Classical Arabic Poetry Between Folk and Oral Tradition

Classical Arabic Poetry between Folk and Oral TraditionAuthor(s): Michael ZwettlerReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1976), pp. 198-212Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/599823 .Accessed: 05/05/2012 05:49

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CLASSICAL ARABIC POETRY BETWEEN FOLK AND ORAL TRADITION*

MICHAEL ZWETTLER

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

In memory of Professor Fran Utley

The oral-formulaic theory of poetic composition and transmission, developed and advanced by Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and others, is just beginning to influence the study of classical Arabic poetry, as it already has influenced the study of several major poetic traditions. But somewhat earlier a few Arabists-chief among them Karel Petracek- had sought to account for features of the classical verse that seemed not to conform with conventional ideas of "artistic" literary poetry and, in so doing, they had turned to the comparatively better established field of folklore scholarship. There they found a point- of-view and an approach that gave new significance to those features of formularity and fluidity-of stereotype and repetition, variation and disputed attribution-which had troubled both medieval and modern critics. An evaluation of their findings-and of PetrRek's, in particular-reveals a certain terminological and conceptual inadequacy in the very area of folklore theory itself. And a further consideration of the pertinence of folklore studies to the study of "early" poetry in general suggests that a more precise and useful theoretical framework is to be derived from a distinction between oral and written poetry than from one between Volks- and Kunstpoesie.

IN 1967 JAROSLAW STETKEVYCH, reviewing A. J. Arberry's Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students,

* This study has been adapted with some revision from Chapter II of my Ph.D. dissertation (cited in the list below). Works referred to in the course of the study more than once have been abbreviated as follows: Bach DVk = A. Bach. Deutsche Volkskunde, 3rd ed.

Heidelberg (Quelle & Meyer): 1960. (Cited according to section numbers).

Boch KWAV = Alfred Bloch. "Der kiinstlerische Wert der altarabischen Verskunst." Acta Orientalia 21 (1950- 53) 207-38.

-VSA = -. Vers und Sprache im Altarabischen: Metrische und syntaktische Untersuchungen (Acta Tro- pica, Supplementum 5). Basel (Verlag ffir Recht und Gesellschaft): 1946.

Bogatyrev/Jakobson FBFS = P. Bogaty rev & R. Jakob- son. "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaf- fens"; in Donum Natalicium Schrijnen. Nijmegen/ Utrecht (N. v. Dekker van de Vegt): 1929. Pp. 900-913.

Degh FS = L. D6gh. Folktales and Society: Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community, trans. E. Schoss- berger). Bloomington, Ind. (Indiana U. P.): 1969.

Dundes SF = A. Dundes, ed. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. (Prentice Hall): 1965.

von Grunebaum GSAP = G. E. von Grunebaum. "Growth and Structure of Arabic Poetry"; in N. A. Faris, ed.

The Arab Heritage. Princeton (Princeton U. P.): 1944. Pp. 121-36. (= von Grunebaum KD 20ff)

- KD = -. Kritik und Dichtkunst: Studien zur arr- bischen Literaturgeschichte. Wiesbaden (Harrassowitz): 1955.

Hultkrantz GEC = A. Hultkrantz. General Ethnographic- al Concepts (International Dictionary of Regional Euro- pean Ethnology and Folklore, vol. I). Copenhagen (Rosenkilde & Bagger): 1960.

Lord HPH = Albert Lord. "Homer, Parry, and Huso." American Journal of Archaeology 52 (1942) 34-44. (= Parry MHV 465-78).

ST =. The Singer of Tales. New York (Atheneun): 1965.

Lutz = Vk = G. Lutz, ed. Volkskunde: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte ihrer Problem. Berlin (E. Schmidt): 1858.

Meier KV = J. Meier. Kunstlieder im Volksmunde: Materialien und Untersuchungen. Halle a. S. (M. Nie- meyer): 1906.

- KVD = -. Kunstlied und Volkslied in Deutschland. Halle a. S. (M. Niemeyer): 1906.

Menendez Pidal CR = Ramon Menendez Pidal. La Chan- son de Roland y el neo-tradicionalismo (Origenes de la epica romdnica). Madrid (Espasa-Calpe): 1959. (Fr. trans. I.-M. Cluzel. Paris [A. & J. Picard]: 1960).

Musil MCRB = A. Musil. The Manners and Customs of

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ZWETTLER: Classical Arabic Poetry-Folk and Oral Tradition

observed that the problem of the origins of classical (that is, pre- and early Islamic) Arabic poetry could by no means be so lightly disregarded as Arberry had suggested.l Subsequent scholarship has tended to confirm Stetkevych's observa- tion, although there is no need to expect an early rehabilitation of the Taha Huseyn-Margoliouth theory that the bulk of that poetry was a later, post-Islamic fabrication. The important study by James Monroe2 and at least two unpublished dis- sertations, John Dennis Hyde's3 and my own,4 have recently postulated a highly developed tradition of oral composition and transmission of poetry-of oral rendition5-as the primary determinant

the Rwala Bedouins (Amer. Geog. Soc. Or. Explor. & St., No. 6). New York (Amer. Geog. Soc.): 1928.

Parry MHV = M. Parry. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. by A. Parry. Oxford (Oxford U. P.): 1971.

PetrACek DSSV = Karel Petricek. Drei Studien liber die siidsemitische Volkspoesie (Dissertationes orientales

7). Prague (Orientalisches Institut in Academia): 1966. - QAAL = -. "Quellen und Anfange der arabischen

Literatur." Archiv OrientaIni 36 (1968) 381-406. - VAL = -. "Die Vorbereitungsperiode der arabischen

Literatur." Acta Universitatis Carolinae 1964, Philolo-

gica 3 (= Orientalia Pragensia 3), 35-51. Petrovic DLT = S. Petrovid. "The Dictionary of Literary

Terms and the Concept of Literary Terminology"; in Z. Skreb, ed. The Art of the Word (Umjetnost RijeEi): Selected Studies 1957-67. Zagreb: 1969.

Peuckert Vk = W.-E. Peuckert & 0. Lauffer. Volkskunde: Quellen und Forschungen seit 1930. Bern (Francke): 1951.

Serjeant PPH = R. B. Serjeant. South Arabian Poetry. I: Prose and Poetry from nHadramatw,t. London (Taylor's Foreign P.): 1951.

Socin DC = A. Socin. Diwan aus Centralarabien (Abh. d. phil.-hist. Cl. d. kgl. sichs. Geslft d. Wissftn. 19 [1901]). 3 parts.

Zwettler OT = M. Zwettler. The Oral Tradition of'Clas- cical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications, Ph. D. dissertation. Berkeley (U. of California): 1972. 1 "Some Observations on Arabic Poetry," Joutrnal of

Near Eastern Studies 26 (1967) 1-12; specifically p. 2. 2 "Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry," Journal

of Arabic Literature 3 (1972) 1-53. 3 A Study of the Poetry of Maymiln ibn Qays al-A'sha,

Princeton (Princeton University): 1970. 4 See list of abbreviations. 5 Given what we have come to learn about the creation

and re-creation of poems within an oral tradition, we

of the form, style, and much of the content of those classical Arabic poems which have been recorded and preserved to today. The conception of this hypothesis owes much to the work of scholars who have reached similar conclusions dealing with certain other poetic traditions. Their findings for poetries in languages as diverse as archaic Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, Old French, South Indian Toda, and Serbo-Croation have led to the realization that such poetries, apparently independently of one another, exhibit features which are remarkably alike. Chief among these features are 1) a very wide repertoire of phrases, phrase-patterns, images, themes, even whole passages, which recur from poem to poem in a given tradition (and even within a single poem), and 2) a large measure of substantive variation from one version of a poem to another.

