The traditional oral audience

Abstract

In studying the Homeric Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and Serbo-Croatian poetries, we often make an unwarranted assumption which has long limited our
undestanding of the creative act particulár to traditional oral poerty: I speak
of the isolation of the singer (whether άοιδός, scop, or guslar) from his listeners implicit in the use of the term "audience”. But the oral poet does not
compose in private for readers widely separated in time and place; rather he
is simply the necessary focus of a collective act in which all members present
at the performance actively patricipate. I therefore propose the substitution
of Erich Neumann’s concept of the "group” to name the singer’s collective
and to explain the distinctive interactions observed among participants at an
example oral performance which took place in Tršić, Yugoslavia. Moving by
analogy from one known to two hypothetically oral situations, I then discuss
the proems to the Odyssey and Beowulf, illustrating the singer’s acknowledgment of the group’s role in the ritual of traditional poiesis.