ABSTRACT
The interaction between the oral and written tradition in medieval culture is analyzed on the basis of an eleventh-century Latin poem, the Versus de Unibove. This poem is the written record of an orally transmitted folktale that was possibly already quite widespread in the eleventh century, and which later became popular and is now known as the tale of Big and Little Claus.
The poem consists of a series of episodes in which a peasant outsmarts his wealthier and more powerful opponents, three village magistrates, by responding to their human weaknesses, greed of money and sex. The language is sophisticated and indicates that both the author and his audience were literate. Ironic references to passages from the Bible suggest that the author was a young monk or a cleric who travelled to various schools.
The main character, peasant One-Ox, is adorned with negative stereotypical attributes of the peasantry that were common in literary works destined for the religious and secular elite: vile, ridiculous, but also unpredictable and therefore dangerous. The descriptions of village life are ironic, but also realistic, and aptly portray the rise of the money economy in rural areas and the social differences within the peasantry.
One-Ox is depicted as ridiculous and sinister, as well as a trickster, who makes up for his weakness by being clever, foreshadowing the protagonists in later, related recordings of folktales. In all of these stories the protagonist is a hero. However, in this version of the poem two contrasting images of the protagonist compete. From the perspective of the group cultures, the negative image forms part of the repertoire of external images of the peasantry. The positive image, on the other hand, seems to represent a fantasy of power held by the subaltern peasant population itself. The parallel influences of written and oral tradition have led to a cultural polyphony within a single literary work.