Earlier literary critics and folklorists who studied the songs and poems that have been variously styled "folk," or "popular," or "primitive," or "traditional," or merely "early poetry" had noted the formular and fluid quality of that poetry. But it has only been through the work of Milman Parry and those who have in some way followed him that formularity and fluidity in such songs and poems have been understood for what they really seem to be: not simply the unavoidable results of deplorable lapses in taste or memory of "primitive" folk-poets or of less gifted "reciters" and "transmitters" of their poems, but rather the most readily discernible internal criteria distin- guishing and authenticating a body of poetry as what Parry has called the "song of unlettered peoples."6 Yet, in setting out to identify and fix

might more usefully term the dual poetic operations of oral composition and oral transmission as a single one of oral rendition. It is an expression that I have already frequently employed and one that allows for both the

productive and the reproductive aspects of oral poetic activity, without specifying either. In rendering a poem, one could be presenting an "original" work, delivering a "version" or "interpretation" of a previously heard (or rendered) work, or reciting a work from rote memory. Rendition neither presupposes nor precludes verbatim repetition; yet the term carries, too, the connotation of live artistic performance, a sense lacking in both transmission and composition. I would like to speak of the oral poet-tradent also as a renderant (the implications of renderer seeming somewhat too unsavory).

6 Besides Milman Parry's completed and published scholarly works (recently re-issued in a single volume

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 96.2 (1976)

with exactness the form of oral, unlettered song and to determine how it differs from the form of written poetry, Parry, his most prominent suc- cessor Albert Lord, and others have frequently had recourse to the work of predecessors and con- temporaries in the field of folklore scholarship and literary criticism-but not without some serious reservations.

Parry often had to confront the difficulties raised with regard to oral, unlettered verse by the "folkloristic" point of view, on one hand, and by the "literary critical" point of view, on the other. At the end of his life he wrote in this connection:

The critics, groping for the rules by which they should group the varied works of the world's literature, have come to see more or less clearly that literature falls into two great parts, but they have not yet agreed upon the real nature of these two parts, nor upon the terms which should be applied to them. Such names as folk-literature, or popular, or primitive literature have much truth in them but they are not finally good because, not to speak of the strange use of the word "literature," they are purely negative terms and mean at the best nothing more than the talk and song of men who have not the education of a self-styled civilized people, while at the worst they either betray a scorn which it would be hard to justify for certain ranks and forms of society, or else a wishful belief in questionable theories which make of the "common" man and the "simpler" stages of society the springhead of art. With our great anthropological knowledge we can now see that such terms get us little further than the point men reached in the seventeen hundreds when they believed that savages had a poetry which was more "natural" than their own. We are readier, now that we know more, to set lore against literature. These two words entangle us in no doubtful theories, but they do suppose that the use of writing brought about the one greatest change in man's artful use of words. It would seem true, however, that learning the use of writing is the one greatest cultural happening in the life of a people.

If we put lore against literature it follows that we should put oral poetry against written poetry but the critics so far have rarely done this, chiefly because it happened that the same man rarely knew both kinds

[Parry MHV], with a translation of his two French dis- sertations, by his son, the late Adam Parry), see also, e.g., the few pages from his unfinished book, written in the fall of 1935, shortly before his death. A. Lord includes them in HPH (also in Parry MHV).

of poetry, and if he did he was rather looking for that in which they were alike. That is, the men who were likely to meet with the songs of an unlettered people were not ordinarily of the sort who could judge soundly how good or bad they were, while the men with a literary background who published oral poems wanted above all to show that they were good as literature. It was only the students of the "early" poems who were brought into touch at the same time with both lore and literature. Early poems come from the time debatable between the lack and the use of writing and if the pride of the nations in the genius of their past has led above all to the vaunting of these poems for the same sort of merits in them as one finds in great literary poetry the little that is known about how they were made keeps pointing the other way to poets who made little or no use of writing. So from the start the songs which men gathered in modern times from unlettered peoples were likened to the early poems (in Lord HPH 37f).

It is evident that Parry's words have great re- levance for those of us who are seriously interested in the study, understanding, and appreciation of "early" Arabic poetry, although the implications of folklore scholarship for our work have, in general, remained strikingly unrecognized.7 In fact, in the case of classical Arabic poetry, only Karel Petracek and, to a lesser extent, Alfred Bloch have raised the prospect of viewing that poetry as "folk-poetry" in any substantive way, thereby implying that it may have been produced under quite different circumstances and in a quite different fashion than has usually been assumed. Petracek's studies, especially, go the farthest in their insights and originality, by proposing that most of the questions about the form, style, language, and tradition of classical Arabic poetry which had beset philologists and critics for centuries can be answered in folkloric terms. As will emerge from the ensuing discussion, however, the value of this important contribution to our understanding of the poetry of the early Arabs is unfortunately impaired because Petracek has not subjected his sources in the field of folklore scholarship to the same kind of learned and penetrating critical examination that he brings to

7 This discussion excludes collectors and analysts of XIXth- and XXth-century Bedouin "folk" poetry who have noted in passing its continuities with the classical pre- and early Islamic poetic tradition; e.g., esp., Socin DC III & Serjeant PPH.

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bear upon his Arabic and Semitic sources. In seeking to undo the damage done to Arabic literary studies by one gross oversimplification-that of the false distinction between "art-poetry" and "folk-poetry"-he has had recourse to a simplistic, discredited, and ideologically tainted theory of folklore. This theory, the so-called Rezeptions- theorie, grievously misrepresents non-literary verbal creativity and undermines the substantial additions that responsible folklore scholarship can offer to students of "traditional" texts such as the classical qasida. Hence, if in what follows there is some ambiguity regarding my attitude toward PetrAcek's studies, it results from an attempt to bring out and do justice to his vital and funda- mentally correct perception of the nature of classical Arabic poetry-a perception that seems to be compromised and threatens to become overlooked or ignored because of the faulty theoretical principles in terms of which it has been framed.

In three important studies dealing with the origins and earliest stages of the poetry, Petracek has set forth strong arguments in support of his contention that classical Arabic poetry of the archaic period would be far better understood in terms of a Volkspoesie or volkstiimliche Poesie than of a Kunstdichtung.8 Petracek (VAL; DSSV 8-20) takes issue with the idea of "Kunstdichtung"9 implied by G. A. von Grunebaum. Von Grune- baum had held, with regard to reports of improvised Arabic songs in the early fifth-century A.D., as well as to the "artless songs [which] continue to be improvised by the Arab nomads to this very day," that "there is . . . no connection between these and similar folk rhymes and the elaborate products of the purely artistic style"-this despite the fact that "the prosodical structure of such more or less popular documents is essentially identical with that of the 'Kunstdichtung'" (von Grunebaum GSAP 121f =- KD 17). Petracek, on the other hand, is convinced that "early Arabic

8 On the terms Kunstdichtung and Volkspoesie or volkstiimliche Poesie, see below.

9 That von Grunebaum may have been using the term Kunstdichtung advisedly is suggested by his enclosing it within quotation marks, both in the original English GSAP and in the later German KD. Cf. Petrovic DLT 294, n. 83: "The terms Volkspoesie and Kunstpoesie, used by Herder and the brothers Grimm, when used in modern German literature already sound more like archaisms or unusual neologisms (when used, they are often put in quotation marks)." Also PetrAcek DSSV 9.

poetry represents a specific type of Volkspoesie, as far as function and general comprehensibility are concerned: it is certainly connected with the background of volkstiimliche poetry and poetics" (VAL 35f; DSSV 8-12).10

On the basis of the scarce, though "often under- estimated" (VAL 35), indirect references in He- brew, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman sources, as well as of ancient Arabian (Thamudic, Safaitic, and Lihyanic) epigraphic evidence, Pe- tracek reconstructs a hypothetical Vorbereitungs- periode of Arabic literature, which he projects back at least a thousand years before the end of the fifth century A.D. (the earliest date given to existing poetical works). During this "preliminary period," Petracek argues, we may assume a long tradition of poetic art such as showed up with many similar features among neighboring (Semitic) cultures, especially Hebrew, Ethiopic, and South Arabian (VAL 37-41; QAAL 381-403). Further- more, the poetry of this "hypothetical pre-history," so far as can be deduced from specimens attributed to the earliest Jahili poets, shared a common sensibility, ethos, and even form, with inscriptional expressions of other ancient pre- Islamic North Arabian peoples (VAL 41-44; QAAL 401-04). Finally, in several of its general features and in its function within Bedouin tribal society, this "pre-historic" Arabic poetry would have to be recognized as altogether consistent with the manifest Volkspoesien of other similarly constituted societies." That the poetry received no written fixation during this preliminary stage and that, as in South Arabia, it was totally disregarded or overlooked by the epigraphic literature of of- ficial culture only confirms its identity as Volks- poesie rather than Kunstpoesie.12 Indeed, PetrA6ek

10 A similar view, though not so explicitly developed as in PetrAcek's studies, can be found in Socin DC III 46f, 70f; Serjeant PPH 55-57.

