-
ons for his fight with Tiamat.
The theme operates under the same principles as
the formula. The formula is used for building lines
and couplets, or line groups; the theme, in building
songs and variants. The theme also has a degree of
independence in oral transmission, because the same
theme can be used in more than one song. Even as
.' the formula is adapted to the varying metrical and other
formal restrictions, so the theme is adapted to the length
of time and tempo of singing required under given
"
,., • social circumstances. It is contractable ·and expandable
according to needs. It has short forms and long forms
and all grades in between; but they are never textually
fixed. Themes ate adaptable to the context of the mo-
ment. It has been found that they, too, take many
'• forms.
One may note, for example, two tellings by the same
.. South Slavic singer of the dressing of the heroine
Fatima in the "Song of Bagdad." She is disguising her-
self as a standard-bearer.
Fatima went to the painted chest and from it took a
bundle. She withdrew its three golden pins and from it took
.'. .
clothes of gold such as the Turkish standard-bearers wear.
She girded on_ a wide belt and weapons and at her side a
golden sabre. On her head she placed a fine fez, surrounded
. .
by a many-colored sash in which she tucked golden plumes.
She then put on boots and leggings.
This is a short form from Song No. 3 in Parry-Lord,
•·... lines 532-542. A longer form of the same theme can
be found in Song No. !, lines 751-778.
Now Fatima went to her room. She changed into better
I .• I
clothing. She donned the garb of a standard-bearer. First
a tunic and over it a breastplate with two panels, both of
gold. Around her neck a collar of gold and on her shoulders
two golden cloaks. On her head she placed a fine fez, sur-
rounded by a many-colored sash in which she tucked golden
plumes. Then she girded on a wide belt and weapons. She
stuck in her belt two small golden pistols which fired well,
neither forged nor hammered. Fatima had had them made in
Venice. Their handles were ornamented with golden ducats,
their barrels of fierce steel and their hammers of precious
stones.
On the level of the "song" the principles are the
sarne. The song is made up of themes and formulas
that have been transmitted orally together with the
technique of their combining. Oral transmission of
songs is basically a transmission of patterns of combined
and ever-recombined themes. It is the transmission of
cornparatively stable ideas in a variety of forms and
combinations.
LITERATURE, ORAL TRANSMISSION OF 829
The Narrative Pattern. Beyond the theme and less
than -the song, although sometimes coinciding with it,
is the narrative pattern. This is a series or cluster of
events that is repeated either in the same song or in
others. On the level of the whole song one might cite
the large number of stories telling of the hero long
away from home who returns to find his wife about
to marry again. This is a basic narrative pattern that has
many forms. It contains elements that persist in most
versions: the absence from home is of some length;
the final release for the hero to return home is brought
about by the intervention of a female figure; the first
person the returned hero meets is often a woman, some-
times a servant; some person close to the hero dies
on his return; the hero conceals his identity and tells
those he meets that he is somebody else; there is an
elaborate series of recognitions; justice is meted out; re-
marriage occurs. Names and places change, but the
basic narrative pattern survives. It must be extremely
old.
There are smaller patterns than those of the whole
song, but they are equally important, and it is necessary
in oral literature research to be able to discern these
patterns in their multiforms. In the Odyssey the hero
lands on Phaeacia, is i:net by Nausicaa, who, with the
additional aid of Athena, takes him to her mother;
earlier in his wanderings, but later in the Odyssey it-
self, Odysseus, after landing among the Laestrygonians,
sends inland a party which meets a girl drawing water,
the daughter of the chief, who takes them to her
mother, who in turn seeks her husband. The pattern
is brief but striking. Heroes coming from the sea meet
a young female figure occupied with water ( washing
or drawing water) who takes them to an older female
figure, who has a male consort. No greater contrast
could be found than between the Phaeacians and the
Laestrygonians, yet this section of the pattern of inci-
dents remains the same in both.
Consideration of a somewhat larger pattern will help
in understanding the structure of an oral narrative that
is transmitted. Odysseus lands after shipwreck suc-
cessively on two islands, Ogygia and Phaeacia. On both
islands he is detained by a female figure, Calypso or
Nausicaa-Arete. In each instance, at the intervention
of a female figure, he is provided with transportation
for further journeying. Thus far there is similarity of
pattern between Ogygia and Phaeacia. This same pat-
tern fits as well with Odysseus' return to Ithaca. There
is per haps a vestige of shipwreck in his strange landing,
because the ship of the Phaeacians is later turned to
stone. He. is met by a female figure, Athena ( cf.
Nausicaa on Phaeacia and also the Laestrygonian girl).
At a feast Odysseus is insulted in Phaeacia and in
Ithaca. There is a recognition scene and a contest is
won in both places. The Phaeacian episode clearly
shares patterns with both Ogygia and Ithaca. The epi-
sodes may thus be considered multifonns of one an-
other.
The comparison of a significant part of the Odyssey
and the Babylonian Gilgamesh shows that some patterns
may have basic mythic meaning (see GILGAMESH EPIC).
Gilgamesh and Enkidu overcome the male monster
Humbaba, who had been placed by the gods to guard
the cedar forest, and thus the heroes incur the wrath
of the gods. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and suffers
afterward from Poseidon's wrath. Gilgamesh and En-
830 LITERATURE, ORAL TRANSMISSION OF
kidu have an adventure with the goddess of love, Ishtar,
who is much like Circe. The pattern thus far is also
like that of the part of *Beowulf in which first a male
monster and then a female antagonist are overcome.
Perhaps the oldest form of this pattern is in the
Babylonian Enuma elish in which first Apsu and then
Tiamat, the male and female principles, are overcome,
although by different heroes. In the Gilgamesh form
of the pattern, death is decreed for Enkidu, and Gilga-
mesh himself goes on a journey to the ends of the
earth seeking knowledge of his mortality, which he
receives from an ancient Noah. After the death of
Elpenor------clearly a vestige in the pattern-Odysseus
goes to the underworld, where he receives knowledge
from the seer TeiresiaS about when death will come
to him. Both heroes return from their journeys to the
other world.
In these patterns the narrative is deeply concerned
with the problems of mortality and immortality. In
one set of patterns a female figure as intercessor emerges
in a key position. In another, man seeks immortality
and eventually becomes reconciled to mortality. The
journey to the other world and return embody the basic
idea of initiation and renewal. Narrative patterns are
not only structurally significant in revealing how oral
traditi0n works in building -and tra_nsmitting stories;
they are also distillations of some of the ultimate mean-
ings of life and death, profound meanings, which are
later bequeathed to written literature See RELIGION (IN
PRIMITIVE CULTURE) ,
Role of Memory. One of the most impoftant prob-
lems in the study of the processes of oral literature is
to define the role memory plays in composition and
transmission. The singer or teller does not memorize a
fixed text. Yet obviously memory is of significance in
oral transmission. The singer uses a phrase many times
and finds it useful; when the need arises again for some-
thing like it, he remembers that phrase; thus it becomes
habitual. One can call this process "remembering."
"Memorization" is the conscious attempt to reproduce
exactly a given set of words, for example. Now singers
and tellers in oral traditional literature are constantly
"remembering," but they do not memorize. In addition
to phrases that become habitual, the teller or singer
remembers the essential facts, names, and plan of the
story. Because singers concentrate on the plan of the
story, they find names most difficult to remember; it
is in names that corruption and variation most fre-
quently occur.
