Worlds of Story — A Relational History of the Epic: 1 Epic Emergence — Oral Worlds and Mnemonic Relationality

Before writing, before codified texts, there were stories — worlds articulated through voice, memory, and collective attention. The epic, in its earliest forms, emerged within oral cultures as a semiotic field in which human communities co-individuated relational patterns across time and space. These narratives did not merely recount events; they orchestrated the alignment of perception, action, and memory, shaping both the social and symbolic worlds of their participants.

Oral epics relied on mnemonic and performative scaffolds. Rhythm, repetition, and formulaic expressions were not aesthetic embellishments alone; they were semiotic technologies that stabilised relational fields, allowing complex sequences of events, characters, and social norms to be held in communal memory. The formulaic line or recurring motif served as a junctional device: it linked the immediate act of utterance to enduring narrative structures, ensuring continuity of meaning across performances and generations.

Memory and improvisation coexisted in this system. The storyteller was both a custodian and an agent of transformation: each recitation reaffirmed existing relational alignments while permitting subtle modulation and local inflection. The epic was thus inherently relational, its intelligibility emerging from the dynamic interplay between performer, audience, and the socio-environmental context. No single mind contained the epic; it was distributed across bodies, voices, and attentional networks, a living instantiation of semiotic potential.

Importantly, the emergence of epic presupposes the fully stratified content plane of Homo sapiens. Semantics and lexicogrammar provided the structural capacity for metaphorical and junctional meaning-making. The epic exploits this capacity to extend relational fields temporally: actions become paradigmatic, qualities become emblematic, and events become symbolic of broader patterns of human and natural interaction. In this sense, the epic enacts a form of temporal extension, projecting social and cosmological relations beyond the immediate moment of performance.

The social force of the epic is inseparable from its mnemonic strategies. Repetition and patterned phrasing not only aid memory; they also generate resonance among listeners, creating shared expectations and anticipatory frameworks. Each audience member participates in the co-individuation of the narrative world, their attention and interpretation feeding back into the relational ecology of the performance. The epic is thus simultaneously conservative and generative: it preserves inherited meaning while permitting continuous adaptation, tuning the semiotic potential of the community to emerging circumstances.

From this perspective, the oral epic is less a repository of static stories than a dynamic relational technology: a medium for aligning human perception, social action, and symbolic possibility. Its patterns scaffold cognition, emotion, and sociality, enabling humans to inhabit, recall, and extend worlds collectively. The epic demonstrates that narrative is not a mirror of life, but a mechanism through which worlds themselves are co-actualised, iteratively and relationally, across space and time.

In sum, the emergence of the epic marks a crucial stage in the history of human semiotic life. It makes visible how stratified language, mnemonic techniques, and performative practice intersect to produce relational worlds that are experienced, remembered, and reconfigured collectively. Oral epic is thus a testament to the semiotic ingenuity of Homo sapiens: a form of worlding in which stories do not simply tell, but co-individuate the social and symbolic orders in which humans live.