One Thousand and One Conjectures

The chansons de geste are famously careless with geography — Saracen kingdoms float, rivers move — yet pilgrims and jongleurs walked real roads, and the two facts have not been squared. This conjecture proposes the epics carry accurate geography exactly where their…

Troubadour songs are saturated with performance deixis — I, you, my lady here, this very season — grammar that pointed at a room which vanished when the song entered a book. The prose vidas and razos, the little biographies and anecdotes that…

An oral epic performance opens under the worst working conditions — the audience still settling, the singer finding the groove — so singers open on the densest formulaic autopilot and individuate as the story takes hold. The connection joins this performance commonplace…

In sung South Slavic epic the decasyllabic line lands on a fixed melodic cadence, and composition-in-performance regenerates each line fresh. The surprising connection is that memory hangs from the cadence: when one singer re-performs 'the same' song, word-for-word agreement between performances should…

Performance maximizes enacted direct speech — the jongleur impersonates his heroes — while private reading tolerates report. In the fifteenth century, adapters systematically turned old verse chansons de geste into prose for reading, and the surprising connection is that this rewriting event…

Within a living oral-epic tradition, some singers learned songs from cheap printed or written songbooks rather than from other singers. The surprising connection is that the written intermediary breaks the song-maker while polishing the parrot: a text-learned song is memorized rather than…