It is sometimes suggested that where a sacred text
is involved, even in oral tradition it will be preserved
word for word because the changing of a word would
vitiate the effectiveness of the ceremony in which the
text is used. Were this true, it seems clear that one
would be dealing not with oral transmission other than
in the most literal sense but with a transmission en-
tirely like that of writing. A lapse of memory in such
a case would be comparable to a scribal error. A
fixed text would be in the mind of the transmitter. With
the possible exception of ritual texts, word-for-word
repetition is not likely to be found in the transmission
of any of the longer genres, especially *epic, *ballad,
and tale. The shorter forms, incantations and other
ritual songs, may be more susceptible to fixity of text
because of their very content and brevity. If it were
true that to change the words in an incantation were to
harm its efficacy, then there would be a special
making for textual exactness. In evaluating anforce
ported cases of such exactness, one should rem Y re.
that to the ~iterate mind multiforms are " ernber
alike," in spite of textual variance. When an inf~Xactty
says that he repeats a song or story "word for rrnan.t
. Word"
exactly as h e hear d 1t, he means only "essentiaU
same." One must be sure that cases of textual y the
ness are carefully authenticated and document e~act.
numerous recordings at different times. It is nece by
essary
also to be sure that one does not have merely hab't1
repetitions of short forms. Ua}
RELATION TO WRITING
If, as is likely, writing was first used to record l'
erature, not to write it, then early literatures were firtt-
5
recordings in writing of what had been long curr ~
in oral tradition. It is possible to make out four m:?
periods of the writing down of traditional literatur~
(1) the Babylonian (c. 2000 B.c.); (2)_ the Hebra'.;
and Greek (c. 800--700 B.c.); (3) the Middle Ages (c.
A.D. 1000-1300); (4) the Modern (1750 to the pre,.
ent). See LITERATURE, WRITTEN TRANSMISSION OF,
Babylonian Period, The ancient Sumerian, Baby-
lonian, Akkadian, and other Near Eastern texts from
the remote past were probably oral compositions trans-
mitted orally over •a long period of time, living parts
of an oral tradition, and written down at whatever the
date of the fust tablets (not of copies). These ancient
texts show the characteristic mar ks of oral composition
and transmission, namely, repetitions of phrase, formu-
las, repetition of themes, repetition of story patterns.
They are, indeed, the earliest recorded oral literary tra-
ditions, stemming roughly from 2000 B.c. in written
form, in content and oral term going back many cen-
turies before that. Their antiquity is shown by the fact
that, when they are written down, they already exhibit
a mature oral art; and such an art is developed slowly.
Moreover, in addition to the internal evidence of repe-
titions and other stylistic phenomena, one can point
to the external evidence of variant versions, typical of
oral literature. The greatest monuments here are surely
the creation epic Enuma elish and the Ep.ic of Gilga-
mesh.
Hebraic and Greek Period. There is no doubt that
oral composition and transmission have played a part
in the history of the Bible, both Old and New Tes<a·
ments.
The Old Testament. It seems very likely that ~.anY
sections of the OT were at one time in oral tradition,
that is to say, they were narratives current in tr~d~io~,
orally composed. The "document theory" bas, 10 e7 '
been useful in pointip.g out the duplicatio~s ao<l
consistencies in the OT narratives, but it 1s possi ·s
-~f;
that its solution. in terms of documents maY be. ID 3j
1
leading. One is perhaps dealing with oral tradition
narratives. "d luge
It might be suggested, for example, th~t the_ emaY
story in Genesis, with its minor inconsistencies, (see
owe less to the mingling of the P and J documen:~an it
PRIESTLY WRITERS, PENTATEUCHAL; YAifWIST) h re j_s
does to oral composition and transmission. T l~erna~
in it an alternation of passages not unlike the a edie~
tion of laisses (irregular strciphes) in some of the {:16 io
val French chansons de geste. At the end _ofc ~tioOS
Genesis, *Noe (Noah) is. given a set of 1nstro

bout the animals to be put into the ark. At the be-
:'°ning of ch. 7 there is a typical form of repetition
~ which the instructions are given again, but this time
jith a variation. Instead of the animals in simple pairs,
fention is made of seven pairs of clean animals and
1
~e pair each of unclean animals. Such a construction
i normal in some traditions of oral narrative. In it
e teller expands in a repeated passage by adding more
formation.
One might suggest also that the remainder of ch. 7
r Genesis and the greater part of ch. 8 exhibit so-called
fing-composition," known especially from the Homeric
'pems. The ring begins with 7 days followed by 40
lys and 40 nights (Gn 7.4). This 7-40 pattern is
danced nicely later (8.8-12) when Noe waits 40 days
Id then 7 and another 7 for the dove to return. A
cond element in the ring is the reference to Noe's
)0 years, which occurs first between God's words to
oe announcing His intentions and the actual narrative
petition of 7 days. A notice of Noe's 600 years fol-
Wsagain immediately, this time in the "date," Noe's
10th year, 2d month, 17th day, thus interrupting the
Petition of 7-40 with which the ring begins. Up to
's point there is the sequence 7-40, 600, 7, 600th-
l
-17th, 40. The last 40 is doubled by the laisse
pe of construction mentioned earlier. The balancing,
: 7-40 by 40-7-7 at the end of the ring has been
f.ntioned. The -'-'date" complex is balanced first ( Gn
O by the ark's coming to rest on Mount Ararat in
[ ?th month on the 17th day, the 17th balancing with
~ earlier date, and second (8.13) when in Noe's 601st
~r on the 1st day of the month the waters had begun
!dry from the earth. Both these later dates are double,
ng the beginning and also the ending of the event.
III.
e center of the ring is the repetition of 150 days.
le type of construction just outlined is not uncommon
: oral composition and is typical of the Homeric
ems, particularly the Iliad.
'r,Iomer and Hesiod. Although there is still some
terence of opinion among scholars, the consensus
1~at the Homeric poems and possibly also some of
1
~nod's works are the products of oral composition
1transmission. The first thorough study of the formu-
f character of the Homeric poems was made by
Iman Parry in 1928 in his L'Epithete traditionelle
is Homere. In this and in subsequent writings Parry
!Wed the usefulness for the traditional singer-poet
the repeated phrases in the Homeric poems. From
f3 to 1935 be made recordings of living Yugoslav
F and lyric tradition. His collection of recordings
I MSS was made especially for the purpose of in-
tigating the process of composition and transmis-
1 of narrative song. Parry's collecting work was
,.tinued after his death in 1935 by Albert B. Lord
rugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania and by James A.
topoulos in Greece. In The Singer of Tales Lord
lyzed the thematic and formulaic structure of the
be-Croatian oral epic tradition and applied the
1Wledgethus gained to the Homeric poems and to
fe medieval poetry. From the experience with the
toslav laboratory much more is now known, for
lnple, about the way in which long epic poems may
rrmed in tradition. Singers expand their songs when
or the audience wish, both by fullness of ornamen-
tnand by the joining or intermingling of stories and
ative patterns. Thematic expansion has already
LITERATURE, ORAL TRANSMISSION OF 831
been illustrated above in an incident describing the
dressing of a hero. Pany's best singer in Yugoslavia in
1935 expanded largely by this technique what was
normally a song of some 2,500 lines to over 12,000
lines. Other texts in the collection demonstrate how
additions may be made to "astory pattern. A pattern of
return, for example, in many instances develops into
a pattern of rescue when the returned hero discovers
that his son has been captured. While the orality of
the Homeric poems is recognized, there is still con-
siderable divergence of thought on bow this orality
is to be interpreted in the case of songs as long and
as rich as the Iliad and Odyssey.
