Collectively, modern analogues present us with a complex conception of the bard or singer most directly responsible for oral epics. Although there can be little doubt that both tradition and individual are crucial to each performance (just as both a language and a speaker are crucial to any discourse event), we find wide variation in the particular activity of the individual. Among the Mande peoples of western Africa (Johnson 2003: 22-9), for example, the griot is a professional bard who plays many roles: chronicler of family, local, and national history; provider of entertainment; preserver of social customs; and mediator. Indeed, not only does the Mande bard arbitrate between the divine and earthly realms through divination, but he also mediates everyday rifts between lineages or other disputing parties. Reaching such an important status, with its array of social responsibilities, requires years of formal apprenticeship (though there are no bardic schools as such), and even then some aspiring singers never become masters themselves.
The exceptionally well-documented singer of the Tulu Siri Epic (Honko 1998a) from southern India, Gopala Naika, on the other hand, is an agriculturalist and a possession priest who attends to a cult group of about 80 women involved in the religious rituals surrounding the goddess Siri. Through interviewing the bard, the fieldwork team was able to determine that, despite not earning his living from performing the epic, he was committed to its signal importance for the Tulu people: ‘‘the epic clearly functions as a myth, a charter for ritual behavior concerned with central human values and the sacred origins of institutions’’ (Honko 1998b: 12). Gopala Naika underwent no apprenticeship
As such, formal or informal, in learning his repertoire of six epics; some came from individuals, while the Siri Epic was apparently an amalgamation of stories from multiple sources (p. 133).
Even more fundamental than the expectable phenomenon of natural heterogeneity among bards fTom around the world is the question of just how ‘‘real’’ the reputed master-singers of ancient and modern epics truly are. In other words, while there can be no ambiguity about the real-life existence of contemporary bards whom fieldworkers have interviewed and recorded, we should be wary of automatically extending this same level of concreteness to the figures who seem to stand behind certain of the ancient oral-derived epics. Conventional literary history abhors a vacuum of authorship, of course, preferring to impute a supremely gifted individual as the ultimate source of each of the works that constitute a tradition, but that desperate search for an author-like figure may well obscure the process behind the product. The troublesome quandary of Homer’s authorship is the most famous instance of this dilemma. Within a few centuries after his supposed lifetime, Homer has already attracted multiple and contradictory biographical accounts, and any fair-minded modern evaluation of ancient attestations as a whole must choose among irreconcilable reports on his geographical origins, parentage, repertoire, and so forth.
As analogous figures from modern oral epic traditions reveal, however, this multiformity is characteristic of a widespread legendary figure we might call the ‘‘Greatest Singer’’ (see Foley 1998b, 1999b: 49-63; with Mongolian and medieval English parallels). Such paragons exist on the periphery of singers’ and audiences’ actual experience: perhaps a generation removed in time or located in another district and, in any event, never personally encountered by any of those who cite him or her as their most admired forebear and ultimate source of all of their best songs. The tradition of South Slavic oral epic offers a dramatic and well-attested ‘‘Greatest Singer,’’ who is identified by different names (Isak, Huso, (Dor Huso, and Mujo within just one region), assigned different parents, accorded unrealistically large and variant repertoires, and credited with diverse, larger-than-life accomplishments and adventures. Nor is this fictive multiformity merely a distortion of historical fact. Rather, the legendary bard’s flexibility as a character-type - with a malleable biography molded to fit the specifics of the real-life’s singer’s personal situation - functions as a ready means of certifying his bardic progeny’s pedigree and excellence. Anyone who can trace his lineage to the Greatest Singer must, in other words, be credited with a virtually idiomatic respect. From an external point of view, then, such figures as Homer stand as personified embodiments of the epic tradition, anthropomorphizations of oral and oral-derived epic.
World History
