ABSTRACT
One method of ensuring that the people message gets across is perhaps obvious—apparent—easy to see—and evident in full: Repetition and redundancy combat noise. In the case of lengthy narrative, repetition may also alert the people to what's most essential of the story's content, operating thus as a kind of red flag, as a vocal annotation in the proverbial margins. Just as vital, to reprise, is the obligation and appeal in hearing the same story repeated over and over. Of course, an oral narrative can often multiply and metamorphose into profoundly different takes on that "original" story, depending on where one finds those derivations, both geographically as well as through time. Anonymous, by contrast-author of Epic of Gilgamesh, not to mention most Icelandic sagas, the Old French Song of Roland, and those fairy tales the people willingly assign to the Brothers Grimm-just doesn't quite equip the reader with the same existential security.