1 Petracek chooses, from groups classified as "diversified pastoral nomads," the Saharan nomadic Teda-Daza and Somalis of North-East Africa, considering them as "typologically related" to the Arabs in many general features, including poetical (and prose) expression (VAL 46).

12 According to Margoliouth's no longer tenable view on "The Origins of Arabic Poetry" (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [1925] 416-49; specifically p. 419), the absence of any epigraphic verse is simply additional evidence that classical Arabic poetry was all a post-Is- lamic fabrication.

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maintains, "We could after all presume no other kind of poetry, given the social organization in ancient Arabia" (VAL 46f, cf. 49).

Volkspoesie, as Petracek conceives of it, is marked by, among other things, "its general comprehensibility (allgemeine Verstdndlichkeit) and its collective (non-individual) character" (VAL 47; cf. DSSV 10).13 Kunstpoesie, on the other hand, is not so marked: "It is separated from Volkspoesie to varying degrees under determined social conditions and thereby loses, to a varying extent, precisely that general comprehensibility and collective character, even though various surviving associations with Volkspoesie can still live on long afterwards; it gains in return new distinc- tive features (Eigentiimlichkeiten), such as, e.g., a distinctly individual stamp" (VAL 47).

In terms of this Kunst- Volkspoesie dichotomy- one which, incidentally, has been generally avoided for some time as unscientific by scholars of literature and folklore (see p. 209-10, below)-Petracek

13 Petracek himself calls attention to "die Problematik des Termins 'Volkspoesie"' (VAL 47 n56; cf. DSSV 6 n2). His designated authority for most of his folklore theory is B. Vaclavek, Pisemnictivi a lidovd tradice (Pra- gue: 1947)-a work inaccessible to me. In another work by VAclavek, to a translation of which Petracek (DSSV 7 n5, 19 n21) refers (Die Volksliteratur in der tschechischen literarischen Entwicklung, trans. H. Rosel [Halle (Max Niemeyer): 1953]), one reads a sensitive discussion of the attempts by XIXth-century Czech literary poets to achieve or incorporate in their verse effects of the oral folk-poetry which had just become available in written collections early in that century. Their object, as Vicla- vek describes it, was to "echo" (widerhallen) the produc- tions of the rural and urban illiterate poets much as, it seems, Wordsworth had sought to reproduce in metrical verse "the language really used by men" as had "the earliest poets of all nations". Vaclavek explicitly scorns the notion of a "gesunkes Kulturgut" (p. 3; see below p. 204), though he does speak regularly in terms of Volks- and Kunstpoesie. PetrAcek cites this work by VAclavek as a source which "draws attention to the characteristic features of Volksdichtung" (DSSV 11); but I do not find that Vaclavek's arguments, in this study at any rate, suggest his dependence upon a Rezeptionsbegriff such as PetrAcek will be seen to subscribe to. I have tried-not always, perhaps, with complete success-to trace down and clarify some of the folkloristic presuppositions (F. L. Utley might decry them as "folkloristic heresies" [see Utley in Dundes SF 17]) which underlie and determine the course of Petracek's studies.

sees the development of early Arabic poetry as consisting of three stages: first, the original volkstiimliche Poesie of the postulated "preliminary period," out of which branched, second, a poetry cultivated by professional bard-poets and orally transmitted by professionals (rawis); from this evolved, under suitable social conditions, third, an artistic (kiinstlerische) poetry, which became more widely known (QAAL 404; cf. VAL 49f).

It is the second stage, roughly corresponding to our earlier classical period (viz., end of the fifth century A.D. to 50/670), that is the focus of Petra- cek's attention, especially in VAL and DSSV 8-20. For him, the poetry of this period represents, equally with that of his "hypothetical pre-history," a Volkspoesie. This is, as mentioned above (p. 201), because of its formal identity with what he accepts as the volkstiimlich poetical norm (cf. VAL 49; DSSV 10-13); but also because of its oral transmission by professional tradents down to the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. "A literature of that sort [i.e., orally transmitted] we can rightfully designate a volkstiimlich quantity" (QAAL 404; cf. DSSV 6 n. 2, 11, 14).14 But this poetry also represents, as noted above (p. 201), "a specific type of Volkspoesie, as far as function and general comprehensibility are concerned" (cf. DSSV 12f).

At this point (if not already previously), one runs into a number of difficulties which arise, I believe, out of a certain "terminological prom- iscuity"15 in which PetrAcek indulges. Anyone who has followed, even casually, the course of folklore studies since the beginning of this century would take exception to his use of the terms which he employs, as if questions about their meaning and validity in discussions of "traditional"16 poetry had never given rise to intense scholarly and even ideological controversy in both Europe and the United States.17 When, for instance, PetrAcek

14 PetrAcek continues: ".. . even if not precisely in the same sense as we are wont to speak about our European material." Yet, in my judgment, this reservation has not prevented his drawing some unwarranted analogies and generalizations, on the basis of an insufficiently precise use of rather dated folkloristic concepts. Cf. also PetrACek DSSV lf.

15 The expression was coined by Z. Skreb and V. Vratovic; see Petrovid DLT 259.

16 I use the term in the sense intended by R. Men6ndez Pidal; see p. 209, below.

17 See inter alia Peuckert Vk, esp. Chs. I & IX; Bach DVk; Lutz Vk; W. Emmerich, Germanistische Volkstums-

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stipulates that Volkspoesie is marked by its "collective (non-individual) character," he apparently is referring to its relationship (or perhaps its contribution ?), as part of a culture, to that culture as a whole-that is to say, its function within the culture (cf. DSSV 78-80). Being "collective," in Petr,aek's sense, it would presumably express, belong to, or somehow avail the community as a whole-perhaps, in the case of early Arabic poetry, along the lines of the "kinship-consciousness of the collectivity" (QAAL 405). And thus, to the extent that a poem reflected or became identified with an individual personality, it would be that far removed from the realm of the Volk and cease to be Volkspoesie.

What is not at all clear is just how a Volksge- dicht or Volkslied would come into and carry on its existence. One presumes that Petracek's idea of the "collective character" of Volkspoesie does not entail that it be some sort of communal creation of an overarching or all-pervasive Volksgeist or Volksseele, as many Romantic poets and scholars had held.l8

More likely his view is related instead to that of John Meier, whose influence upon German and continental folklore scholarship has been decisive.l9 Meier recognized no organic difference between Volkspoesie and Kunstpoesie: the Volkslied, just like the Kunstlied, always originates as the product of a particular poet and is acknowledged as such (KVD 13). A poem, whether due to a literate or illiterate composer, can be called Volkspoesie only when, after it has become widely circulated in oral form among the Volk (" Volk taken in the broadest sense"), there occurs "the denial of any individual right to the particular person's product, which the Volk have orally taken over, and the altogether authoritarian attitude of the Volk with regard to words and melody. This proprietary relationship (Herrenverhdltnis) of the Volk to the material is a necessary prerequisite for Volks-

ideologie (Volksleben 20; Tiibingen [Tfbinger Vereinigung fir Volkskunde]: 1968); etc.

