Earlier, I think, Pietro wrote about the repetition and formulaic phrases in Homer and whether those indicate oral tradition as the source for the texts. I ran into some theories about Homer and oral vs. written while writing another paper (which involved medieval literacy / oral culture) because I was told to look at the work of A. Lord to see why people were writing about literacy in the 70s. As far as I can tell, he and others around the same time, working with Slavic oral traditions, came up with the theory that the Iliad and Odyssey were recorded oral tradition, so that while it retains many of the repetitions, &c., of the oral form, the written version had been even more deliberately composed in the process of recording it. It makes sense to me, because while there are definitely formulaic aspects, they’re still well-suited to the situation in which they’re used.
Relatedly, the oraltradition.org bibliography site was helpful for abstracts on the subject.
That’s pretty cool; is that what you were studying when you were England this past summer?
Sort of; I was studying an Anglo-Saxon manuscript from after the Norman Conquest, and by that point people weren’t writing in Old English so much as speaking it, so if you don’t pay attention to oral culture, you’d think the language was much less used.