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Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski
Very interesting. Well, that would help explain how Homer's works survived so long in oral form in spite of their great length.
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In fact, scholars didn't realize the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally orally transmitted until early in the Twentieth Century when a scholar named Milman Parry studied the bards in the Balkans and identified certain linguistic devices they used that are also present in Homer's works and he realized were charactaristic of oral traditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry
The Wikipeda article is little more than a stub but Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles' translation of the Iliad contains a facinating discussion of Parry and his work. The bards in India have enriched our understandings of oral traditions.