18 See, e.g., Bach DVk ?? 19-24. Cf. the critique which John Meier directed in 1898 against this approach to folk-

poetry-an approach advanced most prominently by the brothers Grimm (in KVD 8f).

19 See, e.g., Peuckert Vk 22-30 (misattributing, however, to John Meier an important statement written

by Ernst Meier much earlier in 1855; cf. Bach DVk ? 321); also Bach DVk, "Verfasserverzeichnis," s.n. "Meier, J".

poesie" (Meier KVD 13f). In another work, Meier elaborates:

Thus, there is purposely not the slightest import attached to the origin of the song: in principle it does not matter who first sang or shaped it. The author

may be one of the vulgar Volk, or he may belong to educated circles-it makes no difference. The Volk do not care, they are no longer concerned about the author. Should a song please them, they adopt it regardless of authorship and origin. They respect no personal rights whatever and consider themselves proprietor of the song, if it is accepted by them as a Volkslied. For the most part the composers of the songs are unknown, but this is by no means necessary. What is necessary only is the proprietary attitude (Her- renstellung) of the Volk, the denial of the author's individual rights to the song (KV ii).

"Popularity" or "currency" (Volkldufigkeit), then, is specified by Meier as "the essential feature of all Volkspoesie." This involves "the authoritarian relationship in which the total group stands with regard to the poetry of particular persons-a relationship that will usually lead to alterations and recasts (Umformungen) of the original. In- dividual poetry changes into collective poetry" (KV xv-xvi). In somewhat similar terms, but dwelling more upon the collective function of folklore, P. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson defined what ought to be the interest of folklore studies:

The existence of a work of folklore must have as prerequisite a group to adopt and sanction it. In investi- gating folklore one must always keep in mind, as a fundamental principle, the preventive censure of the community. We use the term "preventive" advisedly, because, in dealing with a folkloristic entity, the concern is not with the prenatal events in its life history- neither with conception nor with embryonic existence- but rather with the "birth" of the folkloristic phenomenon as such and with its subsequent fate (FBFS 903).20

This theory of the origin and nature of folklore, and of folk-poetry in particular, has been highly influential in German and Central European folklore studies under the name of the Rezeptions- theorie or the Rezeptionsstandpunkt. It supposes that folk-poems or -songs are popular works circulated orally among the "folk," who usually ignore

20 Cf. H. Bausinger, "Folklore und gesunkenes Kultur- gut," Deutsches Jahrbuch fiir Volkskunde 12 (1966) 15- 25, esp. 19-23.

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or are ignorant of the authors' identities and who inevitably reshape them, garble them together, and allow them to die out. It supposes, too, that this "folk" consists of a "lower stratum" of non- creative, "associative," merely recipient beings who "do not produce, but rather reproduce."21 The theory was taken up and elaborated along even more polarized lines by H. Naumann. In 1902 Naumann coined the phrase gesunkenes Kulturgut to characterize the cultural materials produced in the upper stratum (Oberschicht) of society and received or taken over by the lower stratum (Unterschicht)-the Volk. Naumann's view, "already advanced by other scholars, ... is antithe- tically pushed too far along an alluring slant and brought to bear not only on the subject matter, but also on the methodology of the science" (H. Freudenthal, in Hultkrantz GEC 158).

Throughout the first half of this century the Rezeptionstheorie and its offshoot, the idea of a gesunkenes Kulturgut, dominated much of Euro- pean folklore and literary scholarship.22 This is not the place to trace the scholarly disputations, often approaching the doctrinaire, that have brought folklorists today to fairly general agree- ment in revaluating and appreciating the individual's creativity and role in folk-culture and in largely rejecting concepts like those of Naumann, Meier, and others as unscientific and unsubstanti- ated.23 S. P. Bayard in 1953 succinctly expressed this consensus, at least insofar as it existed among American and British folklorists of the time:

That folklore is like a swimming pool, always being emptied at one end by the dying out and the discarding

21 "Das Volk produziert nicht, es reproduziert" (in Lutz Vk 196, cf. 70). The phrase, originated apparently by E. Hoffman-Krayer in 1902, served as a slogan for partisans of the Zweischichtentheorie (i.e., the theory that cultural materials are transmitted "von oben nach unten" [Meier KV xii]); see also, i.a., Hultkrantz GEC 178f.

22 The term has even infiltrated the scholarly vocabu-

ry of some Orientalists; e.g., W. Caskel, "Die Bedeutungy der Beduinen in der Geschichte der Araber," Arbeits-

gemeinschaft ifur Forschung des Landes Nordheim-West- falen: Geisteswissenschaften, Heft 8 (1952), p. 6.

23 See, e.g., Peuckert Vk 7-25, 226-30; Bach DVk ?? 27- 78, 208f, 308-16 & passim; D6gh FS 45-62, 165-86 & passim; also, Emmerich, Germ. Vkstumideol., pp. 258-67 & passim. It should be noted, too, that Meier himself criticized Naumann's more extreme stand on occasion; see Bach DVk ? 37 (p. 65).

of traditions and continually being refilled at the other end by borrowings from a "superior class," is a baseless idea.24

Petriacek indicates that he subscribes to this "receptive" idea of folklore when he comes to deal with the fact that in the pre-Islamic poetical tradition so many poets are known by name and so many poems are attributed to particular poets. The question of attribution raises a number of important issues which I expect to deal with in another study.25 In this context, however, two points ought to be made in passing. First, on the one hand, Petracek, I believe, overestimates the extent to which precise attribution of poetical works to specific poets was prevelant before and during the first century and a half after Muham- mad. There is much reason to believe that many- perhaps most-poems acquired named composers only considerably later than the time of their presumed composition or actual recording. But on the other hand, second, the absence of anonymity with which Petracek is concerned should in no way have deterred him from approaching classical Arabic poetry with the insights gained from folklore scholarship nor have constrained him to rely so heavily upon an inadequate theory of folk- poetical production. That a work is anonymous or that it is attributed-that is, whether it "belongs" to the people or to a poet-is an index not that it is intrinsically a traditional or an individual poem, Volks- or Kunstgedichte. Rather what is indicated by the circumstance of anonymity or attribution is simply the importance which a community attaches to the social and cultural role of its poets. And it is evident from the ayyam- accounts and other early Arabic "historiological" lore that in that regard the pre-Islamic Arabs treasured the names and narrated the deeds of many of their hero-bards.

Nevertheless, for the sake of following Petracek's argument, one might for a moment suppose him to be correct and imagine that such an apparent abundance of designated poetic personalities would seem to deprive the poetry, if it is to be considered

24 "The Materials of Folklore," Journal of American Folklore 66 (1953) 1-17; specifically p. 15. Cf. also F. Utley in Dundes SF 17.

25 The question of attribution and oral-traditional theory is the subject of an extended discussion in Zwettler OT Chapter V: "Variation and Attribution in the Tradi- tion of Classical Arabic Poetry".

