ABSTRACT
Wilhelm Radloff was probably the earliest scholar studying Turkic oral epic poetry who noticed the highly patterned, formulaic character of this type of poetry. In his famous introduction to the Kirghiz volume of his Proben, he enumerates a number of narrative units (Vortragsteile), which occur again and again in the epics, as so to speak pre fabricated building blocks from which the singer can construct his epics: "The art of the singer consists only in stringing all these ready-made narrative units in such a way together as the course of the narrative demands and to link them with newly composed verse-lines."1 Radloff s description, however valuable, has led to misconceptions about Turkic, and in particular Kirghiz oral epic poetry. The mechanical aspect of "composition in performance," to use A. B. Lord’s term, is emphasized by the adverb "only” in the quotation above. Andreas Heusler, one of the leading scholars in the field of Old Germanic poetry in the first half of this century, based his view of Turkic oral epic poetry on Radloff s description, maintaining that the Germanic alliterative lay could never have been "formulaic and full of clichés" like Kirghiz epic poetry.2