On the one hand, during the ancient period m
Greece, writing was not used for literary purposes be-
fore the time when the Homeric poems were written
down. On the other hand, by the time the impetus arose
in the Middle Ages to record the vernacular oral lit-
eratures, a written literary tradition had already been
established for many centuries. But this literary tradi-
tion was in hieratic ( or foreign) languages, Latin in
the West, Greek in the East. It had no direct contact
with those who practiced the oral literatures until, at
least, the time came to write down those literatures.
Formulaic analysis has been applied to some medie-
val Anglo-Saxon poetry, to some of the chansons de
geste, the Old Spanish Cid, and a few Middle ,English
epics and romances. The most notable work in Anglo-
Saxon in this field has been done by Francis Peabody
Magoun, Jr., and bis students. It is clear from their
analyses that the style of Beowulf, as well as that of
certain other works of Anglo-Saxon poetry, is oral.
The formulaic character of these poems .cannot be
doubted. This investigation would seem to indicate
that all these songs were written down from oral tradi-
tion. In some cases, however, the evidence is less strong
than in others, and the material of the narrative itself,
the subject matter, is not traditional. Here we must i
seek some other reason for what is apparently a tradi-
tional formulaic style.
The l\1iddle Ages. The men concerned with writing
in the Middle Ages were primarily experts in the literary
languages, a.rid through these men probably came the
idea not only to write down native vernacular poetry
but also to compose vernacular versions of poetry and
prose found in the sacred or learned literary tradition.
The vernacular already had a developed poetic style,
in oral literature, and the sacred subjects were naturally i
retold in a conventional style like the oral one, the only
one readily available in the vernacular. This would
seem to be the most likely explanation for the fact that
some texts from the Middle Ages submit themselves
readily to formulaic analysis even when it is known
that they could not be traditional oral products because
they are "translations" or paraphrases of Latin originals.
This is especially true, it would seem, of certain Anglo-
Saxon poems, such as Juliana, Daniel, Andreas, or
Elene, works that should be classified as written, not
oral, literature. Such songs are unique since they are
without the variants one would expect from oral tradi-
tional song. If there were sufficient material for analysis
and thus a greater knowledge of the tradition, it would
probably be possible to differentiate between these
works and the purely traditional poems more exactly.
Another group of songs in the Middle Ages, particu-
larly in Middle English, shows by analysis a compara-
832 LITERATURE, POPULARJZATION OF

tively high number of phrases formed on regularly re- the stories that belong to the oral community in Wh' ready,
current patterns, with, however, a very low percentage retelling is normal. Scientific recording methods h tch wheth
of actual repeated formulas. These textS are several progressed side by side with scientific editing. ave now
steps further away from oral style than those men- Decline of Oral Transmission. Pure oral transmiss· peopl
tioned in the preceding paragraph. The patterns of syn- of traditional literature has come to an end almost c~on ciatio
tax, metrics, and word boundaries remain, but the exact pletely in some countries in the West, and in othrn. ings o
repetition of wording has begun to break down, to be- . . cl . . fu q
1t survives o y m remote regtons. no place in th optimi
come more flexible. Here is a conventional literary style West is it any longer the predominant mode of lite e po~u_r
derived from an oral narrative technique. It can be easily ture. It was during the Renaissance that the bala:a- a nsm
identified by formula analysis. Sir Gawain and the shifted to -written literature. Symptomatic of the chance this: a
Green Knight is representative. was the rise to consciousness of the individuality of tfe best,"
Modem Development of Study. The modern period author. The anonymity of many medieval poets is e trash?
of collecting of oral literature began in the 18th cen- reflection of the oral world in which the traditional styla Lite
tury, when there appeared, for example, such works flourished. That style is a more or less homogeneous one *book
as Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in which individual traits, although existent, are sub~ 40 per
(1765); among the South Slavs, the Franciscan monk merged in the common stock of patterns, formulas, and 1964
Andrija *KatiC-MioSiC's Razgovor ugodni na.roda themes. classic
slovinskoga (1756); Johann Gottfried von *Herder's Yet in a sense oral literature is still very much alive sidera
Stimmen der VOiker in Liedern (1778-79); to say today even in the West. A knowledge of its methods is that th
nothing of the influential frauds Of James McPherson, leading to ever deeper inquiry, to exploration of those age go
Fragments of Ancient Poe'fry Colle'cted in the Highlands places in the world untouched by literacy. Illumination vulgari
of Scotland (1760) and The Works of Ossian (1765). is in this w_aybeing shed, furtherm~re, on the artistry terest.
One of the most vexing problems of Oral literature of the stones from the past, a subJect that will con- as the
is that of purity or authenticity. Not only have writers tinue to elicit lively scholarly debate for many years the Ar
used the oral style, as they did in the Middle Ages, to come. watere
because there was no other vernacular style or, more See also LITERATURE, WRITTEN TRANSMISSION OF; "reade
correctly, because there already existed a well developed HUMANISM. that wi
and completely satisfactory vernacular style; they have probab
Bibliography: C. M. BowRA, Heroic Poetry (London 1952),
also attempted to compose their own version of the A. B. LoRD, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass. 1960). G, S,- fled th
subject matter. In the modern period, with the spread Knuc, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge, Eng, 1962). T. M. that th
of literacy and the wide distribution of the printed word, ANDERSSON,The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins (New oprnen
Haven 1964). F. P. MAGOUN,"Oral Formulaic Character of On a
book versions of oral literature have become availabll! Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," Speculum 28 (1953) 446----467.
to the storytellers and singers of tradition. Scholarship's S. THOMPSON,The Folktale (New York 1946). V. I. PROPP,The amazin
first task is often to clear away the false from the true Morphology of the Folktale, ed. S. PIRKOVA-JACKSON, tr. L. air (ra
in order to arrive at an evaluation of the primary ma- SCOTT (Bloomington, Ind. 1958). M. PARRY,L'£pithete tradi- stages
tionelle dans Homere (Paris 1928); "Studies in the Epic Tech- of scho
terial of its investigation. nique of Oral Verse-making," pt. 1: "Homer and Homeric Style,"
With a few exceptions, the central focus of the in- CATHOL
pt. 2: "The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral
terest in oral literature before the 19th century was Poetry," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930) 73- cationa
on poetry-epic, ballad, lyric, ritual songs. The ex- 147; 43 (1932) 1-50. C. WHITMAN,Homer and the Heroic Tradi- lovers c
tion (Cambridge, Mass. 1958), esp. for ring composition. J. A. recited
ceptions are the sagas and prose romances of the Middle NoTOPOULos,"Parataxis in Homer," Transactions and Proceed-
Ages ( and the question of their orality is still un- ings of the American Philological Association 80 (1949) 1-23;
heard r
answered). The latest and best discussion of this prob- "Continuity and Interconnexion in Homeric Oral CompOsition," of the
lem for the Icelandic sagas is in Theodore M. An- ibid. 82 (1951) 81-101. R. A. WALDRON, "Oral-Formulaic Tech- vantes)
nique and Middle English Alliterative Poetry," Speculum ~2 original
dersson's The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins (see (1957) 792-801. J. Ross, "Formulaic Composition in Gaelic
ICELANDIC LITERATURE) . to thos
Oral Poetry," ModPhilol 57 (1959) 1-12. S. G. NICHOLS,Formu-
In the 19th century attention was given to the folk laic Diction and Thematic Composition in the Chanson de Popu
tale as well (see FOLKLORE). Here prose narrative was Roland (Chapel Hill 1961). J. RYCHNER,La Chanson de geste ical kno
(Geneva 1955), esp. for "laisse" structure. R.H. WEBBER,"For• misdire
a demonstrable part of oral tradition, although the early mulistic Diction in the Spanish Ballad," University of California not-a
collectors in all genres had no qualms about editing Publications in Modern Philology 34 (1951) 175-277. B. A.