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Volkspoesie, of its "collective (non-individual) character." But fortunately the Rezeptionstheorie, to which Petracek explicitly refers (VAL 47, 50; DSSV 11; QAAL 404), would conveniently dispose of this objection; for, as we have seen, the identity of a poem's author was assumed to be immaterial to its existence as a Volksgedicht. From the moment that a poem becomes appropriated by the Volk, "the elaborations, the recasts-in short, the evolution that sets in with each new singing- proceed unintentionally and without premedi- tation" (Meier KYD 18). Regardless of its designated author and its "original" form, therefore, a poem in the mouth of the Volk becomes no more (but also, Meier would insist, no less [KV xiii-xv]) than a synthesis and redistribution of elements drawn from the Volk's common stock of received "submerged" poetic materials-elements of which a major share though would quite likely conform to that previously heard "original" (KVD 15f). For folklorists of Meier's and Nau- mann's bent, who saw Volkslieder as "submerged" former Kunstlieder, the object of study was "not so much the original Kunstlied, as what the primitive community who had taken it over made out of it, how they altered it and what part of it they altered, how they 'sang it to shreds' (zersingen)"26 (V. von Geramb, in Lutz Vk 124).

It appears that Petriaek had this object in mind when he termed early Arabic poetry a specific (or special) kind of Volkspoesie as regards function (see p. 201, above). If one accepts the Rezeptionstheorie, the collective character, so essential to the conventional view of Volkspoesie, would by no means be compromised by the ap- pearance of individual bards, though it might be somewhat extenuated. According to Petracek, when individual "authors" come to the fore, this can result in removing their work to some degree from the general run of Volkspoesie. Such a

26 On the principle of Zersingen ("to garble, sing a- sunder") in folklore scholarship, see Meier KV lxxvi-cxliv; E. Seeman in J. Meier (ed.), Deutsche Volkskunde (Berlin/ Leipzig [W. de Gruyter]: 1926), pp. 290-300; Bach DVk ?? 376-91; L. Bodker, Folk Literature (Germanic) (Inter- national Dictionary of Regional European Ethnology and Folklore, vol. II; Copenhagen [Rosenkilde & Bagger]: 1965), s.v. & references cited. It will readily be noticed that the kinds of variations listed by most of these writers (with implicit disapproval) correspond quite closely to those which inhere in the fluidity of oral tradition; cf. Lord ST Ch. Five.

process of individualization, he declares, sometimes even manifested in distinguishable technical or stylistic traits, has been observed for Somali and other traditional bards, prevailing chiefly in the form of a certain archaism on the linguistic level. A similar archaism shows up in the modern Volkspoesie of the Arabian Bedouins, which can "undoubtedly be considered a continuation of early Arabic poetry" (VAL 48).27 "It seems thus," Pe- tracek concludes, "that a certain inclination toward individualization through archaic diction (Sprachlform) (when compared with the society's colloquial vernacular) is inherent in the Volkspoe- sie turned out by individuals (die individuell ge- triebene Volkspoesie)" (VAL 48).

In this connection, reference should be made to the second feature that Petracek holds to be essential to Volkspoesie, that of "general comprehensibility" (allgemeine Verstdndlichkeit). It is hard to determine exactly what he means by this expression, although one assumes that deliberately recondite, convoluted, or recherche elements would naturally be excluded. Certainly, "general comprehensibility" as applied to a poetic tradition- especially a "folk"-poetic tradition; i.e., an oral tradition-must be admitted to be an extremely subjective and relative quantity, one that could scarcely be evaluated by anyone not versed or involved in the living tradition itself. Yet there seems little doubt that Petracek supposes the archaizing tendency that he finds in "the Volks- poesie turned out by individuals" (and specifically in early Arabic poetry) to be at once both that feature of the poetry which made it somewhat less than "generally comprehensible," and the individualizing factor by means of which a particular poet's work might be distinguished from the general run of Volkspoesie.

With respect to the first supposition, my own inclination is simply to discard the notion of "general comprehensibility" as serving no useful purpose but to express a measure of familiarity and a judgment of taste. In the case of Arabic poetry, for instance, whether or not the poems were "generally comprehensible" to Arab audiences at the time of their living rendition is a highly debatable question. It is surely wrong to conclude that they were not so on the basis of opinions formulated by later generations of urbanized litera- ti who would have been unconditioned to the

27 Cf. Socin & Serjeant (n. 10 above); also PetrAcek DSSV 51.

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conventions, presuppositions, and demands of an oral tradition.28

As for whether an archaizing tendency might be supposed to serve as an individualizing factor in "Volkspoesie turned out by individuals," one can only feel that this is a very simplistic and groundless assumption. In the first place, the whole issue of how far individual creativity is operative and manifested in the "general run of Volkspoesie" and folklore is one that seems to have been resolved, for some years now, in favor of the individual versus the undifferentiated Volk. The very existence of folk-poetry and folklore, in general, within a community is now understood to depend upon the presence of gifted individual performers-poets, bards, narrators, and the like- who seldom abound in any group. Only through the distinctiveness and audience-appeal of their public renditions would a poem or tale be assured of admission to and continuance in the so-called "folk tradition." As a result, folklore research has come to attach more and more importance to information regarding the individual bearers of tradition and the occasions of rendition, and no longer draws conclusions solely from the traditional materials themselves.29 Utilization of this information, combined with more scrupulous recording of folk-poems and -tales and more care- ful analysis of existing texts, has shown that a much higher measure of ingredience in folklore is traceable to the personal style and background of individual bearers of tradition than had ever been taken for granted before. In a range of individualizing factors-including stylistic devices, vocabulary, local or ethnic influences, circumstantial pressures, and personal creative intuition-archaic linguistic usage can be held up as just another such factor among many.

But even more surprising, considering the theory of the nature of Volkspoesie that Petracek subscribes to, is that he should imagine archaisms or archaizing tendencies in Volkspoesie to be any index of individualization whatsoever. Meier and Naumann dwell upon, and the whole Receptions- theorie presupposes, the inherent conservatism of the Volk. The taste and styles of the Volk fall

28 See, esp., M. Parry, "The Homeric Gloss: A Study in Word-sense," Transactions of the American Philological Association 59 (1928) 233-47 (= Parry MHV 240-50).

29 See, e.g., Bach DVk ?? 313-21; C. W. von Sydow in Dundes SF 219-42; W. R. Bascom in Dundes SF 279-98; D6gh FS Part II; etc.

about a hundred years behind those of the educated Oberschicht (KD xiii-xv). Archaism, then, in this view, might be expected to form the rule in the Volk's poetry, rather than the exception; and its value as an individualizing factor would be very limited at best.

* * *

Presumably as an example of individualization through archaization among nineteenth-century Bedouin folk-poets, Petracek alludes to an instance of "one particular bard" whose "efforts to achieve archaism .. .went so far that he even drew his vocabulary from old literary sources (the dictionary al-Qamus)" (VAL 48, citing Socin DC III). I fail to grasp how this single, patently untypical example can be interpreted as supporting evidence. Surely a functionally literate poet (if such he really was; cf. Socin DC III 71), who recited or composed with the aid of a dictionary, cannot be adduced as representative in any way of a folk- poetical tradition, if that term is to have any significance at all.30

I feel, moreover, that Petracek has misinter- preted the incident altogether. A. Musil, whose experiences among the Bedouins were at least as broad as Socin's, has also given considerable attention to their poetry and poetical composition. He reports a case where a Bedouin guide named

30 The poet was Nimr b. 'Adwan, a XIXth-century east Jordanian Bedouin, of whom G. Wallin reported that he could read and write and that he took from the Qamis many expressions unfamiliar to daily speech (Socin DC III 71). Socin says in reference to Nimr "What is known of his poetry... does not depart essentially from the qasidas of other poets as regards vocabulary and grammar." Poems attributed to him or thought to be his are included in Socin DC I nos. 47, 48, 54, 55?, 56?; also Musil MCRB 189-98 (cf. 198f). One poem is represented in three extremely varied recensions (Socin DC I nos. 47 [transcription] & 47 [script]; Musil MCRB 195f). Hence, regardless of how Nimr may have composed poetry, his poems were evidently rendered through the oral tradition no differently from those of any unlettered poet. On Nimr see also Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, Die Beduinen, Bd. II (Leipzig [Harrasso- witz]: 1943), p. 214, where his name is given as "Abu Fares Nimr ibn Kablan" or "Nimr el 'Adwan" and where further references are cited (I owe this source to a kind communication from Professor Anton Spitaler of the University of Munich).

