A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and song in the Greek language from the last years of the Byzantine Empire to the present day. The folk poetry of the title includes the songs, composed and handed down by word of mouth, of unlettered villagers, of wandering minstrels with pretensions to professionalism, and, in more recent times, of the poorer inhabitants of Ottoman and Greek cities. The creative period of this folk poetry covers, at the minimum, 500 years of history and a geographical area stretching from Corsica in the west to Cyprus and Trebizond in the east, as well as northwards into the Balkans. This is not a general or theoretical survey of folk poetry, but an exploration, based on literary, historical and sociological evidence, of a single cultural tradition and the forces which have shaped it.

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Once seen as a patriotic evocation of the Greek nationalist struggle of the nineteenth century, Freedom and Death can now be seen to revolve around a number of interrelated conflicts: sexual (in the overlapping, triangular relationships of Mihalis-Nuri-Emine and of Michalis-Polyxingis-Emine); internal (Mihalis's struggles with his "demons"); and ideological/psychological (the "gravitational" pull of Crete and the ancestors versus the centrifugal, enlightening trajectory of Kosmas). Kazantzakis revisits and implicitly criticizes earlier intellectual positions of his own (aestheticism, nationalism). At the same time, the novel pursues a parallel quest (unresolved) to that articulated in the two novels on the Christ story (conflict/union with the divine). But since Freedom and Death is a work of fiction, not of philosophy, it deserves to be read for the play of nonhuman forces acted out by its human protagonists, and hence may be compared with later South American fiction, especially that of Márquez.

It is often suggested that Digenes is in some way connected with oral poetry, whether the oral folk poetry of the modern 'acritic' ballads or the type of oral epic tradition identified by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in the Homeric poems and in modern Yugoslavia. Some clarification of the possible role of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Digenes now seems overdue, and in this paper I propose to examine the texts of the poem in the light of recent work on 'oral literature', so as to define more precisely in what sense any of these can be described as 'oral', and then, more tentatively, to suggest a possible framework for the growth and transmission of the poem which might account for these results. Ever since the discovery of Digenes in 1870 it has been widely believed that one source, at least, for the poem was the oral traditions of the tenth-century frontier between Byzantium and Islam, where the action takes place. Some scholars, such as Stilpon Kyriakidis and Henri Gregoire, maintained that the poem in its earliest form had been closely derived from these oral sources, while others, such as Petros Kalonaros and John Mavrogordato, saw their * The now somewhat distant origin of this, paper was a colloquium on Narrative Style in Medieval Greek Poetry, arranged by David Holton for the Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, in February 1978, at which I gave a brief paper on formulas in Digenes. I am grateful to all the participants on that occasion, whose views have greatly deepened and extended my own, and in particular to Margaret Alexiou, Anthony Bryer and Michael and Elizabeth Jeffreys for many valuable comments and suggestions while this paper was in preparation. The views expressed remain, of course, my responsibility alone.

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