The mechanics of oral poetic storytelling are super interesting. Stock tags like “darkness covered his eyes” are chosen by the poet because they have the correct number of syllables to finish the line. The poet would have a number of alternative phrases ready to fit the meter as needed.

There’s even a theory that this mode of extemporaneous oral composition actually requires that the poet be illiterate. The thinking is that it’s a completely different, sound-first approach to language that literacy totally breaks. In order to compose fluently (not recite, the way we understand today), the poet has to understand a phrase like “darkness covered his eyes” as a discrete unit of meaning made up of syllables, not a composition of independent words.

It is almost like this kind of oral poetry is its own separate kind of "literacy" separate from being able to write and being able to speak conversationally. Definitely a different set of words and skills.

Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it. I don’t ha e the background to speak on whether the “illiterate bard” theory is actually true, but I find the idea that some kinds of literacy could be mutually exclusive totally fascinating.

Many of the pre-Christian European peoples did not have written languages or used them extremely sparingly - oral tradition poetry was how information was stored and communicated. Notice how all of Europe uses mostly Roman letters (the Christians also unfortunately burned most of the existing culture when they converted a population which is also why the Norse legends come mostly from Icelandic, one of the last places to really convert because of its remote location)

Not to mention literacy wasn’t even particularly common in Europe until relatively recently. The work on Homer I’m thinking of (Parry and Lord) is based on oral traditions that were still alive in prewar Yugoslavia.

This is another great New Yorker story on the Indian oral storytelling tradition which goes into the oral vs. written thing a bit (paywalled - sorry)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/20/homer-in-india

Was Shakespeare not a poet?

Talking specifically about oral epic poetry a la Homer or the Serbian heroic oral tradition. Shakespeare’s a totally different bag.