BEATIE,"Oral-Traditional Composition in the Spanish 'Ro~an- media i
collected material in their own words. The brothers
cero' of the Sixteenth Century,'' Journal of the Folklore Jnslltule ophy o
Grimm were no exceptions here. Folktale scholarship
1 (1964) 92-113. M. PARRY,comp., Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, ture, ra
has not been so deeply concerned with orality as has ed. and tr. A. B. LoRD, 2 v. (Cambridge, Mass. 1953-54), v.1: MUNICA
that of the verse genres, because of the special problems English Translations, v.2: Serbocroatian Texts.
See a
of meter and various acoustical requirements. Instead [A. B. LORD]
of interest in the_ repeated phrase, there has arisen in Bibliog
LITERATURE, POPULARIZATION OF 1954). J.
folktale research a concern for the repeated motif and ment Ins
for the _common denominators of types. In this field One of the results of the technological advances. of th~ ton 1961)
Stith Thompson is the justly acknowledged dean. There 20th century has been a widespread dissemination_0
is less urge to memorize a prose text thah to commit culture. This has been made possible by mecha01ca1
verse to memory once the text has been written down. techniques, such as the high-speed press and mass re- LITER
Before the writing down, however, the attitude of the duplication of material, and _bysuch economic factors is TRAN
traditional artist is the same toward the text, be it mass distribution and advertising methods. It rnaY ,e Liter
prose or verse. It is the story, not the text, that is of debated seriously or captiously ( depending on one: forrnanc
prime importance. Many editors today have ceased to sincere interest or perhaps too facile disdain) wheth~s inally th
countenance the practice of retelling in their own liter- this wide diffusion of music, the arts, and literature ten t verbal p
ary language, rather than in the traditional language, to debauch their value by wasting them on those 00
 LITERATURE,
ready, or perhaps not even able, to appreciate them, or
whether the very fact that more and more people can
00 w enjoy them may mean that progressively more
people are being influenced toward true l?v~ and appre-
ciation. It would seem, on balance, that faith m the work-
ings of democracy, and even more, a spirit of Christian
optimism, would impel one to the view that wide ex-
posure to the best would slowly but effectively result in
a rising level of culture. The problem, of course, lies in
this: are growing masses of people being exposed to "the
best," or are they rather being inundated by popularized
trash?
Literature is popularized mainly by *paperbacks,
*book dubs, and *best sellers. It is significant that some
40 per cent of the 18,000 paperback titles published in
1964 were of the "quality" type, i.e. reprints of the
classics and original works of serious intent and con-
siderable literary stature. It may be a balanced judgment
that these superior paperbacks will do more to encour-
age good taste and serious interest in reading than the
vulgarizing paperbacks will do to debauch taste and in-
terest. Literature is popularized also in such publications
as the so-called classic comics, in which such classics as
the Arthurian legends, Dickens' novels, and the like, ·are
watered down in cartoons and minimal text. Some young
"readers" may thereby be given a taste for great stories
that will seek satisfaction in the original works; a more
probable result is that most young people will be satis-
fied that they know these classics-by which they mean
that they could give a superficial account of plot devel-
opment.
On a much higher level, literature is popularized with
amazing frequency on the motion-picture screen, on the
air (radio and television), on discs and tapes, on the
stages of little theaters, and in the drama departments
of schools and colleges. (See AMERICAN LITERATURE, 2;
CATHOLIC THEATER MOVEMENT). In thousands of edu-
cational institutions, and in myriads of homes, poetry
lovers can hear Chaucer's poetry read as he 'would have
recited it,_and modern poets such as T. S. Eliot can be
heard reading their own works. Great film adaptations
of the classics (Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoi, Cer-
vantes) have probably sent thousands of people to the
original works for the first time, or given new insights
to those who already knew them.
Popularization of literature in the age of technolog-
ical know-how ha:s not infrequently cheapened taste and
tnisdirected interest in literature and the arts, but it need
not-and will not among those who use the various
tnedia intelligently. For the Christian-Catholic philos-
ophy on three media of popularization, the motion pic-
ture, radio, and television, see MEDIA OF SOCIAL COM-
MUNICATION, II.
See also LITTER.ATURE SONORE; BALLAD; FOLKLORE.
Bibliography: J. BARZUN,God's Country and Mine (Boston
1954). J. D. HAllT, The Popular Book (New York 1950). Tami-
tnent Institute, Culture for the Millions?, ed. N. JACOBS (Prince-
ton 1961).
[H. C. GARDINER]
LITERATURE, WRITTEN
l'RANSMISSION OF
Literature involves skilled, imaginative verbal per-
!ormance on the one hand and writing on the other.Orig-
inally these two were separate developments. Primitive
Verbal performance reached a high degree of skill and
WRITTEN TRANSMISSION OF 833
artistic virtuosity in tales, oratory, and song thousands-
perhaps hundreds of thousands-of years before writing
was even thought of. Writing first came into existence
not to record or foster verbal virtuosity but to meet prac-
tical needs such as account keeping. Only long after the
invention of writing did it occur to man to record in
writing a performance of storyteller, speechmak:er, or
singer, and finally to make up songs and tales and other
such literary works with writing instruments in ii
hand. I
Oral Roots of Literature. Written composition thus
began as an adaptation to a new medium of skills per-
fected in another, quite different medium. Until very
recently, this fact and its implications have not been
fully appreciated even by scholars. The scholarly study
of skilled verbal activity focused initially on written
verbalization, that is, on texts, and necessarily so, for 'Ii'
only with the advent of recording machines in the past 11
few decades has scholarly study of oral expression be- II
come generally practicable. As a result of preoccupation
with written texts, all artistic verbalization has long been
thought of as "literature" (from litterae, letters of the
alphabet), that is, basically as something written. Some
oral performance can legitimately be so considered: oral
delivery of plays, for example, is vocalization that
matches a written document. But the concept of "liter-
ature" has been extended beyond such warrant. Oral
performance in cultures with no knowledge of writing
at all has been thought of as a form of "literature," and
even great scholars have commonly used such chimeric
concepts as "oral literature" ( that is, "oral writing"). I
The result has been not merely a confused nomenclature
but also a radical misconception ,of what oral perform-
ance is; for thinking of it as somehow "literature" entails
thinking of it as, at least in some obscure way, a variety
of writing-writing that somehow failed to get com-
mitted to paper. Primitive oral performance is no
such thing. Oral performance, arising before the idea
of writing even existed, enforc'ed ·and thrived on tech-
niques, effects, and attitudes-highly specialized themes,
repetitiveness, indifference to "originality"-which writ-
ing was to render increasingly nonfunctional, distaste-
ful, and to some extent obsolete.
