The debate concerning whether the tradition of Serbo-Croatian oral epos is peasant by origin or peasant by adoption seems futile at the present time. There is the possibility that the epic tradition did not originate among the peasantry, but no one has ever demonstrated how in that case a peasant bard of the only attested modern kind would go about learning the demanding epic style and the complex inventory of themes from any source except the example of other bards like himself who sang in the same tradition within easy geographic and social proximity in his own district. If, however, the oral epic tradition did originate with the peasantry in the past, exactly how it originated, and when, remain unanswered questions. The best that recent scholarship has been able to do is to consider the epic tradition as a grand, well organized mass of many individual stylistic and thematic details, and to study the history, functions, and affinities of each such detail separately. The illusive hope of this procedure is that one might eventually be able to see a general pattern in the sum of separate conclusions about the individual stylistic and thematic atoms of the tradition, and so deduct what is aboriginal in modern South Slavic oral epos, and possibly whence it came.

    The decasyllable, a basic prosodic measure of the Serbo-Croatian tradition, was probably an ancient Slavic meter, though that does not necessarily imply derivation of the later Serbo-Croatian metric from an elder Slavic antecedent, either in whole or in part; nor is there any evidence that long narration in decasyllables was a part of ancient Slavic culture. Indeed, if one were to judge only by reference to the modern oral traditional poetry that has been recorded among other peoples of Slavic speech outside the Balkans, the conclusion would have to be drawn that the decasyllable was a pan-Slavic ballad form, but not epic. Nevertheless, regardless of its descent, like vile and belogorke, who were the nymphs and dryads of this tradition, the decasyllable was attested everywhere in modern Serbo-Croatian traditional oral poesy, both epic and otherwise, being quite similar in its broad poetic utility to the hexameter in ancient Greek.

    Even within historic times however, long narrative in decasyllables was not widely customary even among the peasantry in the continental epic-singing territory of the northwestern Balkans; only a relatively few verbally talented individuals carried on the tradition there. But of course that fact is also a slight basis for generalization, since the scientific history of this poetic form does not begin anywhere in the Balkans until the eighteenth century.

    To surmise, then, from all that is actually known, oral epos in the Balkans was always fundamentally a peasant household art loosely rooted in decasyllabic meter. The male members of the patriarchal family and its affines gathered at the dwelling of one of their number during seasons when economic production was suspended by natural or ritual causes (e.g., winter weather, Ramazan). One or more mature men who had (for purely personal and usually inarticulate reasons) voluntarily learned to sing epic poetry would then compose either by their own choice or at the urging of their fellows. Good singers liked to be urged, but got no material profit from their performances apart from the freely proffered benefits that socially stimulated admiration and liking may bring to any man through increased custom and the cooperation of his fellows in ordinary economic life.

    The proliferation of public (coffee) houses in some parts of the epic-singing territory during Ottoman times (or the possible survival of such premises as adaptations of Roman wine-stalls from late classical times) provided in those locales a frequently more heterogeneous social setting for epos than private homes might; but there were dampening influences too in the coffee houses and wine-shops, where the reactions of relative strangers to a given epic performance might not be so predictable as the reception of a singer's own kith and kin at home in the village setting.

    Unlike other customary activities in a customary way of life, epic singing was never a thing that came naturally to most men by simple inheritance or imitation. For brief moments in the recent history of the Slavic Balkans, every worthy household in some districts may have possessed, or its inmates have claimed or wanted to possess, a musical instrument to accompany epic song, and this has sometimes been taken as warrant for a belief that traditional epic singing was once upon a time everyman's accomplishment. But for even longer lengths of time, an even larger number of Balkan households are more reliably known to have possessed, or wanted to possess, such other, religious symbols as crosses, icons, and holy books, though that never meant that anyone in such a household could administer sacraments or perform liturgical chant. So too the possession of gusle or tambura never proved anything about the actual social distribution of epic verse-makers in the Balkans.

    On such other, surer evidence as we do have about the demographic incidence of epic singing, it appears that, on the contrary, there were never many epic singers at any given time anywhere. Whether to join the tradition of epic singing was strictly elective, an adoption of personal culture chosen by only a small minority of the population because only that minority had both the requisite interest and the ability requisite to a demanding voluntary art, quite regardless of the tradition's possible origins, or how anyone outside the tradition might in the complete absence of actual historical evidence imagine that it could conceivably have been practiced at its origin. Knowledge of the tradition and ability to perform in it never just ‘happened’ to anyone; it required of every would-be practitioner that it be actively sought out and persistently acquired and practiced over many years' time, things which only quite limited numbers of talented persons ever did at any time within the known history of this tradition.

    The choice of whether or not to adopt it had to be remade anew by a relatively few individuals who were capable of such an adoption in each generation from whatever time the custom of making oral epic verse came into Balkan peasant culture onward. Constrained only by his own desire and intellectual interest, every singer in the tradition had personally to choose at some time to listen, to learn, and then to spend many long hours privately pondering and reflecting on the substance of the epic tales which, as need might dictate, he might go to considerable lengths to hear from other singers, and eventually to sing himself for the hearing of others. In this manner the learning and recomposition of epic tales in sung verse was always a singer's personal adoption of cultural material that was entirely current and contemporary among his own people. There was no other source.

    Intellectuals who belonged to the urban centers of the Balkans during the nineteenth century and after often considered the traditional epic singer an arch-conservator of old cultural survivals from a deep and outworn past, whereas in his own mind the peasant oral epic bard was only the continuator of a present poetry. By contrast, the urban or metropolitan literati who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrote down a few random epic performances and canonized them in print often thought of themselves as great saviours and conservators of a dying tradition. In reality it was never in their power to rescue or to conserve the epic tradition as such. They were in fact only great innovators, who by their collecting activity only introduced into urban cultural life a peculiar and rather unassimilable new element of literature and education. From the point of view of the oral epic tradition itself, it is hard to imagine a more random or more accidental selection of texts than those which have come through printing to represent the tradition to the metropolitan literary culture in the Balkan Slavic countries.

    Although the epic did not persist everywhere among all the peasantry in that area of the Slavic Balkans where it was sometime found, it persisted only among the peasantry. If its persistence has any considerable antiquity in southeastern Europe, that must mean that the personal decision to adopt it as a part of one's personal culture-we must keep ever in mind that the tradition was elective and voluntary-had to be made a good many times by a numerous succession of utterly obscure persons over whatever span of Balkan history entertained it. Something less than a hundred generations encompasses the whole of Balkan history.

    Since in the twentieth century there could still be found a hundred living men and more who had elected to know and to practice this poetry, a series of such private, personal commitments rising into high antiquity, even to the putative time of Homer and before, is at least conceivable, though by no means were all practitioners in such a lengthy chain of tradition necessarily Balkan (indeed, more probably were not). The whole fabric of the tradition is perhaps not that old, and certainly much of its embroidery—such as the names of heroes, kings, and sultans—is decidedly younger, but there are elements in the modern tradition suggesting that it may substantially ascend to an autochthonous Balkan oral epic tradition of very great antiquity. One can see in these possibly very ancient elements that, although oral epos was not necessarily characteristic of all the peasantry on its native soil in modern times, the intellectual content of peasant life was characteristic of oral epos from earliest times.