Oral tradition

An oral tradition or oral culture is a way of transmitting history, literature or law from one generation to the next, without a writing system, by voice. People tell stories. Often the stories are made into poems and songs to make remembering easy. For example, the Homeric poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined oral literature and oral history. Eventually they were written down.

Related pages

• Legend
• Narrative poetry
• Oral law
• Word of mouth

Other websites

• The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
• The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Online Archived 2007-10-24 at the Wayback Machine
• Oral Tradition Journal