As direct study of purely oral performance has devel-
oped in recent years, ways have been devised for con-
ceiving of such performance as it actually was or is in
itself rather than by analogy with writing. As a result,
the vast differences between skilled verbal performance
of genuine, purely oral preliterates and skilled verbal
works produced pen-in-hand-i.e., literature proper-
have begun to be more fully understood. Proportion-
ately with our understanding of the oral prehistory of
literature, our understanding of literature itself and of
written transmission has improved. The written trans-
mission of literature can be seen to involve several dis-
tinct but interrelated questions. First, what brought
about the writing down of elaborate verbal expression,
which for thousands of years had been an exclusively
oral affair? Second, what happened to the "matter" when
expression shifted from oral to written? That is, was the
same "thing" (incident, plot, characterization, attitude
toward life, world view) that had been communicated
in oral performance also communicated when writing
took over? Third, what happened to the forms of ex-
pression, in the sense of genres, as the use of writing
developed? Finally, how have the oral and the written
834 LITERATURE, WRITTEN TRANSMISSION
influenced one another? These questions are intercon-
nected and will be discussed conjointly.
Beginnings of Writing. Understood as skilled imagina-
tive verbalization involving writing, literature is depen-
dent upon the development of true script, that is, of a
relatively elaborate and supple system of signs usable
for communication.
Systems before Script. Pictures such as the paleolithic
paintings in Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux, France, how-
ever astonishingly imaginative, can hardly be considered
in any sense literature, although they may be taken to
have something vaguely to do with the misty origins of
pictographic script. Similarly, other records of the aide'-
memoire type, such as Inca quipus, Australian notched
sticks, or North American Indian wampum belts, while
they may in a sense tell a story, are hardly literature.
Neither are the picture stories of the Ewe of West Africa
or the "winter count" calendars in which Dakota Indians
kept records of successive winters by inscribing on a
buffalo hide a symbol for a major event in each winter
(JO-Dakotas-killed-by-Crows winter, smallpox winter,
sun-eclipse winter, etc.). '
Earliest Scripts. To the best of our_present knowledge,
scripts, or true writing s)'stems, first appeared among
urban neolithic populations: cuneiform scripts among
the Sumerians c. 3500 B.c., Egyptian hieroglyphics c.
3000 B.C., Minoan pictographic c. 2000 B.c., Minoan
(Mycenaean) "Linear B'' script c. 1200 B.c., Indus Val-
ley script c. 3000 to 2500 B.c., and Chinese script c.
1500 B.c. The alphabet, the most important script of all,
since it undertakes to reduce sound itself most directly
to spatial equivalents, was developed c. 1500 B.C. in the
Eastern Mediterranean region. From there it spread
around the Middle East, Europe, and Asia; all alphabets
in the world derive from the original Mediterranean in-
vention. In the New World, Mayan script seemingly ap-
peared only c. A.D. 50, and Aztec script, aboui AD. 1400.
The principal incentive to the development of scripts
was generally the need for groups of persons living in
concentrated, urbanized centers to keep records of prop-
erty, personal and public, or of various functions. The
record keepers were commonly public officials, often
religious functionaries, such as priests or temple attend-
ants. Of the probably more than 250,000 Mesopotamian
cuneiform inscriptions now known, more_ than 95 per
cent deal with economic transactions. In many cultures,
laws were the first written works to which some literary
value can be assigned, although the relationship of these
written "laws" to actual practice is not always clear.
Many early scripts, Linear B for example, never reached
the point where it was possible to use them for anything
except the crudest lists. They were pictographic, or
largely so, and they could deal only with what was rather
directly picturable.
From Script to Literature. However, in scripts such as
Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform writing, or the Chi-
nese character system, pictography had developed into
a syllabary or partial syllabary. These scripts could be
used for imaginatively nuanced expression such as
skilled oral performance had long employed, and thus
for literature in the strict sense of the term. Above all,
the simple serviceability of the alphabet made the de-
velopment of literature possible, although at the sacrifice
of some of the visually based richness that Chinese char-
acters and comparable pictographic systems can achieve
by the fact that their characters always retain at least
OF
some remote picture value even when denoting rel .
abstract concepts. The Chinese character for "go ~t~;ely
example, is a combination of the charact~ ' for
"woman" and "child," although the spoken Wor~ for
good, how [hau], has nothing to do with the wo\ for
woman, nii [ny], or the word for child, dzuh [dza~ for
hence does not of itself evoke the concepts occa .' and
by the written word. sionect
Within some 1,500 years or so of the appearan
cuneiform writing, the earliest known script, the Suceof
ians, who developed this writing and bequeathed it t ~~­
Assyrians and Babylonians, had a sizable corpuo e
8
works that can be considered truly literary in the 8 of
of being imaginatively evocative. Their monument~~se
scriptions constitute a kind of history; about 3 0~~
known clay tablets, chiefly from c. 2000 B.c., co~tain
literary matter, consisting of myths, hymns, prayers ep·
tales, proverbs and aphorisms, lamentations, and' lo~~
songs. A single clay tablet of c. 2000 B.c. lists 62 differ-
ent titles, and another Sumerian catalogue brings to
nearly 90 the total of known titles of different Sumerian
epics.
The Beginning of Literary Genres. It is a mistake
however, to suppose that early literary productions wer~
written works in the sense in which a novel today is a
written work. Writing, once it was invented, took pos-
session of language only slowly. Given the psychic and
cultural structures of early man, reading itself was diffi-
cult, particularly when carried out in complicated non-
alphabetic scripts. Even when, as among the ancient
Babylonians, it was prescribed by law that all except
the lowest class of people learn to read and write, it ap-
pears that the prescription was often not observed. After
the Greek alphabet came into use probably c. 700 B.c.,
Greek society took some 300 years to pass from a state
of craft literacy, when writing· was a skill practiced by
a certain group, as shipbuilding or stonemasonry might
be, to a state of general literacy, when the ability to read
became an asset to the ordinary citizen. Reading habits
long remained largely painstaking and "myopic,'' pro-
ceeding word by word and~often entailing much vocali-
zation, so that, through much of the Middle Ages, the
reader's voice was commonly audible even when he was
reading to himself. Early manuscript illustrations often
helped alleviate the strain readers felt: they distracted
from the text more than they explained it.
Under such conditions writing was not at first real~y
written composition but rather oral performance Ill
transcriptions that exhibit sometimes more and some-
times less influence of the new medium of writing. The
impulse to write down oral performance was doubtl_ess
a product of the impulse to keep records~ the invention
of writing encouraged this. Transcription of oral per-
formance was at first very difficult; the performer was
necessarily trained to pace his production much _fas~eJ
than an attendant scribe or he himself could wnte bis
he was literate, as he might exceptionally b~), andth·s
ability to recall and perform was closely tied to ~
pacing. One possible way in which this problem wso
solved was to sing a brief passage and then p~use s-
that the scribe could write it out, then another brief pald
sage with a pause, and so on-a procedure that wouas
almost certainly produce a text not quite the same
that of a full-blown normal oral performance.. t all
Division of Genres. Understandably, most tf no res
early literature thus falls into the preliterary gen '
 LITERATURE,
• bicb H. Munro Chadwick and Nora Kershaw Chad-
ick (see bibliog.), ranging through a vast amount·of
orld literature, have classified in two basic groups: ( 1)
orks relating to individuals specified or unspecified,
eroic and nonheroic, including (a) narrative poetry or
ga intended for entertainment, (b) poetry" (rarely
rose) in the form of speeches in character, ( c) didactic
oetrY or prose, (d) poetry (seldom prose) of celebra-
·on or appeal (panegyrics, elegies, hymns, prayers, ex-
0 rtations), and (e') personal poetry (rarely prose) re-
ting to the author -himself and his surroundings; ( 2)
orks impersonal or general in character, iricluding (a)
, tiquarian, (b) gnomic, (c) descriptive, and (d) man-
·c compositions. Reproducing such genres, the earliest
arks.in writing retain the typical features of expression
eroanded for elaborate oral performance but destined
0 become less operative as writing gained strength;
bese features include a fixed and highly selective econ-
mYof themes, formulas, and formulaic elements out of
hi.ch oral performers "rhapsodize" or stitch together
heir recitations (see LITERATURE, ORAL TRANSMISSION
) ,. loose narrative structures, standardized archaisms
which Aristotle took for granted as belonging nor-
ally to poetry, since he found them in the epics ·he
ew-and many parallelisms.
