Was Digenes Akrites an Oral Poem?

Abstract

It is often suggested that Digenes is in some way connected with oral poetry, whether the oral folk poetry of the modern ‘acritic’ ballads or the type of oral epic tradition identified by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in the Homeric poems and in modern Yugoslavia. Some clarification of the possible role of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Digenes now seems overdue, and in this paper I propose to examine the texts of the poem in the light of recent work on ‘oral literature’, so as to define more precisely in what sense any of these can be described as ‘oral’, and then, more tentatively, to suggest a possible framework for the growth and transmission of the poem which might account for these results.

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