Through M. Parry and his analyses of contemporary Serbo-Croatian song Homeric scholarship in recent years has once more happily influenced the study of mediaeval literature. A. B. Lord, continuing and gradually expanding Parry's work, included a tentative chapter on the mediaeval epic in his authoritative book The, Singer of Tales . By this time F. P. Magoun, Jr had begun to use Parry's and Lord's findings in the interpretation of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and since then a good deal of scholarship in (...) this field has consisted of related efforts. Studying a living oral tradition, Parry developed convenient and apparently convincing techniques of proving the oral-formulaic character of a given text . Unfortunately these methods provide a certain temptation to mechanical analysis: one breaks down passages of Anglo-Saxon or, as has more recently been done, Old Spanish and Old Saxon poetry into “formulas” and formula systems, only to find once more that they were “composed orally.” But these efforts are bound to be isolated and inconclusive. In order to be more than that they must be related to comparable problems in other fields of mediaeval literature and to other aspects of oral composition. By surveying a few recent and some older publications I hope to take a step in this direction. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); }). (shrink)