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Isma'in, who had read the legend about the Banil Hilal and memorized several poems contained therein, composed a poem celebrating Musil and extolling his generosity. A second Bedouin, however, who was unable to read, "corrected various verses, replaced several words by more beautiful ones, and reproached Isma'in with not knowing the poetical language and using expressions which no poet would employ. ... He said Ismalin composed bad poems and that no Bedouin would express himself in such a way, though Isma'in imitated the speech of Bedouins."31 Elsewhere, and again being eulogized by a Bedouin poet (this one illiterate), Musil records the following occur- rence:

When I found that he [the poet] depicted me in his poem as sitting upon a hegin (mount, camel) I demur- red, saying that I rode a delul, that the Rwala tribe (1o not say hegin but delul. The poet acknowledged this, but said he could not employ such a common word as dell1 in his poem, for in a poem one has to use the word that is more graceful even if less familiar.32

It is obvious that the two literate poets, the dictionary user and the reader of Sirat Bani Hilal, were seeking to reproduce through delib- erate selection of archaic expressions or imitation of a written (though not necessarily literary33) norm what the two unlettered poets managed to produce instinctively, by virtue of their active involvement in the Bedouin poetic tradition-essentially an oral tradition. It should be granted, then, that the "poetical language" or the "speech of Bedouins," as conceived by those who used it with ease and success and by those who imitated it with some sensitivity, would consist by its very nature of many elements of "archaic diction (when compared with the society's colloquial vernacular)" (see p. 205, above). These elements are part and parcel of the tradition-part and parcel of the "correct" or "proper" way for Arabic traditional poetry to sound. Thus, far from being adducible as an individualizing factor, making

31 A. Musil, The Northern Hijaz (Amer. Geog. Soc. Oriental Explorations and Studies, No. 6; New York Amer. Geog. Soc.]: 1926), p. 157.

32 A. Musil, Arabia Deserta (Amer. Geog. Soc. Oriental Explorations and Studies, No. 2; New York [Amer. Geog. Soc.]: 1927), p. 237; cf. Musil MCRB 284.

33 See, esp., Bridget Connelly, "The Structure of Four Bani Hilal Tales: Prolegomena to the Study of Sira Literature," Journal of Arabic Literature 4 (1973) 18-47.

early Arabic poetry a special kind of Volkspoesie, archaization-or more specifically, archaic elements of diction and vocabulary-must be construed as one of the most typical features of "folk"-poetical production in general, among the Arabs, if not in fact among all peoples as well.34

*

Unfortunately, PetrAciek again is not precise as to what linguistic features go into making up the "archaism" of early Arabic poetry. His only example of an archaizing tendency involves the selection of lexical items (but cf. DSSV 51). Yet, from assuming that a somehow individualizing archaism is present in the poetry of the sixth- and seventh-century Arabs and that such archaism is often to be found in other "special" kinds of Volkspoesien, he leaps to the very important but not very well-supported conclusion that questions concerning the emergence and character of the so- called "poetic koine" or Liedersprache, the classical earabiya of the poets, can be answered in folkloristic terms. "The thorny problem as to whether Classical Arabic emerged as the language of a particular tribe or was from the beginning a super- tribal tongue" (to use J. Blau's words35) becomes to a great extent resolved, Petrdcek proposes, when we realize that the linguistic particularities of the early poetry would not have constituted a special language or dialect at all. Rather they would have formed the elements of a folk-poetical style, for which, he says, we have (regretably unspecified) "folkloristic and ethnographic analogies" (VAL 45-48, esp. 47f).

Petracek's proposal is not entirely new. R. Blach6re, for instance, had already suggested that parallels to the development of classical Arabic might be sought in the existence of a special poetic

34 "Thus one's style should be unlike that of ordinary language, for if it has the quality of remoteness it will cause wonder, and wonder is pleasant" (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1404b). "That [diction] which employs unfamiliar words is dignified and outside the common usage" (idem, Poetics 1458a, cf. 1459a). Cf. M. Parry, "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. II: The Homeric Lan- guage as the Language of an Oral Poetry," Harvard Stud- ies in Classical Philology 43 (1932) 1-50 (= Parry MHV 324-64).

35 In The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic (Scripta Judaica V; Oxford [Oxford U. P.]: 1965), p. 2.

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idiom among the folk-poets of the North African Berbers and the Tuaregs of the Sahara.36 And even earlier, in his VSA published in 1946, Alfred Bloch had provided substantial evidence to show that the poetic language conformed in most important respects to the norms of the classical prose (if not to those of the "colloquial vernacular," which would be most difficult to establish in any event) and that it cannot be considered a special dialect or linguistic variety. Most of the deviations from "normal" language that are attested, in the way of rare morphological and syntactical con- structions, seem to be conditioned by the requirements of meter and rhyme, rather than by the operation of any distinct or distinguishable linguistic process.37 In other words, the 'arabiya of the poets, with all of its inter-dialectal and diachronic features, was largely a function of a poetic style, as Petracek suggests (or better, diction), and not of a poetic dialect. Elsewhere, Bloch specifically relates the differences between the syntactical and lexical usage of early and of later Arabic poets not to a chronological, dialectal, or linguistic change, but to a stylistic one.38

Also well before Petracek's studies, Bloch brought up (in 1953) the subject of Volksdichtung in connection with early Arabic poetry (KWAV 236-38). Bloch's inquiry includes a concise but sensitive analysis of several formal and prosodic complexities of Arabic verse, in comparison with

36 R. Blachere, Histoire de la litterature arabe des

origines d la fin du XV' sikcle de J.-C. (Paris [Adrien- Maisonneuve]: 1952-66), pp. 80f.

37 Even more emphatically, A. Spitaler, partly on the basis of Bloch's VSA, has stongly maintained that ir- regularities of syntax and word-order which are conditioned solely by the requirements of meter and rhyme ought not to be classed or analyzed as discrete linguistic phenomena. See Spitaler, review of Bloch VSA, in Oriens 2 (1949) 317-22, esp. 317f; idem, review of 'Arabiya by J. Filck, in Bibliotheca Orientalis 10 (1953) 144-50, specifically 146, n. 17; idem, in G. Levi Della Vida (ed.), Linguistica semitica: Presente e futuro (Univ. di Roma. Inst. di Studi del vicino Oriente. Centro di Studi Semitici. Studi Semitici 4. Rome: 1961), pp. 125f.

38 A. Bloch, "Die altarabische Dichtung als Zeugnis fur das Geistesleben der vorislamischen Araber," An- thropos 37-40 (1942-45) 186-204, specifically 187, n. 7; idem, KWAV 216-19, n. 13. A detailed examination of this question may be found in Zwettler OT Chapter III: "The Classical 'Arabiya as the Language of an Oral Poetry".

