>There are idiots on /lit/ right now who actually fall for

>>8257402
rabbis memorize the torah so i dont see how itd be impossible

>>8257416
>Iliad
>Word Count: ~150,000 depending on translation

>Torah
>Word Count: 79,976

And remember, the Iliad we have today isn't even half of the original's length.

Modern bards are documented memorising and repeating the Sundiata stories and Balkan epics in bardic format

Mahabharata singers actually straight-up memorise and don't even use bardic format, and it's much longer than Homer

>>8257431
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64QPz2t5T3A

here is an hour on Homer, the epic tradition, and the history of oral poetry.

>>8257458
https://youtu.be/64QPz2t5T3A?t=10m25s

And here is the time mark for an oral poet doing lays in Gaelic

>>8257469
>it's starts about Patrick
it's like we can't give foreign shows to pick up anything else.
>last seanchai died forty years ago
pretty sure that Eddie Lenihan is still alive and saving fairy trees

>the words don't mean anything
irish doesn't work like that. it's meant to have multiple meanings based around ambiguous sounds, and part of the bardic tradition is coming up with new ones with at minimum dual meanings, not just memorisation of the ones that came before.
there are set pieces which show you're trained, but just memorising the previous canon isn't enough because it's a canon of events from the neolithic up to the current day.

>>8257431
Yeah but homer repeats many phrases, so he's actually remembering way less than the word count

>>8257402
Who says they memorized Homer's exact words? Ancient singers had their own retellings of the Iliad myth, and it was Homer who pieced together the different details different oral traditions taught him and wrote it down on paper.