The high incidence of poetry found in earlier liter-
e by comparison with that of more recent times is
so a carry-over from oral cultures. In these, verbaliza-
on was often highly rhythmic for quite practical pur-
e ses; in the absence-of all records, oral-speech itself
actioned as a major mechanism of retention and re-
' and thus was quite commonly given highly rhyth-
,c and other "poetic" turns that facilitated such func-
n. The balanced structure of the Beatitudes in the
rmon on the Mount (Mt 5.3, 4), for example
"Blessed are the poor in spirit/ For theirs is the king-
m of Heaven./ Blessed are the meek/ For they shall
ssess the earth"), represents a mode of expression
d thought developed to facilitate oral retention and
call.
Concreteness of Oral Economy. The same dom-
tly oral economy kept early literature concretely
aginative rather than abstract. Abstract reasoning
d thinking in terms of complex objective causality
-e minimized in oral cultures, for the amount and kind
information needed for scientific analysis cannot be
cumulated in oral media. The result is that actuality
seized in terms not of categories so much as of
• ents, particularly actions of human or anthropomor-
• ed beings, which lend themselves to oral epic and
er oral composition.
' Results of the Use of Writing. Writing created new
ds of variability and new kinds of stability in the
ans:m.issionof verbal performance. In oral tradition,
cial linguistic mixtures, more or less stylized, come
to being. Thus the language of the Iliad and Odyssey
~ special epic dialect originally brought into being by
1c singers to serve their own necessities and ends.
eowulf gives evidence of a similar epic language pre-
\'i.ng special archaic elements, but it also exhibits
er kinds of dialectal variations clearly traceable to
CCessive_scribes. The single extant manuscript that
eserves the poem was written c. A.D. 1000 in a Ian-
age dominantly late West Saxon, but the text shows
. guiar admixtures of early West Saxon, Northum-
an, Mercian, Kentish, and Anglian. Significantly, one
WRITTEN TRANSMISSION OF 835
and the same word often occurs in different dialectal
forms, thus indicating that the manuscript was recopied
several times by various scribes who spoke different
dialects and who sometimes changed the text before
them to their own dialect and sometimes left it unaltered.
Textual Variations and Control. Textual variations
are, of course, not restricted to dialectal irregularities.
Additions and omissions occur in written copies of
works, and attempts at control of manuscripts occur
very early. In antiquity it was common to specify on
copies of a work how many lines the original or stan-
dard edition contained (stichometry) or how many
words or even how many letters. *Josephus specified at
the end of his Jewish Antiquities (A.D. 93) that its
length is 60,000 lines (stichoi). Transmission of re-
ligious writings was often subject to extreme care: to
avoid errors, sometimes each word was assigned a spe-
cial position on each page in all copies, so that something
like the effect of a printed text was achieved for a time
at incredible cost of labor.
Textual control, however, was always exceedingly
difficult in a manuscript culture, and not until the de-
velopment of typography, and particularly of printing
from movable alphabetic type, perfected in the mid-15th
century, did accurate reproduction of texts become fea-
sible on a large scale. Modern textual study dates from
the invention of print (see HUMANISM).
Printed texts reproduced from the author's own
manuscript and, even more, under the author's super-
vision, can be extremely accurate. When the author's
own ·manuscript no longer exists and editors must rely
on copies, problems multiply, particularly if a large
series of copies intervenes between the original and the
extant manuscripts. Somewhat paradoxically, ancient
texts that today show numerous divergent readings are
often much firmer from a scholarly point of view than
ancient texts that show no variations. When an old text
. ha_sno variations, this almost always means that only
one copy of the work is known, so that there is nothing
to check it against. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with its
many variants, is textually far more satisfactory than
Beowulf, which has none because only one manuscript
of it is known. With its many variants, the text of the
Bible, extant in thousands upon thousands of manu-
scripts of varying degrees of completeness, some dating
from even before the time of Christ (see DEAD SEA
SCROLLS) , is a far better text than those of many secular
works of Greek and Latin antiquity, for which our
present text is based at times on only one manuscript,
often copied out 900 years after the original, and oc-
casionally lost since. For example, all known texts of
the Roman poet Catullus ( 84 ?-54 B.c.) derive directly
or indirectly from a single manuscript rediscovered at
Verona shortly before 1323 and lost again by 1433. Ex-
cept for the part.known as Scipio's Dream, what is extant
of Cicero's De republica derives from a single manu-
script of the 4th century of the Christian era.
Bards, Authors, Patrons,-Publishers. With the use of
writing, the routes of transmission for the verbalized cul-
tural heritage of a people change. The role of the bard
becomes less significant, and he is gradually relegated
to the more static and "retarded" sectors of society, a
relic of the past. First scribes become important, then I,[
"authors" ( authorship is made relatively little of in
purely oral cultures, or at best is uncertain or confused),
then patrons who support writers (at first individuals or
 836 LITERATURE, WRITTEN TRANSMISSION
)ft-, --- -
\:"!
':
+-21
~"
Man holding a book, detail of a border ornament in the
9th-centUry "Book of Kells" preserved in the library at
Trinity College, Dublin.
religious institutions or governments, in our day also
private foundations), and finally· printers and publish-
ers. Patrons, printers, and publishers often determine to
a· greater or lesser degree what is written; and how far
or in what way what is written becomes known to read-
ers. With writing, institutionalized religion becomes
more important than ever as a transmitter of culture.
Through the Middle Ages particularly, the preservation
and copying of manuscripts was a major work of monas-
tic orders (see SCRIPTORIUM).
Changes in Matter. As the use of writing grows, the
matter inherited from oral tradition undergoes change.
The hero, exalted by oral tradition as a figure in whose
doings cultural values could be articulated and recalled,
gradually becomes less obviously an embodiment of cur-
rent cultural 'stru~tures and more an abstract ideal.
Eventually central characters are no longer exclusively
public .figures but also include more ordinary individ-
uals, as in Balzac, Dickens, or Faulkner. The types· in
which an oral culture is forced to cast its memory very
largely yield to greater particularizations. The literary
imagination becomes more introspective, interiorized,
and personal, less tribal, focusing on the tensions of in-
dividual conscience rather than on deviations from more
e:Xteriorpatterns of behavior as solil'ces of human un-
easiness. Such increasing interiorization of attention can
be traced from Homer through Virgil and on through
the Middle Ages and Renaissance into the present. At
the same time, the findings of natural science are more
attended to in the interpretation of human behavior.