two other "independent polymetric poetries"- that of the Sanskrit "middle ages" and especially the Greek lyric-as well as with Old Germanic poetry. In conclusion, he turned to the "cultural foundation" (Kulturgrund) whereon "this artistic and diversified (formenreich) poetic craft . . . grew up and flourished" (KWAV 236). Bloch, too, phrased his discussion in terms of the unproduc- tive, but conventionally accepted, Kunst-Volks- dichtung dichotomy, but with rather more conceptual and terminological clarity than Petrdcek, and from quite a different point of view. He refers to the polymetrical verse forms in classical San- skrit ("generally designated as 'Kunstdichtung'," with "a distinctly artificial, meistersingerisch stamp") and those of the Greek lyric (the question whether it is volkstiimlich or kiinstlich "could be considered falsely posed"; but once asked, "one might say: the Greek lyric occupies an interme- mediate position"). Bloch feels that, in comparison,

early Arabic poetry, apart perhaps from the great qasidas, is volkstiimlich in the sense that [A.] Heusler39 ... calls the minor genres of Germanic poetry volkstiimlich: hence it is not volkstiimlich though in the sense of something that had slipped down beneath the upper classes; it is not poetry of inferior circles, of little people. Nearly everyone from the society we encounter in Arab antiquity can make verse; the number of poets is almost unlimited. Decidedly this society is aristocratic in that everyone even has his own family tree-indeed, in that all appear to be united to one another through one vast family tree. In no way does there seem to be an anonymous lower stratum (Unterschicht). Obviously not everyone of the countless poets whose verses are preserved for us was a poet to the same degree. In the early period, of course, one can probably term none of them a "professional poet" (Berufsdichter); not even the greatest and most productive poets led a life different from that of the other Bedouins. And yet individuals (precisely the great poets) were renowned, sought after, and feared on account of their poetic talent; and also they composed long and highly de- manding (voraussetzungsreich) qasidas, while others aired their feelings in verses (unattached stanzas) only on special occasion. But even the verses of such people, who were otherwise little or not at all known as poets, are hardly ever clumsily fashioned (stiimperhcft); almost everyone handles this polymetric art of poetry

39 Bloch refers to A. Heusler, Die altgermanische Dich- lung (Berlin-Neubabelsberg [Akademische Verlagsgesell- schaft Athenaion]: 1924), ? 96.

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with complete confidence. It is certainly created by individuals, but in its function (Anwendung) it is a true resource of the Volk (wirkliches Volksgut) (KWAV 237f).

One can see that Bloch, too, was influenced in his view of folk-poetry by the insidious Rezeptions- theorie. But, contrary to Petracek, he found it inapplicable as such to the cultural environment in which early Arabic poetical production took place. Bloch, however, did not attempt to stretch the notion of Volkstiimlichkeit to cover the many features of these early Arabic poems that set them apart from the more markedly literary and indi- vidually stamped poetical works which were conventionally designated as Kunstpoesie.40 This, of course, is precisely what Petriaek sought to do; not only, as was seen above, to account for the exceptional nature of the so-called Lieder- or Dich- tersprache; but also to explain "the character of this poetry itself." By approaching early Arabic poetry as a "special kind of Volkspoesie," Petracek decided that "we may be able to understand the lack of feeling for originality and likewise the problem of plagiarism and of variations on the same theme (or verse)" (VAL 49f.; cf. esp. DSSV 10-13).

*

The possibly querulous tone that I have taken in the foregoing pages vis-a-vis Petracek's position should not be construed as reflecting disagree- ment in principle with his basic conclusion. On the contrary, I am convinced that he is quite right in perceiving that poetical production among the early Bedouins had much more in common with what he thought of as folk-poetry, than with the distinctly personalized literary creations of later centuries or other cultures; even though the poems themselves might show all the qualities of "elaborate products of the purely artistic style" (von Grunebaum GSAP 121)-i.e., of so-called Kunstpoesie (cf. p. 201f., above). There is no doubt

10 However, just how much the term Volksdichtung or Volkspoesie was assumed by these scholars to comprise is not often easy to ascertain. Already, as a result of Meier's researches, standardization and constant variation of the transmitted materials-to mention but two elements-were to a great extent taken for granted as in- trinsic to any volkstimlich phenomenon.

that responsible folklore scholarship (including, e.g., Meier's investigations of the Zersingen of poems and songs in the folk tradition and much else that is more recent and less prone to ethno- centric prejudices) can afford us many insights into the processes of poetical production in pre-Islamic Arabia and into the state of existing poetical texts-more, probably, than we have gained through the largely philological or sometimes downright impressionistic approaches that have prevailed heretofore. But this valid, even crucial, perception of Petracek's is in danger of being ignored or rejected because of the degree to which his argument is hamstrung by reliance upon highly questionable, if not generally discredited, folk-ethnological concepts and critical terminology (cf. Parry in Lord HPH 37-40; also pp. 199-201 above).

Only a too rigidly categorical understanding of the phenomenon associated with the term Volks- poesie, coupled with a too ready acceptance of the notion of a merely recipient, reproductive, and hence, in essence, anonymous Volk, could have led Petracek to stipulate that early Arabic poetry had to be a specific kind of Volks poesie, on account of its unquestionably outstanding artistry and its profusion of known poets. But the latter circumstance, as already seen, had been recognized earlier by Alfred Bloch as making the Rezeptionstheorie inapplicable to this poetry, particularly if it were to be a question of having to treat the classical qasida as a gesunkenes Kulturgut. And with reference to the former reason, it is not hard to see that Petracek's concern to reconcile the evident Kiinstlertiimlichkeit of the qasida with its equally evident Volkstiimlichkeit arises out of an unneces- sary attachment to what R. Menendez Pidal calls "the improper terms, art poetry and popular poetry" (CR 53 = trans. 55). Referring to B. Croce's "Poesia popolare" e "poesia d'arte" (1946), Menen- dez Pidal welcomes the refinements made by Croce in his use of these "improper terms" and the "great principle" (gran principio) which he established; viz., that popular poetry-or as Menendez Pidal prefers, "traditional poetry"-"is not in itself inartistic, as everyone thinks" (CR 53 = trans. 56). In the view of Menendez Pidal, it is far more proper to speak of "traditional poetry" (la poesia tradicional) and "individual poetry" (la poesia individual); one avoids thus the tacit, almost automatic, value judgments or judgments of taste which have always been exercised by those who

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thought in terms of the Kunst- Volkspoesie dichotomy.41

Ultimately, however, one comes to realize that Ultimately, however, one comes to realize that

amid all the terminological and conceptual disac- cord generated by folklore research, the one almost universally accepted characteristic of the traditional or folkloric verbal work is its orality. Even as early as the end of the nineteenth century, A. C. Berger specifically maintained that Volkspoesie ought to be considered, by definition, unwritten and orally transmitted, while Kunstpoesie would be written (a Schriftdichtung) (cited in Meier KVD 10). J. Meier, though, with his class-oriented distinction between aristocratic production and folk reproduction and his unimpeachable scholarly authority, successfully squelched this point of view before it gained currency. Meier does, nevertheless, grant as "indisputable" that "the Volkslied exhibits all the characteristics of [the style of orally transmitted poetry] in the domain of both internal and external form." But because certain medieval poems which also exhibited these characteristics had, according to Meier, to be classed with Kunstpoesie due to their superior artistic quality, oral style could be considered only as "something accidental [to Volkspoesie], hence not useful as an exclusory principle of analysis" (KVD 11).

But as the theory of the aristocratic origins of folklore fell increasingly into disrepute, the distinction between popular or folk-poetry and art-poetry became progressively less meaningful. Thus, today we read in a basic reference work the following statement:

Literary classification . . . divides oral from written "literature". This is founded on a distinction as to the process, not of composition, but of transmission of

41 Menedez Pidal's further association of traditional poetry with a so-called anonymous era, during which "the traditional poem, in a perpetual state of metamor- phosis, belongs to all who sing it, to all who hear it," must be accepted only with the greatest reservation (see CR trans. 64f; cf. 500-02). Indeed, perhaps his emphasis on "anonymity" is misplaced altogether, since the term appears to serve as little more than a euphemism for the "collectivity" of the Volk so vigorously affirmed by Rezeptiontheoretiker. Cf. Bogatyrev/Jakobson FBFS 904; also C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London [Macmillan]: 1952), p. 404. See, too, pp. 204-5, above.

literary works; the distinction becomes important in many cases in which the composition, and so the characteristic form, of a work is affected by the fact that it is to be transmitted by one means rather than the other, as in ballads or traditional epics. (This distinction is sometimes related to another drawn between folk-literature and literature of art, but the latter is now generally avoided as unscientific, since so far as it means anything concrete it is identical with the distinction between oral and written literature. Scien- tific distinction between a literature of the people and other literature will not deny art to the former.. . .)42

With F. Utley's "operational definition of folk literature" (first published in 1961), we come back, full circle as it were, to the view of Berger, mentioned above. Utley quite unequivocally maintains that he "will stand by the very simple statement that folk literature is orally transmitted literature wherever found, amoung primitive iso- lates or civilized marginal cultures, urban or rural societies, dominant or subordinate groups" (in Dundes SF 13). The rigor with which he applies this definition to the field of folklore research requires that the folklorist who consults literary versions of stories or poems (i.e., versions written down before the nineteenth century and not "recorded under conditions which authenticated them as truly 'literature orally transmitted'" [in Dundes SF 16]) "realize that he is not now studying folklore but the relationship of oral and written literature. This ... should not be confused with the study of oral literature itself" (in Dundes SF 18).

