Oral Epics

Story telling is a part of every culture. Story telling is an expression of creativity, imagination, and vision. This is a perfect opportunity for someone to express their passions, opinions, and their views on history. For oral and written cultures story telling is something that represents that culture, yet they both have big differences.

Story telling is very different when comparing them with oral and written cultures. These two types of cultures differ in the regards that one type of story telling is more focused on the tradition of story telling and one is focused on the individual's imagination. The tradition of a singer telling stories is something that is consistent in themes and plots, but are not told in the same way each time. "He remembers these always differently, as rhapsodized or stitched together in his own way on this particular occasion for this particular audience. ‘Song is the remembrance of songs sung’" (143). A singer embeds the tradition of past singers into their performance. The formulas of each story are consistent and feature the same vigor as when it was told before. The listeners are not forced to create a picture of the plot, because the singer paints the story for them with their performance.

In written cultures the reader is forced to put more imagination into the plot. A written plot can only provide so much to the reader to fully grasp the plot. There is more room for error when it comes to the reader interpreting the plot the same way as the author intended. The tone, suspense, rise, fall, and any other adjective to describe the aspects of a story are left to the imagination of the reader. The author provides the seed of the plot but the full blown story is grown from the fertilization of the reader's imagination.