Within the past few generations the findings of sociol-
ogy, biology, and psychology have been particularly
exploited. Complexes of causalities-psychological, po-
litical, social, and other-are developed more deliber-
ately and explicitly: organization becomes more strongly
"linear." Scientific or "naturalistic" interests are aided
by the development of techniques of exposition and Of
detailed description in which early literature was rela-
tively weak. As knowledge of the natural world grows,
the early literary preoccupation with religious questions
becomes less exclusive and explicit, although the re-
ligious problem of man's existence remains, it would
appear, at the center of literature, overtly or covertly.·
OF
Changes in Genre. With changes in matter -
changes in genre. Literary forms that are mo come
pendent on the written medium as such develo re de.
original categories, as mentioned above in the Ch~d ~he
classification, mostly persist in one form or anotbe Wtck
though certain ones decline in relative importance r, aJ.
bly the purely didactic and gnomic ( directive of biota.
action), and poetry of public celebration or ap Itlan
There is a notable increase of prose, as reliance on hf:!.
rhythmic forms of verbalization for conserving kng f
edge in oral culture decreases. The prose paraphras:w •
the earlier Norse heroic poems are developed, for s of
ample, in writing. Verse itself is given more elaborex.
designs. The verse of Sir Gawain and the Green K.nia~e
or Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Wreck of the n/ r
schland, for all the splendid sound effects of the latt
poem in particular, obviously depends on writing. Plo~~
ting of stories is tightened and becomes more compli-
cated, ultimately producing at one of its peaks the short
story and the murder mystery and at another the ex-
tremes of complexity found in Faulkner's Absalom
Absalom! Drama, at least from ancient Greece 00 '
generally depends on writing for its composition, al~
though, like other forms, it long preserves close asso-
ciation with formally oral genres: Shakespeare's Henry
V is one of countless plays of its time and earlier struc-
tur~d around extensive series of speeches just as old oral
epics had been ( one third of Beowulf is made up of
speeches).
With writing, finally, distinctively chirographic de-
signs are developed. Acrostic poems and alphabetic
poems, each line beginning with a successive letter of the
alphabet as in some of the Psalms or the Lamentations
of Jeremia, obviously depend on the existence of writ-
ing, although such poems are in greatest favor in cul-
tures retaining a strong oral-aural cast of mind and a
certain self-consciousness about literacy: in such cul-
tures the alphabet as such has a strong appeal as another
formula serving organization .and recall. The letter
(epistle) as a literary form is obviously the product of
writing and is normally prose, thus contrasting w_ith
the formalized messages· of preliterate cultures, whi~h
often had to be cast in some rhythmic or thematic-
formulaic design, if they were moderately complicated,
so that they could be recalled with acceptable accuracy.
Oral Effects in Written Works. The use of oral effects
in written composition is frequent, but often different
from that in purely oral performance. Dialogue ~o~-
posed in writing becomes over the centuries increasmgalY
and calculatedly casual and colloquial, whereas 1D • or.
performance it is of necessity highly stylized, thei:11~~~
and formulaic. Sound effects are often more conscio th
elaborated than in oral production. Occasionally. t~
picture presented by the text of a poem is integrated.;; r-
the poem's meaning, as, for example, in George ;e
bert's "The Altar" and "Easter Wings " where
' , re-
printed lines form the shapes of an altar a~d w~gs be-
spectively. Much more sophisticated relat10nsbipstion
tween words as sound and their textual p~esentation
have been achieved recently. A maximum mtera~s is
between oral-aural, visual, and kinesthetic eleme~tled
realized in a p_iece such as E. E. Cummings's u.n biS
poem on a grasshopper, where the reader, puzzhngaJJle
way through ·the.lines, finds himself involved int~ fdbe
kind of situation as when on a walk throug? a ~s dis~
sees an actual grasshopper idiotically dance into
 LITERATURE,
tegrating leap through the air and then abruptly com-
ose himself again in full view:
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe) :1
eA
Ip:
s a
(r
rlvlnG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be) rran( com) gi ( e )ngly
,grasshopper;
this performance words and letters are arranged and
eranged so as to play a kind of visual and kinesthetic
bbligato against the movement of sound. The poem
nnot be read aloud, yet the sound, like the visible ar-
angement of the type, is functional.
Originality and Writing as Property. Another result
f the use of writing is growth in the importance at-
ched to originality and corresponding growth in the
se of writing as property. Originality, the ability to
eate something truly distinctive, meant little in oral"
tures, where, indeed, it constituted a threat. Without
ords, oral cultures bend ·every effort to repeat over
·dover again what they know in order to keep posses-
on of it, so that :fidelity and invariability (never quite
hieved) are among their major ideals in verbalizing.
en writing transfers the burden of retention from
repetition to the inscribed surface of a document,
ere a work can be "look~d up" and gone over at
·sure as often as the· individual reader may want, the
et or other writer is freer to embark on original under-
kings. When he does this, the sense that what he writes
his own begins to gtow and iS reinforced by the· ac-
'ty of booksellers, who were already operative in
cient literate cultures. With the invention of typog-
hy, the sense of literary works as property increases
wly-it was still not very widespread in Shakespeare's
.Y, when what today would be considered plagiarism
s taken to be only a demonstration of wide reading.
e 18th century saw the beginning bf modern copy-
• ht laws.
Learned Languages. Somewhat early in the history of
eracy, as writing penetrated society more deeply, cer-
·n languages, such as Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
Chinese, developed a. "learned" form cut off from the
ainstream 6f oral developments in which these Ian-
ages themselves had first appeared. The 'learned form
the languages rigidified around bodies of written
s. Spoken forms of the languages, relatively free
•rn written control, continued to develop into new
aculars in ways previously normal for spoken Ian-
:ages generally, and more or less oral forms, such as
lads and £Olk tales, proliferate in these vernaculars.
actually some of the vernaculars-those which have
orne today's "literary" or written languages---came
Ore and more under scribal control. The learned Ian-
. ages were totally under scribal control from the time
Y ceased to be vernaculars, all their subsequent de-
lopment being governed by written models, rather
by oral practice, for which writing had originally
ished merely a means of record, not a rule. Para-
.xically, however, these learned languages sometimes
WRITTEN TRANSMISSION OF 837
perpetuated strongly oral-aural sets of mind, for the
reason that they had become fixed in writing in an age
when the total culture was highly oral-aural in cast. Thus
the written Latin works studied in school vaunted both
rheforic, •in its original sense of the art of public speak-
ing, and the equally oral art of dialectic or formal aca-
demic debate because skill in public oral performance
had been the aim of ancient Latin education, as of
Greek. So long as Latin study dominated the curriculum
in the West, it gave a more than normal oral tinge to the
literary world. Renaissance manuals, for example, often
specify anachronistically that letters (epistles) be or-
ganized as orations, and as late as the 19th century much
literature has a decidedly elocutionary cast, not always
to good purpose. '
Writing and History. One of the ·most radical effects
of writing is a change in the relationship betwee.n verbal
performance and tradition. Memory is restructured. The
thematic-formulaic memory of purely oral performers
(whose trained memories were prodigious, but not ver-
batim) is replaced for a while by word-for-word mne-
monic techniques, based on repetition of a written text.
Memorization of writing, initiated toward the start of
the chirographic stage of culture, reaches a peak in the
typographic stage, which is early marked by develop-
ment of the catechism, for religious and other subjects.
Finally, in the present day, mechanical means of storage
and recall are making vast ranges of knowledge extraor-
dinarily easy of mechanical access and are further re-
structuring the memory and its functions. In imaginative
writing, correlative developments can be detected: there
is a tendency today even in fiction to minimize narrative
continuity and to proceed by means of complex and
involuted itemizations.