Although Utley insists, with justice, that the field of folk-literature proper be confined to authenticated documents of the oral tradition, his insistence by no means implies that oral tradition and folk-literature did not exist before such documents were recorded, nor that written versions of stories and poems which have come down to us through literary (or textual) transmission would not reflect, more or less faithfully, the state and characteristics of that tradition and literature. Utley says at one point (and his statement holds good for all forms of folk "literature"): "We cannot generalize about the nature of the folktale unless we have a sharply defined corpus as the basis for

42 J. C. La Dricre, article: "Classification, literary," in J. T. Shipley (ed.), Dictionary of World Litarary Terms, rev. ed. (Boston [The Writer]: 1970), pp. 49-51; specifically p. 51.

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remarks on folktale or folksong structure, formula, style, content, context, function, and method of transmission" (in Dundes SF 17). It is surely the prerogative of the literary critic to utilize intelli- gently the generalizations and insights of scrupulous folklore research in understanding and elu- cidating the received texts of an earlier era. If the state and characteristics of a corpus of "literary versions" (or more strictly speaking, "literarily transmitted versions") of early poems or stories bear strong and substantive resemblences to those of a modern scientific folklorist's "sharply defined corpus," we-as students and readers of literature-would be culpably negligent to ignore these resemblences and their implications for our work. After all, the fact that literarily transmitted versions of medieval (or earlier) poems and tales "cannot be trusted as clear cases of oral transmission" (Utley in Dundes SF 16) simply excludes them as valid evidence for the cautious folklorist. It does not mean that they are not cases of oral transmission (at least, up to the time of their textualization); nor does it invalidate application of folkloristic principles in dealing with them.

The folkloristic emphasis on oral transmission was carried an important step further with the work of the Homerists (and Slavicists), Milman Parry and Albert Lord, and other subscribers to the oral-traditional theory of poetry. Applying to the Homeric epics principles derived from ob- serving and recording the processes of a living oral tradition (mainly Yugoslav), they have been able to show that poetry of this kind-formulaic in diction, uniform in sensibility, multiform in as- pect-is not just orally transmitted. It is also, and at the same time, orally composed-albeit with the aim of rendering a previously heard poem as excellently and as accurately as possible.43 Thus, the very features of fluidity and formularity-as well as those of avoidance of self-conscious originality, uncertain attribution, linguistic archaism, and others-, all of which folklore scholarship has usually accepted as unavoidable con-

43 On the difficult and probably unanswerable question as to what measure of variation we may and should expect from one rendition of an oral-traditional poem to another see, e.g., G. S. Kirk, "Homer and Modern Oral Poetry: Some Confusions," Classical Quarterly n.s. 10 (1960) 271- 81 (repr. in G. S. Kirk [ed.], The Language and Background of Homer: Some Recent Studies and Controvwrsies [Cam- bridge/New York (Heffer/Barnes & Noble): 1964], pp. 79- 89).

sequences of oral transmission by and among the folk, would be far better and more realistically understood as natural concomitants of a living and continuous tradition of oral rendition by and among an unlettered people (cf. Lord ST 6f & Parry in Lord HPH 37-40).

Although both Petracek and Bloch were pri- marily concerned with establishing the Volkstiim- lichkeit of early Arabic poetry, both recognized and acknowledged in passing the fact of its oral transmission (Petracek DSSV 6 n2, 11, 14 & QAAL 404; Bloch VSA 3, 18 & passim). In this, of course, they were merely concurring with generations of philologists, critics, and authors who have offered lip service to the same idea But by stressing the folkloric qualities of the poetry, the two scholars have pointed out a new direction which serious students of early Arabic literature are only beginning to follow; for the findings of the folklorists with respect to folk "literature" can bring the Arabist to a revaluation and a new understanding of precisely some of the most deprecated and least appreciated aspects of the classical poetry. In order that the contribution of the folklorists be really valuable to us, however, we must hold to what has become one of their most important principles: that of "a method of composition as the distinction between oral..... ['folk'] poetry and 'written' poetry" (Lord ST 6; cf. Parry in Lord HPH 37f). It is not, then, just as a Volks- poesie (in Bloch's or Petracek's sense of the word) nor even as a traditional poetry (as signified by Men6ndez Pidal) that classical Arabic poetry will be most profitably and fruitfully re-examined, but rather as an oral-traditional,-indeed oral- formulaic-poetry.

The real value of this insight into the oral- traditional nature of classical Arabic poetry will emerge, of course, when we confront the texts of the poems themselves. It has been generally accepted that the bulk of what we know as pre- and early-Islamic Arabic poetry was composed from around the end of the fifth century to the mid-seventh century A.D., but that no systematic, large-scale movement to set it down in textual form was initiated before the end of the seventh century. As already noted, a process of "oral transmission" was assumed to account for the preservation of the poems up to the period of their textualization. However, "lapses of memory" on the part of the transmitters-their "insensitivity," "incompetence", "irresponsibility", "over-inven- tiveness," even "unscrupulosity"-have all been

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blamed for the "conventionalizations," "misat- tributions," "plagiarisms," "confusions," "incon- sistencies," "interpolations," "fabrications," etc., alleged to have "corrupted" the texts of those poems. But the same phenomena have been observed to be regular, even typical, attendants to the production and performance of "folk-poetry"; and some Arabists have tentatively advanced the notion of the importance of folklore studies to the study of early Arabic poetry. It is especially, though, in light of the Parry-Lord theory of oral-formulaic poetic composition and rendition, judiciously adapted and applied to the particular circumstances of pre- and early Islamic Arab culture and Arabic poetry, that these "corrupted" texts will appear in their true significance. For, given the care, thoroughness, and scrupulosity with which the early medieval redactors and schol- iasts sought out and noted down variations and anomalies wherever they encountered them, it is clear that these texts would actually reflect-to the extent that any pre-modern written sources can do so-the normal operation of a living oral tradition, as it has come to be understood. These texts, moreover, as authentic and conscientiously recorded documents of such a tradition, provide

us with a body of poems which would have been composed, and rendered for some time thereafter, without the aid of writing-poems that would not merely have survived, but would have flourished in the fluid and formular state that obtains wherever oral poetry is alive and has not been sup- planted by written poetry. The multiplicity of variants and attributions and of formulaic phrases and elements attested for the great majority of classical Arabic poems may undermine our confidence in ever establishing an "author's original version"-as indeed they should I But they ought to convince us that we do have a voluminous record of a genuine and on-going oral poetical tradition (even if in its latest stages), such as no other nation can match in breadth of content and scrupulosity of collection and documentation. The textual tradition of classical Arabic poetry comes closer than that of any other early poetry-including the Homeric epics-to satisfying in its earliest stages the requirement set by Utley in his "operational definition fo folk literature" (see`p. 210f., above): namely, that the poems be "recorded under conditions which authenticated them as truly 'literature orally transmitted'."

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Classical Arabic Poetry Between Folk and Oral Tradition

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