"In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. This book weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works that we know only through written texts but that are grounded in oral technique - works such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf."--BOOK JACKET.