the mid-1900s he traveled throughout the former Yugoslavia (now a number of separate, independent countries) and found people who still followed the oral tradition. He demonstrated that the “singer of tales,” the person who learns epic poems and goes from village to village reciting them, is really re-creating them, composing poetry on the fly in such a way that it obeys the rhythm, theme, story line, structure, and other characteristics of the poem. This is a prodigious feat, but it is not an example of rote memory.
