"Stories Which I Know to Be True": Oral Tradition, Oral History, and Voices from the Past. (1st September 2016) - Garner, Lori Ann
Abstract: This article explores areas of productive overlap in the respective fields of oral history and oral tradition, with particular focus on ways that both disciplines have enabled and encouraged engagement with premodern texts. Shared points of inquiry into the vexed concepts of truth, performance, and orality are explored in oral and oral-derived narratives of storytellers from medieval France, Anglo-Saxon England, and mid-twentieth-century Memphis, Tennessee. As an extended illustrative example of analysis drawing from a blended methodology, three versions of the "same" story are examined as they appear in the Old English epic Beowulf . Comparison with modern-day oral history accounts puts into sharp relief the ways that early medieval texts—texts produced in an era of new and emerging literacy—reflect very real patterns of oral narrative seen in interviews recorded quite recently.