Writing makes history possible. With the understand-
ing of the history of literature and its antecedents and
of cultures other than the writer's own, now available
on an unprecedented scale, writers turn, with a self-
consciousness before unknown, to the past and to the
diversity of cultures around them for both form and
matter. The design of the Japanese haiku was taken
over, not always very knowledgeably, by American and
British imagist poets in the early 20th century. Ezra
Pound incorporates Chinese ideograms into his English-
language Cantos. Joyce's Finnegans Wake, basically in
English, achieves a new linguistic virtuosity and range
by weaving countless other languages, past and present,
into the text. With writers ranging through space and
time.for diversity, literatures of all nations and languages
tend in many ways to grow together; international styles
and fads have developed in the 20th century as never
before ( see WORLD LITERATURE) .
When viewed in its deepest perspectives, the use of
writing has also brought about a radical restructuring of
thought and thought categories and of the psyche itself.
With writing, and even more with print, man is de-
tribalized to a greater and greater degree and the iso-
lated individual-the reader alone with his book or the
writer at his desk-becon;ies a normal cultural type and,
ultimately, a typical concern of literature in the present
technological age. Verbalization is associated more and
more closely with s·pace and visualization-first on the
written, then on the less variable printed page-rather
than with its original habitat, sound. With the new elec-
tronic media of communication that are paraliterary or
transliterary, such as the telephone, radio, and televi-
838 LITERATURE AND THE CHURCH
sion, and with the increased use of person-to-person con-
tact made possible by rapid transit, communication is
reentering the world of sound in a new way. The effects
on literature are seen already in a loosening of the linear
structures (plot, for example) and in increased appeal of
improvisation, or of seeming- improvisation, similar to
that once inseparable from early oral cultures.
Religion and Written Transmission of Verbal Per-
fonnance. Like the Hebrew religion, Christianity came
into being in an alphabetic culture with a strong residue
of cry.I-aural institutions. The Bible includes a great
man)' different types of works-history, allegory, poetry
of celebration or appeal, hymns, prayers, gnomic and
mantk:' writings, and other types (see LITERARY GENRES,
BIBLICAL)-but all of these works exhibit, in varying
degrees, a residue of oral-aural cultural attitudes and
ways of thought and expression far more massive than
anything ordinarily familiar in the literature of tech-
nological man. A long oral tradition formed and re-
tained much of what is in the Old Testament and in the
Gospels for varying periods before the material was
written down, and even, the most directly literary com-
positions in the Bible, such as the letters of St. Paul, are
written in styles influenced or dominated by a highly
oral cast of mind. It is noteworthy that Jesus, the Word
of God, was Himself literate (Lk 4.16-22; Jn 8.6-8)
but conveyed His teaching personally only by word of
mouth. The New Testament is ·part of the Church's
*kerygma. It is not Jesus' own writing, of which we
have none.
The written text of the Bible, however, has a cer-
tain maximum religious value. According to Catholic
teaching, it is inspired, having God as its author, in the
words of the Council of Trent and the First Vatican
Council. How far this claim can be extended to the oral
substratum of the Bible or to the antecedent literary
documents on which the present books of the Bible at
times depend is still a matter of active discussion. As
knowledge of literary history has developed, the literary
forms of the Bible have been the subject of large-scale
and highly informative study (see FORM CRITICISM,
BIBLICAL),especially since the mid-19th century. Papal
encyclicals such as *Providentissimus Deus have en-
couraged continuation of such studies as basic to the
understanding of the fuller meaning of the Scriptures
in present-day perspectives.
Like other widely diffused religions (notably Judaism,
Mohammedanism, Confucianism, and Buddhism),
Christianity has encouraged use and study of the written
word. More than this, however, Hebrew and Christian
teaching regarding the positive religious significance
of historical time enhances the value often placed by
religions generally on written records; and the Christian
doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word of God, Him-
self a Person and God, has given the word as such a
unique value to the Christian mind. The alphabet, and
with it the possibility of literature, secular as well as
religious, was introduced by Christian missionaries to
most of the non-Mediterranean European peoples as
well as to the peoples of the.New World. The Bible has
influenced the literary development, religious and secu-
lar, of many"languages more profoundly than any other
single book. In English literature it. has provided not
only modes of expression ( at first chiefly through the
Latin Vulgate and then through vernacular translations,
particularly the King James or "Authorized" version of
1611 ) , but also themes for almost every cone ,
form of literature, notably lyric poetry, epic, and e~;abJe
-from the Old English The Drea'?' of the Rood•rna
900) through Abraham Cowley's epic Davideis (1 (c_
6
to Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. ( 1958). See LITE 56)
GENRES,BIBLICAL. RA.Ry
BlbUography: There is no single book-length treatment
matter covered in this article, but the following are so of the
ously relevant works. H. M. and N. K. CHADWICK, The~ Vari-
o/ Literature, 3 v. (Cambridge, Eng. 1932-40), nearly ex:h ro"':th
worldwide survey of preliterate oral performance anaaustive
literature ( omits American Indians), no longer has entirely early
date conception of oral culture. D. DIRINGER, The -;:-to..
produced Book (New York 1953); Writing (New York 19~nd-
L. FEBVREand H.J. MARTIN, L'Apparition du livre (Paris 19/).
E. A. HAVELOCK, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.. l% B).
3
H. M. McLUHAN, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of T ).
graphic Man (Toronto 1962), a racy survey, indifferent to YPo-
scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the ssome
and depth of the ~u!tural and psrchological changes entail:rp
the passage from illiteracy to prmt and beyond; bibliog. J ;
THOMPSON, Ancient Libraries (Berkeley 1940). lllnstr~tio
11
credit: Embassy of Ireland, Washington, D.C.
[W, J, ONG]
LITERATURE AND THE CHURCH
The attitude of the Church toward secular literature
has been the subject_of long and industrious study, but
most of the emphasis has been placed on the reaction
of the early and medieval Church to the possibility or
desirability of tolerating or teaching the pagan classics.
Little, accordingly, has been done to examine the at-
titudes of the modern Church-say from the end of
the Renaissance-toward modern vernacular litera-
tures· or literature in general. It seems evident, however,
that if one is to speak about literature and the Church,
.one cannot concentrate on the ancient "controversies"
to the exclusion of modern and contemporary devel-
opments.
Early Controversy. When the Church became well
enough established to face the probl,em of what sort of
education was fitting and needed for those who had
abandoned paganism, a controversy did indeed arise;
but it is hardly correct to designate it as a controversy
between the Church as such, i.e., the Church speaking
with its teaching authority, and pagan culture and lit-
erature. The controversy showed itself rather in tb_e
attitudes taken by various churchmen, often at van-
ance with one another. Such divergencies of opinion
became evident somewhat early ·among churchmen and
reached their climax in the 4th century, when they also
found the key to their solution.
Christians and Pagan Education. In those early da!s,
practically the only education Christians could r~c~ive
was provided by the schools Of rhetoric; if Chn 5fra~s
were not to be segregated from all public life. arrtl~i;
flee, they simply had to study the pagan classics.
obviously became more and more the situation as coo·
verts in growing numbers came from the upper cla~e-~
But how deeply could a Christian become munerse ~-
such study? Perhaps the earliest evidence of _doW e·
grading, if not deep suspicion, of the classics is P:t
served in the Didascalia Apostolorum. This docuro:ies'
8
which claims to enshrine the teaching of the Af~ th;
1
exists in two versions, Syriac and Latin, _ofwhic the
Syriac is probably the earliest (c. 345). Under ou
rubric Gentiles autem libros penitus ne tetzgeri~~oi·
must wholly abstain from pagan works), the a
tion is fully spelled out: