No one said these songs were "unchanged," like the folk process wasn't going on. But in a time when there was less or little written, or only a small fraction of the population dealt in the written word, song, poems, and/or stories were handed down verbally. They may not be memorized exactly, and as has been shown with American Indian storytellers, the ones I've seen discussed, there are certain features in their story telling (adherence to detail while at the same time developing an appealing individual style) that would lead me to believe that stories and songs were transmitted a lot more faithfully before the printed word than after.

Let me give you a modern illustration of how I've seen this work for me. Have you experienced going on vacation and relying on taking photos to "remember" what you see? If your film fails, it's like you've lost that part of the trip. You remember being there, but you didn't lock in the images, you let the camera do that, keeping it in reserve to look over later. If you don't have a camera and instead you look carefully while you're there, not mediating through the "capture" of the lens (as compared to the written word on paper to "keep" important words), you remember it much better.

Songs, stories, epic poems, they were mnemonic devices, they're meant as a way to remember important cultural things, and to teach how to live and survive.

The worst thing in the world for human brains was the written word. We stopped learning how to remember things efficiently, relying instead on our ability to find the printed document to get the info we need. We don't pay as close attention as we should, because we've lost the ability to concentrate to learn things entirely from being told.

SRS