I assume that in illiterate societies mistakes do occur in the transmission of stories and learning, even well-trained memories being fallible. I wonder if they happen in universal and systematic ways, so that they can in principle be reverse-engineered from the ways that stories are told at later dates - rather as philologists are able to work out the form of long-dead languages by studying extant ones?
They don't seem to. (I mean, they don't seem to happen in systemic ways, rather than they don't happen at all. They definitely do, no matter how much the oral, memorised tradition is respected.) But by God, do people try. Hang out on Arthurnet sometime watching people try to recreate pagan myths out of medieval stories and feel my Celticist pain. ;)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-08 11:23 am (UTC)They don't seem to. (I mean, they don't seem to happen in systemic ways, rather than they don't happen at all. They definitely do, no matter how much the oral, memorised tradition is respected.) But by God, do people try. Hang out on Arthurnet sometime watching people try to recreate pagan myths out of medieval stories and feel my Celticist pain. ;)