ABSTRACT
This study considers two kinds of texts from two very different places in the world and from two very different chronological periods. These are Australian Aboriginal clan songs from Arnhem Land, which continue to be performed in Northern Australia today (and sometimes outside it), 1 and a group of poems with mythological and heroic subject matter which were recorded by medieval Icelandic people in the thirteenth century but are generally considered to have had a long oral history before they were written down. I propose to discuss them together, not simply because I happen to know something about both textual traditions, but because I think there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn from a comparison of the editorial methods of modern scholars faced with making a literate record of a living oral tradition and what we can deduce of the methods adopted by medieval editors and compilers of oral poetry. I hope to show that both groups have faced essentially the same major problem and coped with it in similar ways, in spite of the different technological resources available in each case.
