Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Francis P. Magoun, Jr. "The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry." Speculum, 28:446-67. Rpt. in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Ed. Lewis E. Nicholson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 3rd printing 1966. pp. 189-221. Rpt. in The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Donald K. Fry, Jr. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968. pp. 83-113.

Argues a direct, one-to-one correspondence between formulas and orality. Analyzes Beowulf 1-25 for formulas and formulaic systems, claiming that over 70% of the diction occurs elsewhere in the OE corpus. Bases methodology and interpretation directly on the work of Parry, transferring all definitions and concepts from Homer to OE poetry without allowing for tradition-dependent characteristics. Although his assertions are too broad (he remarks, e.g., that "the recurrence in a given poem of an appreciable number of formulas or formulaic phrases brands the latter as oral, just as a lack of such repetitions marks a poem as composed in a lettered tradition" and that "oral poetry, it may be safely said, is composed entirely of formulas, large and small, while lettered poetry is never formulaic" [BP, p. 84]), his ideas are at the root of a great deal of scholarship and cannot be overestimated (see Foley 1980b).
Area: OE, CP